The number of new cases of Ebola rose in all three of West Africa's worst-hit countries last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday, ending several weeks of encouraging declines across the region.

Suspicion of aid workers, especially in Guinea, and unsafe local practices were continuing to hamper efforts to halt the deadly virus, the United Nations agency said.

"An unsafe burial that took place in early January in the (Guinean) eastern prefecture of Lola, on the border with Côte d'Ivoire, has so far resulted in an outbreak of 11 confirmed cases," it said. Investigators had been initially rebuffed by the local population, it added.

Mourners have caught the haemorrhagic disease in the past by touching the highly-contagious bodies of dead loved ones, sometimes by laying hands on them to say goodbye.

The WHO said a week ago that there had been 99 confirmed cases in the week to Jan. 25, the lowest tally since June 2014, raising hopes that the tide might have turned.

But its new figures, for the week ending Feb. 1, showed the first recorded rise in new cases across all three countries this year.

The Arizona Attorney General's Office is asking for dismissal of a lawsuit filed by a teacher who was brutally assaulted and raped after being left in an unguarded prison classroom with a convicted sex offender.

The AG's reasoning is essentially this: the woman knew she was in a prison, so what did she expect?

No, seriously. That's the reasoning.

"Plaintiff is an ADOC (Arizona Department of Corrections) employee who routinely worked at the prison complex," Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Weisbard wrote in his motion to dismiss. "By being placed in a classroom at the complex, the officers were not placing Plaintiff in any type of situation that she would not normally face. The risk of harm, including assault, always existed at a prison like Eyman."

Weisbard made his pitch on Monday to U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton, who is pondering the matter.

Hopefully, she's pondering a nice strongly-worded response to AAG Weisbard.

The woman, who works for DOC as a teacher, was scheduled to give a GED exam to seven sex offenders housed at the Arizona State Prison Complex-Eyman on Jan. 20, 2014.

Normally, such tests are given in the visitation room, which is monitored by security cameras and corrections officers. But on that day, because of a special event, she was sent to an unmonitored classroom, handed a radio and told to use it if there was any trouble, her lawsuit says.

The test lasted 90 minutes during which not a single corrections officer checked on her or radioed to ask if everything was okay. As they finished, six inmates left, returning unescorted to their dorm. One, Jacob Harvey, lingered.

According to the lawsuit, the 20-year-old inmate grabbed her from behind and took her to the ground as she struggled. He then stabbed her repeatedly in the head with a pen, choked her, slammed her head into the floor, tore away her clothes and raped her, the lawsuit says.

There was a bizarre scene on Tuesday morning in Arapahoe County Court as the jury selection continues in the Aurora theater shooting trial.

A woman answered her summonses with a child. She said the child is one of two children she babysits.

The woman told the court the child has not been immunized for measles and couldn't go to day care.


She asked to be excused but was rescheduled for another day. That's when she fell to knees, crying and pulling chunks of her hair out.

At that point she was released from jury.

She was one of 66 potential jurors who were released on Tuesday morning.

Tuesday's incident came after two other prospective jurors previously showed up intoxicated. Another one was high and at least one person had to leave in an ambulance violently ill. Despite all the incidents, the jury selection process is moving more quickly than expected and individual questioning should begin next week.

Icelanders will soon be able to publicly worship at a shrine to Thor, Odin and Frigg with construction starting this month on the island's first major temple to the Norse gods since the Viking age.

Worship of the gods in Scandinavia gave way to Christianity around 1,000 years ago but a modern version of Norse paganism has been gaining popularity in Iceland.

"I don't believe anyone believes in a one-eyed man who is riding about on a horse with eight feet," said Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, high priest of Ásatrúarfélagið, an association that promotes faith in the Norse gods.

"We see the stories as poetic metaphors and a manifestation of the forces of nature and human psychology."

Membership in Ásatrúarfélagið has tripled in Iceland in the last decade to 2,400 members last year, out of a total population of 330,000, data from Statistics Iceland showed.

