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The College Football Czar: Week 8 Week seven in review: One of these weeks, the College Football Czar will wise up and start picking the Mississippi schools to win. In truth, he remains skeptical of Ole Miss, but there’s no question at this point that Mississippi State deserves its new #1 ranking. The Czar did not doubt the quality of the MSU team, but had instead overrated Auburn, which set out to prove that its near-upset at Kansas State was no fluke. For the week, the Czar only went 11-8, although he would protest the result of the Baylor-TCU game,...

Award-winning US stage and screen actor Neil Patrick Harris will host the next Oscars show, organizers announced Wednesday. The star, who has hosted both Broadway's Tony and TV's Emmy awards shows in the past, will front the 87th Academy Awards on February 22, said the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The high-profile hosting job is a prime gig in Hollywood, at the climax of its annual awards season. Harris will follow Ellen DeGeneres last year and a who's who of showbiz over the decades. "It is truly an honor and a thrill to be asked to host this...

A Chinese pharmaceutical firm that has links with the country's military has developed an experimental Ebola drug. It is hoping federal authorities will immediately grant its approval so it can be marketed the soonest. Sihuan Pharmaceutical Holdings Group Ltd developed the drug called JK-05, along with the Institute of Microbiological Epidemiology, a part of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences. It has been approved but only for emergency military purposes. Sihuan also admitted during an investor call last week it has yet to undergo clinical trials. The firm said it is working to have the tests started, but if possible...

The Ebola vaccine that Canada has developed has started its human clinical trials, Health Minister Rona Ambrose announced. Authorities will test the VSV-EBOV vaccine on a small group of people to assess its safety, determine the appropriate dosage and identify any side effects. So far, the vaccine has shown a 100 per cent success rate in animals, Ambrose said. A total of 20 vials of the experimental vaccine have been supplied for use in the trial. It was developed by scientists at the Public Health Agency of Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory (NML). The 20 healthy volunteers at the Walter Reed...

UN officials admit that unless the international community can get Ebola under control by Christmas, the world will face an "unprecedented" situation for which there are no plans to deal with. From Sky News: "The WHO advises within 60 days we must ensure 70% of infected people are in a care facility and 70% of burials are done without causing further infection," said Anthony Banbury, the UN's deputy ebola coordinator. "We need to do that within 60 days from 1 October. If we reach these targets then we can turn this epidemic around." But Mr Banbury told the UN Security...

Rome — I am sitting on the steps of the Capitoline Hill, as close as I can approximate the spot where, exactly 250 years ago today, on October 15, 1764, the 27-year old Edward Gibbon was struck by the muses, leading to perhaps the greatest work of historical scholarship in the English language. Though the anecdote in his biography recalling the moment has been called into question, it is both sufficiently famous and sufficiently inspiring to anyone with a historical bent to warrant retelling. Gibbon’s recollects the moment: It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as...

When it comes to producing millionaires, the U.S. still leads the pack. Between July 2013 and July 2014, the ranks of Americans with a net worth exceeding $1 million grew by 1.63 million, or more than one-third of the 3.84 million adults worldwide who saw their net worth exceed $1 million over that span, according to a new report on global wealth from Credit Suisse CSGN.VX -3.56%. Overall, the U.S. was home to around 14.2 million millionaires, or more than 40% of those in the world. After the U.S., the United Kingdom, France and Germany added more millionaires than...

LENOIR CITY, Tenn. – A Tennessee woman who fell behind on her yard work was cited by code enforcers and has served a stint in jail over her overgrown yard.

MARSHFIELD – Residents opposed to a school committee vote to remove the word “Christmas” from the school calendar say the decision promotes religious intolerance and censorship. At a school committee meeting Tuesday night, several residents asked members to reconsider the September vote that changed the name “Christmas vacation” to “holiday break” on the calendar. The vacation week begins on Christmas Eve and ends the Monday after New Year’s Day.

Harvard College junior and undocumented immigrant Dario Guerrero-Meneses, who had been barred from returning to the U.S. after taking his mother to Mexico last July for cancer treatments, has been granted a humanitarian visa to return to the States on Tuesday evening. The decision, handed down by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, will allow Guerrero to return to the U.S. to see his immediate family in California and soon-to-be-born child, as well as start his senior year at Harvard, according to his lawyer, Alan R. Klein.

