More than 120 people, including 100 students, have been killed and 122 others injured in a Taliban seizure of a military-run school in the city of Peshawar, Pakistan, according to provincial authorities.

The numbers of dead and injured may still rise as the casualties of the assault are counted.

Some 500 students and teachers were in the Army Public School on Warsak Road at the time of the attack. Pakistan's military said most of the civilians escaped, but some had been taken hostage by the assailants.

According to media reports, as many as 10 militants dressed in Pakistani military uniforms entered the school compound on Tuesday at around noon. They torched a car at the site and proceeded with a raid on the facility.

"Seven to eight people attacked us, then an army soldier came to us and he asked [the] principal and teachers to take the children out of compound from the back gate. There were thousands [of] students in college. They were moved to auditorium, they can't come out until the fight is ended," Arshad Khan, a student at the school, told RT's Ruptly.
The Pakistani Army responded to the emergency, dispatching security forces to cordon off the area and sending military helicopters for surveillance. A commando force arrived at the site.

"As the firing started our teacher asked us to bent down and we went to a corner of the class, after one hour when firing reduced, [an] army officer came and rescued us, but as we came out we saw on the way in corridors our friends were lying dead on ground hit by bullets, some with three, some with four bullets. They were bleeding," another student, Muhammad Naeem, said.

In the ensuing battle with Pakistani security forces, three militants reportedly were killed. One of them is said to have detonated a suicide vest he was wearing.

At least one Pakistani soldier was reported killed in the gun battle, which seriously damaged the school building.

Gaza leads the list, with 16 journalists killed by Israel during the Operation Protective Edge, followed by Syria and Pakistan, the Geneva-based Press Emblem Campaign NGO says
At least 128 journalists were killed in 32 countries in 2014, including nine in Ukraine, the Geneva-based Press Emblem Campaign (PEC) independent NGO said on Monday.

"Gaza leads the list, with 16 journalists killed by Israel during the Operation Protective Edge, followed by Syria (13 journalists killed) and Pakistan (12 killed)," PEC said calling 2014 a terrible year for journalists.

Iraq and Ukraine come fourth and fifth among the most dangerous places for media work, with 10 and nine journalists killed, the PEC said.

"New conflicts for media workers opened in Ukraine, in the Israeli assault on Gaza, which led to the killings of many media workers, and in Syria, the situation was unprecedented with the beheading of journalists recorded in video clips," the organisation said.

"Compared to 2013, when 129 journalists were killed, the figures are very close," the NGO said.

• Video shows Ohio detective accusing her of lying and threatening her with jail
• Tasha Thomas only told of Crawford's death after 90-minute interrogation

• Officer who shot black man in Walmart lied, victim's mother says
• Ohio Walmart video reveals last moments before officer shot man

Police aggressively questioned the tearful girlfriend of a young black man they had just shot dead as he held a BB gun in an Ohio supermarket - accusing her of lying, threatening her with jail, and suggesting that she was high on drugs.

Tasha Thomas was reduced to swearing on the lives of her relatives that John Crawford III had not been carrying a firearm when they entered the Walmart in Beavercreek, near Dayton, to buy crackers, marshmallows and chocolate bars on the evening of 5 August.

"You lie to me and you might be on your way to jail," detective Rodney Curd told Thomas, as she wept and repeatedly offered to take a lie-detector test. After more than an hour and a half of questioning and statement-taking, Curd finally told Thomas that Crawford, 22, had died.

"As a result of his actions, he is gone," said the detective, as she slumped in her chair and cried.

Crawford had been shot by police officer Sean Williams, after a customer called 911 and claimed the 22-year-old was pointing a gun at passersby. Surveillance footage released later showed Crawford picking up the BB rifle from a shelf, wandering the aisles and occasionally swinging the gun at his side while he spoke on his cellphone to his ex-girlfriend.

A 94-minute police video recording, released to the Guardian by the office of Mike DeWine, the Ohio attorney general, in response to a public records request, shows Thomas, 26, being interviewed by Curd after she was driven from Walmart to the Beavercreek police department. Curd later told investigators he had not yet been told Crawford only had a BB gun that had been on sale at the store.

Curd promptly asked Thomas whether she and Crawford had criminal records. Already tearful and breathless, Thomas explained that she may have had some traffic offences and had been arrested for petty theft as a juvenile.

The detective then became increasingly aggressive and banged on the table between them with his hand. "Tell me where he got the gun from," Curd repeated. Thomas insisted Crawford had been carrying only a white plastic grocery bag when they arrived at Walmart to buy the ingredients to make s'mores at a family cook-out.

Asked one of several times whether Crawford owned a gun, Thomas said: "Not that I know."

Curd told her: "Don't tell me 'not that you know', because that's the first thing I realise somebody's not telling me the truth".

He later repeated: "You need to tell me the truth" and "You need to be truthful."

Crawford's family and their attorneys have stressed since his death that under Ohio's open-carry firearms laws and Walmart's regulations, he would have been allowed to carry a real rifle with him around the store.

Crawford was talking on his cellphone to LeeCee Johnson, the mother of his two sons, when he was shot by Williams. Curd repeatedly suggested to Thomas that Johnson, who was in fact at home in Cincinnati, may also have been in the Walmart store and that Crawford was there to attack her.

