Police in Hutchinson say a 71-year-old woman used a frying pan to knock out a man who attacked her.

Police Sgt. John Moore say a 25-year-old man talked his way into the woman’s home shortly after 7 a.m. Saturday, claiming he was homeless and had nowhere to go.

Moore says when he tried to attack the woman, she fought back and “beat him down with a frying pan.”

When police arrived, he was unconscious on the floor.

Kevin Scott Funderburk remains jailed on $55,200 bond on suspicion of attempted rape, aggravated battery, criminal restraint and criminal damage to property.

He was wearing a neck brace when he made his first appearance Tuesday in court.

The 50-year-old Versace was gunned down on the steps of his Miami apartment in 1997 by serial killer Andrew Cunanan.

According to a new book by Giuseppe Di Bella, a former member of the Calabrian Mafia known as the N’drangheta, Versace was allegedly killed “over debts” he had with the Godfathers.

In the book Metastasi, Di Bella alleges that Versace was being used by Godfather Paolo De Stefano to launder money.

Di Bella told investigative journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi:”There were rivers of money from drugs, extortion, protection rackets, loan sharking, mountains of money and it had to be made clean.

“Bars, restaurants, property and luxury goods were used but also clean businesses like that of Versace.”

Di Bella also describes how the N’drangheta plotted to steal Versace’s ashes from a cemetery near his family home on Lake Como on New Year’s Eve 1997 but it was never carried out.

Assailants on motorcycles attached bombs to the cars of two nuclear scientists as they were driving to work in Tehran Monday, killing one and wounding the other, state media and officials said.

Iran’s nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, said the man killed was involved in a major project at the country’s chief nuclear agency, though he did not give specifics.

Some Iranian media reported that the wounded scientist was a laser expert at Iran’s Defense Ministry and one of the country’s few top specialists in nuclear isotope separation.

UPDATE: looks like there’s a Stuxnet connection too! http://www.debka.com/article/20406/

He is the sadistic executioner whose killings have terrorised Mexico.

But unlike most of the brutal players in the country’s horrific drug wars, El Ponchis (The Cloak) is just 12 years old.

The diminutive hitman, whose real name is not known, is in the pay of a Mexican cartel battling for control of the cocaine trade.

He works alongside a posse of women dubbed the Chavelas, who are responsible for dumping the bodies of his victims. Some of them are believed to be his sisters.

A Mexican Army spokesman said: ‘We understand El Ponchis works under the command of Julio Jesus Radilla.

‘These victims were tortured, their throats cut and bodies dumped at roadsides.’

Gruesome videos of El Ponchis torturing and executing his enemies have been circulated online.

His favoured technique is to slit the throats of his victims using a cutting technique which leaves the head hanging by a thread.

The killer has also posed for photographs wielding a rifle and standing beside a body.

For a time it seemed Nicolo Rizzuto was the last of the untouchables, or at least that the enemies picking off his family had decided to let the elderly godfather live out his final years.

Mr. Rizzuto was shot dead at his home at dinnertime Wednesday in what may be a stunning coup de grâce against the mob clan he headed for 30 years.

The 86-year-old was shot at 5:45 p.m. at his house on Antoine-Berthelet Avenue, the street where Mr. Rizzuto, his imprisoned son, Vito, and several of his acolytes have lived for years.

Mr. Rizzuto’s crime clan has been under attack in Montreal’s underworld for several years.

A number of high-profile members have disappeared or been killed, including Mr. Rizzuto’s grandson and namesake, Nick Rizzuto, who was shot dead standing beside his black Mercedes last December.

“It’s the end of the Rizzuto crime family. The killing is probably not over, but the family is finished,” said retired RCMP intelligence analyst Pierre de Champlain.

A 32-year-old man accused of hitting his wife with a small bat after getting “enraged because she ate all the French fries” faces charges, according to a recently released Martin County Sheriff’s Office report.

Fernando Guzman Cruz, 32, faces charges including false imprisonment with a weapon (domestic), battery (domestic) and assault (domestic) following the 2 a.m. Friday incidents in the 11500 block of Southwest Kanner Highway in Indiantown.

Cruz’s 51-year-old wife said Cruz was “enraged because she ate all the French fries” and started to yell, swear and throw things around their trailer.

She said he started swinging a 12 inch wood bat at her but missed. She tried to leave three times, but Cruz, who was intoxicated and smelled strongly of booze, locked the door and threw her on their living room bed. He finally hit her right calf and foot with the bat.

Hat tip to Will!

The girlfriend and children of a US man have been charged with his murder after his remains were found inside a freezer.

David Reuben Green Jr’s de facto partner Wendy Edmond Green and his teenage children of are accused of feeding parts of his body to their pit-bull, as well as bringing friends to their home in North Carolina to show off “their father’s mutilated and quartered body”, the News & Observer reports.

Ms Green, who took on her wealthy partner’s surname despite them never marrying, also posed as his wife to withdraw money from his bank accounts, police say.

The 41-year-old told family that her boyfriend was overseas — but after a long absence, his extended family began to suspect something was amiss and hired a private investigator to track him down.

Saddam Hussein’s longtime foreign minister Tariq Aziz was sentenced to death by hanging Tuesday for persecuting members of Shiite religious parties under the former regime.

Iraq’s high criminal court spokesman Mohammed Abdul-Sahib did not say when Aziz, 74, would be put to death.

The death sentence followed his conviction of taking part in a Saddam-led campaign that hunted and executed members of the Shiite Dawa Party, of which current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is a member.

Aziz, a Christian who became the international face of Saddam’s regime, can appeal the sentence.

An Australian set her husband’s genitals alight because she suspected he was having an affair and wanted to ‘purify his penis,’ a court in Adelaide was told Thursday.

Rajini Narayan, 46, has pleaded not guilty to murdering her husband and causing the fire that burned down their 1-million-Australian-dollar (980,000-US-dollar) home.

Satish Narayan died in hospital from his injuries several weeks after being allegedly doused with methylated spirits and set alight in the 2008 attack.

‘He was my hero, the man of my life, the love of my life,’ the mother-of-three told the court. ‘I was going to purify his penis, leave a mark there and he would remain with me. He would be mine.’

A longtime federal judge was freed on a $50,000 bond Monday after his arrest on federal charges that he bought cocaine and other illegal drugs while involved in a sexual relationship with an exotic dancer for the past several months.

North Fulton Senior U.S. District Judge Jack T. Camp Jr. was arrested late Friday night near Sandy Springs. Camp, 67, is accused of purchasing cocaine and marijuana, along with prescription painkillers that which he shared with an exotic dancer he met last spring at the Goldrush Showbar in Atlanta, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit for his arrest.

Camp met the dancer, identified in the affidavit as CI-1, when he purchased a private dance from her, according to the affidavit by Special Agent Mary Jo Mangrum, a member of a task force investigating public corruption. He returned the next night and purchased another dance and sex from her, the affidavit said. The two then began a relationship which revolved around drug use and sex.

Guess he likes his crust crispy and burnt.

A pyromaniac pizza-maker fired from his job at Domino’s decided to turn up the heat on his former employer — torching two of the chain’s Bronx restaurants by setting fire to pizza boxes, authorities said today.

The antics of accused arsonist Jamal Thomas threatened the life of at least one person and cost Domino’s more than $1 million in building damage and lost business, according to FDNY officials.

“Domino’s is a terrible place to work,” griped Thomas, 24, to authorities after his bust, according to court papers.

“They didn’t treat me right. They are terrible to workers. I was punched at work, and nobody helped me.”

Police have arrested a third person in connection with the murder of Samuel Boob.

Boob was shot and killed at his home in Potter Township, Centre County, on the morning of August 23rd, 2009.

Kermit Butts, 26, of Madisonburg, is accused of driving the suspected killer to and from the crime scene on the morning of the killing.

He was charged with aggravated assault and assisting a murder suspect and placed in the Centre County Prison.

A dismissed policeman armed with an automatic rifle seized a bus in the Philippine capital Monday with 25 passengers, most of them Hong Kong tourists, in a bid to demand his reinstatement, police said.

Six hostages, including three children, were subsequently released, and appeared to be unhurt.

Police sharpshooters took positions around the white-blue-red bus, which was parked near a downtown Manila park, and negotiations to free the remaining hostages were under way, deputy director of Manila police Alex Gutierrez said.

A drunken man went on a rampage while driving a shovel loader in northern China, smashing into shops and vehicles and killing 11 people, a government spokesman said Monday.

The incident began when 38-year-old Li Xianliang killed a customer Sunday at the Hongyuan coal depot in Hebei provinces Yuanshi county where he worked driving a shovel loader, said a news release issued by the county government.

Li, who had been drinking, then drove his loader down an adjacent road, smashing into cars, buses, motorcycles, trucks and roadside shops, the news release said.

The tractor eventually came to a stop in a field where police subdued the man after the hour-long rampage.The man was taken into custody and likely faces the death penalty if convicted of murder.

A Whatcom County man’s friendship and aggressive support for a man convicted in the infamous Enumclaw horse-sex case led to his arrest this week for allegedly operating a bestiality farm just south of the Canadian border, federal prosecutors said Friday.

Douglas Spink, 39, a one-time dot.com millionaire, convicted drug smuggler and horse trainer, was quietly living on rural property south of Sumas when he connected with James Tait, who was in a Tennessee jail on a bestiality charge.

Tait had earlier been convicted of trespassing in 2005 in the Enumclaw case, in which a Gig Harbor man died after having sex with a horse.

The two men’s communications set in motion an investigation that resulted in Spink’s arrest Wednesday at the Sumas farm for suspicion of violating his federal probation for drug smuggling.

Federal prosecutors and Whatcom County sheriff’s officials say Spink also allowed people to come to the farm and have sex with animals.

He was “promoting tourism of this nature for bestiality,” Whatcom County Sheriff Bill Elfo said Friday.

An East Hampton, Connecticut, woman is facing several charges after her 2- and 3-year-old sons were playing in the woods for hours wearing nothing but diapers on Friday morning, police said.

Julie Root, 27, was arrested shortly after coming home from work.

A neighbor called East Hampton police when she had heard the children playing alone by the road in the rain for at least an hour.

When two officers arrived, they found the two small boys walking in the woods on the south side of Flatbrook Road near a stream. The boys were wearing no clothing other than their diapers and they were freezing cold, police said.

An ambulance was called and the boys were taken to Marlborough Clinic for a medical evaluation.

While all of this was taking place, Root walked up to the scene and said she had returned from working third shift at 7:30 a.m. and had possibly dozed off, allowing the boys to slip out of the house.

Root, who is wearing the t-shirt that reads “I Love Weed” in her mug shot, was heavily under the influence of prescription pain medication, police said.

TWO escaped convicts have dodged a huge manhunt – by disguising themselves as SHEEP.

The pair dressed in full sheepskin fleeces, complete with heads, to lie low among farm flocks.

Robbers Maximiliano Pereyra, 25, and Ariel Diaz, 28, stole the sheep hides from a ranch after breaking out of an Argentinian maximum security prison a week ago.

And they have managed to evade the 300 cops on their trail – despite locals seeing them running through fields at night.

A farmworker at La Almeda said: “They were wearing grey clothes but had full sheepskins, including the sheeps’ heads, over their heads and backs.”

Another sexual assault of a female student has occurred on the UCLA campus, the sixth crotch-grabbing incident in the last month, authorities said on Friday.

In this latest attack, which occurred Wed. about 6 p.m. east of Westwood Village near a Ralphs grocery store, the male suspect reached out and tried to grab the female victim’s crotch, said Sgt. Tim Nyx of the UCLA Police.

These crotch-grabbing incidents date back to March 8. All the attacks occurred between 3:30 p.m. and 6:45 p.m. on Westwood Plaza between Charles E. Young Drive South and just south of Le Conte Avenue, according to campus police.

All six women told police the suspect was Hispanic, 40 to 60 years old, 5 ft 3 in to 5 ft 6 in tall, 150 to 180 pounds, with a dark complexion, brown eyes, and a pot belly.

The women also said the suspect wore “various hats,” during the assaults, including a farmer’s hat and a baseball cap.

According to police, the suspect’s pattern is to wait in the path of female victims who are distracted while using their cell phones, and then as the victim approaches to reach out with his hand and grab the victim’s crotch area.

Four people were shot and dozens of people were arrested Monday in a mile-long stretch of Manhattan near Times Square in mayhem that police said was connected to the start of the city’s annual auto show.

A group of youths who attended the New York International Auto Show at the Jacob A. Javits Center ran amok in midtown Manhattan.

Chief NYPD spokesman Paul J. Browne said additional officers were on patrol because similar problems have happened during past auto shows.

“Young men looking for trouble afterwards,” he said. “There has been incidents over the years. It’s something we watch over and we prepare for it in advance.”

Police made 54 arrests, mostly on charges of disorderly conduct. Police weren’t sure how many of those arrested knew each other, or what sparked the shootings that began shortly after midnight.

From the game room to the movie theatres – the busiest day of the year at New Roc City is always Easter Sunday.

But never before had the crowd at the entertainment complex been so big – or so out of control – as it was Sunday night.

“They kept on yelling, screaming, you got people throwing rocks,” said Derrick Smith.

200 cops in riot gear were called to disperse a rowdy crowd of teenagers – mostly from the Bronx – who swarmed New Roc City.

Police believe groups of young people who had started Easter Sunday in New York City began texting and e-mailing each other – the message, essentially – ‘let’s go to New Rochelle and takeover New Roc City.’

A ‘highly professional’ criminal gang is on the run after digging their way into the vault of a Paris bank and stealing millions of pounds worth of cash and jewellery.

The meticulously planned raid saw four men using pickaxes and even a flame thrower to get into the vault of a Credit Lyonnais branch in the upmarket Avenue de l’Opera, close to the Louvre Museum.

Once inside they tied up a security guard and then spent at least seven hours emptying more than 200 high security private safes, getting away with more than £20million.

So as to destroy evidence, they then started a fire which set off sprinklers which flooded the entire basement of the bank.

Police have estimated the criminals’ haul to be worth ‘at least’ £22million.

The ingenious heist – which is already being described by French media as the ‘Crime of the Century’ – is thought to have been carried out by a notorious gang dubbed ‘The Termites’.

The bodies of 21 babies, believed dumped by hospitals, have washed ashore on a riverbank in eastern China, state media reported Tuesday.

Video footage showed that the bodies – stashed in yellow plastic bags, at least one of which was marked “medical waste” – included some infants several months old. Some wore identification tags with their mothers’ names, birth dates, measurements and weights. The official Xinhua News Agency said there were also fetuses among the bodies.

Residents discovered the remains under a bridge in the city of Jining, Shandong province, over the weekend. Tags on the feet of eight of the babies traced them back to a hospital in Jining, according to the People’s Daily Web site. Three of them had been admitted earlier to the hospital in critical condition, the report said. It did not say when.

Hat tip to Kara!

French and Swiss police have launched a cross-border manhunt for an armed gang who stormed a casino in Basle and broke open cash desks before vanishing into the night with hundreds of thousands of euros.

The raid, which prosecutors said was a professional operation orchestrated with “brutal” efficiency, was carried out at 4am this morning at the city’s Grand Casino by about 10 masked raiders armed with machine guns and pistols.

After one man burst through the front entrance with a sledgehammer, his accomplices ran inside and ordered guests to the floor while firing into the air.

“The criminals fired a number of shots, but luckily no one was hit,” the Basle public prosecutor said in a statement. Some of the gang tried to break into the safe room but failed, despite firing bullets into the door. Others went to the cash desks and managed to steal “several hundreds of thousands of [Swiss] francs”.

The gang then sped off across the border in two silver Audi cars whose numberplates were registered in the Bas-Rhin area of eastern France.

The Grand Casino, which describes itself as “the Swiss Las Vegas”, is just 200 metres from the French border. Witnesses said the gang members spoke in French. Today, as the authorities in both countries stepped up the manhunt, casino staff said they were left shaken by the heist.

“This is the first time we’ve been robbed. We are all very shocked. You can prepare for it, but when it happens it’s something else,” a manager, Michael Favrod, told Swiss television.

“Thankfully nothing happened to my colleagues or the guests,” he added. While none of the staff or guests were shot, several were kicked or manhandled. One woman, who accidentally blocked the gang’s getaway, was dragged from her car and beaten, said the authorities.

“The perpetrators knew what they were after. They proceeded quickly, professionally and brutally,” said Peter Gill, a spokesman for the Basle prosecutors.

When Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, was chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools, his office kept a log of nearly 40 pages listing the local politicians and business people and others who sought help getting children into the city’s most selective public schools.

According to an article Tuesday in The Chicago Tribune, which first obtained and reported on the confidential log, those who sought such help included 25 aldermen, Mayor Richard M. Daley’s office, the State House speaker, the state attorney general, the former White House social secretary and a former United States senator.

A spokesman for the Department of Education said Tuesday that the log was a record of those who asked for help, and that neither Mr. Duncan nor the aide who maintained the list, David Pickens, ever pressured principals to accept a child. Rather, he said, the creation of the list was an effort to reduce pressure on principals.

“Arne Duncan asked David Pickens to respond to all of these requests, some of which came from him, some from lots of other people, as a way to try to manage a process that was putting a lot of pressure on principals,” said Peter Cunningham, who handled communications for Mr. Duncan in Chicago and is now assistant secretary of the Department of Education.

“This was an attempt to buffer principals from all the outside pressure, to get our arms around something that was burdensome to them. It was always up to the principal to make the decision. Arne never ever picked up the phone.”

Yep, I “believe” it too – do you?

The man who staged a St. Patrick’s Day bank robbery in a leprechaun costume and died during a police shootout also held up a bank three days before Christmas in a Santa suit, police said Thursday.

Investigators in the Nashville suburb of Gallatin said information from the FBI linked David Christopher Cotton, 20, of Brentwood to the December robbery.

FBI Supervisor Special Agent Scott Augenbaum told The Associated Press that investigators found a Santa suit at Cotton’s home, and that the suspect made similar comments during both robberies.

The man police identified as the getaway driver, 20-year-old Western Kentucky University student Jonathan Ryan Skinner, also was killed.

Police said they think Cotton shot himself to death as officers surrounded the two in a field after a car and foot chase.

Patrol car video of the chase released Thursday shows one of the suspects leaning out of the passenger window of the getaway car and firing several shots at police on the street of a subdivision.

At least one round strikes the front of the car, kicking up a shower of metal and glass. Police said the shots disabled the vehicle, and the video shows a string of other police cars giving chase.

