Nadia Umm Fuad watched her son being shot by Islamist rebels in Syria after the 14-year-old referred to the Prophet Mohammed as he joked with a customer at his coffee stall in Aleppo. She speaks to Richard Spencer.

Mohammed Katta's mother witnessed the execution of her son in three stages.

She was upstairs at home when she first heard the shouting. The people of the neighbourhood were yelling that "they have brought back the kid", so she rushed out of her apartment.

"I went out on my balcony," Nadia Umm Fuad said. "I said to his father, they are going to shoot your son! Come! Come! Come! I was on the stairs when I heard the first shot. I was at the door when I heard the second shot.

"I saw the third shot. I was shouting, 'That's haram, forbidden! Stop! Stop! You are killing a child.' But they just gave me a dirty look and got into their car. As they went, they drove over my son's arm, as he lay there dying."

Mohammed was 14 when he was killed, earlier this month, prompting international condemnation. He has become a symbol of the fears many Syrians have for the future of a country where jihadists are vying with the regime for control.

Daniel Somers was a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was part of Task Force Lightning, an intelligence unit. In 2004-2005, he was mainly assigned to a Tactical Human-Intelligence Team (THT) in Baghdad, Iraq, where he ran more than 400 combat missions as a machine gunner in the turret of a Humvee, interviewed countless Iraqis ranging from concerned citizens to community leaders and and government officials, and interrogated dozens of insurgents and terrorist suspects. In 2006-2007, Daniel worked with Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) through his former unit in Mosul where he ran the Northern Iraq Intelligence Center. His official role was as a senior analyst for the Levant (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and part of Turkey). Daniel suffered greatly from PTSD and had been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury and several other war-related conditions. On June 10, 2013, Daniel wrote the following letter to his family before taking his life. Daniel was 30 years old. His wife and family have given permission to publish it.

The fact is, for as long as I can remember my motivation for getting up every day has been so that you would not have to bury me. As things have continued to get worse, it has become clear that this alone is not a sufficient reason to carry on. The fact is, I am not getting better, I am not going to get better, and I will most certainly deteriorate further as time goes on. From a logical standpoint, it is better to simply end things quickly and let any repercussions from that play out in the short term than to drag things out into the long term.

You will perhaps be sad for a time, but over time you will forget and begin to carry on. Far better that than to inflict my growing misery upon you for years and decades to come, dragging you down with me. It is because I love you that I can not do this to you. You will come to see that it is a far better thing as one day after another passes during which you do not have to worry about me or even give me a second thought. You will find that your world is better without me in it.

I really have been trying to hang on, for more than a decade now. Each day has been a testament to the extent to which I cared, suffering unspeakable horror as quietly as possible so that you could feel as though I was still here for you. In truth, I was nothing more than a prop, filling space so that my absence would not be noted. In truth, I have already been absent for a long, long time.

Witchcraft is suspected in the mysterious cutting of a Shetland pony's mane.

Little Elicia Curtis was devastated to find the animal she has been grooming had had its mane cut off by an unknown attacker.

The 11-year-old had been helping out with the horses on a farm near Wroughton after her own pony, Muffin, had to be put down last year.

The police suspect it may have been done as part of a rite or spell, but a local Druid has put the blame on New Age Travellers rather than witches.

Elicia had been training the unbroken Shetland, called Tyrone, and was hoping to enter him into shows this summer. That hope has now been dashed by the criminals who came on the night of Sunday, June 16 and cut the five-year-old horse's flowing mane.

The Wroughton Junior School pupil said: "I'm really shocked someone would come in and hurt him.

The demonstrations in Brazil began after a small rise in bus fares triggered mass protests. Within days this had become a nationwide movement whose concerns had spread far beyond fares: more than a million people were on the streets shouting about everything from corruption to the cost of living to the amount of money being spent on the World Cup.

In Turkey, it was a similar story. A protest over the future of a city park in Istanbul - violently disrupted by police - snowballed too into something bigger, a wider-ranging political confrontation with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which has scarcely been brought to a close by the clearing of Gezi Park.

If the scenes have seemed familiar, it is because they shared common features: viral, loosely organised with fractured messages and mostly taking place in urban public locations.

Unlike the protest movement of 1968 or even the end of Soviet influence in eastern Europe in 1989, these are movements with few discernible leaders and with often conflicting ideologies.

Their points of reference are not even necessarily ideological but take inspiration from other protests, including those of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement.

The result has been a wave of social movements - sometimes short-lived - from Wall St to Tel Aviv and from Istanbul to Rio de Janeiro, often engaging younger, better educated and wealthier members of society.

What is striking for those who, like myself, have covered these protests is how discursive and open-ended they often are. People go not necessarily to hear a message but to take over a location and discuss their discontents (even if the stunning consequence can be the fall of an autocratic leader such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak).

If the "new protest" can be summed up, it is not in specifics of the complaints but in a wider idea about organisation encapsulated on a banner spotted in Brazil last week: "We are the social network."

The photographer who took pictures of Nigella Lawson being assaulted by her husband says the attack lasted for "27 minutes of madness" but he didn't intervene because he feared being arrested himself.

Snapper Jean-Paul says the incident outside a London restaurant shouldn't be brushed under the carpet and the celebrity chef Lawson was "properly abused" by art collector husband Charles Saatchi.

