A witness to the aftermath of the terrible school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut on December 14th described police cuffing a man in camouflage pants and a dark jacket who was walked past him, and who looked at gathered parents and told them that he wasn't responsible for the shooting. At the time the witness was interviewed by CBS News, the man he described was not far away. In fact, he was sitting in the front of a police car that was nearby.

Witness: I saw them walk a guy earlier with handcuffs...he walked by us and said he didn't do it.

Reporter: It was a grown man?

Witness: A grown man, yeah. He's sitting in the front of the police car over there now. So, I mean...

Reporter: He didn't have a gun?

Witness: No, I didn't see any gun...just had him handcuffed and he walked by us and looked into parents' eyes and said "I didn't do it".

Reporter: How was he dressed?

Witness: Camo pants with a dark jacket.

There have been a lot of factual errors in the chaotic rush to get details about today's shooting in Connecticut. But one fact that seemed established across the board was that victim Nancy Lanza, the mother of alleged shooter Adam Lanza, was a teacher at the Sandy Hook Elementary School - specifically that it was her class that Adam Lanza massacred.

But this story just out in the Journal suggests that's not true.

Oddly, it's buried down at the bottom of the story, almost as an afterthought ...

A former school board official in Newtown called into question earlier reports that Nancy Lanza had been connected to Sandy Hook Elementary School, possibly as part of the teaching staff.

"No one has heard of her," said Lillian Bittman, who served on the local school board until 2011. "Teachers don't know her.

"It's mentioned so offhandedly. And this apparent fact was so widely reported that I'm still wondering if I'm misreading these two grafs. But it seems hard to read it any other way.

Allegations of animal cruelty on the set of The Hobbit threaten to tarnish the film's reputation. So has director Peter Jackson done enough to answer them?

"What do you fear, lady?" Aragorn asks in JRR Tolkien's The Return of the King. Éowyn replies, "A cage. To stay behind bars ...".

The animals, more than two dozen of them, didn't even get a cage: they lost their lives during production of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in freakish and no doubt preventable ways. A rep for Jackson acknowledged the lives lost but said that some died of natural causes. The deaths are worth remembering as the film is set to premiere in the UK, just two days after International Animal Rights Day is recognised around the world.

Unlike Frodo Baggins, animals don't aspire to do "great deeds" (although if you realise that the albatross was the first living being to circumnavigate the globe and that ants built boats out of leaves to cross mighty rivers before any human, they certainly can carry them out). They ask for far less: simply to be able to live their lives, seek out small pleasures and basic pursuits and go about their business without being captured and controlled, tormented and slaughtered.

In the production of The Hobbit, goats and sheep were reportedly corralled in crowded pens, kept on land full of burrows that caused them to lose their footing and exposed to a variety of other hazards from which they could not escape. Chickens, naturally timid birds, were left at the mercy of marauding dogs and were chased down and killed.

Pittsburgh woman raped at gunpoint and charged with fabricating her story has won a settlement after a marathon legal battle, changing federal law along the way, reports Joanna Walters

Sara Reedy remembers clearly the start of her ordeal, and how surprisingly painful it was to have a gun jammed to her temple. Then her attacker demanded oral sex, saying he would shoot her if she refused. She was shaking, gagging.

"I had images of my family finding me dead," she told the Observer. "I closed my eyes and just tried to get it over with."

Reedy was 19 when the man entered the petrol station near Pittsburgh where she was working to pay her way through college and pulled a gun. He emptied the till of its $606.73 takings, assaulted her and fled into the night. But the detective who interviewed Reedy in hospital didn't believe her, and accused her of stealing the money herself and inventing the story as a cover-up. Although another local woman was attacked not long after in similar fashion, the police didn't join the dots.

The 15 first graders cowered in a dark, barricaded bathroom as gunfire boomed outside, shot after shot after shot killing their classmates and teachers.

Terrified as they were, their teacher played loving mother hen, even as she feared they - ages 6 and 7 - and she were next and would die any minute.

Sandy Hook Elementary School teacher Kaitlin Roig cried, sniffled and fidgeted as she recounted her harrowing and heartbreaking chapter of the Connecticut school shooting to ABC News.

When gunfire rang out, she gathered her kids together - their classroom had a big, exposed and thus dangerous window - and rushed them into the small bathroom.

Newborn Goodluck Caubergs died the day after Grace Adeleye carried out the procedure without anaesthetic and using only a pair of scissors, forceps and olive oil.

A nurse has been found guilty of the manslaughter of a four-week-old baby who bled to death after a botched home circumcision near Oldham.

Goodluck Caubergs died the day after Grace Adeleye carried out the procedure without anaesthetic and using only a pair of scissors, forceps and olive oil, a trial at Manchester Crown Court heard.