Police said the two ditched their vehicle and ran into a field near a subdivision where they died.

A man armed with a high-powered gas pistol tried to break into Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin’s tomb on Red Square in Moscow, shooting a policeman in the process.

The man, named as Sergey Karpentsov, is quoted as saying he wanted to let loose a volley of bullets at Lenin’s carefully embalmed corpse, one of the Russian capital’s most popular and ghoulish tourist attractions.

“My main demand is the quick bulldozing of the mausoleum which contains the body of the anti-Christ,” he said.

“I wanted to open fire on the tomb with an assault rifle but I was advised not to do that in case the tomb is armour-plated.”

“I have drawn attention to this issue with my actions,” he added.

Lenin’s waxy presence at the heart of the Russian capital 86 years after his death continues to divide Russian society, with many older people believing he should be left where he is.

Authorities say a man tried to sexually assault a Southern California jogger who escaped by jumping off a cliff and sliding about 100 feet down a steep hillside.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s Sgt. Derek Sabatini says the woman was taken to a hospital Friday with cuts and bruises from the fall in Malibu.

She told deputies she had finished a run at about noon at Point Dume State Beach and was standing at the edge of a cliff when she was grabbed from behind.

She says she and the man struggled for several minutes before she was able to break away.

That’s when the woman ran and jumped off the cliff.

Rumours that French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy are both having affairs are gaining momentum in France.

The suggestion that the couple were both committing adultery first emerged on Twitter, the microblogging website. It was followed by a report in the Sunday newspaper le Journal du Dimanche.

The first ‘tweet’ claimed that Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy had become romantically involved with Benjamin Biolay, a musician and a winner at France’s recent Victoires de la Musique awards.

It then claimed that the jilted Mr Sarkozy had swiftly found solace in the arms of his 40-year-old ecology minister Chantal Jouanno, also a French karate champion.

French web magazine suchablog.com alleged that Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy had been a close friend of Biolay for many years and was now unofficially living with him at his flat in Paris.

The rumours were given extra weight after being reported in an blog on the website of Le Journal du Dimanche.

Police arrested a man early Sunday after two bottles of corrosive liquid were hurled into a crowd at one of Hong Kong’s famous tourist spots, officials said.

At least 30 people were injured in the city’s latest acid attack. The victims, including children and tourists, were all treated at local hospitals for burns and other injuries and released.

The liquid was thrown on them Saturday night near Temple Street, a densely populated district known for its outdoor shops and restaurants in the city’s Kowloon area.

Hong Kong has seen a series of similar attacks since December 2008 that have injured more than 100 people.

The suspect, described as a Chinese man in his 30s, was arrested after authorities found him on the roof a nearby building along with caps to the bottles believed to have been used in the attack, said police spokeswoman Michelle Mak.

The suspect has not been formally charged, and the investigation is ongoing, Mak said.

She did not say if he was also suspected in other attacks.

Armed robbers on Saturday struck at Germany’s largest poker tournament, stealing hundreds of thousands of euros in prize money and injuring gamblers, police said.

The masked gang burst into the Grand Hyatt hotel in central Berlin, where the tournament was taking place, threatening security staff and prompting a brief panic, police spokeswoman Heidi Vogt told AFP.

Berlin’s Tageszeitung newspaper reported on its website that six robbers armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and grenades made off with €800,000 ($1.1 million).

“Several masked, armed individuals entered the Grand Hyatt and fled with a haul of money,” Vogt said, without giving details of the sum involved.

She said a number of the tournament’s players were injured in the incident, though none were seriously hurt.

Gov. David A. Paterson personally directed two state employees to contact the woman who had accused his close aide of assaulting her, according to two people with direct knowledge of the governor’s actions.

Mr. Paterson instructed his press secretary, Marissa Shorenstein, to ask the woman to publicly describe the episode as nonviolent, according to a third person, who was briefed on the matter.

That description would contradict the woman’s accounts to the police and in court. Mr. Paterson also enlisted another state employee, Deneane Brown, a friend of both the governor and the accuser, to make contact with the woman before she was due in court to finalize an order of protection against the aide, David W. Johnson, the two people with direct knowledge said.

Ms. Brown, an employee of the Division of Housing and Community Renewal, reached out to the woman on more than one occasion over a period of several days and arranged a phone call between the governor and the woman, Mr. Johnson’s companion.

Investigators for Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s Office spent four hours Friday questioning Sherr-una Booker as it kicked off its probe into whether State Police — and possibly Gov. Paterson himself — intervened to quash her domestic-violence case against an administration official.

They asked about the incident last Halloween between Paterson’s top aide, David Johnson, and Booker in the Bronx apartment they shared, according to a person briefed on the investigation.

Booker had previously told cops that Johnson choked her, ripped off her clothes and pushed her into a mirror.

Later on Friday, investigators turned the heat on Maj. Charles Day, head of the governor’s security detail, who reportedly contacted Booker the day after the altercation and the day before she complained of State Police pressure in a Bronx Family Court appearance, the source said.

…

The Post revealed yesterday that the inquiry will also look at Booker’s purchase of a $40,000 Lexus shortly before she dropped her case.

News broke this week that a Blackwater subsidiary was arming violent drug users in Afghanistan. They took hundreds of weapons intended for the Afghan National Police and at least one of them (probably more) signed for the shipments with the name “Eric Cartman.”

When I asked “South Parks”’s creators what they thought of these men co-opting their character they were completely unfazed.

“It makes perfect sense. It’s the name I would use,” Trey Parker said.

“Our first reaction to any story is ‘How do we put this into the show?’ and the second reaction is ‘Did Cartman do that?’ because he’s so real to us it’s like ‘I bet Cartman did that.’”

“I saw that and thought, ‘Wow, Cartman did that? That’s pretty cool. Sounds like something he would do,’” Matt Stone agreed.

Last fall, a woman went to court in the Bronx to testify that she had been violently assaulted by a top aide to Gov. David A. Paterson, and to seek a protective order against the man.

In the ensuing months, she returned to court twice to press her case, complaining that the State Police had been harassing her to drop it.

The State Police, which had no jurisdiction in the matter, confirmed that the woman was visited by a member of the governor’s personal security detail.

Then, just before she was due to return to court to seek a final protective order, the woman got a phone call from the governor, according to her lawyer.

She failed to appear for her next hearing on Feb. 8, and as a result her case was dismissed.

Many details of the governor’s role in this episode are unclear, but the accounts presented in court and police records and interviews with the woman’s lawyer and others portray a brutal encounter, a frightened woman and an effort to make a potential political embarrassment go away.

An extra fibula and jawbone have investigators wondering who else was burned in the fire pit where Andrew and Elizabeth Hawes are believed to have taken their brother’s body after he was brutally murdered at his Andover home.

The bones, including the partial remains of Edwin Hawes, were discovered more than a year ago when police officers checked out an illegally burning bonfire on Andrew Hawes’ farm in Cottonwood County, nearly 200 miles from the Twin Cities.

When the medical examiner and a forensic anthropologist reconstructed Edwin Hawes’ remains, they discovered three extra human bones.

Mixed in the fire pit were a left eye orbit, a fibula and part of a lower jaw.

It wasn’t until three months ago that the Cottonwood County sheriff’s office was notified about them, which triggered a fresh search of the fire pit.

Deputies found several small bone fragments, according to the search warrant filed in Cottonwood County in November.

An Ohio man is in jail after police arrested him on charges of urinating on a meat counter at a Wal-Mart store, Cleveland’s Fox8.com reported.

Robert T. Jenkins, 21, of Canton, Ohio, was arrested at 1:30 a.m. local time on Friday morning, Lt. Linda Brown of the Canton Police Department told Fox8.com.

Jenkins was charged with felony vandalism and disorderly conduct.

Jenkins was arrested after police responded to a call from an employee at the Wal-Mart store telling authorities that a man walked up to the meat counter and began urinating on the steaks, police told Fox8.com.

The disorderly conduct destroyed more than $600 dollars in meat.

Hardcore bowlers don’t just call their main alley their lanes — it’s their house.

A beloved house burned down last week after 50 years on the edge of Vineland, a city in a part of New Jersey far from the historical home of the mob and the teeming chaos of the shore, a place where the state nickname, the Garden State, seems apt.

Sadness turned to anger Wednesday, when authorities announced that the manager of a rival bowling alley, the only other one in Cumberland County, had been charged with arson in the destruction of Loyle Lanes.

 Steven Smink, the lessee-manager of Pike Lanes Family Fun Center in Deerfield, hired another man, Felix Manzano, 21, and a teenager to torch Loyle Lanes, police said.

This was the amazing sight that greeted Italian immigration police during routine spot check – a teenage boy hidden in a suitcase as he tried to illegally enter the country.

The 15-year-old Afghan boy was discovered curled into foetal position inside the case while his 17-year-old brother was hidden in the foot well covered with blankets.

Officers immediately arrested the Greek driver of the car, Alexandros Lepesiotis, 42, and charged him with illegally smuggling people into the country. This Afghan illegal immigrant, 15, was discovered hiding in a zipped suitcase in the boot of a Peugeot 207 by Italian border guards

The discovery was made at the Adriatic port of Bari, a well known entry point for people smugglers, on a ferry which had just arrived from Greece, the Sea Trade.

Officers pulled over Lepesiotis for a spot check in his Peugeot 207 and became suspicious of him as he reacted nervously when they began examining the car.

In a new incident of grisly drug war violence, a man’s face was skinned and stitched onto a soccer ball as a threat to members of Mexico’s Juarez drug cartel.

The unknown assailants cut up the body of Hugo Hernandez into seven pieces and left him on a street in the northern city of Los Mochis, a spokesman for Sinaloa prosecutors, Martin Robles, told the Associated Press.

Hernandez’s torso was found in a plastic container in a separate location from another box that contained his arms, legs and skull.

The macabre soccer ball was discovered a plastic bag near Los Mochis’ City Hall in Sinaloa.

Citizens of Shanghai are aghast at the collapse of a major new bridge, pictured, which was revealed to be constructed partially out of rubbish instead of concrete.

The bridge, spanning the Wusong River in central Shanghai, was completed in 2009 and replaced a century old bridge with a more modern design.

However, after only a short period in operation the bridge began to collapse, with investigators finding such sturdy construction materials as bags of rubbish, Styrofoam, scrap wood and waste plastic used in the structure in place of reinforced concrete.

A four-foot pile of ash and charred debris is all that remains of the Rodriguez family’s two-story garage, which had been stuffed with tools, machinery, couches and appliances when a mysterious fire ripped through it earlier this month.

It was the 22nd arson that has taken place since August in a historic Houston neighborhood called the Heights, known more for its comforting small-town feel in the midst of big city sprawl than for being the center of criminal activity.

Most of the fires have taken place in the middle of the night and nearly always in abandoned structures, though flames have leapt to some adjacent occupied homes, frightening residents like the Rodriguez family.

“I just don’t know when they are going to catch this guy,” a dejected Jesus Rodriguez said as he stood over his truck’s pickup bed, dirtied by ash and scorched pieces of wood after it had been used to haul away the debris.

Authorities charged a suspect last month for starting one of the blazes. But he has not been charged with any of the other arsons and the fires continued even after his arrest.

Residents of the Heights, which sits on one of Houston’s rare hills overlooking nearby downtown, have taken some comfort no one has been hurt. But they worry their property could be next.

Authorities say Robert Holt, 25, wanted to get back at his old girlfriend by throwing a Molotov cocktail through the window of her home.

But he got the wrong house. He is being held today without bond, charged with throwing the firebomb through the window of a Dell Drive house on Sunday night.

Mr. Holt was taken into custody shortly after the incident by officers with the Thomson Police Department.

He has been arrested on a number of charges in recent months, authorities say, and is now facing charges of arson in the first-degree, four counts of aggravated assault and possession of an explosive device, according to police records.

Each charge is a felony.

The “Arbeit macht frei” sign stolen from Auschwitz in southern Poland has been found in the north and five men are being questioned by police.

The five suspects, aged in their 20s and 30s, were not members of a neo-Nazi group, Krakow police said. The metal sign from the main gate, which symbolises for many the atrocities of Nazi Germany, had been cut into three pieces, they added.

A major search was launched after the sign was stolen before dawn on Friday. Andrzej Rokita, the local police chief in Krakow – where the men were being questioned – said the theft had been financially motivated, and it remained unclear whether it was carried out to order.

“From the information we have, none of the five belong to a neo-Nazi group nor hold such ideas,” Andrzej Rokita said of the suspects.

A Muslim chef who lost a claim of religious discrimination against Scotland Yard after complaining he was forced to cook sausages and bacon faces a legal bill of more than £75,000.

Hasanali Khoja accused the Metropolitan Police of failing to consider his Islamic beliefs when he was asked to handle pork products as a catering manager at a police station.

The £23,000-a-year chef claimed suggestions by his bosses that he should wear gloves and use tongs left him ’stressed and humiliated’.

Muslims are banned from eating pork under Islamic law. But Mr Khoja, 62, lost his claim in May after a police employee told an employment tribunal how she saw Mr Khoja eat bacon rolls and sausages.

The Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) has now won a ruling ordering Mr Khoja to pay its costs, which total at least £76,200. In its costs claim, the Met said Mr Khoja ‘knew that he had asked for a bacon roll two or three times for personal consumption before bringing his claim and throughout the conduct of his claim’.

‘The fact that he had knowingly come into contact with pork products before bringing the claim shows that the claim had no reasonable prospect of success from the outset.’ Judge Michael Southam agreed and ruled Mr Khoja should pay costs, though these would be determined at a later date at a county court.

Polish police say the infamous iron sign over the gate to the Auschwitz memorial site with the cynical phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei” — German for “Work Sets You Free” — has been stolen.

Police spokeswoman Katarzyna Padlo said police believe it was stolen between 3:30 a.m. and 5 a.m. Friday, when museum guards noticed that it was missing and alerted police.

Padlo says the iron sign, which spanned a gate at the main entrance to the former Nazi death camp in southern Poland, was removed by being unscrewed on one side and pulled off on the other.

A Times Square bloodbath was narrowly avoided because the machine-pistol-toting thug who fired at a cop flipped the gun on its side like a character out of a rap video, causing the weapon to jam after two shots, law-enforcement sources said yesterday.

When scam artist Raymond “Ready” Martinez held the MAC-10-style gun parallel to the ground, it caused the ejecting shells to “stovepipe,” or get caught vertically in the chamber, the sources said. The gun is designed to be fired only in a vertical position.

If he had fired the weapon — which had another 27 rounds in the clip — properly, Martinez, 25, could have killed the hero cop pursuing him and countless others walking through the swarming tourist mecca Thursday morning.

Instead, Sgt. Christopher Newsom was able to return fire — killing Martinez with four shots before anyone was hurt. The fatal gun battle erupted after Martinez bolted from cops who approached him for aggressively peddling his own rap CDs to tourists and shaking them down for cash. Newsom gave chase and shouted for Martinez to put up his hands.

Martinez instead pulled the machine gun from a sling under his coat and turned to fire as he ran into the parking breezeway within the Marriott Marquis Hotel. One of the shots shattered a gift-shop window and a second struck the car of an out-of-town couple coming to see the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall.

Who’s been firebombing all those Italian cafés in Montreal? The answer police have been getting so far: silenzio.

Police are stumped as to why at least five bars in the city have been hit by Molotov cocktails in less than a month, but it’s clear that the victims don’t want to talk.

The head of the Montreal police arson squad said his detectives are mulling a number of theories, but, with merchants remaining mute, all they have are hypotheses.

There’s the possibility that a Mafia war has erupted. Or perhaps a brazen street gang is trying to move in on the Mob’s turf. Or maybe rival gangs are battling among themselves. Police have even considered an arsonist with a particular penchant for putting latté-makers out of business.

“None of the hypotheses have been set aside, but none have been validated for the time being, either,” said Cmdr. Robert Quevillon, who heads the police arson and economic crimes unit.

There are questions about how the federal government is spending tax dollars. It appears millions of economic stimulus dollars are being spent in Congressional districts that do not exist.

 In Tennessee, federal economic stimulus money is being spent on several projects including the creation of thousands of jobs. The money became available when lawmakers passed the stimulus package earlier this year. President Obama promised government transparency.

Americans would be able to see where every dollar was spent by going to the government website Recovery.gov. People started checking and they’ve found problems.

Ben Cunningham is with Tennessee Tax Revolt, an advocacy group for taxpayers. “It just adds to the stereotype that government can’t find it’s behind with both hands if you’ll excuse the expression,” said Cunningham.

Recovery.gov showed stimulus money spent in imaginary congressional districts, seven districts that are in Tennessee. According to the website nearly $54 million had been spent in the districts, and nearly $41 million in a district called 00. There was an imaginary 47th district where the government had apparently spent $2.3 million.

“Yes, the 47th district in Tennessee. That’s right. Boy, we’re going to have a lot of pull in Congress next in redistricting,” said Cunningham. Tennessee has only nine congressional districts, and they are numbered one through nine.

One of Russia’s most powerful tycoons — barred entry to the U.S. for years due to U.S. government concerns about possible ties to organized crime — visited the country twice this year under secret arrangements made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska met with FBI agents in August and earlier this month as part of a continuing criminal probe, according to two administration officials. The focus of that probe couldn’t be learned.

Mr. Deripaska used the opportunity of his recent U.S. visits to meet with top executives of U.S. investment banks Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The aluminum giant he controls, UC Rusal, is preparing for an initial public offering, a vital part of Mr. Deripaska’s efforts to save his debt-burdened business.

The U.S. trips came at an opportune moment to help reassure bankers his visa difficulties may be easing. Mr. Deripaska’s visa troubles are a potentially sensitive issue for investors, bankers say.

Mr. Deripaska also stopped in Detroit to meet with top executives at General Motors Co. to discuss the sale of a stake in its Adam Opel AG unit to a Russian-backed consortium that includes Mr. Deripaska’s AO GAZ auto maker, people familiar with the visit said.

The State Department, which rules on requests for U.S. visas, hasn’t publicly said why it previously denied entry to Mr. Deripaska, and declined to comment on the recent visits.

The House ethics committee announced Thursday it is investigating two California Democratic lawmakers, but its embarrassed leaders then had to explain that other members—named in a confidential memo that a hacker posted online—may have committed no wrongdoing.

