The family of an 8-year-old boy beaten to death as he tried to defend his 12-year-old sister from a brutal rape gathered outside their home Friday, grappling with the details of the vicious attack.

They leaned on one another, crying, shaking and struggling to understand the loss of little Martin Cobb.

"He was a lovely little boy. He didn't deserve this," said Geraldine Pitchford, the children's aunt, choking back tears in front of the family's home in Richmond's working-class Southside. Martin's mother was too distraught to come outside.

A subway train carrying 1,000 passengers shook through a tunnel, tilted and derailed on Friday, injuring more than a dozen people and frightening scores of others with sparks, smoke and sudden darkness.

Four people suffered serious injuries and were hospitalized, firefighters said. Some complained of chest pains. Fifteen others were treated at the scene.

The express F train was heading for Manhattan and Brooklyn when six of its eight cars derailed at 10:40 a.m. about 1,200 feet south of the 65th Street station in the Woodside section of Queens.

Passenger Rashmi Basdeo said the train suddenly "started to tilt and shake."

"It was scary," said the sales associate from Queens, who was taking the train to work in Manhattan. She said she held onto a post as the train came "screeching to a stop."

"We knew it was derailed from the sounds and the position of the car," she said.

Dozens of firefighters, police officers and paramedics converged. They used ladders to help passengers descend from the train to track level and guided them along the track to a sidewalk opening. The derailment happened about 30 feet below street level. Power was cut to the third rail to aid the rescue.

Deputy Assistant Fire Chief James Leonard said the middle six cars of the eight-car train derailed but remained upright.

The cause of the accident, which damaged the express tracks, was unclear.

According to a lawsuit filed in Oregon this week, an Oregon police officer assaulted and falsely arrested a high school student who he believed had had sex with his schoolteacher wife.

In February, former Sherwood High School teacher Denise Keesee pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a 16-year-old boy in 2008. Her relationship with the boy was discovered by his mother, who found inappropriate text messages between Keesee and her son.

She also admitted to having an inappropriate relationship with another student in 2012, but investigators determined that the student was 18 at the time it occurred.

Keesee did not plead guilty to charges involving another boy who not only alleged that she sexually abused him, but that her police officer husband, Adam Keesee, intimidated and harassed him to keep silent about the abuse.

The Oregon State Police investigated the allegations of this teen - who is known as "J.M.O." in court documents - and found that while there was clearly "bad blood" between Officer Adam Keesee and the teen, there was no evidence that Keesee had committed a crime.

Audio recordings of the final conversations between pilots of the missing Malaysian jet and teams of air traffic controllers on the ground were "edited" before they were made public, voice experts say.

The tapes also appear to be recorded by at least two different audio sources, one of which may have been a digital recorder held up to a speaker, they said.

The analysts cautioned that their observations don't necessarily imply anything about the investigation into the missing flight.

The quality and brevity of the interactions between the cockpit and controllers made it impossible to glean any information about the pilots' state of mind before the plane disappeared, or even to determine whether both the pilot and co-pilot were speaking or if just one can be heard.

The audio recordings were published Thursday for the first time as part of a preliminary report by Malaysian authorities. In the report, Malaysia's Air Accident Investigation Bureau said a lack of real-time tracking devices caused "significant difficulty" in the hunt for MH 370, which disappeared March 8.

Speaking at the Pastor for Life Luncheon, which was sponsored by Pro-Life Mississippi, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment only applies to Christians because "Buddha didn't create us, Mohammed didn't create us, it was the God of the Holy Scriptures" who created us.

"They didn't bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship," he continued. "Let's get real, let's go back and learn our history. Let's stop playing games."

He then noted that he loves talking to lawyers, because he is a lawyer who went to "a secular law school," so he knows that "in the law, [talking about God] just isn't politically correct." He claimed that this is why America has "lost its way," and that he would be publishing a pamphlet "this week, maybe next" that contained copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, thereby proving that all the people "who found this nation - black, white, all people, all religions, all faiths" knew that America was "about God."

Chief Justice Moore later defined "life" via Blackstone's Law - a book that American lawyers have "sadly forgotten" - as beginning when "the baby kicks." "Today," he said, "our courts say it's not alive 'til the head comes out."

Sammy McLean, 14, felt overwhelming helplessness as she stood with her family and watched two angry rivers - the Bow and the Elbow - surge through their home, cutting a path of destruction across the downtown Calgary neighbourhood. Furniture flew through the front windows, and the basement and first floor were washed out and filled with mud. McLean remembers thinking that her once calm, picturesque street resembled a war zone.

A confident, athletic girl, McLean says the flood left her vulnerable, scared and hating the rivers that encircled her home. "They wouldn't let us in for several days after we were evacuated," says McLean, who now lives in a downtown condo with her parents and three siblings while the house is being extensively renovated. "I used to think the rivers were so pretty. It made me not like them any more. I thought the water was going to take away the whole house - and my bedroom."

