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BEIJING (Reuters) - Knife-wielding attackers slashed and stabbed people at a railway station in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, wounding at least nine before police shot dead one of the suspected assailants and arrested another. It was the latest in a string of knife attacks that have unnerved the country, and was launched during the morning rush hour, at 8:18 a.m., the city's public security authorities said via an official microblog account. Investigations were ongoing, and the offenders would be severely punished, the microblog said. ...

"Military operations in and around Tikrit have precipitated displacement of an estimated 28,000 people to Samarra," the UN said in a statement Thursday. Some 30,000 Iraqi security forces members and allied fighters launched the operation to retake Tikrit on Monday, the largest of its kind since IS overran swathes of territory last June. Retaking Tikrit, the hometown of executed president Saddam Hussein, from militants who have had more than eight months to dig in poses a major challenge for the country's forces. Sectarian-fuelled revenge killings targeting Sunni Arabs have been a feature of past operations involving Shiite militias, raising concerns that the same may happen in Tikrit.

At the Game Developers Conference that ends here on Friday, a hot-button topic was the treatment of women in the industry, with female game makers facing frequent vitriol by anonymous attackers. The touchpaper was lit when independent game developer Zoe Quinn's romance with a video game journalist became the subject of an angry online rant by her ex-boyfriend. What appeared to begin as a campaign for better ethics in video game journalism, however, evolved into a fierce debate regarding sexism and racism in video games and the male-dominated industry that makes them. An International Game Developers Association (IGDA) study last year indicated that 22 percent of those working in the industry are women while about 49 percent of players are female.