The committee said it is investigating whether Rep. Maxine Waters used her influence to help a bank in which her husband owned stock, and whether the couple benefited as a result. Separately, the panel is investigating whether Rep. Laura Richardson failed to disclose required information on her financial disclosure forms and received special treatment from a lender.

As the House was conducting scheduled votes Thursday, ethics chairwoman Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., went to the microphone to announce that a confidential weekly report of the committee from July had leaked out in a case of “cyber-hacking.” A committee statement said its security was breached through “peer to peer file sharing software” by a junior employee who was working from home. The staff member was fired.
…
The Post reported that nearly half the members of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee were under scrutiny.

A woman being driven around in a rented limousine pulled up at a coat store and announced she’d won the lottery and would pay for everyone’s purchases, police said, but she ended up causing a riot when customers realized it was a hoax.

Angry customers threw merchandise around and looted, leaving the store looking as though a hurricane had passed through it, police said.

Linda Brown was arrested Tuesday after an hours-long shopping spree that began when she hired a stretch Hummer limousine to drop her off at a Burlington Coat Factory store, police Sgt. Lt. Michael Deakins said.

Brown walked to a cash register and loudly announced she had won the lottery and would pay for each person’s merchandise up to $500, he said.

The scandal surrounding the left-wing activist organization ACORN has spread to New York, with employees at its Brooklyn office caught on video helping supposed ladies of the night get loans for their dream houses of ill repute.

Rather than reminding the women that prostitution is dangerous and illegal and advising them to change their careers, counselors at the social-services group shockingly offer suggestions on how they can launder their earnings.

“Honesty is not going to get you the house,” a loan counselor at the offices told two activists posing as a mortgage-seeking pimp and prostitute. “You can’t say what you do for a living.”

ACORN workers in two other cities, Baltimore and Washington, DC, had already fallen hooker, line and sinker for the hidden-camera sting operation by two conservative activists.

One of France’s highest-profile prisoners escaped from jail on Wednesday by packing himself into a cardboard box.

Embarrassed officials were at a loss to explain how Jean-Pierre Treiber, 45, a double murder suspect, managed to elude detection in the box he had built himself at a workshop in the high security prison of Auxerre, Burgundy.

With its hidden human cargo, the box was loaded with dozens of others onto a lorry for delivery to the Yonne region, southeast of Paris. During the 100-mile journey, he broke free and leapt from the lorry.

The driver only realised there was a problem once he had reached his destination, when he spotted a hole in the tarpaulin covering the boxes, some of which were flattened. Police have sealed off roads and a huge area of woodland in the hunt for Treiber using helicopters and sniffer dogs.

A British playboy who held a fundraising event for Hillary Clinton is facing life imprisonment for the murder of a caretaker who stood in the way of a $3.2 million property deal.

Thanos Papalexis, 37, tortured and killed Charalambos Christodoulides after he refused to move out of a flat in a North London warehouse that the struggling developer was trying to sell.

Christodoulides, 55, a shy loner known as Bambi, was hooded, tied to a chair, beaten and strangled. His body was wrapped in a sheet, covered with paint-stripper and hidden.

The case against Papalexis was strengthened after a former Miami porn star and $2,800-a-night prostitute stated that he had confessed to the killing.

Rebecca DeFalco told U.S. marshals that her former lover told her he had killed a man who was a “problem” and gave her a graphic description of the murder.

The victim, a sitting tenant who had lived in the flat for most of his adult life, refused to move out after Papalexis received a $3.7 million offer for the derelict warehouse in Kilburn.

The man accused of biting out his 4-year-old son’s eyes will not stand trial.

A Kern County Superior Court judge ruled Tuesday that Angelo Mendoza is not mentally competent for trial. County mental health officials will recommend whether Mendoza should go to a county or state mental health facility.

The 34-year-old man is accused of attacking his son, Angelo Mendoza Jr., in late April. The child, who was discovered by a neighbor lying naked in a bloody heap on the floor of an Ohio Drive apartment, told officers, “My daddy ate my eyes” and “Daddy bit my eyes and hands,” according to Bakersfield police reports.

Mendoza is in a wheelchair with a spinal cord injury, and police said he rolled away from his apartment after the alleged attack and started hacking away at his leg with an ax. Police reported that Mendoza was showing signs of being under the influence of the psychedelic drug best known as PCP or angel dust during the alleged abuse.

THE leader of congress of Mexico’s southern state of Guerrero was shot dead in his car, while three human heads showed up in ice coolers elsewhere in the state, officials said today.

Guerrero is home to beach resorts including Acapulco, but is also a drug trafficking hub which has seen brutal killings and beheadings linked to the country’s powerful cartels in recent years.

Leftist politician Armando Chavarria Barrera was found with bullet wounds to his head and stomach in state capital Chilpancingo, a public security ministry statement said.

The motive for the crime was unclear, it added. Members of his PRD party said the killing was a political crime, and told a Mexico City news conference that 25 of the party’s members had been assassinated in 2009.

Police today, meanwhile, recovered three human heads in ice coolers, and their body parts stuffed in bags, in a small town in the mountains of Guerrero, the public security ministry said.

A former chief of staff for Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas faces felony charges accusing her of smuggling a knife and 48 tattoo needles onto the state’s death row.

The charging of Betsey Wright, 66, of Rogers, Ark., comes as The Associated Press obtained documents showing death-row inmate passed love letters and contraband to a guard he committed a sex act with.

Combined, they represent just the latest in a series of high-profile incidents at the state prison system, ranging from two convicted murderers escaping in guard uniforms to a man being shot to death at a contraband checkpoint.

Wright, a longtime visitor to death row at the state’s Varner Unit, was arrested May 22 after a guard noticed a knife mixed in with her materials at an X-ray machine, an Arkansas State Police report shows. Inside a bag of Doritos, the guard found 48 tattoo needles, the report claims.  Wright also had a box cutter and tweezers, the report claims.

In an interview with the AP, Wright denied the charges against her.

In one murder after another, the “Canal Livre” crime TV show had an uncanny knack for being first on the scene, gathering graphic footage of the victim.Too uncanny, say police, who are investigating the show’s host, state legislator Wallace Souza, on suspicion of commissioning at least five of the murders to boost his ratings and prove his claim that Brazil’s Amazon region is awash in violent crime. Police also have accused Souza of drug trafficking.

“The order to execute always came from the legislator and his son, who then alerted the TV crews to get to the scene before the police,” state police intelligence chief Thomaz Vasconcelos charged in an interview with The Associated Press.

The killings of competing drug traffickers, he said, “appear to have been committed to get rid of his rivals and increase the audience of the TV show.” Souza denied all the criminal allegations and called them absurd, insisting that he and his son are being set up by political enemies and drug dealers sick of his two decades of relentless crime coverage on TV and crusading legislative probes.

Animal Services is investigating two construction workers who might have used nail guns to impale two Townsend’s chipmunks at a job site in the 8000 block of 28th Court near Hawks Prairie, killing the animals.

Townsend’s chipmunks are on a list of protected species under Washington law, Animal Services director Susanne Beauregard said. Killing animals on such a list is a misdemeanor.

Greg Bailey, the owner and contractor for the construction project on 28th Court, said he fired the two subcontractors after he confronted them Wednesday and they admitted to shooting the chipmunks with nail guns. He said the two men were doing framing work at the site.

“I can’t even believe they did it,” Bailey said. “I’m just appalled.”

The mayors of Hoboken, Secaucus, Ridgefield were among 44 people arrested in early morning raids across New Jersey this morning as federal officials unveiled a long-ranging probe into public corruption and international money laundering, officials said

FBI and IRS rounded up various elected officials and several rabbis across the state in what is being described as one of the biggest investigations of its kind in Jersey’s scandal-plagued history.

The corruption investigation, which has been ongoing for over ten years according to officials, dovetails with a “high-volume international money-laundering conspiracy.” It is said to involve rabbis in the Syrian Jewish enclave in Brooklyn and Deal, New Jersey. It started when money transfers drew the interests of the feds who followed the trail back to small-town Jersey corruption.
…
Officials say separate from the corruption probe, some of the suspects charged today were also connected to an illegal human organ-selling ring. Investigators say some charged would take cash payments to help find organs for sick patients in need of transplants. It’s unclear where the body parts might have come from or how many surgeries may have been done.

More than a dozen Polaroid pictures of graphic child pornography was discovered by a cleaning company in the bathroom of a local park.

Workers at R.B. Satkowiak City Sewer Cleaners of Carrollton Township found the photographs while clearing a sewer drain at Imerman Memorial Park in Saginaw Township on May 27.

Pat Kinney said his crew pulled about 15-30 pictures portraying sex acts between a middle-aged woman and a boy from a suction cleaning pump after the tool became clogged.

“They were tied together with a string,” Kinney said. “Just about everything you could think of was shown in the pictures.”

Lin Zongxiu, from the southwestern province of Sichuan, heard in 2008 that soup made with a man’s head could help cure her daughter who had suffered from psychiatric problems for years, the Chengdu Commercial newspaper reported.

Lin and her husband decided to enlist the help of a man in December who knocked unconscious a drunk 76-year-old passer-by before beheading him, the paper claimed.

The couple then gave their 25-year-old daughter soup made from the man’s head, and duck. A local court sentenced the murderer to death with a two-year reprieve on Monday, and Lin was convicted of helping to destroy evidence that included the culprit’s bloody clothes and shoes, the paper said.

The murderer’s reprieve means that his sentence will likely be commuted to life in prison as long as he commits no further offences in the next two years.

Hat tip to Kara!

A 23-year-old woman who got a friend to kill her Jack Russell terrier was charged with skinning the puppy to make a belt out of its hide.

Krystal Lynn Lewis and Austin Michael Mullins, 26, were being held Friday in the Muskogee County jail on $25,000 bail each. They were charged with one felony count of cruelty to animals. A Muskogee County judge ordered a mental competency hearing for Lewis.

Lewis wanted the puppy, named Poplin, killed because it was a gift from a female ex-lover with whom she doesn’t get along, said Muskogee County sheriff’s deputy George Roberson.

Hours after police plucked him out of a suburban alley, Vincent Smothers dropped a bombshell confession: “I don’t have a profession,” he told an investigator. “I kill people for money.”

Then, police say, he laid out details of how each of eight hired hits happened. He stalked his victims before shooting them at close range. He killed some while talking on his cell phone and fired on others even when they appeared to lay lifeless on the ground.

 Even in Detroit, which had more than 300 slayings last year, Smothers’ case is notable: Rarely is one person charged in so many deaths. On Friday, his lawyers planned to ask a judge to have the confessions thrown out, arguing he was worn down while in custody. Police deny it.

 ”He’d been accused of doing so many, he just wanted to get it over (with),” said Detective Sgt. Ken Ducker of the Michigan State Police.

Police say the work paid $60,000 over two years, although Smothers did one job for as little as $50. All but one of his victims were involved in drugs. The exception was a police officer’s wife.

Mexico says it found nearly one ton of cocaine hidden inside frozen shark carcasses.

Prosecutors say hundreds of packages stuffed in the bellies of dozens of dead sharks seized in the Gulf port of Progreso contained 1,965 pounds (893 kilograms) of cocaine.

The Attorney General’s Office says the sharks were found in two containers on Tuesday.

The containers had been shipped from Costa Rica. There was no immediate information on its intended destination.

The 870 packages were found wrapped in plastic and inserted in the sharks.

The family of an Australian Aboriginal elder who died after being “cooked” in the back of a prison van on a scorching hot day is considering suing, they said.

A coroner Friday dismissed treatment of the 46-year-old man as inhumane and a “disgrace,” saying he would ask prosecutors to consider criminal charges over his death from heatstroke in Western Australia in January 2008.

The elder, known only as Mr Ward as his first name was withheld for cultural reasons, was transported 360 kilometres (225 miles) to jail in temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius (122 F) in a van with faulty air conditioning.

Ward, who was arrested a day earlier for drink driving, spent four hours in the searing heat between the mining towns of Laverton and Kalgoorlie, suffering third-degree burns where his body touched the metal floor, the inquest heard.

Western Australia Coroner Alastair Hope found that Ward was effectively “cooked” to death and heavily criticised the state prisons department, the private security firm that operated the van and the two guards who escorted Ward.

A serial killer obsessed with electricity murdered at least five people in a series of lurid experiments to test his home-made electric chair, Russian police said on Friday.

The 30-year-old electrician, identified only as Dmitry K, lured victims to his house by posting adverts for computer equipment on the internet. Police in Yekaterinburg, a city in Russia’s Urals region, tracked the suspect down after finding the charred body of a law student in a roadside ditch.

Dmitry K admitted murdering the student, investigators said, before claiming that he had also killed several other victims as he conducted experiments on an improvised electric chair that he had invented.

The suspect, who worked at a local power plant, told detectives he would confess to the other murders if they found the bodies.

Police say they are investigating at least four other incidents in which Yekaterinburg residents went missing after responding to internet adverts for computer supplies over the past 12 months.

A Queens teacher and her student were recently caught having sex in the classroom.

On Thursday she was behind bars, charged with rape, sexual abuse and child endangerment after the student’s mom tracked her down.

Her head hung low, Melissa Weber was ushered away in cuffs, no doubt thinking about the probable end to her teaching career and whether her alleged sexual rendezvous with her 14-year-old student had been worth it.

“It’s real disconcerting to find that,” said parent and school employee Stacy Gold. Gold works at I.S./M.S. 8 with Weber. “It’s extremely shocking. This is a teacher that teaches my son,” Gold said.

It was inside a second-story classroom where police said Weber gave one of her students an up close and personal lesson in sex education.

Witnesses have testified in the case of 11 men in Burundi, accused of the attempted murder of albino people and selling of their body parts.

Initial charges of murder have been dropped because the prosecution failed to produce enough evidence.

Police suspect the body parts are being sold in neighbouring Tanzania, for use in witchcraft.

Forty-six albino people have been murdered in Tanzania in the past 18 months, but no-one has been convicted.

A man was so desperate to avoid a parking ticket that he ran over a NYPD traffic cop before she could write it, breaking her legs and causing a head injury.

The incident happened Friday afternoon on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. The 26-year-old agent was about to write a ticket for a double-parked car when the motorist ran to the vehicle, got in and tried to drive away, police said.

As he made his escape, the car knocked the agent to the ground and then drove over her, crushing her legs. Police were trying to identify a suspect. They say the traffic agent is in guarded condition at St. Barnabas Hospital.

Surveillance video captures the suspect wearing a red shirt and dark pants running across the street to his 2002 black Ford Taurus. The suspect is described as a man who is about 5 feet 8 inches tall and 250 pounds.

An Egyptian billionaire and former top political figure has been sentenced to death in Cairo for the 2008 murder of Lebanese pop star Suzanne Tamim.

Hisham Talaat Moustafa was found guilty of paying $2m to an ex-policeman to kill the singer. The killer Muhsin Sukkari was also sentenced to hang.

Ms Tamim reportedly broke off a secret love affair with Moustafa months before she was stabbed to death in Dubai. The tale of sex, politics, money and show business gripped the Arab world.

Reports described “chaos” in the courtroom after the judge read out a short statement and ordered the sentences referred to the religious authorities for confirmation – as is normal in Egypt.

Sukkari’s face went pale and family members burst into tears as the sentence was delivered, news agency AFP said.

Someone has beheaded a statue of President James Garfield that was installed last week at an Ohio college.

Hiram College spokesman Shawn Brown says the vandalism was discovered Friday morning, just a day after the sandstone statue was dedicated on the campus in Hiram, 30 miles southeast of Cleveland.

Brown says the college is hoping the head will be recovered so the 95-year-old statue can be restored, but police have no leads in their investigation.

A 17-year-old boy accused of killing his mother last week intentionally strangled her to death and sexually abused her corpse before dumping her body in a trash can, according to a juvenile court document released Monday.

Johnson City Juvenile Court Judge Sharon Green ordered Codey Wayne Miller, 17, held at the Upper East Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center pending a June 5 status hearing, when she will hear motions in the case, including prosecutors’ request to transfer the teenager to adult Criminal Court for trial.

Miller is charged with first-degree murder, felony murder and abuse of a corpse in the death of his mother, Sherry R. Cooper, 36, at her Lake Terrace housing development apartment on Thursday. Assistant Public Defender Ivan Lilly, appointed to represent Miller, waived the teen’s detention hearing after telling Green that details from the homicide had not been released to news media or Miller’s family.

Authorities say a North Carolina teen who was thwarted as he tried to rob a store with a banana ate it before they could arrive.

Winston-Salem authorities say 17-year-old John Szwalla held the banana under his shirt when he entered the store Thursday, saying he had a gun and demanded money.

Owner Bobby Ray Mabe says he and a customer jumped Szwalla, holding him until deputies arrived. While they waited, Mabe says the teen ate the banana.

The bodies of four U.S. citizens were found strangled, beaten and stabbed in a van in this border city, two days after they reportedly left their Southern California homes for a night at the Mexican clubs, U.S. officials said Thursday.

The victims, ages 19 to 23 years old, were found tied up on Saturday, but their deaths were not reported earlier because they were under investigation, said Fermin Gomez, an assistant state prosecutor in Baja California.

U.S. consular officials in Tijuana said the victims — two men and two women from the San Diego and Chula Vista areas — were U.S. citizens. The state attorney general’s office in Baja California said one of the women was Mexican.

A teacher at a Head Start preschool in Miami has been charged with hitting three children in his care, including a 5-year-old girl whom police say he kicked in the face as she lay on her cot during nap time.

Jean E. Dorvil, 56, a preschool teacher at the Head Start program at Charles R. Drew Elementary in Miami, was charged Friday with aggravated child abuse with great bodily harm, three charges of battery and two charges of child abuse with no harm.

Four of the charges are felonies. Dorvil is in jail without bond.

A Clarendon County waitress is accused of shooting a customer at the restaurant after the two had a dispute.

Yakeisha Ward, 29, is charged with assault and battery with intent to kill. An early morning run for breakfast at the Waffle House on Paxville Highway in Manning turned terribly wrong for Crystal Samuel.

 ”I thought I was gonna get me an All-Star,” says Samuel. A popular meal on the menu. “Grits, sausage, toast, eggs and a waffle,” says Samuel. She didn’t get what she came for. Instead, she says while she waited for her order, her friends started eating.

That’s when Samuel says she was told they couldn’t eat from carryout trays inside the restaurant.

“I said what is your fuss about. I said we haven’t paid for our food. She (Ward) said well you all got to leave. How you want us to leave and we ain’t paid for the food yet,” says Samuel. That’s when it got ugly.

