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At least 1,201 people were killed in 2022 by law enforcement officers, about 100 deaths a month, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit research group that tracks police killings. ProPublica examined the 101 deaths that occurred in June 2022, a time frame chosen because enough time had elapsed that investigations could reasonably be expected to have concluded. The cases involved 131 law enforcement agencies in 34 states.

In 79 of those deaths, ProPublica confirmed that body-worn camera video exists. But more than a year later, authorities or victims’ families had released the footage of only 33 incidents.

Philadelphia signed a $12.5 million contract in 2017 to equip its entire police force with cameras. Since then, at least 27 people have been killed by Philadelphia police, according to Mapping Police Violence, but in only two cases has body-camera video been released to the public.

ProPublica’s review shows that withholding body-worn camera footage from the public has become so entrenched in some cities that even pleas from victims’ families don’t serve to shake the video loose.

Sohaila is a widow. She has six children, her youngest a 15-month-old girl named Husna Fakeeri. The tea that Sohaila refers to is what's traditionally drunk in Afghanistan, made with green leaves and hot water, without any milk or sugar. It contains nothing that's of any nutritional value for her baby.

Sohaila is one of the 10 million people who have stopped receiving emergency food assistance from the UN World Food Programme (WFP) over the past year - cuts necessitated by a massive funding shortfall. It's a crushing blow, especially for the estimated two million households run by women in Afghanistan.

Under Taliban rule, Sohaila says she can't go out to work and feed her family.

"There have been nights when we have had nothing to eat. I say to my children, where can I go begging at this time of night? They sleep in a state of hunger and when they wake up I wonder what I should do. If a neighbour brings us some food the children scramble, saying 'give me, give me'. I try to split it between them to calm them down," Sohaila says.

British Columbia's chief coroner Lisa Lapointe says she's a hopeful person, but she is leaving her office frustrated and disappointed. Angry, even, with drug overdose deaths expected to hit record levels this year.

The B.C. Coroners Service issued a public safety warning Wednesday, citing increases in overdose deaths "above earlier indications," when 189 deaths were reported in October.

Lapointe has been at the forefront of the province's battle against toxic drug overdoses for years, but she said the public health emergency that was declared in April 2016 never received a "a co-ordinated response commensurate with the size of this crisis."

Instead, she lamented a "one-off, beds and projects" response to the emergency that the B.C. Coroners Service says has claimed more than 13,000 lives in the past 7½ years.

"We see these ad hoc announcements but sadly what we haven't seen is a thoughtful, evidence-based, data-driven plan for how we are going to reduce the number of deaths in our province," Lapointe said in an interview Monday.

Lapointe, who retires in February, said she was particularly worried about what she feared was the creep of politics into vital public health decisions surrounding overdose policies.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t immediately say what type of missile it was or how far it flew.

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula are at their highest point in years, with the both the pace of North Korean weapons demonstrations and South Korea’s combined military exercises with Japan intensifying in a cycle of tit-for-tat.

The weapons North Korea tested this year included intercontinental ballistic missiles that demonstrated potential range to reach the U.S. mainland and a series of launch events that the North described as simulated nuclear attacks on targets in South Korea.

The landmark verdict marks a monumental step in a four-decade struggle for Indigenous land rights and a long, bitter legal battle, which has at times spilled into the streets of northern Guatemala.

According to a verdict read from Costa Rica in the early hours of the morning, the Guatemalan government violated the rights of the Indigenous Q’eqchi’ people to property and consultation by permitting mining on land where members of the community have lived at least since the 1800s.

In its written sentence, the court linked the human rights violations to “inadequacies in domestic law,” which fail to recognize Indigenous property and ordered the state to adopt new laws.

Guatemala first granted massive exploratory permits at the Fenix mine in eastern Guatemala to Canadian company Hudbay just under two decades ago. In 2009, the mine’s head of security shot Tot’s son dead. Hudbay sold the site to a local subsidiary of Swiss-based Solway Investment Group two years later.

“Losing your life doesn’t matter, but only for something important,” Tot said. “Within our anthem there is a part where it says ‘overcome or die.’ If I die defending my land, then I believe it is something that will remain as the history of our struggle.”

The comparison in a recent New Yorker article was viewed as controversial in Germany, where government authorities strongly support Israel as a form of remorse and responsibility after Adolf Hitler’s Germany murdered up to 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.