For nearly any crime requiring a "Whodunnit" answer in Boston around the time of the April 15, 2013, Marathon bombing, the authorities answered: The Tsarnaev brothers.

One egregious crime pinned on them was a grisly Sept. 11, 2011, triple murder in Waltham, Mass.

Now, prosecutors in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev have delivered a shocking reversal. They admit to having no evidence that his dead brother, Tamerlan, was involved in the slayings.

That wasn't the case right after the bombing: law enforcement fingered Tamerlan as the perpetrator, and suggested Dzokhar may have been involved. Much of the media has presented it as fact ever since.

This is a pattern we've seen since the bombing: The government feeds prejudicial information (usually anonymously) to the press, implying Tamerlan and Dzhokhar's guilt, despite having flimsy or no evidence. In the most extreme example, prosecutors had to completely recant their accusation that the brothers robbed a 7-Eleven.

Haitian police and UN peacekeepers have attacked protesters with live ammo and chemical agents as several thousand opposition supporters tried to march on the presidential palace, demanding new leadership.


Haiti has seen many anti-government protests in recent months calling for President Michael Martelly to step down, amid a growing anger over the high levels of government corruption. Elections have been delayed now for years.

In the wake of last week's release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program, 69 percent of Americans consider waterboarding to be torture, but 49 percent think aggressive interrogation tactics like waterboarding are sometimes justified. 36 percent think they are not justified.


More than half (57 percent) think that such interrogation tactics provide reliable information that helps prevent terrorist attacks at least some of the time. Fifty-two percent of Americans think the release of information regarding the CIA interrogation tactics poses a threat to U.S. security; a third doesn't think it will have an impact.

Homeland Security officials are warning that a major coronal mass ejection, solar flare or electromagnetic pulse may be inevitable and catastrophic to modern civilization. The devastation to the electric grid and modern infrastructure could impact the lives of more than 100 million, and cause untold casualties during prolonged outages.

Homeland Security conducted a study assessing the risks with these extreme solar events (as well as manmade EMPs).

Greenpeace is apologizing to the people of Peru after pulling a stunt at the site of the sacred Nazca lines. Government officials claim the action damaged the ancient markings.

Before dawn on Monday, 20 Greenpeace activists went to site of the historic Nazca lines and laid out massive yellow letters reading "Time for Change: The Future is Renewable." Currently, the United Nations is holding the Lima Climate Change Conference in the country, and the stunt was apparently intended to catch the attention of officials gathered there.

According to a press release on Greenpeace's website, the group meant for the message -- which can be seen from the sky -- "to honor the Nazca people, whose ancient geoglyphs are one of the historic landmarks of Peru. It is believed that one of the reasons for the Nazca's disappearance can be linked to massive regional climate change."

However, the government of Peru did not take it as an honor.

"It's a true slap in the face at everything Peruvians consider sacred," Deputy Culture Minister Luis Jaime Castillo told Associated Press.

The Greenpeace activists entered a "strictly prohibited" area near the famed figure of a hummingbird, according to Associated Press. Entrance to this area is permitted only with authorization, and those who get approval must wear special footwear.

"They are absolutely fragile," the minister said of the geoglyphs. "They are black rocks on a white background. You walk there and the footprint is going to last hundreds or thousands of years. And the line that they have destroyed is the most visible and most recognized of all."

A suspect in five killings barricaded himself inside a suburban Philadelphia home on Monday morning, several local media outlets reported.

Police had discovered the bodies of five people in three separate locations, WPVI television and other media reported.

The suspect, believed to be a military veteran, was holed up in a home in Souderton, Pennsylvania, about 35 miles north of Philadelphia, WPVI reported.

With the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture, it becomes clear that in the aftermath of the loathsome terrorist attack of 9/11, the United States entered into a new and barbarous stage in its history, one in which acts of violence and moral depravity were not only embraced but celebrated. Certainly, this is not to suggest that the United States had not engaged in criminal and lawless acts historically or committed acts of brutality that would rightly be labeled acts of torture. That much about our history is clear and includes not only the support and participation in acts of indiscriminate violence and torture practiced through and with the right-wing Latin American dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil in the 1970s but also through the wilful murder and torture of civilians in Vietnam, Iraq, and later at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and Afghanistan. The United States is no stranger to torture nor is it a free of complicity in aiding other countries notorious for their abuses of human rights. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman reminded us by taking us as far back as 1979 that of the "35 countries using torture on an administrative basis in the late 1970s, 26 were clients of the United States."[1]

In fact, the United States has a long record of inflicting torture on others, both at home and abroad, although it has never admitted to such acts. Instead, the official response has been to deny this history or do everything to hide such monstrous acts from public view through government censorship, appealing to the state secrecy principle, or deploying a language that buried narratives of extraordinary cruelty in harmless sounding euphemisms. For example, the benign sounding CIA "Phoenix Program" in South Vietnam resulted in the deaths of over 21,000 Vietnamese. As Carl Boggs argues, the acts of U.S. barbarism in Vietnam appeared both unrestrained and never ending, with routinized brutality such as throwing people out of planes labeled as "flying lessons" or "half a helicopter ride,"[2] while tying a field telephone wire around a man's testicles and ringing it up was a practice called "the Bell Telephone Hour."[3] Officially sanctioned torture was never discussed as a legitimate concern; but, as indicated by a few well-documented accounts, it seems to be as American as apple pie.[4]