All posts tagged: Massacre

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Curry Barker to Direct

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Curry Barker to Direct

Published by Daniella Wilson

Curry Barker is gassing up his chainsaw. Though the 25-year-old filmmaker’s much talked-about film Obsession is not yet in theaters, A24 is handing him the feature keys to storied horror property The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Barker is in talks to write and direct his own take on Texas Chainsaw, that will stand separate from an A24 TV series from Glen Powell, Dan Cohen and JT Mollner. Barker has been on a rise rarely seen these days in Hollywood. After coming up in the world of YouTube sketch comedy, he shot an $800 horror movie and put it on YouTube for free, where it amassed more than 2 million views and caught Hollywood attention. He then became the toast of the Toronto Film Festival last fall, when his under $1 million budgeted movie Obsession became the biggest sale of the fest, going to Focus Features for around $15 million, a sum which makes it won of the biggest indie sales ever in terms of budget to purchase price ratio. The feature, which Barker wrote, directed and …

This Week in History: Deception at No 10, a Soviet massacre, and the deadliest school shooting in US history

This Week in History: Deception at No 10, a Soviet massacre, and the deadliest school shooting in US history

Published by Daniella Wilson

Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Destruction and deception dominate this week’s news. The world grieves the loss of 32 lives in the Virginia Tech massacre and watches in horror as flames engulf the iconic Notre-Dame Cathedral. Meanwhile, political leaders are forced to face reckonings of their own. From the Soviet Union finally admitting to the Katyn massacre of nearly 15,000 Poles after half a century of denial, to Boris Johnson becoming the first sitting prime minister fined for breaking the law, history unfolds across the front pages of The Independent. 14 April 1990 – Moscow admits Katyn massacre amid Lithuania ultimatum Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev issues a 48-hour ultimatum to Lithuania, threatening an economic blockade if the republic refuses to annul its recent declaration of independence. Meanwhile, in a …

Scientists Recruit Undergrad to Step Into Room Filled With Ravenous Mosquitoes for “Full-Body Massacre”

Scientists Recruit Undergrad to Step Into Room Filled With Ravenous Mosquitoes for “Full-Body Massacre”

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Some dedicate their lives to science. Others, like Georgia Tech student Chris Zuo, give their bodies. A bizarre three-year study run by Georgia Tech engineering and biology professor David Hu sought to identify how mosquitoes choose their prey. As explained by Hu in the Conversation, mosquitoes are the world’s most dangerous animal, causing over 700,000 deaths every year by spreading deadly disease like Malaria. In the initial experiment, Zuo stood in as bait in a chamber full of 100 hangry skeeters. Though he had a mesh suit, it failed to stop the bugs from reaching his skin, causing him to suffer what Hu calls a “full-body massacre.” As the trials went on, Zuo became a graduate student. He switched out of the failed mesh suit to a basic long-sleeved shirt, washed with unscented detergent, as well as gloves and a face mask. He and a fellow student, Soohwan Kim, were then tasked with standing in the chamber while …

Pro-War Republican Senator Apologizes For Iran Girls’ School Massacre After Trump Blames Tehran

Pro-War Republican Senator Apologizes For Iran Girls’ School Massacre After Trump Blames Tehran

Published by Jenni Sidey

Authored by Brett Wilkins via Common Dreams A Republican senator apologized this week for what US military investigators have reportedly determined was an American missile strike on a girls’ school in southern Iran that killed around 175 people—mostly children—amid continued sidestepping by President Donald Trump, who has blamed Tehran for the massacre. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.)—who supports the US-Israeli war on Iran—first apologized for the attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab during a Monday interview with NBC News senior national political reporter Sahil Kapur. “It was terrible,” Kennedy said. “We made a mistake… I’m just so sorry it happened.” Kennedy repeated his apology Tuesday on CNN, telling political correspondent Kasie Hunt: “The investigation may prove me wrong. I hope so. The kids are still dead, but I think it was a horrible, horrible mistake. I wish it hadn’t happened. I’m sorry it happened.” ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect Reuters first reported last week that US military investigators believe American forces carried out the school strike, a preliminary conclusion that came on the heels of a New York Times analysis that found the …

Brutal Iron Age massacre may have targeted women and children

Brutal Iron Age massacre may have targeted women and children

Published by skeptic

Illustration of the Iron Age mass grave at Gomolava Sara Nylund Women and children may have been deliberately targeted in one of the largest prehistoric mass killings discovered in Europe. Buried together in one grave more than 2800 years ago, most of the 77 victims suffered violent deaths in what seems to have been an intentional act. The mass grave was found at Gomolava, an early Iron Age site in the Carpathian basin in what is now Serbia. The place is an artificial mound known as a tell, formed by the accumulation of debris from thousands of years of human habitation from the late 6th millennium BC, including collapsed mud-brick structures, pottery and organic material. Linda Fibiger at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and her colleagues have looked at the bones from the grave, stored at the Museum of Vojvodina in Novi Sad, Serbia, and gathered evidence from DNA and isotopes to investigate what happened. Of the 77 individuals, 51 were children and adolescents. Biological sex could be determined for 72 individuals, and 51 of …

