North Carolina officials say there has been a huge increase over the past two years in the number of Tar Heel families who have pulled their kids out of public schools and begun educating them at home.

The number of homeschools has jumped 27 percent since the 2011-12 school year, NewsObserver.com reports. As of last year, 98,172 North Carolinian children were homeschooled; that's 2,400 students more than the number who attended a private school.

While the sputtering economy is the reason families are choosing homeschooling over private schooling, the nationalized learning experiment (Common Core) is the main reason families are leaving the public schools in the first place. "Common Core is a big factor that I hear people talk about," Beth Herbert, founder of Lighthouse Christian Homeschool Association, told NewsObserver.com.

"They're not happy with the work their kids are coming home with. They've decided to take their children home." In-the-know parents understand that Common Core's plodding approach to math instruction leaves students unprepared for college study in STEM courses - science, technology, engineering and math.

Young father John Crawford was shot and killed by police this week at a Wal-Mart store in Ohio, because he was apparently carrying around a toy gun that was available for purchase in the store. Police were called to the store by an irresponsible couple who had seen Crawford walking around with the gun pointed in the air.

According to the victim's girlfriend, the police had shot Crawford before they even gave him a chance to put down the gun.

"We was just talking. He said he was at the video games playing videos and he went over there by the toy section where the toy guns were. And the next thing I know, he said, 'It's not real,' and the police start shooting and they said, 'Get on the ground,' but he was already on the ground because they had shot him, and I could hear him just crying and screaming. I feel like they shot him down like he was not even human," LeeCee Johnson, the victim's girlfriend told reporters.

"He had a lot of family members that cared about him, and his kids. They're not going to be able to know their dad. They're too young, only 4 months and a year old, to even know how wonderful he was to them," she added.

Business continues to disappoint at Walmart's U.S. locations. The big-box retailer reported on Thursday that sales at existing stores were flat in the latest quarter after declining for the previous five. It said traffic dipped 1.1 percent (though customers who made it in chose to spend slightly more) and cut its full-year earnings outlook on higher-than-expected health care costs and company spending on e-commerce.

Walmart has now spent months explaining away the poor performance of its U.S. division. In the first quarter it blamed the weather; in Q4 2013 it cited cuts to government benefits and increased taxes; and in Q3 2014 it gave perhaps the vaguest excuse of all, a "challenging global economy and negative currency exchange rate fluctuations." In a sign that it might be finally shouldering some responsibility for its results, Walmart a few weeks ago ousted U.S. chief Bill Simon and appointed former Walmart Asia head Greg Foran to replace him.

An Alabama federal judge stripped of his caseload following his arrest on domestic violence charges in Atlanta will continue receiving his annual salary of nearly $200,000.

Legal experts say federal judicial rules don't include a provision for withholding the pay of U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller while a disciplinary committee reviews the case.

In Slavyansk, occupied by Ukrainian troops, the local residents have practically disappeared. The town is being inundated with migrants speaking in a foreign dialect, who take over the housing of those who left to escape the Ukrainian bombing campaign.

This is reported by one of very few residents of Slavyansk who, trusting Ukrainian official propaganda, made the decision to return to his native city. The picture that he saw is terrifying. He realized that the information about residents of Slavyansk returning home is nothing but a vile lie.

"Please, heed our plea! The people have disappeared from Slavyansk!

"I am a native of Slavyansk, residing here already for twenty-seven years. Or better to say 'I was residing', having left the town three months ago, when it was becoming dangerous to stay. During this time I found refuge with relatives in Odessa. I made a decision to return when all the Ukrainian media started saying that everything in Slavyansk was back to normal, that over sixty percent of residents have come back.

"In the three months of my absence my apartment remained untouched by shells from the junta's bombardment or by its marauding thugs. I had already started to unpack when I heard the sound of my neighbour's doors opening across the hallway. I thought it must have been my neighbour, Sergey Ivanovich, but then I saw a young man unknown to me. To my question about his identity he replied that he was Sergey Ivanovich's son.

"Small problem here - my neighbour's son died in a car accident three years ago - and he happened to be my childhood friend. I decided to pay a visit to my other neighbours and ask who this guy really is, perhaps truly a son about whom I had no idea.

RT has been nominated for a prestigious International Emmy award for its groundbreaking coverage of the six-month-long mass hunger strike by inmates at Guantanamo Bay.

In its investigation, the channel helped to bring the daily brutality suffered by inmates to millions of viewers across the globe, keeping the scandal in the headlines when many in the mainstream media ignored or downplayed the story. In May 2013, President Barack Obama promised to begin letting go prisoners who were cleared for release in January 2010. However, since that promise made over 440 days ago, only 17 of the 86 have been allowed to leave.

