In brief: Ecuador to end use of U.S.-run school

QUITO, Ecuador – Ecuador’s defense minister said the Andean nation will stop sending military and police officers for training at the U.S. Defense Department-run school formerly known as School of the Americas.

Opponents of the school, currently located at Fort Benning, Ga., blame it for human rights abuses in Latin America by foreign military officers trained there.

Defense Minister Miguel Carvajal’s announcement came after President Rafael Correa met Wednesday with a delegation from School of the Americas Watch. The advocacy group has campaigned since 1990 to close down the school now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

Venezuela stopped sending officers there in 2004, Argentina and Uruguay in 2006 and Costa Rica in 2007.

An Ecuadorean military official says about 20 Ecuadoreans are currently at the school.

Taliban video shows 17 beheaded soldiers

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan – The Taliban released a video Wednesday that they said shows the heads of 17 Pakistani soldiers captured in a cross-border raid from Afghanistan this week and beheaded.

In violence Wednesday, a bomb in a railway station in Pakistan’s southwest killed at least five people , police said, and the leader of an anti-Taliban militia was killed in Peshawar in the northwest.

The Pakistani Taliban’s bloody cross-border raid Sunday night showed the threat still posed by the group, despite multiple army offensives. Increasingly, the militants have used sanctuaries in eastern Afghanistan to attack border areas in Pakistan’s northwest.

Pakistan has criticized NATO and Afghan forces for not doing enough to stop the attacks, but it has received little sympathy. The Afghan government and its allies have long faulted Pakistan for failing to target Afghan Taliban militants and their allies who use Pakistani territory to launch attacks in Afghanistan.