Gessen, who was born Jewish in the Soviet Union, is critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

In Gessen’s article, titled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” the author explores German Holocaust memory, arguing that Germany today stifles free and open debate on Israel.

Gessen also is critical of Israel’s relationship with Palestinians, writing that Gaza is “like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”

“The ghetto is being liquidated,” the article added.

(Here's a non-paywall link to the article.) It is profound.

A Ukrainian military drone unit near Stepove, a village just north of Avdiivka, where some of the most intense battles have taken place, shot the video this month.

It’s an apocalyptic scene: In two separate clips, the bodies of about 150 soldiers — most wearing Russian uniforms — lie scattered along tree lines where they sought cover. The village itself has been reduced to rubble. Rows of trees that used to separate farm fields are burned and disfigured. The fields are pocked by artillery shells and grenades dropped from drones. The drone unit said it’s possible that some of the dead were Ukrainians.

The footage was provided to the AP by Ukraine’s BUAR unit of the 110th Mechanized Brigade, involved in the fighting in the area. The unit said that the footage was shot on Dec. 6 over two separate treelines between Stepove and nearby railroad tracks and that many of the bodies had been left there for weeks.

The letters, obtained Thursday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through an open records request, were hand-written and terse. Neither letter acknowledges the legitimacy of Democrat Joe Biden’s win in Georgia’s 2020 election nor denounces the baseless conspiracy theories they pushed to claim Trump was cheated out of victory through fraud.

“I apologize for my actions in connection with the events in Coffee County,” Powell wrote in a letter dated Oct. 19, the same day she pleaded guilty to six misdemeanors accusing her of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties.

“I apologize to the citizens of the state of Georgia and of Fulton County for my involvement in Count 15 of the indictment,” Chesebro wrote in a letter dated Oct. 20, when he appeared in court to plead guilty to one felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents.

A spokesperson for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who brought the election interference case, declined Thursday to comment on the contents of the letters.

The decision came in April after the utility sought advice from the National Cyber Security Centre, a branch of the nation's signals intelligence agency GCHQ, the newspaper quoted a Whitehall official as saying.

The FT said an employee at the Nari subsidiary NR Electric UK had said the company no longer had access to sites where the components were installed and that National Grid did not disclose a reason for terminating the contracts.

It quoted another person it did not name as saying the decision was based on NR Electric UK components that help control and balance the grid and minimise the risk of blackouts.

It was unclear whether the components remained in the electricity transmission network, the report said.

Quaker, which is owned by PepsiCo, said in a news release that it has not received any reports of salmonella infections related to the recalled granola products. The full list of recalled foods includes granola oats cereals and Quaker Chewy Bars, which are also sold in PepsiCo’s snack mixes.

The affected products have been sold in all 50 U.S. states, as well as U.S. territories, Quaker said. The company is asking customers with recalled products to throw them away and contact its customer support line or visit the recall website for more information and reimbursement.

According to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 1.35 million cases of salmonella infection occur in the U.S. each year, causing approximately 26,500 hospitalizations and 420 deaths.

List of recalled items here (about halfway down the page).

The trial, which exposed infighting and intrigue in the highest echelons of the Vatican, lasted for 86 sessions over two-and-a-half years.

It revolved mostly around the messy purchase of a building in London by the Secretariat of State, the Vatican's key administrative and diplomatic department.

Becciu, then an archbishop, held the number two position there in 2013 when it began investing in a fund managed by Italian financier Raffaele Mincione, securing about 45% of the building at 60 Sloane Avenue, in an upmarket district of the city.

Mincione was found guilty of embezzlement and money laundering and given the same sentence as Becciu.

An architect of the 1993 Oslo peace accords with Israel that raised hopes of Palestinian statehood, Abbas has seen his legitimacy steadily undermined by Israeli settlement building in the occupied West Bank, which he oversees. Many Palestinians now regard his administration as corrupt, undemocratic and out of touch.

But in the wake of Hamas' Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, President Joe Biden has made it clear that he wants to see a revitalized Palestinian Authority – which Abbas has run since 2005 - take charge in Gaza once the conflict is over, unifying its administration with the West Bank.

Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security advisor, met with Abbas on Friday, becoming the latest senior U.S. official to urge him to implement rapid change. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters after meeting the Palestinian leader in late November that they discussed the need for reforms to combat corruption, empower civil society and support a free press.

Three Palestinian and one senior regional official briefed on the conversations said that Washington's proposals behind closed doors would also involve Abbas ceding some of his control over the Authority.