The 67-year-old is originally from Nigeria, as are the youngster's parents, where the circumcision of newborns is a tradition for Christian families, the jury heard.

Adeleye, who is also a midwife, was paid £100 for the operation as Goodluck's parents were not aware the procedure was available on the NHS.

The Royal Oldham Hospital was just a mile and a half from the family home in Chadderton, near Oldham, but by the time an ambulance was called the infant could not be saved, the court heard.

On Friday a jury of eight women and four men found Adeleye guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence by a majority verdict of 10 to 2 after deliberating for eight hours and 20 minutes.

Sentencing was adjourned to a date to be fixed for the preparation of pre-sentence reports.

Adeleye, of Sarnia Court, Salford, Greater Manchester, was granted bail with conditions.

The trial heard that the nurse botched the procedure by leaving a "ragged" wound which bled, and her post-operative care was also woefully inadequate.

Adrian Darbishire QC, opening the case for the prosecution, told the jury: "The allegation essentially here is that the care she provided in the course of that procedure was so bad that not only did it cause the death of that young baby wholly unnecessarily, but it amounted to gross negligence and a crime."

China has launched a crackdown on a cult it says is calling for a "decisive battle" to slay the "Red Dragon" Communist Party, and which has been spreading doomsday rumors, state media said on Friday.

In recent weeks, hundreds of members of the "Almighty God" group have clashed with police, sometimes outside government buildings, in central Henan, northern Shaanxi and southwestern Gansu provinces, according to photos on popular microblogs.

(The group) has "incited followers to launch a decisive battle with the 'Big Red Dragon', to make the 'Red Dragon' extinct and to establish the reign of the kingdom of the 'Almighty God'", the provincial Shaanxi Daily said on its website.

It added that the sect's followers have been distributing leaflets saying that the world will end in 2012.

China's Communist Party brooks no challenge to its rule and is obsessed with social stability.

Two pagans were sentenced to more than a decade in prison today after being found guilty of abusing children in bizarre sex rituals as part of a witches' coven.

Peter Petrauske and Jack Kemp were said to have worn ceremonial robes and pagan paraphernalia while they abused young girls in Cornwall during the 1970s.

Police believe one of their victims may have been as young as three when the abuse started.

The judge described the victims' experiences as 'nothing less than harrowing' as he condemned their 'utterly horrifying' crimes, sentencing Petrauske to 18 years in prison and Kemp to 14.

Lone Tree, Colorado - A female inmate claims a security guard sexually assaulted her minutes after giving birth at Sky Ridge Medical Center in Lone Tree.

The 34-year-old Arapahoe County jail inmate claims this happened in September. Her accused attacker is also now in jail.

Under the supervision of the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office, contracted security guard Michael Arnold was hired to watch her.

But according to court documents obtained by FOX31 Denver, just 15 minutes after the inmate gave birth, the woman claimed Arnold raped her while her newborn infant was in the bed with her.

The sheriff's office would not comment on the story except to say they are aware of the criminal investigation.

Officials say they do contract private security in these situations to save money.

"In 1982, Ronald Reagan sat down with the Democrats and they had a deal - a $3 cut in spending for every dollar they raised in taxes. Guess what? They raised the taxes, and they never cut the spending."

- oft-repeated story told in Washington during "fiscal cliff" negotiations

It had become an article of faith by conservatives that President Reagan reluctantly agreed to raise taxes in his first term in office - and that Congress then failed to follow though on promised spending cuts. The frequent recitation of this story during the current fiscal debate made us wonder: What actually happened three decades ago?

It's not hard to find the source of this story - Reagan's own memoir, An American Life. Here's what he wrote: "I made a deal with the congressional Democrats in 1982, agreeing to support a limited loophole-closing tax increase to raise more than $98.3 billion over three years in return for their agreement to cut spending by $280 billion during the same period; later the Democrats reneged on their pledge and we never got those cuts."

When Reagan made a nationally-televised speech in support of the tax hike - trying to refute charges that it was the biggest tax increase in U.S. history - he also cited a 3-to-1 agreement:

"Revenues would increase over a three-year period by about $99 billion, and outlays in that same period would be reduced by $280 billion. Now, as you can see, that figures out to about a 3-to-1 ratio - $3 less in spending outlays for each $1 of increased revenue. This compromise adds up to a total over three years of a $380 billion reduction in the budget deficits."

The Washington Post did not have a Fact Checker column back then, and this speech certainly would have been ripe for fact checking. (We would have been suspicious of his use of the word "outlays.") Let's go back in time to show what really happened, using documents, news reports and memoirs of the period.