While the Alberta floods haven't been directly linked to climate change, destructive weather events are expected to increase in Canada in the future. McLean, a normally upbeat youth, is painfully aware of the sheer power of Mother Nature and the carnage its fury can wreak. She's now anxious about what we're doing to our environment. "I volunteered to take an active role in my school's Model United Nations, which is studying the impact climate change is having on our planet," she said.

On one hand it scared her, but it also made her want to know more so she could help activate positive change.

A Texas veterinarian arrested for animal cruelty has admitted to keeping alive five dogs meant to be put down, among them his own pet, which was discovered lying motionless with one of her legs missing.

Dr Millard Lucien 'Lou' Tierce, 71, turned himself in at the Tarrant County Jail at around Wednesday and was later released on $10,000 bail.

His veterinary license has been suspended by the state pending an investigation.

According to the suspension order, officials inspecting Tierce's popular Camp Bowie Animal Clinic found 'unsanitary conditions, animal organs kept in jars, bugs in exam rooms, open and unsecured medications' strewn about the office along with laundry and pieces of paper.

They also discovered that five pets the veterinarian had accepted for euthanasia were still alive, one of them kept in a cage for two or three years. Three dogs rescued from the veterinary office by police were described as being in 'such a decrepit shape' that they had to be euthanized to put an end to their suffering.

Tierce told investigators that two of the pooches had been brought to the clinic by their owners to be put to sleep, but according to state records, the 71-year-old doctor believed that the decision was his to make.

A third dog, a black and white border collie that belonged to Tierce himself, was discovered twitching in pain inside a box left in an exam room. One of the animal's legs was missing, another was dislocated, and the collie also had two dislocated shoulders.

Amid Kiev's info war branding Slavyansk civilians "hostages of the terrorists," the residents of Slavyansk speak out against the military campaign in eastern Ukraine and go out to block troops and APCs, as self-defense vows to "stand to the last."

Expecting a fresh wave of assaults from armed forces loyal to Kiev to start at any moment, the defiant anti-government stronghold of Slavyansk has become "eerily quiet," with the streets, dotted with checkpoints, practically devoid of passersby. These are the impressions of RT's Paula Slier reporting on the spot.

A while back, I was on a philosophy debate binge. Watching Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens annihilate their opponents with precision and wit is my idea of a good night in, and YouTube's "related videos" are a deep, dark rabbithole.

I stumbled upon two debates involving Deepak Chopra: one alongside possible alien Jean Houston against Sam Harris and Michael Shermer called Does God Have A Future? and one against Richard Dawkins at the Dangerous Ideas festival. I had never seen Chopra speak before, and I was only familiar with his name from cheesy-looking self-help titles. As I watched the debate, his childish behaviour and smugness amazed me. He constantly interrupted and talked over the others, usually to make cheap shots or have the last word instead of making a sound argument. He got weirdly defensive when Harris pointed out that nobody at the debate was qualified to talk about quantum physics - quantum is one of his favourite buzzwords - and boasted that he was the most qualified one there because he's an MD(!). It's clear the man isn't used to being challenged.

The US economy is a house of cards. Every aspect of it is fraudulent, and the illusion of recovery is created with fraudulent statistics.

American capitalism itself is an illusion. All financial markets are rigged. Massive liquidity poured into financial markets by the Federal Reserve's Quantitative Easing inflates stock and bond prices and drives interest rates, which are supposed to be a measure of the cost of capital, to zero or negative, with the implication that capital is so abundant that its cost is zero and can be had for free. Large enterprises, such as mega-banks and auto manufacturers, that go bankrupt are not permitted to fail. Instead, public debt and money creation are used to cover private losses and keep corporations "too big to fail" afloat at the expense not of shareholders but of people who do not own the shares of the corporations.

Profits are no longer a measure that social welfare is being served by capitalism's efficient use of resources when profits are achieved by substituting cheaper foreign labor for domestic labor, with resultant decline in consumer purchasing power and rise in income and wealth inequality. In the 21st century, the era of jobs offshoring, the US has experienced an unprecedented explosion in income and wealth inequality. I have made reference to this hard evidence of the failure of capitalism to provide for the social welfare in the traditional economic sense in my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, and Thomas Piketty's just published book, Capital in the 21st Century, has brought an alarming picture of reality to insouciant economists, such as Paul Krugman. As worrisome as Piketty's picture is of inequality, I agree with Michael Hudson that the situation is worse than Piketty describes.

Capitalism has been transformed by powerful private interests whose control over governments, courts, and regulatory agencies has turned capitalism into a looting mechanism. Wall Street no longer performs any positive function. Wall Street is a looting mechanism, a deadweight loss to society. Wall Street makes profits by front-running trades with fast computers, by selling fraudulent financial instruments that it is betting against as investment grade securities, by leveraging equity to unprecedented heights, making bets that cannot be covered, and by rigging all commodity markets.

The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury's "Plunge Protection Team" aid the looting by supporting the stock market with purchases of stock futures, and protect the dollar from the extraordinary money-printing by selling naked shorts into the Comex gold futures market.