Samuel says she threw a waffle at the waitress. “I did actually throw some food but it didn’t hit her,” says Samuel. “That’s when she (Ward) jumped across the counter and we got into it,” says Samuel.

Clarendon County Sheriff Randy Garrett says the altercation continued outside where he says Ward got a gun from her car and a gun magazine from her trunk.

Terrified residents at a Corpus Christi, Texas, state school for the mentally disabled were forced to be part of a brutal “fight club” operated by night shift employees, who made videos of the sessions with their cell phones, the newly released videos show.

Mentally disabled residents forced to brawl as employees prod and laugh. On the videos employees can be seen and heard laughing and prodding the residents to fight.

One resident is seen on the video trying to run away from his attacker and a large group of employees and residents tracking him through the halls. When cornered, he wails and moans and tells the employees, “I will behave.”

The videos were discovered by police in March when one of the school employees left his phone at a hospital and it was turned over to police. In an effort to find its owner, officers saw the disturbing videos.

A US security consultant who negotiated the release of dozens of kidnap victims in Latin America has himself been kidnapped by masked gunmen in northern Mexico.

The gunmen abducted Felix Batista outside a restaurant last Wednesday in the relatively safe industrial city of Saltillo in Coahuila state, Mexican authorities and his employer, security consultancy ASI Global, have revealed.

“We have notified the FBI and Mexican authorities, and they are working on the case,” said Charlie LeBlanc, chairman of ASI. Mr LeBlanc said Mr Batista had his own security business and that “he was in Mexico for business that wasn’t associated with our company”.

Man Who Tried to Buy 9-Year-Old Girl for Sex Sentenced to 10 Years in Federal Prison Without Parole

Kevin Moake, 50, of Flower Mound, Texas, was sentenced this morning by U.S. District Judge David C. Godbey to 10 years in federal prison, the statutory maximum, following his guilty plea in January to one count of possession of child pornography, announced James T. Jacks, acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas. Judge Godbey also ordered that Moake register as a sex offender and serve a lifetime of supervised release following his release from prison. Moake, who has been on bond, was remanded to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service at the conclusion of the sentencing hearing.

According to documents filed in court and public documents, Moake admitted that on May 30, 2007, he drove to a Burger King restaurant, on Mockingbird Lane near Love Field in Dallas, to meet an undercover officer in an attempt to buy a 9-year-old girl for sex. Public documents reveal that Moake gave the undercover officer $100 to spend the night with the nonexistent child, the cash representing a down payment in a “rent-to-own” plan. Moake was arrested on the spot and is presently facing charges in Dallas County related to this sting operation. Moake’s federal sentence will run concurrent to any state sentence he receives.

THE moral authority of Parliament is at its lowest ebb in living memory. That, I’m sorry to say, is my inescapable verdict on Westminster’s great expenses scandal. Coming at a time of financial crisis and political betrayal of the Gurkhas, this threatens to be the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back.

Can public trust ever be restored? The whole nation has seen minister after minister on TV, cringeingly trying to justify their allowances and expenses claims.

And let us not forget there was a time when to become an MP was seen as a noble and honourable way of serving your country.

Ask yourself now whether men or women of integrity from whatever walk of life will want to touch political office? Our politicians of the future are all likely to have climbed the greasy pole from within by working as researchers or lobbyists.

Already our MPs are seeking a scapegoat. The first reaction was to shoot the messenger, blaming so-called chequebook journalism. Yet they’ve only themselves to blame.

It is not just the clawing greed of painstaking claims for such minor items as tampons, barbecue sets and bathrobes, but also the egregious way some have transferred allowances from one second property to another-enabling them to refurbish homes at public expense then sell at a profit.

A 7-year-old boy who was allegedly shot in the head by a couple who thought he and three other people were trespassing on their property died Saturday, authorities said.

Donald Coffey Jr. died Saturday morning at a Houston hospital, less than two days after the boy was struck in the head by shotgun pellets, Sheriff’s Cpl. Hugh Bishop said.

Sheila Muhs and her husband, Gayle Muhs, both 45, were charged with second-degree felony counts of aggravated assault in the shootings Thursday. They were being held at Liberty County Jail with bail set at $25,000 each and had not yet retained an attorney, Bishop said.

After they got into a dispute over a beer-pong game, Joseph Jiminez, 24, and Scott Riley, 25, met in a Bridgeport alleyway and Riley made a dare, investigators said.

“Shoot me, shoot me,” Riley said to Jiminez and a companion. “You guys ain’t got the … ”

Jiminez accepted the challenge, police said, and today he is being held without bail at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility on murder and related charges pending a hearing a week from now.

At least 45 people have been killed in an attack on a wedding party in south-eastern Turkey, officials say. Mask-wearing assailants opened fire with automatic rifles and grenades, officials in Mardin province said.

The area, near the border with Syria, has been plagued by fighting between Kurdish separatists and government troops for 25 years. But Turkey’s Interior Minister Besir Atalay said the attack did not appear to be a “terror event”.

Local media have suggested the violence might have been the result of a blood feud or an argument between guests. Other unconfirmed reports said the wedding guests included members of a militia who help troops to fight Kurdish rebels.

The Federal Trade Commission has begun an inquiry into whether the close ties among the boards of two of technology’s most prominent companies, Apple and Google, amount to a violation of antitrust laws, according to several people briefed on the inquiry.

Apple and Google share two directors, Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, and Arthur Levinson, former chief executive of Genentech. The Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 prohibits a person’s presence on the board of two rival companies when it would reduce competition between them.

The two companies increasingly compete in the cellphone and operating systems markets. Antitrust experts say the provision against “interlocking directorates,” known as Section 8 of the act, is rarely enforced. Nevertheless, the agency has already notified Google and Apple of its interest in the matter, according to the people briefed on the inquiry, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity because the inquiry was confidential.

Police in Vienna arrested a man suspected of slipping drugs into drinks at a crowded bar Sunday, causing five people to collapse. Authorities said all five victims were hospitalized in life-threatening condition.

Investigators said they were still trying to determine a motive for the attack, which happened on a sunny afternoon at a small bar packed with up to 50 people enjoying an “after hours” party.

Authorities were called to the scene when customers at a sidewalk ice cream salon across the street from the bar saw the five victims fall to the ground.

“We got an emergency call at 5 p.m.,” or 1500 GMT, said police spokeswoman Iris Seper. She said officers later took the unidentified suspect into custody after witnesses said they had seen a man offering the victims drinks.

Investigators said it was unclear exactly what substance had been added to the drinks, but that it appeared to be some kind of narcotic. Seper said the victims drank freely, apparently unaware that anything was amiss.

A woman stepped forward Wednesday to claim her late father was the infamous Zodiac Killer and that she as a 7-year-old wrote some of the letters that taunted local police.

Kevin McLean, the former law partner of the late Melvin Belli, said he has led a two-year investigation into claims by Deborah Perez that her father, Guy Ward Hendrickson, was the Zodiac killer. Hendrickson, who lived in Orange County, died in 1993 of cancer.

 “He was a Jekyll and Hyde,” McLean said of Hendrickson. “He was nuts. He set out to kill people. Some of these killings were not random.”

McLean said Perez came forward on Wednesday because another investigator in Sacramento was about to come forward with a different theory of the killings. She was also currently involved in making a documentary on the crime.

As a youngster, Perez said she sometimes accompanied her father on his killing sprees to the Bay Area. The family lived in Santa Ana, but McLean said Hendrickson may have worked at one time at the Mare Island Naval shipyard in Vallejo.

Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed down four manholes serving the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and cut eight fiber cables in what appears to have been an organized attack on the electronic infrastructure of an American city. Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported.

That attack demonstrated a severe fault in American infrastructure: its centralization. The city of Morgan Hill and parts of three counties lost 911 service, cellular mobile telephone communications, land-line telephone, DSL internet and private networks, central station fire and burglar alarms, ATMs, credit card terminals, and monitoring of critical utilities. In addition, resources that should not have failed, like the local hospital’s internal computer network, proved to be dependent on external resources, leaving the hospital with a “paper system” for the day. In technical terms, the area was partitioned from the surrounding internet.

What was the attackers goal? Nothing has been revealed. Robbery? With wires cut, silent alarms were useless. Manipulation of the stock market? Companies, brokerages, and investors in the very wealthy community were cut off. Mayhem, murder, terrorism? But nothing like that seems to have happened. Some theorize unhappy communications workers, given the apparent knowledge of the community’s infrastructure necessary for this attack. Or did the attackers simply want to teach us a lesson? Although they are silent on the topic, I hope those responsible for emergency services, be they in business or government, are learning the lessons of Morgan Hill.

The first lesson is what stayed up: stand-alone radio systems and not much else. Cell phones failed. Cellular towers can not, in general, connect phone calls on their own, even if both phones are near the same tower. They communicate with a central switching computer to operate, and when that system doesn’t respond, they’re useless. But police and fire authorities still had internal communications via two-way radio.

Realizing that they’d need more two-way radio, authorities dispatched police to wake up the emergency coordinator of the regional ham radio club, and escort him to the community hospital with his equipment. Area hams dispatched ambulances and doctors, arranged for essential supplies, and relayed emergency communications out of the area to those with working telephones.

A hairdresser from the small Russian town of Meshchovsk has subdued a man who tried to rob her shop, and then raped him for three days in the utility room, Life.ru reports.

The incident occurred on Saturday, March 14. The working day was coming to an end at a small hairdressers, when a man armed with a gun rushed in and demanded the day’s earnings. The frightened employees and customers agreed to fulfill his demand, but when the shop’s owner, 28-year-old Olga, was handing the money to the robber, she suddenly knocked him down on the floor and then tied him up with a hairdryer cord.

The 32-year-old Viktor couldn’t have known that the woman was a yellow belt in karate. Read more Olga locked the unlucky robber in the utility room and told her colleagues that she was going to call the police – but didn’t do so. When everybody left home, she approached the man and ordered him to ‘take of his underpants’ threatening to hand him over to the police if he refuses to cooperate.

After that Olga raped her hostage for three long days. She chained Viktor to the radiator with pink furry handcuffs and fed him Viagra. She eventually let the man go on Monday, March 16, saying: “Get out of my sight!”

Viktor went straight to hospital as his genitals were injured, and then to the police.

A TEENAGER who laughed at a cat’s “screams” as he hurled it off a second storey rooftop into a swimming pool was fined $1000 in Cairns Magistrates’ Court yesterday. The court heard that Christopher Jeffrey James, 18, paused before throwing the cat – his ex-girlfriend’s mother’s pet – as his friend got his mobile phone ready to record the cruel show.

“The video footage clearly shows a man throwing a cat from the roof of a two-storey house,” police prosecutor Constable Siobhan O’Rourke said.

“There is the sound of a cat’s scream as he does this.”

“The cat lands in a nearby swimming pool and swims to the edge then runs into nearby bushes.

“Voices are heard laughing in the background.” 

The Manhattan district attorney’s office has smashed a sinister plot to smuggle nuclear weapons materials to Iran through unwitting New York banks, the Daily News has learned.

Officials plan to unseal a 118-count indictment Tuesday accusing a Chinese national of setting up a handful of fake companies to hide that he was selling millions of dollars in potential nuclear materials to Tehran.

“This case will cut off a major source of supply to Iran and it shows how they are going ahead full steam to get a nuclear bomb. Long-range missiles they pretty much have already,” a law enforcement source close to the case said.

“We think it is one of the largest suppliers of weapons of mass destruction to Iran.”

Feeding picky eaters can be a pain.

Just ask Lyndel Toppin’s fiancée, whose middle finger was almost chopped off when Toppin allegedly attacked her with a kitchen knife, according to Upper Darby police.

The reason for the assault, cops say, was a poorly made meatball sandwich. Specifically, the cheese placement was all wrong, which infuriated Toppin.

“That was the catalyst,” police Superintendent Michael Chitwood said. The 44-year-old woman, whom cops did not identify, was preparing dinner last week in her Kingston Road home when Toppin “became enraged due to the victim not placing cheese on his hoagie roll correctly,” according to the arrest affidavit.

A former south Alabama judge is accused of checking male inmates out of jail and forcing them to engage in sexual activity including paddling, according to officials and court documents.

Former Mobile County Circuit Judge Herman Thomas was arrested Friday after a grand jury returned the indictments against him. He was released on $287,500 bond later Friday. The indictments total 57 counts, and the charges range from ethics violations to kidnapping, extortion, sex abuse and sodomy.

If convicted on the most serious charge — kidnapping, a Class A felony — Thomas faces a prison sentence of 10 to 99 years in prison, Mobile County District Attorney John Tyson Jr. said Monday.

A Modesto police officer had to pull his gun to keep a hostile crowd at bay early Sunday. The officer sustained minor injuries in the southwest Modesto incident, said police spokesman Sgt. Brian Findlen.

Police are not releasing the officer’s name. The officer’s dog was assaulted but not seriously injured, Findlen said. Police arrested several suspects in connection with the incident. A loaded assault rifle was found later at the scene of the struggle, which unfolded about 2 a.m.

Findlen said the officer pulled his gun only after other deterrents, including his police dog, failed to keep the crowd under control. “In a situation where you really feel that your life is in imminent danger, your options become very few,” Findlen said. Some members of the crowd told the officer that “he was not going to leave the scene alive,” according to police.

 The crowd of as many as 60 people included some known gang members, Findlen said. Police believe the group was gathered for a party in the 1700 block of Pelton Avenue. The officer happened upon the group when he was responding to another call in the area.

The officer saw several people assaulting one man, Findlen said. As the officer tried to break up the fight, the crowd’s attention shifted from the assault victim to the officer. The crowd surrounded the officer. The officer sent his dog into the crowd in an attempt to stop the group.

The dog apprehended one suspect, who police later identified as 18-year-old Alfredo Espinoza of Modesto. As the officer tried to arrest Espinoza, the crowd pulled Espinoza away from the officer.

The credit card details of up to 19,000 British shoppers were published on the internet – where they could be found using a simple search on Google. The details apparently originated from the website of a criminal gang in the Far East.

The list, obtained by the Mail, includes the names, home addresses and full card details of thousands of Visa, Mastercard and American Express customers. Google’s high-powered search engine inadvertently picked up the list during a ‘crawl’ of the web – allowing it to be seen and copied.

Nine employees are under investigation over allegations of new fights among mentally disabled residents of the troubled Corpus Christi State School, a state lawmaker said Saturday night.

State Rep. Abel Herrero said the workers are on leave while officials look into complaints that the staff members did nothing to intervene in the fights involving residents Wednesday and Thursday.

The new allegations follow six staffers being charged earlier this month with injury to a disabled person over separate fights allegedly organized for the staff’s entertainment. Videos of those fights were found on a cell phone.

“Appalling,” said Herrero, a Corpus Christi-area Democrat. “Completely unacceptable. It’s important that the state exhaust every resource to once and for all ensure the safety and well-being of our state’s most vulnerable population.”

Motorists stopped on freeways Thursday and scrambled to collect cash that drug suspects tossed like confetti from their pickup while leading police on a pursuit during the evening commute.

Police arrested two men on Interstate 5 in Carmel Valley while other officers collected more than $17,000 along the pursuit route. Drug Enforcement Administration agents took custody of the money, the pickup and the suspects.

Some civilians who got in on the cash-grab later handed it over to police. A 16-year-old boy turned over $570 at the department’s northeastern division station.

A woman got a terrifying taste of the Old West this afternoon when she was struck by an arrow as she stepped out of a car at a Riverdale nursing home. Witnesses said Denise Delgado-Brown was dropping two friends off at the Schervier Nursing Care Center on Independence Avenue shortly after 1:30 p.m. when a black arrow with yellow feathers – apparently fired by an unknown archer – struck her mid-section near the heart. “They shot me with an arrow!” a stunned Delgado-Brown, who lives in Yonkers, told friends as she collapsed near her KIA SUV.

Lesbians living in South Africa are being raped by men who believe it will ‘cure’ them of their sexual orientation, a report has revealed. Women are reporting a rising tide of brutal homophobic attacks and murders and the widespread use of ‘corrective’ rape as a form of punishment.

The report, commissioned by international NGO ActionAid, called for South Africa’s criminal justice system to recognise the rapes as hate crimes as police are reportedly failing to take action over the spiralling violence.

The owner of a Nebraska car dealership and two executives were in police custody facing theft charges Thursday after 81 cars were taken from the dealership’s lot, authorities said. Alan Patch, 52, who owns Legacy Auto Sales in Nebraska is being held in Tooele County, Utah.

Rachel Fait, 37, Legacy’s comptroller, was arrested in Tooele County on Wednesday, and Legacy general manager Rick Covello, 53, turned himself in to Scottsbluff officials Thursday, Spencer said.

Police became aware of the case Tuesday, when they received a call from Toyota company officials, Spencer said. Toyota told police they had received a call that all of Legacy’s new Toyotas were gone from its lot.

Employees arriving at the dealership for work on Tuesday also found the three executives gone, police said. They had packed up their personal possessions. Some computers were gone, as well. Fait and Patch’s homes in Nebraska were on the market and empty, Spencer said.

Mexico’s government condemned Forbes Magazine on Thursday for putting the country’s most wanted man, a violent drug lord, on its annual list of the world’s richest people.

Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman made the prestigious business magazine’s list for the first time on Wednesday, sharing the 701st spot at $1 billion in assets. The amount was based on his estimated share of drug shipments to the United States.

Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora accused U.S.-based Forbes of coming to the defense of a criminal and said it was “deplorable” for the publication to compare Guzman with honest and law-abiding business people.

Guzman, who is just 5 feet tall, escaped from prison in 2001 and set off a wave of killings across Mexico in an attempt to dominate the country’s highly lucrative drug trade into the United States.

A $10,000 Internet bounty was placed on Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s head by a suspected agent of the North American Man/Boy Love Association, The Post has learned.

The shocking death threat by the infamous organization of pederasts was posted three weeks ago on an Internet news-group bulletin board that originated in The Bronx, law-enforcement sources said.

The threat, described by a source as “unprecedented” because it is believed to come from an organization, prompted a sweeping and ongoing criminal probe by the Attorney General’s Office and at least one other law-enforcement organization, and subpoenas were issued, sources said.

A feisty 70-year-old woman who fought off four home intruders by whacking one with a signature Emeril Lagasse saucepan was upset when police took it as evidence after apprehending the suspects.

