Scores more freed from Boko Haram

Scores more freed from Boko Haram

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria

Scores more women and children have been rescued from Islamic extremists in the remote Sambisa Forest, Nigeria’s military said amid reports that some of the women fought their rescuers fiercely.

A community leader from the area of northeast Nigeria said Thursday that a senior army officer who was at the scene described the women opening fire on shocked troops in the village of Nbita a week ago, with Boko Haram Islamic insurgents using the women to shield their main fighting force.

He said he was told that 12 women fighters and seven soldiers died in a fierce firefight. The community leader spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue and personal security risks.

Sources: Chicago getting Obama presidential library

CHICAGO

President Barack Obama has selected the University of Chicago to host his library and museum, sources have told the Chicago Tribune.

Despite a flurry of reports Thursday that Chicago had won the library, there was no official confirmation by the Obama administration, city hall or the Obama Foundation, which is leading the site selection process.

2 young brothers take guns to school

LOUISVILLE, Ky.

A first-grader and his brother in kindergarten took two handguns, one of them loaded, on a bus to a Kentucky elementary school Thursday morning after apparently thinking they were toys, authorities said. They said no one was hurt, and the firearms were seized when the boys reached school.

The boys, age 6 and 7, had a gun each in their school backpacks and showed them to some other pupils on a bus headed to Dewitt Elementary School in Flat Lick, said Kentucky State Police Trooper Shane Jacobs. He said one student alerted a teacher, and the eastern Kentucky school was briefly locked down, and the guns were confiscated.

Reports: French troops raped kids

BANGUI, Central African Republic

Residents of a squalid refugee camp said Thursday that French soldiers tasked with protecting civilians had sexually abused boys as young as 9 years old, luring the children with army rations and small change when their families had nothing to feed them.

The accounts given to The Associated Press by one of the boys’ mother and another woman living in the camp came a day after French authorities acknowledged that investigations into the allegations had been underway for months. The children — who described to investigators last year how they were given bottles of water after being sodomized — still are living in the refugee camp, relatives said.

Police kill woman who fired at them

ATLANTA

Police officers in Atlanta fatally shot a woman who first fired at them while sitting in the back of a patrol car Thursday, authorities said.

Two officers were investigating a call about a stolen car Thursday afternoon when they saw a woman sitting inside the vehicle in a parking deck, said Maj. Darin Schierbaum.

He said they took the woman into custody and put her in a patrol car, and that at one point she fired at least two shots at the officers. Schierbaum said the officers returned fire, critically wounding her. She later died at a hospital, he said.

Schierbaum says it’s unclear how the woman was able to fire a gun while in the patrol car and that police are investigating whether she had been handcuffed.

Combined dispatches