The temple will be circular and will be dug 4 metres (13ft) down into a hill overlooking the Icelandic capital Reykjavik, with a dome on top to let in the sunlight.

"The sun changes with the seasons so we are in a way having the sun paint the space for us," Hilmarsson said.

The temple will host ceremonies such as weddings and funerals. The group will also confer names to children and initiate teenagers, similar to other religious communities. Iceland's neo-pagans still celebrate the ancient sacrificial ritual of Blot with music, reading, eating and drinking, but nowadays leave out the slaughter of animals.

Source: Reuters

Malcolm X, unlike Martin Luther King Jr., did not believe America had a conscience. For him there was no great tension between the lofty ideals of the nation - which he said were a sham - and the failure to deliver justice to blacks. He, perhaps better than King, understood the inner workings of empire. He had no hope that those who managed empire would ever get in touch with their better selves to build a country free of exploitation and injustice. He argued that from the arrival of the first slave ship to the appearance of our vast archipelago of prisons and our squalid, urban internal colonies where the poor are trapped and abused, the American empire was unrelentingly hostile to those Frantz Fanon called "the wretched of the earth." This, Malcolm knew, would not change until the empire was destroyed.

"It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck," Malcolm said. "Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it's more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody's blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, then capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It's only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely."

King was able to achieve a legal victory through the civil rights movement, portrayed in the new film "Selma." But he failed to bring about economic justice and thwart the rapacious appetite of the war machine that he was acutely aware was responsible for empire's abuse of the oppressed at home and abroad. And 50 years after Malcolm X was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem by hit men from the Nation of Islam, it is clear that he, not King, was right. We are the nation Malcolm knew us to be. Human beings can be redeemed. Empires cannot. Our refusal to face the truth about empire, our refusal to defy the multitudinous crimes and atrocities of empire, has brought about the nightmare Malcolm predicted. And as the Digital Age and our post-literate society implant a terrifying historical amnesia, these crimes are erased as swiftly as they are committed.

"Sometimes, I have dared to dream ... that one day, history may even say that my voice - which disturbed the white man's smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency - that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even fatal catastrophe," Malcolm wrote.

O_O - Purported dashcam pics of the crash, via@Missxoxo168.#GE235 #TransAsia pic.twitter.com/VHy8dgSDrO
A Taiwanese commercial flight with 53 passengers aboard clipped a bridge shortly after takeoff and crashed into a river in the island's capital of Taipei on Wednesday morning.

Taiwan's Central News Agency said at least 10 people were being taken to safety after the incident but gave no immediate information about the other passengers and crew aboard the TransAsia Airways flight.

"Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books."

- Etienne de La Boétie, The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude: How Do Tyrants Secure Cooperation? (1548)

Americans love their reality TV shows - the drama, the insults, the bullying, the callousness, the damaged relationships delivered through the lens of a surveillance camera - and there's no shortage of such dehumanizing spectacles to be found on or off screen, whether it's Cops, Real Housewives or the heavy-handed tactics of police officers who break down doors first and ask questions later.

Where things get tricky is when we start to lose our grasp on what is real vs. unreal and what is an entertainment spectacle that distracts us vs. a real-life drama that impacts us.

For example, do we tune into Bruce Jenner's gender transformation as it unfolds on reality TV, follow the sniping over Navy sharpshooter Chris Kyle's approach to war and killing, or chart the progress of the Keystone oil pipeline as it makes it work through Congress? Do we debate the merits of Katy Perry's Superbowl XLIX halftime performance, or speculate on which politicians will face off in the 2016 presidential election?

Here's a hint: it's all spectacle.

Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch - and I would posit that it's all reality TV - the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce. Unfortunately, Americans have a voracious appetite for TV entertainment. On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we're watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

Decatur, GA - A family is speaking out and demanding justice after the December 29th killing of Kevin Davis, 44, after he called 9-11 for help.