But now, Ellen Basinski, of Elyria, outside Cleveland, has lots of replacement Lagasse cookware coming her way, courtesy of the chef himself, and The Early Show Saturday Edition.

The feisty Basinski was on the phone with her husband, a local judge, when the would-be robbers entered the house.

“I was angry,” she says.

Italian investigators testified Friday in the murder trial of an American student and her former boyfriend, with one saying the American turned cartwheels in the police station after the killing.
…
Profazio said Knox and Sollecito had a “strange attitude” when they were brought to the police station for questioning following the discovery of Kercher’s body. He said that on one occasion Knox sat on Sollecito’s lap.

“I told them it was not appropriate,” Profazio said.

He also recalled other officers reporting that Knox was doing cartwheels and splits in the police station.

Two teenaged girls were arrested for allegedly pimping other students for prostitution, Phoenix police said.

Jazmine Finley and Tatiana Tye, both 16, allegedly used contacts from local schools and their friends to lure other young girls into prostitution, MyFOXPhoenix reported.

Investigators said the suspects recruited at least five girls, ages 14 to 17.

 Finley and Tye, who were allegedly involved in prostitution themselves, were responsible for recruiting, teaching and receiving money from the other girls who worked for them, police said.

A Hong Kong chef on Thursday began a 20-month jail sentence for attacking a woman diner with a meat cleaver after she complained about his food. Cheng Chi-wai, 50, hit the 47-year-old woman on the head with the cleaver after she grumbled about the meal she was served in the seafood restaurant in the city’s Wan Chai district. He ran into the kitchen and emerged with two meat cleavers after she remarked on the poor quality of his cooking and hit the woman on the forehead with the blunt side of one of the cleavers.

A 16-year-old girl was found dead and another teenage girl was discovered unconscious in a barracks on this Army base south of Tacoma, the Army said Monday.

In a statement issued about 36 hours after base emergency personnel responded to a 911 call early Sunday morning, Fort Lewis spokesman Joe Piek said a Madigan Army Medical Center doctor declared one girl dead at the scene. The second teen was taken to Madigan for emergency medical care and was reported in stable condition Monday.

For years, the juvenile court system in Wilkes-Barre operated like a conveyor belt: Youngsters were brought before judges without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent off to juvenile prison for months for minor offenses.

The explanation, prosecutors say, was corruption on the bench.

In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.

While the world focused on Hamas militants launching rockets from Gaza at southern Israel, the terrorist organization also voted quietly to implement Islamic law in the Gaza Strip, including crucifixion of Christians, according to reports in the Arabic press.

The traditional Muslim criminal code, known as Sharia law, includes penalties such as amputation of limbs for stealing and the death penalty, including crucifixion, for actions Hamas deems detrimental to “Palestinian interests,” including collaborating with Israel.

The new law was reported on the Al-Arabiya Web site and in the London-based Saudi-owned newspaper Al-Hayat, which wrote that the implementation of Sharia law has “brought criticism and concern from human rights organizations in the Gaza Strip.”

A frustrated man sought revenge on his neighbors in a unique manner: He planted nails at the ends of their driveways so their tires would bust whenever they pulled in or out. How cruel. Apparently this guy’s been booby-trapping driveways since 2006, according to the Journal News. That’s even crueler. Four people – two in Stony Point and two in Haverstraw – have called in more than 40 complaints over the last two years

A gardener detained along with more than a dozen members of an alleged drug trafficking ring testified that police threatened him to feed him to lions and tigers during a raid at a Mexico City mansion, a newspaper reported Friday.

The Oct. 16 raid — in which police seized exotic animals from a private zoo at a sprawling estate — has been marred by allegations of abuse and corruption against the police who conducted the operation.

 Mexico’s former acting federal police chief, Gerardo Garay, is under investigation for allegedly stealing money from the mansion during the raid. Garay is among several federal officers arrested for alleged collaboration with drug cartels in a corruption investigation known as “Operation Clean House.”

The Reforma newspaper says it had access to a court hearing Tuesday in which the gardener, Fernando Maya, testified that police beat him, gave him electric shocks and threatened to rape his wife if he did not reveal the whereabouts of the owner of the house, who remains at large. He claimed that police dragged him to cages with lions and tigers and threatened to throw him inside.

A man dressed as Santa Claus opened fire at a Christmas Eve party in a home that subsequently caught fire, leaving three people dead, police said. The suspect later killed himself, police said.

Police found the body of Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, 45, at the home of his brother early Thursday in the Sylmar area of Los Angeles. Police would not say how he died.

Police said he was the estranged husband of a person who may have been at the party in Covina, a Los Angeles suburb.

“He was going through some type of marital problems, and we believe that this residence is a relative’s residence,” Lt. Pat Buchanan said.

A reigning Mexican beauty queen from the drug-plagued state of Sinaloa was arrested with suspected gang members in a truck filled guns and ammunition, police said Tuesday.

Miss Sinaloa 2008 Laura Zuniga stared at the ground, with her flowing dark hair concealing her face, as she stood squeezed between seven alleged gunmen lined up before journalists. Soldiers wearing ski masks guarded the 23-year-old model and the suspects.

Zuniga was arrested shortly before midnight on Monday at a military checkpoint in Zapopan, just outside the colonial city of Guadalajara, said Jalisco state police director, Francisco Alejandro Solorio.

Zuniga was riding in one of two trucks, where soldiers found a large stash of weapons, including two AR-15 assault rifles, .38 specials, 9mm handguns, nine magazines, 633 cartridges and $53,300 in U.S. currency, Solorio said.

Forty-six people were injured when two bottles of what’s thought to be acid fell onto a busy street in Hong Kong. Police suspect the bottles were dropped deliberately from a high-rise building, an official told a local newpaper. Victims cried out as the liquid damaged skin and burned holes in clothing, witnesses said. Those taken to hospital were released the same day. Police searched the building, but no arrests were made following the incident late on Saturday.

Thousands of Greek protesters clashed with riot police yet again in Athens today, as police started to run out of tear gas after battling rioters day and night for a whole week.

 Police sources said their riot squads had fired 4,600 tear gas canisters this week as rioters torched hundreds of banks and shops and occupied their campuses, where police after forbidden by law from entering.

The police have asked Israel and Germany to send them emergency supplies, while protesters claimed that they had been using old stock from the 1980s in a desperate bid to contain the rioting. They claimed that corroded chemicals were causing some demonstrators to collapse and need medical attention.

?We found tear gas canister dated from 1981,? said one demonstrator, calling himself only GK. ?The old chemicals make us sick, people have fainted and have trouble breathing,? he said.

The driver of a silver Bentley was shot early Friday in an apparent car-to-car freeway shooting in the southbound lanes of Highway 101 in downtown Los Angeles.

California Highway Patrol and police officers responding to a 3:25 a.m. shots-fired call discovered the bullet-riddled Bentley stopped on the freeway near the eastbound Interstate 10 connector.

Police Lt. Paul Vernon says the Bentley driver, who has several bullet wounds, was found slumped over the steering wheel. The lieutenant says he’s hospitalized with serious injuries.

Vernon says no witnesses have come forward to the apparent car-to-car shooting. Investigators don’t know if the shooting is gang or narcotics related or the result of road rage.

The Bentley, which is peppered with bullet holes, does not have license plates.

Bernard L. Madoff, a legend among Wall Street traders, was arrested on Thursday morning by federal agents and charged with criminal securities fraud stemming from his company?s money management business.

The arrest and criminal complaint were confirmed just before 6 p.m. Thursday by Lev L. Dassin, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, and Mark Mershon, the assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

According to the complaint, Mr. Madoff advised colleagues at the firm on Wednesday that his investment advisory business was ?all just one big lie? that was ?basically, a giant Ponzi scheme? that, by his estimate, had lost $50 billion over many years.

Related accusations were made in a lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in federal court in Manhattan. That complaint accuses Mr. Madoff of defrauding advisory clients of his firm and seeks emergency relief to protect potential victims, including an asset freeze and the appointment of a receiver for the firm.

A six-year-old albino girl in Burundi has been found dead with her head and limbs removed, in the latest killing linked to ritual medicine. Albinos in the region have been targeted because of a belief peddled by witchdoctors that their body parts can be used for magic potions. The girl, who was attacked on Sunday, was the sixth person with albinism to be killed in Burundi since September.

A beheaded man was hung from an overpass Thursday, a gruesome display even for this northern border city long used to drug-related violence. Shortly after the grisly sighting about 5 a.m., police found the victim’s head in a black bag in a nearby plaza, said state police spokesman Alejandro Pariente. Pariente said the body was wearing black jeans, a red T-shirt and white sneakers, and was handcuffed. A banner apparently directed at rival drug-gang members was hung next to the corpse. The victim’s father identified the 23-year-old man.

A man was ordered to be held without bail after police tied him to a recent armed robbery. But at least he has his thumb back. Police said Bryan Perez, 22, and an accomplice made off with hundreds of dollars in cash in an Oct. 11 raid at an alleged brothel in Washington’s Columbia Heights neighborhood. According to charging documents, one of the victims took control of Perez’s silver machete during a struggle and hacked off his right thumb. About two hours after the robbery, a nine-fingered Perez went to an emergency room. Police found out about it, fingerprinted the thumb and transported it to the hospital for a comparison, according to a report in The Examiner.

Detectives on Sunday continued collecting evidence and interviewing people as they investigated a baby shower that turned into a gunfight at a union hall on Oakwood Avenue.

Four people were shot and are recovering at area hospitals, said police Det. Capt. Paul Melanson.

Police were called to the United Auto Workers hall at 666 Oakwood Ave. about 11:20 p.m. Saturday for a report of a disturbance. By the time the first officers arrived, two of the wounded were on their way to Hartford Hospital by private car. Another victim was taken by ambulance. It remained unclear Sunday morning how the fourth victim got to the hospital.

One of the victims taken by car to Hartford Hospital suffered a life-threatening wound to the abdomen, but was recovering after surgery, Melanson said.

In addition to collecting and cataloging evidence, police interviewed the approximately 60 people attending the baby shower.

“Some were very helpful,” Melanson said of those at the shower. “Most were less than forthcoming.”

Crowds in a busy market fled in terror as a woman walked among them holding aloft the severed head of a man who had attacked her.

Covered in blood, she held the head high like a trophy, said police – her way of showing that she had delivered her own kind of justice to her attacker.

The gruesome scene was played out in Makkapurva village, 170 miles south east of the Indian city of Lucknow, where, last night, the woman was being held behind bars.

According to police officer Ram Bharose, the unnamed 35-year-old woman had sliced off the man’s head with a sickle she had been using to cut grass near her village.

‘She was getting grass for her cattle when the man came up from behind her and tried to sexually assault her,’ said Mr Bharose.

‘In a bid to save her dignity, she turned on him and during a struggle managed to chop off his head with the sickle.

A British man who killed his wife with a meat cleaver because she changed her Facebook status to “single” was sentenced to at least 14 years in a U.K. prison Friday, the Daily Mail reported.

Wayne Forrester, 35, was under the influence of alcohol and cocaine when he drove to their family home and murdered his wife, Emma, as she slept in her bed. The couple had recently separated and Forrester felt humiliated when Emma changed her relationship status to single on Facebook.

The police were called amid Emma?s screams for her life. Wayne emerged from the house, drenched in blood and gripping a carton of juice when the police arrived. Holding his stained hands out for handcuffs, the Mail Online reports he told police, “Who called you? My wife is in there. I killed her.”

Five immigrants from Afghanistan enslaved a teenage girl they brought to the United States, with some forcing her to do chores and one ? her 37-year-old husband ? beating and sexually assaulting her, according to a federal indictment unsealed this week.

The girl is from an impoverished single-parent home in Afghanistan, and she was informally adopted by another family there that forced her to marry at age 13 in 2005, Emily Langlie, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office, said Thursday. The girl’s husband is Mohammad Atahee, a friend of the adoptive family; U.S. officials don’t recognize the marriage.

Keovongsa Siharath was arrested in Henry County on charges he punched his stepfather.

Jeffrey Churchill was charged with assault in an altercation with a woman in a mall parking lot.

Calvin Thomas was taken into custody in DeKalb County on a concealed weapons charge.

 All three are now officers with the Atlanta Police Department.

 More than one-third of recent Atlanta Police Academy graduates have been arrested or cited for a crime, according to a review of their job applications. The arrests ranged from minor offenses such as shoplifting to violent charges including assault. More than one-third of the officers had been rejected by other law enforcement agencies, and more than half of the recruits admitted using marijuana.

O.J. Simpson, who went from American sports idol to celebrity-in-exile after he was acquitted of murder in 1995, was found guilty Friday of robbing two sports-memorabilia dealers at gunpoint in a Las Vegas hotel room. The 61-year-old former football star could spend the rest of his life in prison. Sentencing was set for Dec. 5. A weary and somber Simpson released a heavy sigh as the charges were read by the clerk in Clark County District Court. He was immediately taken into custody.

A blank-faced 7-year-old boy broke into a popular Outback zoo, fed a string of animals to the resident crocodile and bashed several lizards to death with a rock, the zoo’s director said Friday.

The boy jumped a security fence at the Alice Springs Reptile Center in central Australia early Wednesday, then went on a 30-minute killing spree, using a rock to slay three lizards, including the zoo’s beloved, 20-year-old goanna, which he then fed to “Terry,” an 11-foot, 440-pound saltwater crocodile, said zoo director Rex Neindorf.

The boy, whose deadly acts were caught on the zoo’s security camera, also threw several live animals to Terry over the two fences surrounding the crocodile’s enclosure, at one point climbing over the outer fence to get closer to the giant reptile. In the footage, the boy’s face remains largely blank, Neindorf said.

“It was like he was playing a game,” he said.

Now this is some serious computer theft. We’re talking 19,709 pieces of stolen computer equipment from the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. The theft included everything from PCs and printer toner to hard drives, software and other office equipment amounting to over $120,000 according to court documents and published reports.

 The systems administrator, Victor Papagno plead guilty in federal court today to stealing the items in a period between 1997 and 2007 to benefit Papagno and his friends, reports said.

He took so much stuff that he stored some of it in neighbors’ houses, according to WTOP.com a local news outlet.

Tenants of a Brooklyn building say their landlord came up with a new idea for how to kick them out: Let the smell of the cats out of the bag.

 Dead cats, that is.

The stench from the carcasses did catch the tenants’ attention — but they stayed and sued.

One tenant, Daisy Terry, told a City Hall news conference on Friday it was so bad she had to hold her nose coming down the stairs.

 The building in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood was purchased last year by a company listed in court papers as Heskel. A call to Heskel Properties in Manhattan was not immediately returned.

Metrolink officials Saturday put the blame squarely on the engineer of the train for the deadly crash that has claimed at least 25 lives. They say he ran a red light.

But a group of local teens, train enthusiasts, who know the engineer well doubt that he was to blame.

 They called their friend professional and caring and said he helped them learn about trains and being an engineer. To a man, they said he would “never” have been reckless or unprofessional or run a red light.

But one minute before the deadliest crash in Metrolink history, one teen — Nick Williams — said he received a text message on his cell phone from the engineer, whom the teens identified as Robert Sanchez.

An estimated 123 people were shot and killed over the summer. That’s nearly double the number of soldiers killed in Iraq over the same time period.

In May, cbs2chicago.com began tracking city shootings and posting them on Google maps. Information compiled from our reporters, wire service reports and the Chicago Police Major Incidents log indicated that 123 people were shot and killed throughout the city between the start of Memorial Day weekend on May 26, and the end of Labor Day on Sept. 1.

Italians have been left shocked by a ferocious assault on Franciscan monks by hooded thugs at a monastery in the foothills of the Alps, which has been compared to incidents seen in the film ‘A Clockwork Orange’.

Father Sergio Baldini, 48, the guardian of the San Colombano Belmonte monastery near Turin, and three elderly monks from the Franciscan order of Friars Minor, were having their evening meal when they were attacked by three hooded men who gagged and bound them before punching, kicking and beating them with clubs.

Father Baldini suffered severe head injuries but also has “serious respiratory problems” because he choked on his food while being assaulted, doctors say. He has had brain surgery and was in a coma.

Following an undercover operation, Colorado police this month broke up a prostitution operation running out of a massage parlor known as Tokyo Sauna. Broomfield Police Department officers arrested a 54-year-old woman on a prostitution charge and a 65-year-old male customer for patronizing a hooker. But the big catch was the 48-year-old woman who allegedly ran the prostitution operation. She was charged with pimping, pandering, and keeping a place of prostitution. Mi Sook You is her name

Is the defendant’s dock at the International Criminal Court reserved for leaders of small and poor countries that defy the West? Not if Rwanda has its way. It wants to charge some of France’s most celebrated leaders of the 1990s as collaborators in genocide.

Last week the government of Rwanda issued a damning 500-page report documenting France’s participation in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This marks a remarkable turnaround in the deeply politicized world of human rights reporting. Usually, such reporting takes the form of governments or human rights groups based in the West condemning poor countries for having political or social systems that do not meet Western standards.

Now a wretched African country has turned the table.

All who study the Rwandan genocide, as I did while researching a book about that ill-fated country, come away stunned by what they learn about French support of mass murder. France was so eager to defend a client regime against English-speaking rebels that, as the new report asserts, it gave that regime “political, military, diplomatic and logistic support” and “directly assisted” its genocidal campaign.

The report names 33 present and former French politicians and military officers as conspirators, among them the late President François Mitterrand and other well-known figures like former foreign minister Alan Juppé and former prime minister Dominique de Villepin.

Former President Ford secretly advised the FBI that two of his fellow members on the Warren Commission doubted the FBI’s conclusion that John F. Kennedy was shot from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository in Dallas, according to newly released records from Ford’s FBI files.

Ford, still a congressman at the time, also told a senior FBI official about internal panel disputes over hiring staff, Chief Justice Earl Warren’s timetable for completing the final report on the assassination and what panel members said about the FBI.

Greyhound has scrapped an ad campaign that extolled the relaxing upside of bus travel after one of its passengers was accused of beheading and cannibalizing another traveler.

The ad’s tag line was “There’s a reason you’ve never heard of ‘bus rage.’”

Greyhound spokeswoman Abby Wambaugh said Wednesday a billboard and some tunnel posters near a bus terminal in Toronto are still up and would be removed later in the day.

“Greyhound knows how important it is to get these removed and we are doing everything possible,” Wambaugh said. “This is something that we immediately asked to be done last week, realizing that these could be offensive.”

Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters says a Springfield Township man, accused of running an “underwear con” to get near young children, is a predator who deserves to be locked up for a “very long time because he will continue to prey upon young children unless he is removed from the community”. Prosecutors today released new information in the case against 44 year old Ben Hawkins.

Hawkins allegedly conned parents into thinking their children were participating in an “underwear survey” in order to get close to them for sexual contact. Prosecutors now say Hawkins had “unpermitted contact” with 11 children, boys and girls ages 9 to 16, between March and July of this year.

Today a grand jury indicted Hawkins on 19 counts, including gross sexual imposition, importuning, and kidnapping.

A Pickaway County man shot at a tractor mowing a ditch on his property last night and ended up hit by one of his own bullets, authorities said.

Randall Turner of Ashville threatened the driver of the tractor, which was pulling a mower, before firing five bullets into the tractor, Pickaway County Prosecutor Judy Wolford said. One of the bullets ricocheted and hit him, she said.

“So he went to the hospital and then he went to jail,” she said. Turner is charged with one count of felonious assault.

Wolford didn’t know the nature of Turner’s injuries but said he was released and booked into the Pickaway County Jail yesterday. He was released on bond, she said.

An Australian court heard testimony yesterday in a case invovling a mother who reportedly put her nine-month-old daughter into an aquarium filled with water after she was unable to stop the baby from crying.

The 22-year-old, who was not identified, has pleaded not guilty in the District Court to endangering the life of the baby at her Blakeview home in May, 2007.

The father, who also cannot be named, told the court he and his then-partner had been arguing on the night the baby was allegedly put into the aquarium.

He said the child had been crying and his partner was not able to make her stop. He saw his partner walk past their bedroom and then saw her walk back without the child.

“Five to 10 seconds later I heard coughing, spluttering, splashing and screaming,” he said. “I saw (the baby) face up on her back in the tank splashing, screaming, panicking.”

As many as 300 people joined a melee that began inside a Raleigh mall and spilled outside the shopping center during the fight, police said Sunday.

Raleigh Police Department spokesman Jim Sughrue said the gang-related brawl began inside Triangle Town Center Mall on Saturday night at about 8 p.m. Off-duty officers working at the mall requested assistance, and Wake County sheriff’s deputies N.C. Highway Patrol troopers also responded

Sughrue said a 15-year-old was stabbed during the incident. He was taken to WakeMed and treated for non-life-threatening injuries. A police officer was also injured with a “significant” cut to his knee that he suffered during a chase. He was taken to Duke Raleigh Hospital for treatment and is expected to recover, Sughrue said.

THE president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, has been warned by Thabo Mbeki, the South African president, that he faces prosecution for the crimes he has committed during his 28 years in office unless he signs a deal to give up all effective power.

Mbeki, who has done all he can to shield and support Mugabe for the past eight years, has come under overwhelming western pressure and has had to tell Mugabe that he could no longer protect him and his key cronies from being charged by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The power-sharing talks between Mugabe’s Zanu-PF and Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) are shrouded in secrecy. But The Sunday Times has learnt that Mugabe, who has vowed that Tsvangirai will never be in government and that “only God can remove me from power”, faces humiliation over the terms of the deal that he will be forced to sign next month.

State police say they arrested a man early Tuesday whose blood alcohol level was 0.491 percent — the highest ever recorded in Rhode Island for someone who wasn’t dead.

Stanley Kobierowski was taken to a hospital, put in the detoxification unit and sedated, said Maj. Steven O’Donnell. He was arraigned Tuesday on charges of driving while intoxicated and resisting arrest, and he was released after promising to appear Friday at a court hearing.

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, accused architect of massacres making him one of the world’s top war crimes fugitives, was arrested on Monday evening in a sweep by Serbian security forces, the country’s president and the U.N. tribunal said.

Karadzic is suspected of masterminding mass killings that the U.N. war crimes tribunal described as “scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history.” They include the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, Europe’s worst slaughter since World War II.

Zimbabwe’s troubled central bank introduced $100 billion banknotes Saturday in a desperate bid to ease the recurrent cash shortages plaguing the inflation-ravaged economy.
A shopper displays a $500 million Zimbabwean bank note.

The bills officially come into circulation Monday, although they were on the foreign currency dealers market Saturday.

As high as they are, though, the bills still aren’t enough to buy a loaf of bread. They can buy only four oranges.

The new note is equal to just one U.S. dollar.

Once-prosperous Zimbabwe has seen an unprecedented economic meltdown since it gained independence in 1980, with the official inflation rate now at 2.2 million percent.

Hundreds of super-rich American tax cheats have, in effect, turned themselves in to the IRS after a bank computer technician in the tinyEuropean country of Liechtenstein came forward with the names of US citizens who had set up secret accounts there, according to Washington lawyers investigating the scheme.
Kieber

Heinrich Kieber, a bank computer technician in Liechtenstein came forward with the names of US citizens who had set up secret accounts there, according to Washington lawyers investigating the scheme. He has been branded a thief by the government of Liechtenstein for violating the country’s bank secrecy laws.

He is now in hiding but scheduled to testify to the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Thursday via a video statement from a secret location, according to Congressional investigators.

A police officer and his family have won $40,000 in their lawsuit against a restaurant that had served them food tainted by an employee’s spit and urine.

A jury on Friday ruled in favor of Sidney police Officer Keith Andrew, whose two sons, then 4 and 7, were sickened by the food they ate at a KFC/Taco Bell in October 2005. Sidney is a town of about 6,000 in western Nebraska.

The younger boy became violently ill with gastroenteritis and dehydration, vomited for hours and was forced to spend time in a hospital, the family’s lawsuit said.

A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco’s new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail, authorities said Monday.

Terry Childs, a 43-year-old computer network administrator who lives in Pittsburg, has been charged with four counts of computer tampering and is scheduled to be arraigned today.

Prosecutors say Childs, who works in the Department of Technology at a base salary of just over $126,000, tampered with the city’s new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials’ e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates’ bookings are stored.

Childs created a password that granted him exclusive access to the system, authorities said. He initially gave pass codes to police, but they didn’t work. When pressed, Childs refused to divulge the real code even when threatened with arrest, they said.

For six days American actress Joyce Germain lay dead beneath a pile of towels, cushions, a foot spa and a construction hat, decomposing in the bathroom of her inner Sydney flat.

It was a bizarre scene, rivalled only by the cast of characters who will be called to give evidence about her unsolved death.

Opening an inquest into the 59-year-old’s death in Sydney on Monday, counsel assisting the coroner, Rebbecca Becroft, said the circumstances could only be described as “strange and bizarre”.

Ms Germain’s large frame was buried beneath various household items, including bedding, towels and a blue foot spa.

An electric iron cord was wrapped about her neck and a knife and razor were found near her body, but there were no discernible wounds, Sgt Becroft said.

Her dress was lifted above her head and a clothes peg had been attached to her genitals, with lipstick smeared over the vanity basin, walls and the body.

A Houston man was sentenced to 35 years in prison on Tuesday after prosecutors said he fatally stabbed his roommate during an argument about foot odor.

William Antonio Serrano, 23, pleaded no contest to murder in May in the October death of Noel Quintanilla-Vaquero, 21.

During his sentencing hearing on Tuesday, Serrano cried as he told state District Judge Mike Anderson that he had been defending himself against Quintanilla-Vaquero, his court-appointed attorney, Sid Crowley, said.

However, no evidence was available to show that Quintanilla-Vaquero had a weapon, Harris County Assistant District Attorney Joe Vinas said.

“The defendant said the victim had smelly feet,” Vinas said.

A man has been arrested after tearing the head off a wax figure of Adolf Hitler at a newly opened branch of Madame Tussauds in Berlin.

The 41-year-old man was held after attacking the waxwork, only hours after the attraction opened on Saturday.

The inclusion of Hitler in the exhibition has aroused controversy in a country where Nazi symbols are banned.

Three decapitated corpses were discovered in Mexico’s northwestern Sinaloa state Friday, bring to a total of seven headless bodies found and 11 police assassinated in a bloody week of often drug-related violence in the country, officials and news reports said.

The three headless corpses were found in a car in Culiacan, Sinaloa, together with a note critical of one of the Beltran Leyva brothers, heads of a faction of the divided Sinaloa drug cartel, state judicial officials said in a statement.

The Beltran Leyva brothers are in a fight with Sinaloa-based Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the country’s most sought-after drug kingpin.

A message attacking him was found with four decapitated bodies on Wednesday, also in Culiacan.

A 22-year-old man is in custody after police said he and another man unwittingly tried to carjack an unmarked police car with two uniformed officers inside.

At 9:30 p.m. Thursday, the officers were investigating illegal fireworks activity in the 2200 block of Eastwood Avenue when a sports utility vehicle pulled up in front of their unmarked police sedan, said Santa Ana Police Department Comm. Steve Colon.

The two men got out of the SUV and took “an aggressive approach toward the officers,” Colon said. The driver acted as if he had a weapon in his waistband, police said.

At that point, the officers got out of the car; the two suspects ran back into their SUV and attempted to get away, Colon said. Police suspect the two men didn’t realize there were officers in the vehicle.

A teenager died after he was tied to a tree and made to drink petrol before being set on fire, police revealed yesterday.

Simon Everitt died from inhaling some of the fluid, a post-mortem examination found.

The 17-year-old engineering student had been missing for three weeks before his body was discovered buried in a ditch last Saturday.

A Durham, N.C., Democratic official and her husband face criminal charges in connection with alleged satanic rituals.

Joy Johnson, 30, a third vice-chairwoman of the Durham County Democratic Party and vice chairwoman of the Young Democrats, was charged Friday with two counts of aiding and abetting. Her husband, Joseph Scott Craig, 25, was charged with second-degree rape, second-degree kidnapping and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon for incidents in January and May, the Raleigh News & Observer reported Tuesday.

Mark McCullough, an assistant district attorney, would not release details of the allegations. But in court on Monday, he acknowledged that “part of the allegations are that satanic worship is part of this case.”

Rescuers in the Philippines may bore a hole in a ferry capsized by a deady typhoon in a desperate attempt to find survivors among more than 800 missing passengers and crew, an official said Monday.

A group of 28 ferry passengers and crew washed ashore after drifting at sea for more than a day from the site where their ship was capsized and left most of the hundreds aboard missing and presumed dead, officials said.

Manila’s DZBB radio said the survivors, 20 male passengers, four women and four crewmen, drifted at sea for more than 24 hours wearing their lifejackets, reaching Mulanay township in eastern Quezon province late Sunday.

In the windowless front rooms of a former day care center in a tiny Texas community, children as young as 5 were fed powerful painkillers they knew as “silly pills” and forced to perform sex shows for a crowd of adults.

Two people have already been convicted in the case. Now a third person with ties to the club, previously known in town only as a swingers group, is set to go on trial Monday not far from Mineola, population 5,100.

“This really shook this town,” said Shirley Chadwick, a longtime resident of Mineola. “This was horrible.”

Patrick Kelly, 41, is charged with aggravated sexual assault of a child, tampering with physical evidence and engaging in organized criminal activity.

In all, six adults have been charged in connection with the case, including a parent of the three siblings involved.

Jurors this year deliberated less than five minutes before returning guilty verdicts against the first two defendants, who were accused of grooming the kids for sex shows in “kindergarten” classes and passing off Vicodin as “silly pills” to help the children perform.

A dwarf charged with prostituting an underage runaway will appear in Kings County Supreme Court on Monday.

Jacqueline Green, a.k.a. ‘Shorty,’ due to her 3 foot 9 inch height, is charged with promoting prostitution and child endangerment for allegedly pimping a 15-year-old that ran away from a troubled home.

According to published reports, Green is accused of using her Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment as a sex pad for clients who paid $250 per half-hour for intercourse, and $100 per half-hour of oral sex.

Clients were found using Craigslist.

Police in Macedonia have arrested a journalist on suspicion that he is behind three murders he reported on.

The journalist, Vlado Taneski, is accused of raping, torturing and killing three elderly women in the south-western town of Kicevo.

Macedonian police began to suspect him after he included details in his reports that they had not made public.

Other men have reportedly already been convicted of the first two murders. The third was committed last month.

Mr Taneski, 56, has not yet been charged with any offence, police said.

A South Carolina man convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents 14 years ago was executed in the state’s electric chair after a last-ditch effort to halt the sentence was denied by the U.S. Supreme Court.

James Earl Reed was pronounced dead at 11:27 p.m. Friday in the state’s death chamber in Columbia. He did not issue a final statement.

The execution, first scheduled for 6 p.m., had been put on hold as defense attorneys successfully obtained a stay from a federal judge, only to see it vacated by the 4th U.S. Circit Court of Appeals. Their attempt to get the U.S. Supreme Court to block the execution was subsequently denied.

A public school teacher preached his Christian beliefs despite complaints by other teachers and administrators and used a device to burn the image of a cross on students’ arms, according to a report by independent investigators.

Mount Vernon Middle School teacher John Freshwater also taught creationism in his science class and was insubordinate in failing to remove a Bible and other religious materials from his classroom, the report said.

An unruly JetBlue passenger from Queens who lit up a cigarette mid-flight Tuesday forced the 145-passenger flight to be diverted after she became violent and uncooperative when asked to stop smoking, CBS 2 HD has learned.

Christina Szele, 35, was arrested and charged with assault and interfering with a flight crew, and remains locked up in Denver until a detention hearing scheduled for Monday.

Szele’s brother told CBS 2 HD she is going through a tough time right now, having recently seen the end of a 10-year relationship.

“She does drink a lot. I think part of it is the breakup, and that’s what she told me,” Ladi Szele said. “She could use help.

“She was going to fly out a week ago, but she missed her flight. So they were going to put her on another flight. And they wouldn’t let her board because they said she was too intoxicated.”

Jailed Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri has lost his High Court bid against extradition to the US where he faces terror-related charges.

The Egyptian-born preacher is currently serving a seven-year jail term in the UK for inciting murder and race hate.

Abu Hamza, 50, from west London, is wanted by US authorities on 11 charges, including sending cash to al-Qaeda.

He has 14 days to decide whether he will launch a final appeal in the House of Lords against the judges’ decision.

The extradition order was first approved by City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court and ratified by the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith in February 2008.

With just a week to go before Zimbabwe’s run-off elections – and with the body count growing – President Mugabe has been warned that he could be hauled before the International Criminal Court in The Hague over the atrocities inflicted on his opponents.

A key Western diplomat, speaking yesterday on condition of anonymity, said: “He needs to know he is moments away from an ICC indictment.”

Twelve bodies of activists, most of them showing signs of torture, were found across Zimbabwe yesterday.

In New York, Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, convened a crisis meeting at the United Nations. She said: “By its actions, the Mugabe regime has given up any pretence that the June 27 elections will be allowed to proceed in a free and fair manner. We have reached the point where stronger international action is needed.”

Martha Stewart has been refused a visa to Britain because of her criminal convictions for obstructing justice, the Daily Telegraph has learned.

The lifestyle guru, convicted four years ago in the US for obstructing justice, was planning to speak at the Royal Academy and to hold meetings with several figures in the fashion and leisure industry, including Jasper Conran, and was due to travel within the next few days.

The refusal by the UK Border Agency was sent to Ms Stewart, aged 66. A spokesperson for the business magnate said: “Martha loves England and hopes this can be resolved and that she will be able to visit soon.”

The probe into the Rev. Al Sharpton’s finances intensified this week, with the IRS sending out a flurry of subpoenas to his most generous corporate donors, The Post has learned.

Anheuser-Busch, the brewer of Budweiser and Michelob, confirmed yesterday that it received a federal subpoena in connection to its charitable giving to Sharpton’s National Action Network.

“We have received a subpoena and are cooperating with the IRS,” the company said in a statement.

Morgan Stanley has suspended a trader in London after the individual allegedly cost the Wall Street bank $120m (£60m) by wrongly pricing investments.

The employee has been reported to the City regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA). Morgan Stanley discovered the problem in the second half of May and believes it had been going on for at least three months.

The trader appears to have placed too high a price on certain investments which are currently very hard to value because there is almost no market for them. Banks are struggling with these types of investments and have to mark them to a model which they believe reflects a fair value.
advertisement

They have come under pressure to be very rigorous about these marks from investors who are nervous about possible new blackholes emerging in companies’ balance sheets. Morgan Stanley issued a statement saying: “The firm became aware of marks in a London-based trader’s book that were inconsistent with firm policies.

An Italian man was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping his ex-girlfriend from a pub, taking her home and forcing her to iron his clothes and wash the dishes, police said Monday.

The 43-year-old man dragged the woman out of a pub in the port city of Genoa, shoved her into a car and took her to his home, where he made her iron and wash dishes after threatening her, they said.

Japan on Tuesday executed three people including notorious serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, a fetishist convicted of murdering four young girls and eating some of their bodies, officials said.

Miyazaki, 45, was nicknamed the “killer nerd” for his obsession with sexual cartoons and pornography. But defence lawyers contended he was mentally ill and could not be held fully responsible for his actions.

Japan is the only major industrialised nation other than the United States to apply the death penalty and has been stepping up the pace of executions, which enjoy wide public support.

“We are carrying out executions by selecting the people whom we can execute with a feeling of confidence and responsibility,” Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama told a news conference.

Hatoyama said he had signed the order to send the trio to the gallows to “realise justice.”

A man parked his truck on a country road outside Turlock on Saturday night, removed a baby boy from a car seat and then beat the child to death in the street, fighting off passers-by who tried to stop him, until he was gunned down by a police officer whose helicopter landed in a nearby pasture, police said Sunday.

The 27-year-old suspect, who lived in Turlock (Stanislaus County), died almost immediately where he fell. The child, who according to police appeared to be 12 to 24 months old, was taken to a hospital but died before arrival.

Police officials declined to identify the man and said they were not yet certain who the child was – or in what way, if any, he was related to his attacker. The Stanislaus County coroner’s office told police that the agency may have to identify the boy through a DNA test because he was beaten beyond recognition.

Guerima, a remote Colombian settlement, wants its Marxist rebels back. With the national army deployed in a stranglehold around the town, there is nobody to traffic the town’s only commodity – drugs.

More than 1,000 people live in Guerima, carved out of the Amazonian rainforest. Its clearings are filled with coca bushes, the basis for cocaine.

This was once the heartland of the 16th Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), the Marxist guerrilla movement that has fought in Colombia’s jungles for the past 44 years.

