In March 2013 with ten minutes left in a freshman science class, boys were being boys. Kyle, 14 at the time, and a member of the football team sat with a few teammates and wrote up a "hit list", people they would like to hit on the football field. "It was just a joke, it wasn't to hurt anybody," Kyle explained afterwards. The list included silly names like "Applesauce Head". The Easter Bunny may even have been mentioned. It is apparent to any and all readers that while the joke may be questionable in it's level of humor, it was, in fact, a joke.

The small town of Statesville, N.C., was in mourning Thursday, a day after six members of Front Street Baptist Church were killed and 12 others were injured when their bus overturned on an East Tennessee interstate.

"My prayers are with all of them and my faith is in God, but this is definitely going to be a grieving community, the Rev. Jeff Luxon, the church's former senior care pastor, told The Statesville Record & Landmark.

With Front Street's senior pastor in Tennessee to be with his congregants, Luxon made sure he was at the church after he heard the news.

"I had some great friends on that bus, and I'm sure knew all of them who were members of the church," Luxon said.

The church members on the bus were part of Front Street's Young at Heart group for senior citizens, who were returning from a Christian conference in Gatlinburg, Tenn. The dead ranged in age from 62 to 95.

"I knew probably everybody who was on the bus," said Emmy Miller, a member of the church.

"They would want us to know they are in a better place now," Miller told the Record & Landmark. "We all know God is in charge and that this will make us stronger. That's what Front Street is all about."

Move seen as bid to halt division among jihadists over Syrian rebel split

An official al Qaeda website that is restricted to members of the terrorist group opened its first Twitter account this week in what U.S. officials say is an effort to resolve a major split over Syria's Islamist rebels.

The Shamukh al-Islam website, used as an official clearing house for al Qaeda members to communicate and issue propaganda statements, started its first Twitter account on Tuesday.

The first posts on the account focused on divisions between two al Qaeda rebel groups in Syria, al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

The account, @shomokhalislam, issued 29 tweets, followed one account, and attracted 1,532 followers as of Friday afternoon. U.S. officials said among its followers are several high-profile digital jihadists.

Counterterrorism analysts view the new account as another indicator that terrorist groups are stepping up their use of social media over traditional Internet sites.

The official al Qaeda account also highlights the view among Islamists that Twitter is fast becoming an essential tool for online jihad, or holy war.

"We've seen terrorist groups make increasingly effective use of social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook, in recent years," said Patrick Poole, a counterterrorism expert. "Not only is this important for propaganda purposes but also recruitment."

An increasingly likely government shutdown won't affect most of the federal government's safety net, like retirement and health insurance programs, but nutrition support for millions of women and babies could be in trouble.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Saturday that if Congress can't cut a deal to fund government operations past Monday, "No additional federal funds would be available to support the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC)'s clinical services, food benefits and administrative costs."

The $6 billion program helps pregnant women and new moms buy healthy food if they're poor and facing "nutrition risk," meaning that they have medical problems or trouble following nutrition guidelines. Although the program that mitigates nutrition risk for 9 million Americans is in jeopardy, the impact of a shutdown would depend on how individual states react and how long the shutdown lasts.

"States can probably shelter families receiving WIC from the effects of a shutdown for a short period, but it could be a real problem if it lasts more than a few days," policy analyst Elizabeth Lower-Basch of the Center for Law and Social Policy said in an email Saturday.

The USDA suggested that some aspects of the program could last through a short shutdown.

Senator John McCain was just sure he could pick moderates in Syria worth supporting. To prove his point he made a trip to Syria this spring to demonstrate how much the insurgents were just like us, struggling for democracy and equal rights for all.

But his trip was organized by the Syria Emergency Task Force's Mouaz Moustafa, who not long ago headed up the Libyan Council of North America. Both organizations are partly funded by the US State Department through a mirrored wilderness of NGO cutouts. But both have close ties to extremists fighting in each country. (In Libya, for example, Mustafa was with the people who killed US ambassador Stevens.) In McCain's case, the "moderates" he met and was so attracted to in Syria tunred out to be kidnappers and thugs.