"What I witnessed was 27 minutes of madness," Jean-Paul wrote in the British tabloid Sunday People, which first published his shocking pictures last weekend.

"That's how long the abuse lasted from start to finish so it was most definitely not a fleeting moment."

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg came under fire last week for suggesting Saatchi's clutching of his wife's throat could have been "just a fleeting thing".

US politicians and bureaucrats have less compassion and common sense than an average Londoner

"You've heard of Live Aid? Well, this is Drive Aid," an ardent young man says, as he approaches London pedestrians. "Greedy people in developing nations are eating huge amounts of food that could easily be turned into biofuel to power our cars. African acreage the size of Belgium is being used for food, and we're saying it should go to cars here in the UK. Can we have your support?"

Londoners reacted with disbelief and outrage, the ActionAid UK video shows, and refused to sign his mock petition. The amusing stunt drove home a vital point: Biofuel programs are turning food into fuel, converting cropland into fuel production sites, and disrupting food supplies for hungry people worldwide. The misguided programs are having serious environmental consequences, as well.

Why, then, can't politicians, bureaucrats and environmentalists display the common sense exhibited by London's citizenry? Why did President Obama tell Africans (many of whom are malnourished) in July 2009 that they should refrain from using "dirty" fossil fuels and use their "bountiful" biofuel and other renewable energy resources, instead? When will Congress pull the plug on Renewable Fuel Standards?

Ethanol and other biofuels might have made some sense when Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and established mandates (or "standards") requiring that refiners and consumer purchase large quantities of ethanol and other biofuels. Back then, despite growing evidence to the contrary, many people thought we were running out of oil and gas, and believed manmade global warming threatened the planet. But this is not 2005. Those rationales are no longer persuasive.

Facebook said Friday it fixed a bug that exposed contact info for over six million accounts. The admission revealed its 'shadow profile' data collection activities, and users are furious.

Friday Facebook announced the fix of a bug it said inadvertently exposed the private information of over six million users when Facebook's previously unknown shadow profiles accidentally merged with user accounts in data history record requests.

According to Reuters, the data leak spanned a year beginning in 2012.

Sunday, June 23, 8:15 PM PST: Updated at page bottom to reflect response statements from Facebook.

The personal information leaked by the bug is information that had not been given to Facebook by the users - it is data Facebook has been compiling on its users behind closed doors, without their consent.

A growing number of Facebook users are furious and demand to know who saw private information they had expressly not given to Facebook.

Earlier this week, an anonymous public defender sent Gothamist this photo of an NYPD warrant squad officer wearing a t-shirt with a pretty disturbing quote from Ernest Hemingway:
The Village Voice reports that the quote was also printed on t-shirts worn by NYPD's infamous Street Crimes Unit, which was disbanded after shooting unarmed immigrant Amadou Diallo 41 times in 1999 as Diallo reached for his wallet. The Voice also reports that at least two NYPD police commissioners have used the phrase "hunter of men" to describe police work -- Bernard Kerik and Howard Safir.

More than one-third of all women around the world are victims of physical or sexual violence. The World Health Organization (WHO) released a new report this week, in partnership with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), calling this problem a public health epidemic. Two companion papers were also published in The Lancet and Science.

The report, which is the first systemic study of global data on the prevalence of violence against women by both partners and non-partners, claims that 38 percent of all women murdered were killed by their partners.

As BBC News reports, the study also reveals that such violence is a major contributor to depression and other health problems in women, such as broken bones, bruises, pregnancy complications, and other forms of mental illness.

"This is an everyday reality for many, many women," Charlotte Watts, a health policy expert at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine told Reuters.

Recent high-profile rape cases in India and South African have highlighted the treatment of women worldwide, said Claudia Garcia-Moreno of the WHO. A 23-year-old woman was brutally gang raped on a bus in New Delhi last December. She later died of her injuries. The event sparked a global outcry and unprecedented protests in India demanding better policing of sex crimes.

"These kinds of cases raise awareness, which is important, and at the same time we must remember there are hundreds of women every day who are being raped on the streets and in their homes, but that doesn't make the headlines," Garcia-Moreno said.

It's the age old and seemingly unanswerable question: What in the world is my dog thinking? It's also one that has spawned a growing market not only of scientific research but of everything from decks of pet tarot cards to books by pet psychics.

Whether any one of them can provide real answers is a matter of opinion, but pet owners can spend a lot of time and money trying.

Andrea Gladstone and David Radis wanted to know more about what was going on in their rescue dog's head, so they bought The Original Dog Tarot, a set of 30 cards and a guidebook developed by Heidi Schulman, a freelance writer and former television news producer from Santa Fe, N.M.

They spread the deck on the floor, and asked LoLa why she chewed up her puppy training book and the Dog Tarot guide.

The answer they divined from the three cards she picked - The Cat, the Pack and Justice - was that she was insecure in her new home and wrecked the books to establish her security and see if they held grudges.

"For me it is more the fun of it than the life lessons to be learned. But I respect the tarot," said David Radis, of Encino, Calif. "I have done one reading for each of my dogs and they were both spot on. I spread the cards out and ask the dog to touch the cards with their nose or paw."

Not everyone consults the latest books for fun. Cathy, an entertainment paralegal in California who asked that her last name not be used, called on pet psychic Jocelyn Kessler, author of The Secret Language of Dogs, to help her communicate with her 11-year-old lab Champ when he fell ill.