A Russian performance artist nailed his genitals to the ground outside Moscow's Red Square in protest over Russia's "police state" as the country marked national police day.

A witness in the Costa Concordia shipwreck trial has described how the captain jumped aboard a lifeboat, testifying how the commander wasn't the last to abandon the rapidly capsizing luxury cruise ship.

The European Space Agency says one of its research satellites re-entered the Earth's atmosphere on an orbit that passed over Siberia, the western Pacific Ocean, the eastern Indian Ocean and Antarctica.