Obama's announcements follow the massive hack of Sony Pictures late last year. The attackers crippled Sony's computer network and leaked unreleased films, inflammatory e-mails and financial documents.

The announcements also follow a year of high-profile news stories about hacks of major retail chains in the US, including Home Depot, Target, Staples and others.

Musa Alhaji Bukar, a senior government official in the area, said that fleeing residents told him that Baga, which had a population of about 10,000, was now "virtually non-existent".

Those who fled reported that they had been unable to bury the dead, and corpses littered the town's streets, he said.

While he raised fears that some 2,000 had been killed in the raids, other reports put the number in the hundreds.

President Barack Obama signed an executive order Friday to authorize sanctions that allow the US Treasury Department to restrict North Korean officials, entities and supporters from accessing the US financial system. This means Americans are not allowed to do business with them.

The FBI said it had determined the North Korean government was responsible for the hacks, based on the software used during the attacks.

"North Korea's absolute leadership will crumble if the idolization of leader Kim breaks down," Park told the AP, which noted that the dispatched versions will have Korean subtitles.

"I believe that if we can get 100 times more balloons, then we will make [North Korean dictator] Kim Jong Un paranoid—sending more and more balloons to North Korea is more effective than sending a bomb on North Korea," Park said at the time. "The thing is that if South Korea or the United States Air Force dropped a bomb, there's a way that [North Korea] would react to it, but the thing is with leaflets there's no way to react."

More than 1,000 people marched in the centre of the EU quarter to protest about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA).

The text included a clear attempt to exempt US companies from any requirement to store personal data on EU soil.

"This leak shows TiSA is intended to enforce the interests of large corporations at the expense of consumer and data protection. Data protection standards should not be lowered through the back door of trade agreements. Companies that want to offer their services in Europe, also have to accept our standards."

In dozens of recently leaked emails from the Sony hack, lawyers from the MPAA and six major studios talk about "Goliath" as their most powerful and politically relevant adversary in the fight against online piracy.

At the beginning of this year, the MPAA and six studios — Universal, Sony, Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros., and Disney — joined together to begin a new campaign against piracy on the web.

In another instance, the group seemed to look to articles on political corruption not as a cautionary tale but as an instruction manual.

The series details many tactics involved in Project Goliath, including hiring former attorneys general as counsel and targeting officials at the state level where lobbying dollars may stretch farther.

The Virginia Department of Elections said that some AccuVote TSX Touch Screen voting machines changed votes to something other than what the voter intended.

Another issue that cropped up was that the wrong digital voter rolls were loaded onto thumb drives in North Carolina. In Michigan, there was a similar problem that resulted in some voters being turned away: the mayor of Norton Shores was told that he had already voted by absentee, which he hadn’t. In Indiana, several polling locations were shut down as some computers would not boot entirely.

Karel De Gucht, the outgoing EU trade commissioner, described it as "the cheapest stimulus package you can imagine". To UK prime minister David Cameron it is a "once-in-a-generation prize".

CGE is a form of mainstream economic modelling that assumes all markets are perfectly competitive, efficient and in equilibrium. Or, in lay terms, that there is a buyer for every product or service, including labour. Not only is this a poor approximation of reality, but CGE models are notoriously open to bias.

The models do include estimates of "job displacement" – ranging from 400,000 to 1.1 million in the EU – but they also assume that these workers will be seamlessly reallocated to new jobs by the market.

Most of those killed were ISIS militants and Syrian Kurdish fighters, battling for control of Kobani, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The group said it believes the actual casualty figure is twice the number documented, "because there is absolute secrecy on casualties and due to the difficulty of access to many areas and villages that have witnessed violent clashes and bombardment by the two sides."

Authorities and pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong remain at loggerheads as protests continued into Monday, the day the government has set as a deadline to clear the streets.

Demonstrators are upset with a decision this summer by China's ruling Communist Party to let a committee stacked with Beijing loyalists choose who can run as a candidate for the chief executive role in the 2017 election.