Davis was by all accounts a kind and loving man. He was, in fact, so kind, that he invited a coworker Terrance Hilyard, who was going through a rough time, to stay with him and his girlfriend, April Edwards, in their small apartment.

On the 29th, an argument escalated between Edwards and their house guest. Hilyard then stabbed Edwards with a kitchen knife before fleeing the residence. Davis called 9-11, and the couple waited in their bedroom for help to arrive.

Shortly after the call, Davis heard gunfire from the front room of his home. He believed Hilyard had returned with a gun. Davis grabbed his gun and went to the front room where he heard the shots.

Tragically, the shots he heard came from an Officer Joseph Pitts, the first to arrive on the scene. He had just shot and killed Davis' three-legged dog, Tooter. Three witnesses all claim the officer never announced his presence or identified himself as a policeman.

Upon entering the room, Davis was shot, twice, by Officer Pitts. The police claim Davis had been ordered to drop his weapon and did not comply. However, neighbors report that they did not hear the officer tell Davis to drop his gun until after hearing the gunshots.

"We have witnesses that will testify that they heard police yell 'Drop the gun' only after the shots were fired," Mawuli Davis, the family's lawyer has stated.

Davis was then arrested, charged with aggravated assault of a police officer, and transferred to a hospital in police custody, where he would die two days later.

Last week, a man was arrested while he was attempting to pay his property taxes in $1 bills. According to the police report, 27-year-old Timothy Andrew Norris attempted to pay $600 worth of property taxes in intricately folded one dollar bills.

The tax officials refused the payment because it would make their job more difficult. Norris was then asked to leave by a police officer who was at the office.

When Norris refused to leave until they accepted his payment, the officer immediately grabbed him and put him in handcuffs. When he attempted to pull away from the officer, he was thrown to the ground and placed under arrest for criminal trespass and resisting arrest.

The arrest report stated, "The deputy was at the Annex, 600 Scott Street, just after 2 p.m. when Wichita County Tax Assessor-Collector Tommy Smyth asked Timothy Andrew Norris, 27, to leave the tax office. Smyth accused Norris of disrupting the operation and efficiency of the tax office by attempting to pay $600-worth of property taxes with $1 bills. The bills were said to be folded so tightly it "required tax office personnel approximately six minutes to unfold each bill."

Norris was released on $500 bail over the weekend.

Similar tax and fine protests have been staged by activists in the past, but rarely is there ever an arrest.

Last year we reported on the case of a blogger named "Bacon Moose", who paid a $137.00 ticket all in ones.

A 13-year-old Baltimore girl needed 10 stitches in her head after a police officer hit her with a baton in an altercation caught on video, WBAL-TV reported.

The video, released today, shows the encounter between the officer and the girl, identified as Diamond. A photograph taken after the incident last October shows a bandage on Diamond's head and bloodstains on her Vanguard Middle School shirt. Two of her relatives, who also attend Vanguard, were also involved. The name of the officer involved in the incident has not been released.

Footage shows Diamond's cousin, identified as Starr, talking to the officer after walking down a stairway. The officer then grabs her by the arm and pushes her against a wall and seems to hold her by her hair at one point.

"The officer was hollering at her and said, 'Little girl, get down here,'" Starr's grandmother, Vanessa Ward, told WBAL. "And so Starr said, 'My name is not little girl, it's Starr.' Starr came on down the steps, and Starr said that's when the officer grabbed her."

Starr's sister is then seen approaching the scene and arguing with the officer after finding out that Starr was involved. Diamond is then seen trying to step between the officer and Starr.

The officer lets Starr go and begins chasing Diamond. The officer then draws her baton and hits Diamond, who is backed against a wall with her hands up.

Neals said that the school did not tell her that her daughter had been hurt by the officer. Instead, she said, she found out from paramedics. The officer was also seen using pepper spray against the other two girls as they were being restrained by a school official. All three girls had to be hospitalized.

"The officer kind of comes from behind and reaches around and sprays them multiple times in the face with pepper spray," the family's attorney, Jared Jaskot, said. "It's disgusting."