Moustafa's key staffer until recently was war lobbyist Elizabeth O'Bagy, whose day job was with the US military contractor funded neoconservative "think tank," the Institute for the Study of War. Shockingly enough, this "think tank" never saw a potential war it did not want to turn into a real one. O'Bagy was the bagman for the State Department, delivering goodies to the Syrian rebels while delivering fantasies of Syrian moderates needing support to Capitol Hill and environs.

She had many customers, including McCain and Secretary of State John Kerry, who were eager to cite her "studies" revealing that the rebels in Syria were by and large all moderates, with a few extremists who could simply be marginalized and ignored.

Despite the partisan war in Washington that shut down the federal government this week, President Barack Obama has succeeded in implementing the first major health reform in the United States in nearly 50 years, as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act goes into effect. Even though its most virulent critics raise the spectre of "Canadian-style" health care, "Obamacare" does little to change the enduring differences between the two health care system. What, exactly, does "Obamacare" look like compared to Canada?

To ask whether public banks would interfere with free markets assumes that we have free markets, which we don't. Banking is heavily subsidized and is monopolized by Wall Street, which has effectively "bought" Congress. Banks have been bailed out by the government, when in a free market they would have gone bankrupt. The Federal Reserve blatantly manipulates interest rates in a way that serves Wall Street, lending trillions at near-zero interest and pushing rates so artificially low that local governments have lost billions in interest-rate swaps.

Banking, money and credit are not market goods but are economic infrastructure, just as roads and bridges are physical infrastructure.

State and municipal governments already have public lending programs, which are generally not seen as distortions of the free market. They exist because private banks are not lending in some sectors that need financing. Montana finances first-time ranchers and farmers; Sonoma County has its Energy Independence Program; and San Francisco has half a dozen mortgage lending and small business programs. Globally, public banks lend countercyclically, providing credit when and where other banks won't. This does not crowd out private banks. Germany and Taiwan, which have strong public banking sectors, are among the most competitive banking markets in the world.

A Belgian has been killed by medical euthanasia after pleading for death because a botched sex change operation to turn her into a man had resulted in "a monster".

Mother of sex change Belgian: 'I don't care about his euthanasia death'

Nathan, born Nancy, Verhelst, 44, was given legal euthanasia, most likely by lethal injection, on the grounds of "unbearable psychological suffering" on Monday afternoon.

Wim Distelmans, a cancer specialist who carried out the euthanasia, is the same doctor who late last year gave lethal injections to congenitally deaf twins who were frightened they were also going blind.

"I was the girl that nobody wanted," Mr Verhelst told Het Laatste Nieuws newspaper in the hours before her death.

"While my brothers were celebrated, I got a storage room above the garage as a bedroom. 'If only you had been a boy', my mother complained. I was tolerated, nothing more."

Dmitry Peskov has been forced to deal with rumours Mr Putin wed Alina Kabayeva, a 30-year-old politician and former Olympic gymnast, in a church ceremony last week.

"It's his decision and he's not obliged to talk about his personal life," Mr Peskov told Izvestia. "He works so much I don't know where he finds time for it."

Rumours that he had remarried were started by a Twitter user who claimed last week that the Federal Guards Service had blocked roads around the Iversky monastery in the Valdai Hills because "Putin and Kabayeva are being crowned," a reference to Russian wedding traditions.

It snowballed after being retweeted by opposition leader Alexei Navalny, prompting Mr Peskov to call it "an exercise in boredom."

Stouffville, - Cat owners in a community north of Toronto are being warned to keep their pets indoors after a number of severed cat heads were found, one of them near a daycare.

York Regional Police said Thursday there have been six recent incidents in Whitchurch-Stouffville where heads and, in one case, other body parts of a dismembered cat were found in public locations.

Investigators don't know what the motive behind the dismemberments could be, said Const. Andy Pattenden.

But he said it's believed the dismemberments were done intentionally, adding the heads were all placed within a one-kilometre area in residential neighbourhoods.

The first incident was reported Aug. 12 when a head and two legs were found near a daycare centre and police were called to the scene.

Five other cat heads were found during the next few weeks, with one being found near a school, and the last incident was reported on Sept. 13, when a homeowner found her cat's head in front of her residence.

In five of the six incidents, just the cat's head was found, usually on or near a curb, Pattenden said. No torsos were found and there was no sign of any blood.