RT's #Gitmo coverage earns network its THIRD Emmy nomination [VIDEO] http://t.co/PfYNPOclUL @ManilaChan

- RT America (@RT_America) August 13, 2014

.@RT_com received #iEmmy nod in 2012 for reporting on #OWS & in 2010 for coverage of Pres. Obama's visit to Russia. http://t.co/2Aq6pFZMnw

- RT Press Office (@RT_PressOffice_) August 13, 2014

A photograph is never sufficiently proportional to truth. The truth - the full story, the context of things - is too large and complicated to be encompassed by any single image. So from Ferguson, Mo., where daily protests have erupted after Saturday's police shooting of an unarmed African American teenager, we get only photographic data points.

A man lights a rag in a bottle and prepares to throw a Molotov cocktail; militarized police sit atop armored vehicles, guns drawn and aimed at protestors who have their hands raised. Both are volatile images, and both confirm aspects of the truth: There are provocateurs among the mostly peaceful protestors, and the police have adopted a terrifyingly aggressive posture in relation to the citizens they supposedly serve.

But these images aren't coming from Egypt or the Gaza Strip or Ukraine. These are our own, homegrown documents of social unrest and they can't, like images from more distant lands, be kept safely at bay.

The manipulation of photography has become so complex and widespread that images from conflict zones often tend to cancel each other out. Propaganda has trickled down from the state to the D.I.Y. level, and it's hard to tell the difference between the two.

The resulting frustration, our inability to be certain of the authenticity of the image and the accuracy of the caption, is in many ways a relief: If we can't be sure whether the bloodied corpse of a dead child was the result of a bomb from Hamas, or the Israeli army, we push it aside, grateful not to have to take a moral position on the conflict. The self-canceling nature of images releases us from the responsibility to think things through.

The Argentina headquarters of British bank HSBC has been raided by tax officers after revelations that the multinational institution carried out thousands of illegal transactions at its local branches. HSBC now faces money laundering and tax evasion charges. Its operations in Argentina are also being closely screened.

Yet another huge money laundering scandal hits British multinational banking group HSBC, this time in Argentina. The Federal tax office has uncovered scores of bogus transactions involving illegal assets and has filed a lawsuit against HSBC.

Local political leaders are now criticizing the government for failure to prevent money laundering, which, according to the Financial Action Task Force, is spreading across the country. Argentina's tax authority, AFIP, raided the HSBC Argentina headquarters in downtown Buenos Aires and its main offices across the city, but couldn't find all the documents it needed. The bank claims the documents were destroyed in a fire back in February but officials are investigating the claim. Opposition leaders hope the probe on HSBC is just the first step in a much wider investigation into the operations of the British financial group in Argentina. This is not the first time HSBC comes under a criminal investigation as it has been recently hit by a host of scandals internationally. The huge police raid at its Argentina headquarters is certainly another blow to its now poor reputation. Only in Latin America, the British bank is now facing several lawsuits on money laundering related to drug trafficking in Mexico and Colombia.

In a ward at Shifa, Gaza's largest hospital, child therapist Rabeea Hamouda is trying to elicit a response from two small brothers, Omar and Mohammed, aged three and 18 months, hoping for some words or perhaps a smile.

For seven straight minutes the children, peppered with burns and shrapnel wounds sustained in Israeli shelling that hit their home in north Gaza, stare at him blankly, emotionless.

Eventually, as Hamouda gently teases them, pretending to mix up their names and holding out a present while another counselor sings quietly, a smile creeps across Mohammed's face and the older one, Omar, cries out his name.

The rulers of ancient Egypt lived in glorious opulence, decorating themselves with gold and perfumes and taking their treasures with them to the grave.

But how could such a hierarchical, despotic system arise from egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies? The reasons were part technological and part geographical: In a world where agriculture was on the rise and the desert was all-encompassing, the cost of getting out from under the thumb of the pharaoh would have been too high.

"There was basically nowhere else to go," said study author Simon Powers, a postdoctoral researcher in ecology and evolution at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. "That cost of leaving could basically lock individuals into despotism."

From egalitarianism to hierarchy

Ancient Egypt is just one example of a society that transitioned from equality to hierarchy. During the Neolithic Period, often referred to as the Stone Age - which began about 10,000 years ago - agriculture began to replace hunting and gathering as the principal means for obtaining food. At the same time, societies in which everyone had been more or less equal began to schism into classes, with clear leaders emerging. In many cases, these leaders held absolute power.

Many researchers have theorized that agriculture allowed people to hoard food and resources, and that with this power, they could induce others to follow them. But no one had ever convincingly explained how the transition from no leaders to leaders could have occurred, Powers told Live Science. If everyone in hunter-gatherer societies was more or less equal in strength or resources to start, why would they allow an individual to dominate in the first place?

To find out, Powers created a computer model filled with individuals who had their own preferences for egalitarianism or hierarchy. In the model, as in life, the more resources an individual possessed, the more offspring they could have. In the simulations, populations would sometimes gain a voluntary leader - though the next generation down the line could choose to break off from that leader, at a cost of some resources. (Leaders' children did not defect, given that they stood to inherit their parents' wealth.)

The simulations revealed that voluntary leadership arises when leaders give enough benefits to their followers at the outset, Powers said. If leaders give their people an advantage in producing food, the people will follow them, he added.