But now the troops of the 58th Counter-Guerrilla Battalion patrol the dirt streets.

Their presence has stirred deep resentment, revealing the complexities of Colombia’s war against Left-wing rebels and drug lords.

Zimbabwe’s army has threatened to evict the country’s remaining white farmers if a single vote is cast for Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, in polling stations on their land.

The final round of the presidential election will take place on June 27 and Robert Mugabe’s regime is trying to guarantee his victory with a violent crackdown on opponents.

At least 42 people have been murdered and thousands assaulted since Mr Tsvangirai defeated Mr Mugabe in the first round on March 29, although he fell short of the 50 per cent threshold needed to avoid a run-off.

Five landowners from two different districts were called to a meeting last week by a lieutenant colonel in the army, whose name is known to The Daily Telegraph. He was accompanied by three senior officials from Mr Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party.

A family moved into their new home only to discover 12 illegal immigrants living in the roof.

Lee Bradley was inspecting the loft of his rented terraced house when he made the shock discovery.

Under the roof, a colony of Kosovan migrants had knocked down the wall between his house and the two adjoining properties to create living space for several families.

They had even brought in several deck chairs and a cupboard and the floor was littered with children’s toys.

Mr Bradley, 33, found them eating sandwiches.

A couple accused of tying their 13-year-old son to a tree for two nights to punish him for disobedience has been charged with murder in his death, authorities said Friday.

Brice Brian McMillan, 41, of Macclesfield, told a deputy that the child was being disobedient and was forced to sleep outside Tuesday while tied to a tree, the Edgecombe County Sheriff’s Office said. The teenager was released Wednesday morning but again tied up that night for bad behavior, authorities said.

The boy was left tied to the tree until the following afternoon when his stepmother found him unresponsive, Sheriff James Knight said in a statement.

Mike Tyson chipped in $50,000 for a contract to kill members of a Brooklyn drug gang that murdered his bodyguard in 2000, a government witness testified Thursday.

A former member of the violent Cash Money Brothers gang said the ex-heavyweight champ and another thug, Muhammad Nur, who was also close with the victim, each contributed $50,000 to the bounty on the heads of CMB leaders Damion (World) Hardy and Edward (Taz) Cooke.

“Why would Mike Tyson put a hit out on Taz and World?” asked Assistant U.S. Attorney James Loonam.

“He was close friends with ‘Homicide,’” replied witness Dwayne Meyers, referring to victim Darryl Baum by his nickname.

As bomb scares go, this one might be the most unusual for local police.

A motorist on Powder Forest Drive Friday morning noticed what looked like a whole chicken — the kind bought at grocery stores for roasting — with a pipe bomb stuffed inside, police said Monday.

When they arrived on the scene around 9 a.m. officers found the roaster had an improvised explosive device where the fowl’s innards should have been.

They closed the road for part of the morning as the Hartford Police Department’s bomb squad was called to detonate the device, police said.

A mother who was intoxicated during her labor at a Polish hospital gave birth to a baby girl who was almost 15 times over the country’s adult drunk-driving limit, Agence France-Presse is reporting.

The baby girl, born Monday, had a blood alcohol level of 0.29 percent. Poland’s drunk driving limit is 0.02 percent, according to the report.

In the U.S., the adult drunk-driving limit is 0.08.

A note threatening a Mexican journalist was found outside the office of a newspaper in southern Mexico on Monday, two days after someone left a severed head there.

Tabasco state Attorney General Gustavo Rosario said the letter was directed at Juan Padilla, editor of El Correo de Tabasco, which recently carried reports about migrant smuggling and kidnapping in the area.

“You are next,” the note read.

The head of a man police identified as a low-level drug trafficker was found outside the offices on Saturday. Soldiers later located his body in another part of the city alongside a separate note that said, “This is what will happen to those who go around pointing fingers.”

Samuel Mluge steps outside his office and scans the sidewalk. His pale blue eyes dart back and forth, back and forth, trying to focus.

The sun used to be his main enemy, but now he has others.

Mr. Mluge is an albino, and in Tanzania now there is a price for his pinkish skin.

“I feel like I am being hunted,” he said.

Discrimination against albinos is a serious problem throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but recently in Tanzania it has taken a wicked twist: at least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed and mutilated in the past year, victims of what Tanzanian officials say is a growing criminal trade in albino body parts.

Many people in Tanzania — and across Africa, for that matter — believe albinos have magical powers. They stand out, often the lone white face in a black crowd, a result of a genetic condition that impairs normal skin pigmentation and strikes about 1 in 3,000 people here. Tanzanian officials say witch doctors are now marketing albino skin, bones and hair as ingredients in potions that are promised to make people rich.

Arson is suspected in a fire that swept through the historic Texas Governor’s Mansion early Sunday and left much of the 152-year-old home charred and severely damaged, the state fire marshal said.

“We have some evidence that indicates that we do have an intentionally set fire,” said state Fire Marshal Paul Maldonado. “So we believe that we may be looking at a criminal act here.”

Calling it a “devastating loss to the state of Texas,” Maldonado did not offer details on how the fire may have been set or whether authorities had identified a suspect.

A man who said he was tired of life went on a stabbing rampage on Sunday in a crowded Tokyo shopping street, killing seven people and wounding a dozen others.

The man drove a rental truck into a crowd of pedestrians at lunchtime and then walked down the street knifing passers-by in Akihabara district, known for its discount electronics and maid cafes.

“I came to Akihabara to kill people,” Kyodo news agency quoted the attacker as telling police. “I am tired of the world. Anyone was OK. I came alone.”

With things quieting down in Iraq (U.S. casualties hit an all-time low in May, 2008), South Africa has regained its position as the most violent country on the planet, with a murder rate of 65 per 100,000 population. The death rate is also high in some other African countries (like Sudan, Somalia and Congo), but those placed don’t keep records as effectively as South Africa. The Iraqi rate is now running at about 48 per 100,000.

The city’s chief crane inspector was arrested Friday and charged with taking bribes to allow cranes under his review to pass inspection and for taking money from a crane company that sought to ensure that its employees would pass the required licensing exam, the authorities said.

The man, James Delayo, the acting chief inspector for the Cranes and Derricks Unit at the city Department of Buildings, was in charge of overseeing the issuance of city licenses for crane operators.

He is also facing charges that he provided a copy of the crane operator’s exam and the test answers to a crane company in exchange for $3,000, said an official involved in the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the charges had not yet been formally filed.

Thieves seeking copper to sell as scrap may have stolen an 8-foot statue of Jesus Christ off a crucifix in Detroit. Problem is, it’s made of plaster.

The Rev. Barry Randolph said Wednesday that the statue at the Church of the Messiah is a green color and looks like copper, one of several metals coveted by thieves because of soaring scrap prices.

Thieves have damaged copper pipes and stolen aluminum gutters at the church over the past few months as the congregation has dwindled from about 350 members to just 50, congregation member Donya Ray-Gregg said.

A former nurse accused of intentionally injecting bleach into two patients at a dialysis center was arrested Friday, police said.

Two witnesses said they saw Kimberly Clark Saenz, 34, draw bleach into syringes and inject it into two patients’ dialysis lines at the DaVita Dialysis Center on April 28, Lufkin police said in a statement.

Both patients survived, but one required treatment at a hospital, police said.

Police said tests showed bleach in the syringes and dialysis lines.

Saenz, who remained in Angelina County jail Friday evening, is charged with two counts of aggravated assault. Her bail was set at $200,000. A jail official said he did not know whether she had an attorney. Attempts to find her home phone number were unsuccessful.

A homeless woman who sneaked into a man’s house and lived undetected in his closet for a year was arrested in Japan after he became suspicious when food mysteriously began disappearing.

Police found the 58-year-old woman Thursday hiding in the top compartment of the man’s closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.

The resident of the home installed security cameras that transmitted images to his mobile phone after becoming puzzled by food disappearing from his kitchen over the past several months.

One of the cameras captured someone moving inside his home Thursday after he had left, and he called police believing it was a burglar. However, when they arrived they found the door locked and all windows closed.

Mexico’s northern border town of Juarez, infamous for its history of drug-related violence, has gone into lockdown after an e-mail began circulating warning of an unparalleled “bloodbath” in the coming days.

Shops, bars and restaurants have shut and soldiers are patrolling the streets, giving a surreal and dangerous tone to this city of 1.4 million people which sits just across the US border from the Texan town of El Paso.

Authorities are taking seriously the anonymous e-mail, which menaced “the bloodiest and most violent weekend in the history of Juarez.”

The place is already reeling from a surge in murders that has claimed around 400 lives so far this year, several of them police officers and members of rival narcotics gangs.

The US embassy to Mexico has told US citizens that the message represented a “potential threat” and that public places, nightspots and the main streets in Juarez should all be avoided.

In Juarez, nerves frayed by the rising body count — including at least 20 people killed over the past weekend, among them two policemen gunned down as they finished their shift — have begun to shred in terror because of the much-forwarded e-mail, even though its veracity was unknown.

AN AUSTRIAN man who lost a six-figure sum in bad investments has admitted killing five family members with an axe to spare them the “disgrace” of financial ruin.

The 39-year-old public relations consultant, identified only as Reinhard S, walked into a Vienna police station at 3.20am yesterday, and told the duty officer: “In my apartment are my dead wife and my dead child.”

The man said that, after killing the two, he drove two hours to Linz, where he killed his father-in-law and his parents.

After trying and failing to hang himself, he turned himself in.

A flight attendant angry about his work route smuggled a lighter aboard an airplane and set a fire in a bathroom, forcing an emergency landing, authorities said Thursday.

The Compass Airlines flight carrying 72 passengers and four crew members landed safely in Fargo on May 7 after smoke filled the back. No injuries were reported. The plane was flying from Minneapolis to Regina, Saskatchewan, authorities said.

Eder Rojas, 19, appeared in court Thursday, following his arrest a day earlier in Minneapolis, and was ordered held without bail, prosecutors said. The charge of setting fire aboard a civil aircraft carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

His public defender did not return a phone call seeking comment. Assistant U.S. Attorney Lynn Jordheim, who is prosecuting the case in Fargo, would not comment.

Court documents said Rojas, of the Twin Cities suburb of Woodbury, told authorities he was upset at the airline for making him work the route. He is accused of taking a lighter with him through the security checkpoint, authorities said.

A man has been given a suspended jail sentence for attacking two Star Wars fans while dressed as Darth Vader.

Arwel Wynn Hughes, 27, from Holyhead, Anglesey, admitted assaulting Barney Jones and cousin Michael with a metal crutch, whilst shouting “Darth Vader”.

Hughes told police he had no memory of the incident as he was drunk.

District Judge Andrew Straw said the publicity his case had received was perhaps a good thing, and a “wake up call” to deal with his alcohol problem.

Diane Williams, prosecuting, said the two cousins had set up a Jedi faith church with around 30 local members in the Holyhead area.

A New York City man is suing JetBlue Airways Corp. for more than $2 million because he says a pilot made him give up his seat to a flight attendant and sit on the toilet for more than three hours on a flight from California.

Gokhan Mutlu, of Manhattan’s Inwood section, says in court papers the pilot told him to “go ‘hang out’ in the bathroom” about 90 minutes into the San Diego to New York flight because the flight attendant complained that the “jump seat” she was assigned was uncomfortable, the lawsuit said.

Mutlu was traveling on a a “buddy pass,” a standby travel voucher that JetBlue employees give to friends, from New York to San Diego on Feb. 16, and returned to New York on Feb. 23, the lawsuit said.

Initially, Mutlu was told a flight attendant had taken the last seat on the plane, but then he was advised she would sit in the employee “jump seat,” meaning he could have the last seat, the lawsuit said.

The pilot told him 1 1/2 hours into the five-hour flight that he would have to relinquish the seat to the flight attendant, court papers say. But the pilot said that Mutlu could not sit in the jump seat because only JetBlue employees were permitted to sit there, the lawsuit said.

A gang of London teenage girls is suspected of destroying three houses and killing a man with a homemade liquid bomb during an argument over a boy.

According to the U.K.’s Daily Mail, witnesses say a purple, smelly liquid was poured into a mailbox of one of the homes, which set off a massive explosion.

The intended target of the attack, Charlotte Anderson, was injured in the blast and rushed to the hospital with severe burns. Her next-door neighbor, Emad Qureshi, 26, who was at home with his parents, was killed when he was crushed by falling debris, it was reported.

A Sacramento man faces criminal charges after police searched his home and found at least 300 dead cats in his freezers, authorities said.

Michael Parnell, 46, also known as Michael Vondueren, was charged with possessing an assault weapon and obstructing an officer when he was arrested, KXTV, Sacramento, reported.

. Police Sgt. Jim Hose said authorities entered the home because of concern for the well-being of the Parnell’s 81-year-old mother.

The bodies of three German infants have been found stuffed in a basement freezer and their mother has been arrested, a prosecutor’s spokesman said Monday.

Johannes Daheim said police determined the three infants had not been stillborn but did not say how old they were or what the cause of death was. He said the bodies were found Sunday night after police received a tip and searched the home in Wenden in North Rhine-Westphalia.

The name of the woman was not released. Police said they planned to hold a news conference about the case later Monday.

There have been a number of similar cases in Germany.

Two men were arrested Wednesday after their homemade bomb exploded prematurely, injuring both, authorities said.

Acting on an anonymous tip, Sampson County deputies found a Chevrolet minivan outside Sampson Regional Medical Center with a side window blown out and blast marks on the outside of a door, authorities said.

Inside the hospital emergency room, Martin Bryant Boyette and Julio Frentez Morales were receiving treatment for injuries from a bomb blast, authorities said. An investigation determined that the pair had made several bombs at Boyette’s house, where both lived, and Morales tried to throw one out the window of the minivan on U.S. Highway 701 as they drove past Hobbton Schools, authorities said.

A former ‘Mr Gay UK’ has been charged with murdering a man, amid fears that part of the victim’s leg was chopped up and chunks of it eaten.

When police discovered the body of Damian Oldfield, 33, at a terraced house in Harehills, Leeds, they are said to have found part of his right leg had been carved up and the flesh diced and cooked on a kitchen worktop. It is thought tests showed the flesh was human.

A police source told a newspaper: “It appears it was being prepared for cooking.”

Hat tip to Kara!

Two teenage boys have been jailed for life for the murder of a woman who was killed for dressing as a Goth.

Sophie Lancaster was kicked and stamped to death by Brendan Harris, 15, and Ryan Herbert, 16, in Stubbylee Park in Bacup, Lancashire, last summer.

The pair turned on Miss Lancaster, 20, in an act of “feral thuggery” as she tried to get them and three other youths to stop attacking her boyfriend.

Harris must serve a minimum of 18 years and Herbert 16 years, the judge said.

A new SQL injection attack aimed at Microsoft IIS web servers has hit some 500,000 websites, including the United Nations, UK Government sites and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. While the attack is not necessarily Microsoft’s fault, it is unique to the company’s IIS server.

The automated attack takes advantage to the fact that Microsoft’s IIS servers allow generic commands that don’t require specific table-level arguments. However, the vulnerability is the result of poor data handling by the sites’ creators, rather than a specific Microsoft flaw.

In other words, there’s no patch that’s going to fix the issue, the problem is with the developers who failed follow well-established security practices for handling database input.

An Austrian man allegedly held his daughter captive in a cellar for 24 years and fathered four children with her, reports say.

The existence of the woman, believed missing since 1984 and now 42, emerged after one of the children was found in the house in a “serious condition”.

A search was begun by the authorities for her mother after she was found, Austrian broadcaster ORF reports.

The 19-year-old is now in hospital in the Lower Austrian town of Amstetten.

University of Minnesota college student Chris Jenkins was found in the Mississippi River in February of 2003.

Minneapolis Police began investigating the case, which also caught the attention of two retired NYPD detectives.

Turns out, Jenkins’ death was the missing part of the puzzle for Kevin Gannon and Anthony Duarte.

They think Jenkins connects dozens of other deaths around the country over the last decade. The stories are the same all over the country–an athletic, intelligent, well-liked college student goes missing.

Family and friends launch a massive search. Weeks or months later, the young man is discovered drowned. In more than 40 cases, the deaths are blamed on a drunken accident–except for one.
…
While most local investigations focused on where a body was recovered, Gannon and Duarte tried to figure out where the body went into the river.

City after city, when they’d find the spot where the body went into the water, they would find something else: The symbol of a smiley face

“It’s very disturbing,” Duarte said.

The paint color and size of the face varies, but the detectives are convinced that it’s a sick signature the killers leave behind.

Massive gunbattles broke out between suspected drug traffickers who fired at each other while speeding down heavily populated streets of this violent border city early Saturday, killing 13 people and wounding nine.

All of the dead were believed to be drug traffickers, possibly rival members of the same cartel who were trying to settle scores, said Rommel Moreno, the attorney general of Baja California state, where Tijuana is located.

“Evidently this is a confrontation between gangs,” Moreno told reporters.

Eight suspects and one federal police officer were injured in the pre-dawn shootings, none gravely, said Agustin Perez Aguilar, a spokesman for the state public safety department. The suspects are being held on suspicion of weapons possession among other possible charges.

Police recovered 21 vehicles, many with bullet holes or U.S. license plates; a total of 54 guns; and more than 1,500 spent shell casings at various points in the city where the battles broke out, Perez Aguilar said.

Whether he was up to no good or simply desperate to play BrickBreaker, a Mexican press attaché was caught on camera pocketing several White House BlackBerries during a recent meeting in New Orleans and has since been fired, FOX News has learned.

Sources with knowledge of the incident said the official, Rafael Quintero Curiel, served as the lead press advance person for the Mexican Delegation and was responsible for handling logistics and guiding the Mexican media around at the conference.

Mexican Embassy spokesman Ricardo Alday said Thursday he was asked to tender his resignation once he arrived back in Mexico City.

“Mr. Quintero will be responsible for explaining his actions to the American authorities conducting an investigation. The Mexican Government deeply regrets this incident,” he said.

Quintero Curiel took six or seven of the handheld devices from a table outside a special room in the hotel where the Mexican delegation was meeting with President Bush earlier this week.

More charges have been filed against a Burlington County police officer who was recently charged with sexually assaulting three girls.

Authorities announced Moorestown Officer Robert Melia Jr., 38, has been charged with four counts of animal cruelty after allegedly engaging in sex acts with cows between June and December of 2006.

A SERIES of sickening videos have been posted on the internet showing a man who claims to have deliberately “infected” thousands of women with AIDS.