Precrime: Months Before Massacre, OpenAI Worried About Canada’s Trans Mass Killer

Precrime: Months Before Massacre, OpenAI Worried About Canada’s Trans Mass Killer

Published by Jenni Sidey

Months before a Canadian man in a dress went on a Feb 10 rampage, killing his mother and half-brother at home before slaughtering five students and an education assistant at a secondary school where he was formerly a student, employees at OpenAI were deeply troubled by his interactions with the firm’s ChatGPT AI chatbot.    As first reported by the Wall Street Journal, Jesse Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT activity was flagged by the company’s automated review system. When employees took a look at what he’d been up to over a several-day period in June 2025, they were alarmed. About a dozen of them debated what they should do. OpenAI employees were sufficiently alarmed by future mass murderer Jesse Van Rootselaar’s interactions with ChatGPT that they urged managers to call the police Some were convinced Van Rootselaar’s descriptions of gun-violence scenarios signaled a substantial risk of real-world bloodshed, and implored their supervisors to notify police, according to the Journal’s unnamed sources. They opted against doing so, and a spokeswoman now says they’d concluded Van Rootselaar’s posts didn’t cross the …

Israel’s president visits Sydney’s Bondi Beach massacre site and meets victims’ families

Israel’s president visits Sydney’s Bondi Beach massacre site and meets victims’ families

Published by Sam Flores

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Israel President Isaac Herzog started a state visit Monday aimed at consoling grieving Australian Jews and improving bilateral relations by laying a wreath and stones at the site of an antisemitic attack in Sydney that left 15 dead. Herzog met victims’ families and survivors of the Dec. 14 attack on a Jewish festival at Bondi Beach. Only one of the two alleged gunmen survived following a gunbattle with police. Naveed Akram has been charged with committing a terrorist act, murdering 15 people and wounding another 40 in what was Australia’s worst mass shooting in 29 years. Herzog laid the wreath and two stones he had brought from Jerusalem at the rain-swept Bondi Pavillion near the site of the massacre. The pavilion became on impromptu memorial in the days after the tragedy as flowers and cards were placed there. Herzog says he’s in Sydney to show solidarity and love The Israeli president said the stones would remain at Bondi in memory of the victims and as a reminder that good people of …

How AI-generated images are being used to deny the massacre of protesters in Iran

How AI-generated images are being used to deny the massacre of protesters in Iran

Published by Sam Flores

Iranian security forces have been carrying out a deadly, unprecedented crackdown on anti-government protesters since January 8. Preliminary estimates of the number of demonstrators killed range from 6,000 – the current total of an ongoing count being carried out by NGOs – and 20,000, according to the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Mai Sato.  As our team observed by reviewing many videos filmed by eyewitnesses, the Kahrizak morgue in Tehran was flooded with hundreds of protesters’ bodies. According to partial counts carried out by the BBC and the NGO Human Rights Watch, the bodies of at least 200 to 400 demonstrators were brought to the site. However, social media users and media outlets with links to the Iranian government began, the week of January 19, to explicitly deny that the massacres were taking place, claiming that the photos taken in the Kahrizak morgue were all generated by artificial intelligence.  The Fars News Agency, which is linked to the Iranian regime, has tried to make this point by sharing two images of the same moving scene: …

Who was Rifaat al-Assad, commander of Syria’s 1982 Hama massacre? | Syria’s War

Who was Rifaat al-Assad, commander of Syria’s 1982 Hama massacre? | Syria’s War

Published by Sam Flores

EXPLAINER ‘Butcher of Hama’ and former Syrian vice president, convicted of money laundering in France and accused of war crimes in Switzerland, has died at age 89. Listen to this article | 5 mins Rifaat al-Assad, the uncle of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the former commander of the paramilitary “Defence Companies” (Saraya al-Difa), has died in the United Arab Emirates at the age of 89. The Reuters news agency cited two sources confirming his death on January 21, 2026. Rifaat had reportedly fled from Beirut to Dubai following the collapse of the Assad regime and the flight of his nephew to Russia in December 2024. Born in Qardaha, northwestern Syria, in 1937, Rifaat, a member of the country’s Alawite minority, was a central figure in the establishment of the Assad family’s rule in the 1970s. But he fell out with his brother, former President Hafez al-Assad, following a failed coup attempt in the early 1980s. Here is a brief timeline of the main events during the life and career of the man known as the …