Brad Pitt has been big on guns since he was only six years old, when he inherited his grandfather’s shotgun in kindergarten. Before that, in nursery school, he had used a BB gun, and then he was firing handguns by the time he was eight.Pitt called weapons merely a “rite of passage” in his family, and said that his older brother had gotten his dad’s gun when he got his grandfather’s, he told the Radio Times. Pitt, born in Oklahoma and raised in Missouri, called it “a sane environment.”“The positive is that my father instilled in me a profound and...

FULL TITLE: Giggling nurse with a throat infection who breathed on critically ill baby and said it was 'better off dead' faces being struck off A nurse who breathed on a critically ill baby while she was suffering from a throat infection and said the newborn was ‘better off dead’ faces being struck off. Claire Orton giggled after exhaling onto the 'extremely poorly' child while it was being treated at University Hospital in Coventry, Warwickshire, a tribunal heard. She had told colleagues she had been ill with a throat infection before she deliberately breathed on the infant’s face as if...

Microsoft released its first Windows 10 Technical Preview at the beginning of October, and the company is now revealing that 1 million people are helping test the upcoming operating system through the Windows Insider Program. "That equates to a lot of people using the Windows 10 Technical Preview and sending us feedback," says Microsoft's Joe Belfiore. The software maker has received more than 200,000 pieces of feedback on the early version of Windows 10, with top requests that include options to remove the new search and task view buttons, as well as requests for a Start Menu animation or transition...

The celebrated social-democratic nations of Scandinavia have some of the highest wealth inequality in Europe. That's according to Credit Suisse's weighty Global Wealth Report 2014. It's a finding that's likely to seriously surprise some people. The top 10% of wealth holders in three Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden and Denmark) hold between 65 and 69 per cent of those nations' wealth. In comparison to the other developed economies in Europe, Scandinavian inequality on this measure seriously stands out: they're significantly above British, French, Italian or Spanish levels. Germany and Austria come a little closer, but are still behind. Only finance-dominated Switzerland...

Dallas Cowboys running back Joseph Randle was arrested Monday night for allegedly shoplifting from a Dallas-area mall, Naheed Rajwani of the Dallas Morning News reports. Randle, 22, was a fifth-round pick by the Cowboys in 2013 out of Oklahoma State. In six games this season, he has 16 carries for 113 yards, including a season-high 52 yards during Sunday's win against the Seattle Seahawks. Police said Randle allegedly shoplifted from a Dillard's at Stonebriar Mall.

Most people assume that the fourteenth-century Black Death that quickly ravaged the western world was a bacterial bubonic plague epidemic caused by flea bites and spread by rats. But the Black Death killed a high proportion of Scandinavians where it was too cold for fleas to survive. Biology of Plagues. Evidence from Historical Populations published by Cambridge University Press, analyzed 2,500 years of plagues and concluded that the Black Death was caused by a viral hemorrhagic fever pandemic similar to Ebola. If this is correct, the future medical and economic impacts from Ebola have been vastly underestimated.  Authors Dr. Susan Scott, a demographer,...

Apple and Facebook say they'll shell out out as much as $20,000 for women to put their parenthood plans on ice. The firms also hope the incentive will help women balance child-rearing and work life. However, even as success rates continue to rise, there are no guarantees the method will lead to conception down the road.

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Police have cited a 21-year-old man they say entered a St. Paul home drunk and dressed as a Santa Claus zombie, terrifying a 16-year-old girl who locked herself in a bathroom.

Reports of creepy clowns carrying knives and other weapons have been scaring people in the California city of Bakersfield for the past week, police said on Sunday. ... "We've been having sightings all over the city," Matson said. "They range from anywhere from a guy carrying a gun to a guy carrying a knife running up to houses." The Bakersfield Californian newspaper reported earlier in the week that at least some of the reports were hoaxes. Matson said he did not know whether the incidents were pranks. At least one of the reports was not a hoax - police arrested...

In the spirit of October’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month, women across the country on Monday are “setting their girls free.” October 13 is National No Bra Day, an annual holiday reportedly created in 2011 by breast cancer supporters that’s now sweeping social media. Breast cancer survivors and supporters on Twitter and Facebook are encouraging women not to wear a bra for a day to raise awareness and support breast cancer survivors. ...