Calling himself ‘Trashman’ and speaking with an American accent, the masked man says he has infected between 1200 and 1500 unknowing victims with the devastating disease.

He can be seen reading the names and ages of some of the women he claims to have had unprotected sex with in the video clips on website YouTube.

The videos – one of which has been viewed 195,000 times – also feature a web address to a “gangsta” portal filled with pornography and where Trashman has a profile.

Authorities have charged a western Oklahoma sheriff with coercing and bribing female inmates so he could use them in a sex-slave operation run out of his jail.

Custer County Sheriff Mike Burgess resigned Wednesday just as state prosecutors filed 35 felony charges against him, including 14 counts of second-degree rape, seven counts of forcible oral sodomy and five counts of bribery by a public official.

Burgess, the top officer in the county of 26,000 since 1994, appeared in court Wednesday was released after posting $50,000 bail.

A message left at Burgess’ home Thursday was not immediately returned.

Among other things, Burgess is accused of having sex with a female drug court participant who was in his custody. The crimes are to have occurred between October 2005 and April 2007.

Police say two people have been injured and five people arrested after dozens fought in the streets of the Rockland County village of Nyack.

Orangetown police say fights among 40 to 50 people broke out Wednesday afternoon.

It took police officers from seven departments to finally break up the fights, which continued across Nyack for an hour.

Police say some involved in the fight were armed with knives, bats and an ax.

A federal prison inmate got himself listed on the ballot for Idaho’s May 27 primary as a Democratic presidential candidate, the state’s top election official said.

Keith Russell Judd is serving time at the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution in Texas for making threats at the University of New Mexico in 1999. He’s scheduled for release in 2013.

Judd, 49, qualified for the ballot by submitting a notarized form and paying the required $1,000 fee, state Secretary of State Ben Ysursa said. As a result, Democratic voters will be able to choose among Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Judd.

A police officer shot and killed a high school student Wednesday after the teenager attacked the officer with a baseball bat on campus, authorities said.

Police said the officer fired shortly before noon, after a 17-year-old boy at Roosevelt High School allegedly came up behind the officer and hit him in the head with the bat, according to Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer. The officer fell down dazed, grabbed a gun from his ankle holster and fired, Dyer said.

“The officer was fortunate that he was able to defend himself,” the chief said.

The cause of the attack was not immediately known. Dyer said there was no history of prior run-ins between the student and the officer, who was employed by the police department as the school’s resource officer.

Police did not immediately release the identities of the officer or student, who was described as a longtime Fresno resident who recently transferred to the school. The teenager was 6 feet tall and 250 pounds — larger than the officer, authorities said.

About two weeks after he was released from prison, Freddie Johnson was arrested on charges of illegally rubbing up against a woman on a crowded Manhattan subway train.

It is a fairly common crime in New York. But this was no common criminal.

Johnson has been arrested a staggering 53 times—the majority for allegedly groping women on subway trains.

In his latest arrest, Johnson was being followed by plainclothes officers who recognized him from police photos. He was charged with persistent sexual abuse, and if convicted this time he could be sent away for life.

But the fact that Johnson was roaming the subways in the first place has raised questions about how the state deals with the problem of repeat sex offenders. His case even drew the scorn of a recent newspaper editorial that labeled him the “Subway Rat.”

An Italian woman artist who was hitch-hiking to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace has been found murdered in Turkey.

The naked body of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, 33, known as Pippa Bacca, was found in bushes near the northern city of Gebze on Friday.

She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.

Turkish police say they have detained a man in connection with the killing.

Reports say the man led the police to the body.

The stories unfold like scenes from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, only this isn’t Texas and the alleged victims claim the roaring sound of the chainsaw is very real.

For months, five homeless men have complained to the Fort Lauderdale Police Department that they have been terrorized by a local businessman known to them only as “the Chainsaw Man.”

They say he chases them through fields and over railroad tracks, armed with a chainsaw, and has even shot at them with a pistol.

Special Branch is investigating an alleged attempt to murder Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB double-agent who spied on Russia for British intelligence at the height of the Cold War.

The former Soviet colonel, who escaped to Britain in 1985, says he was poisoned by a Russian assassin who visited him at his secret safe-house in Surrey.

He fears he is the latest victim of revenge attacks by Russian intelligence on high-profile defectors.

Alexander Litvinenko, another former Russian spy, was murdered in London in 2006.

Gordievsky – awarded one of Britain’s highest honours by the Queen last October – was rushed to hospital after collapsing at home.

He lay unconscious and “close to death” for 34 hours. He spent a further two weeks recuperating in a private clinic paid for by his former bosses in MI6.

He was initially left partially paralysed by the alleged attack and still has no feeling in his fingers.

Last night Surrey Police confirmed they were investigating a possible attempt on Gordievsky’s life.

SONNY Bono, former husband and singing partner of superstar Cher, was clubbed to death by hitmen on the orders of drug and weapons dealers, an ex-FBI agent claims.
Ted Gunderson, now a private investigator, has told the US Globe tabloid that Bono, who served as mayor of Palm Springs for four years, did not die after hitting a tree on a Nevada ski slope in January 1998 as everyone believed.

“It’s nonsense for anyone to now try to suggest that Bono died after crashing into a tree. There’s zero evidence in this autopsy report… to show such an accident happened. Instead, there’s powerful proof he was assassinated.

France’s military is keeping close tabs on a French luxury yacht seized by pirates off Somalia’s coast, and officials hope to avoid using force to free the 30 crew members, the prime minister said Saturday.

Attackers stormed the 288-foot Le Ponant on Friday as it returned without passengers from the Seychelles, in the Indian Ocean, toward the Mediterranean Sea, officials with French maritime transport company CMA-CGM said.

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said officials were “following the hostage situation minute by minute.”

“Our priority is to protect the lives of the people on board,” Fillon said while visiting the town of Le Mans. “All channels of discussion are open to try to resolve this case by trying not to use force.”

Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete has condemned witchdoctors who kill albinos and harvest their body parts in the hope it will bring prosperity.

He said 19 albinos had been murdered since March 2007, and another two were missing presumed dead in the east African country.

“Sometimes, word spreads around that body parts of people with certain physical attributes like bald people or albinos contribute greatly to attaining quick prosperity,” Kikwete said in a monthly state of the nation speech late on Wednesday.

“These killings are shameful and distressing to our society,” he added.

The pitch to co-workers or bar patrons, police say, went like this:

“Hey, anybody interested in buying a trailer?”

Somebody was. Big-screen TVs, riding mowers, motorcycles, frozen food and more exchanged hands in what authorities charge was a sophisticated theft-to-order ring in the Rust Belt region stretching from Cleveland to Western Pennsylvania.

Police said the thieves, seeking quick cash for drugs, stole and sold high-demand items for more than 1 1/2 years, often at up to 85 percent discount from retail prices and sometimes to return customers.

“You don’t steal these things unless you have a customer,” said Canfield police Detective Sgt. Andy Bodzak.

Hat tip to Kara!

A young Saudi Arabian woman was murdered by her father for chatting on the social network site Facebook, it has emerged.

The unnamed woman from Riyadh was beaten and shot after she was discovered in the middle of an online conversation with a man, the al-Arabiya website reported.

The case was reported on a Saudi Arabian news site as an example of the “strife” the social networking site is causing in the Islamic nation.

Saudi preacher Ali al-Maliki has emerged as the leading critic of Facebook, claiming the network is corrupting the youth of the nation.

“Facebook is a door to lust and young women and men are spending more on their mobile phones and the Internet than they are spending on food,” he said.

A Roman Catholic nun accused of taking more than $250,000 from the Archdiocese of Omaha and gambling much of it away has pleaded guilty to theft.

Sister Barbara Markey entered the plea to a charge of theft of more than $1,500 on Monday in Douglas County District Court, according to her attorney, J. William Gallup. She also agreed to pay $125,000 in restitution to the archdiocese.

In exchange, Gallup said, the state and the archdiocese agreed not to object to probation for the 73-year-old Markey. Her sentencing is set for July, and she faces up to 20 years in prison.

From the deserted streets of Bulawayo to the fetid slums of Mbare, Zimbabwe was waiting on tenterhooks last night to discover the fate of President Mugabe as he appeared to be heading towards election defeat.

With official counts trickling out of Harare, the clamour grew for the authorities to tell the people what they already knew from their own polling stations: that for the old tyrant, the writing was on the wall.

Lists posted outside each station announced the scale of the swing to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which scooped up the figures from teams of observers to declare that it was bound for a landslide victory in parliamentary and presidential polls.

Web-site hacking has reached a new low, both morally and technically.

Unknown miscreants had a good time two weekends ago when they posted hundreds of flashing animated images onto discussion boards hosted by the Landover, Md.-based Epilepsy Foundation.

Flashing lights or bold moving patterns can trigger often violent seizures among 3 percent of the estimated 50 million epileptics worldwide.

“I was on the phone when it happened, and I couldn’t move and couldn’t speak,” RyAnne Fultz, who has epilepsy, told Wired News about her reaction to viewing one of the images on March 23.

Fultz’s 11-year-old son walked over and closed the browser window after about 10 seconds. Fortunately, she suffered nothing more than a bad headache.

By then, the second day of vandalism on EpilepsyFoundation.org, the jerks had moved on to hijacking the browsers of anyone who clicked on certain forum posts, filling the screens with bright, flashing colors.

Police have closed down a circus in southern Italy after a terrified 19-year-old woman was forced to swim in a tank full of piranha fish while her younger sister endured the company of snakes and tarantulas.

Three men have been arrested and charged with holding the Bulgarian women in slavery and breaching international human rights conventions.

The trio, who are accused of running a “circus of horrors,” were named as Enrico Raffaele Ingrassia, 57, the owner, his son William Ingrassia, 33, and his son-in-law Gaetano Belfiore, 25.

The Marino Circus has been offering shows at Petina, south of Naples in southern Italy, in a tent with 200 plastic seats inside it.

17.03.2008: 0230 LT: Enroute Cagbalite, Mituban and Balisen, Polilio Island, Philippines.
A passenger boat with ten passenger including five crewmembers was returning to Polilio Island after discharging her cargo on the mainland. Two passengers who had earlier boarded after asking for a ride to Polilio Island took control of the boat and shot dead three crewmembers including the captain. The pirates then tied them to the anchor and threw them overboard. The pirates shot the remaining two-crew members and injured them. One of the injured jumped into the sea and is still missing. The other injured crew is recuperating in the hospital. Three other passengers including a child were unharmed. The coast guard has mounted a search for the missing and dead crewmembers and the pirates who fled in a motor boat.

Disgraced former Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been identified as a long-standing client of a second high-priced call-girl ring, The Post has learned.

The ex-governor regularly patronized Wicked Models, the Manhattan-based operation taken down Tuesday, according to financial documents and other evidence unearthed in a yearlong prostitution in vestigation, law-enforcement sources said.

Daniel Hynes was a newly minted lawyer, only one month in, when he apparently came up with a bright idea, according to this report in the New York Lawyer.

Fifteen months ago, Daniel Hynes of Manchester told a Concord hair salon to pay him $1,000 or face a lawsuit because its different prices for men and women were discriminatory. In one court document, he said the unequal prices at Claudia Lambert’s salon caused him mental anguish. That’s even though the salon charged women more than men.

Well, how is a young lawyer supposed to make a living when he’s got no clients and needs a haircut?

Unfortunately, a jury was unimpressed by Hynes’ career move, and convicted him of misdemeanor theft by extortion.

Hynes, apparently relying on his vast legal experience, disagreed with the jury.

“The conviction goes against the First Amendment,” he said. “People have a right to petition the courts.”

An international manhunt was launched last night for a Russian-born British media magnate whose mysterious disappearance has possible links to the murder of former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko.

Jet-setting billionaire Leonid Rozhetskin, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, vanished from his £1 million home just outside the Latvian capital Riga a week ago.

Last night, Latvian authorities expressed fears that Mr Rozhetskin, one of the co-founders and major shareholders in British business newspaper City AM, may have been murdered.

Police in Italy have issued footage of a man who is suspected of hypnotising supermarket checkout staff to hand over money from their cash registers.

In every case, the last thing staff reportedly remember is the thief leaning over and saying: “Look into my eyes”, before finding the till empty.

In the latest incident captured on CCTV, he targeted a bank at Ancona in northern Italy, then calmly walked out.

A female bank clerk reportedly handed over nearly 800 euros (£630).

The cashier who was shown the video footage has no memory of the incident, according to Italian media, and only realised what had happened when she saw the money missing.

Banished to the basement, the 29-year-old mother with a childlike mind and another baby on the way had little more than a thin rug and a mattress to call her own on the chilly concrete floor.

Dorothy Dixon ate what she could forage from the refrigerator upstairs, where housemates used her for target practice with BBs, burned her with a glue gun and doused her with scalding liquid that peeled away her skin.

They torched what few clothes she had, so she walked around naked. They often pummeled her with an aluminum bat or metal handle.

Dixon — six months pregnant — died after weeks of abuse. Police have charged two adults, three teenagers and a 12-year-old boy with murder in the case that has repulsed many in this Mississippi River town.

“This is heartbreaking,” police Lt. David Hayes said. “It was almost as though they were making fun of the abuse they were administering. This woman was almost like living in a prison.”

Three spring breakers were arrested after an explosion rocked two hotel guests from their bed and shattered the windows of their Daytona Beach Shores hotel room around 2:30am Friday.

Officers patrolling the Oceanside Inn on South Atlantic Avenue in Daytona Beach Shores (see satellite map of location) heard a loud explosion early Friday morning. Several witnesses said the explosion came from the sundeck, located on the second floor of the hotel.

When officers first arrived, they found three safety windows had been shattered, along with a metal light pole that had been destroyed. They also noticed metal and glass debris scattered across a 100-foot area.

Police said surveillance video from the hotel showed three hotel guests running from the scene. The guests, three college students, were identified as 21-year-old Timothy Bechtel of La Grange, Illinois, 21-year-old Christopher Romano of Dayton, Ohio, and 21-year-old Michael Bolt, also from La Grange. When officers contacted Bechtel, he was found to have a cut on his arm and he admitted to being involved in the incident.

A hotel and store in Lancaster County are assessing the damage after a naked man ran amok and allegedly did thousands of dollars worth of damage to two businesses.

West Lampeter Township police said they were dispatched to the Willow Valley Resort, and later Darrenkamp’s Market, on Friday amid reports of a naked man on a rampage.
Some office space at the resort was trashed and a forklift was driven into an interior wall, also damaging an overhead sewer pipe, authorities said.

Police said the man, whom they identified as Nicholas Hadzick, 28, of Freeland, then crossed the street and entered Darrenkamp’s in the Willow Valley Shopping Center, causing more destruction.

A man who has been hospitalized since Valentine’s Day with respiratory ailments and failing kidneys told his brother he believes he was contaminated by the deadly ricin poison found in his Las Vegas motel room.

Roger Bergendorff regained consciousness on Wednesday but remains in critical condition at a Las Vegas medical center.

His younger brother, Erich Bergendorff, told The Associated Press that they spoke briefly on the telephone Sunday for the first time since the ricin was found, and said Roger claimed he had never had any intention of endangering anyone with the toxin.

“He did mention that he would have never done anything to anybody,” said Erich Bergendorff. “He himself is under the impression he was contaminated by it — he did mention the ricin and seemed to say something like, ‘Gee, it sure worked on me.”‘

Erich Bergendorff said his brother told him the ricin was easy to make. But he added that his brother, who was on a ventilator until last week, still had a hard time speaking clearly, so it was not clear whether Roger Bergendorff made it himself or watched someone else manufacture the powder.

Bone-white stretches of salt, leached up from the lifeless soil, lay like a shroud over the high desert where a paranoid Charles Manson holed up after an orgy of murder nearly four decades ago.

Now, as then, few venture into this alkaline wilderness — gold-diggers, outlaws, loners content to live and let live.

But a determined group of outsiders recently made the trek. They were leading forensic investigators searching for new evidence of death — clues pointing to possible decades-old clandestine graves.

And the results of just-completed followup tests suggest bodies could indeed be lying beneath the parched ground. The test findings — described in detail to The Associated Press, which had accompanied the site search — conclude there are two likely clandestine grave sites at Barker Ranch, and one additional site that merits further investigation.

Next step, the ad hoc investigators urge: Dig.

Mexican investigators found 19 more bodies buried in the backyard of a house in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, increasing the tally of corpses found there to 33, officials said Thursday.

Federal agents began digging in the yard in the La Cuesta neighborhood on March 1, initially finding six dismembered bodies, Mexico’s federal attorney general’s office said in a statement.

The remains date back about five years and all but three apparently are males, the statement said.
Click here to find out more!

The attorney general’s office did not say how the victims died or who may have buried the bodies. In the initial raid, authorities found 3,740 pounds of marijuana in the house.

Ciudad Juarez has been plagued by violence as Mexico’s crackdown on powerful drug cartels stokes turf wars among traffickers that have been linked to hundreds of killings in the past two years.

Hat tip to Kara!

A drunken 15-year-old boy stamped to death a young student because she was dressed in the distinctive fashion of a ‘Goth’, a court was told yesterday.

Sophie Lancaster, 20, and her boyfriend Robert Maltby, 21, had been meandering home through a skate park late on a Friday night when they were set upon by a gang of teenagers in a savage and unprovoked attack, the jury heard.

The five-strong gang acted “like a pack of wild animals”, first targeting their violence on Mr Maltby, an arts student also dressed in the style of a Goth or mosher, raining punches and kicks on his head as Miss Lancaster pleaded with them to stop, it was alleged. It was as Miss Lancaster was kneeling down cradling her boyfriend’s head that the accused, along with another teenager who has already pleaded guilty to murder, are said to have turned their attention to her.

The two teenagers kicked and stamped on her head, the jury at Preston Crown Court was told.

As Gov. Spitzer held the state hostage to negotiate a sweet plea deal Tuesday night, probers looked to see if he used tax dollars for trysts with high-priced hookers totaling up to $80,000.

A source familiar with the probe said IRS and FBI investigators found at least nine instances going back 18 months in which Spitzer made multiple cash transfers linked to Emperors Club VIP, a high-priced prostitution ring.

Although the cash used to pay for a $4,300 prostitute named “Kristen” apparently came from Spitzer’s account, he used taxpayer dollars to fly to and from his .illicit rendezvous.

Investigators are looking to see whether he used state money for the hotel rooms.