‘The homicide squad is investigating the discovery of a dead baby in a cupboard of a family home at Geelong, south-west of Melbourne.
Police were called to a house in Peter Street, Grovedale at 6.15pm (AEDT) yesterday, when the newborn was found in a laundry cupboard.
A police spokesman said the circumstances of the baby’s death were unknown.
“The baby was born on the 24th of February, it was only one day old,” he said.
“(It was) located in the laundry cupboard of the house.”
The baby’s 37-year-old mother was taken to Geelong Hospital in shock.’
‘A 53-year-old woman who claimed she received spiritual messages from geese before allegedly stabbing her toddler granddaughter to death was found not guilty by reason of insanity Friday.
A judge ordered Carol Lynn Pappas committed to the state mental health hospital, where officials will decide “when and if she will ever be released,” said Kathleen Walsh, spokeswoman for the district attorney.’
‘At a preliminary hearing yesterday, Allegheny County homicide Detective Robert Opferman testified that Mr. Page confessed that he became angry with Nyia because she kept taking off her diaper. Although Mr. Page initially said he backhanded her, Detective Opferman said Mr. Page later said in a tape-recorded statement that he kicked her between the legs, while wearing Timberland boots, and then put his hand “in there” to stop the bleeding.
He then took her outside, still crying, intending to put her in a sewer, the detective said. Instead, Mr. Page left her on the ground in an old playground less than a mile from the house.’
‘Brace yourself. James Cameron, the man who brought you ‘The Titanic’ is back with another blockbuster. This time, the ship he’s sinking is Christianity. [..]
Let’s go back 27 years, when Israeli construction workers were gouging out the foundations for a new building in the industrial park in the Talpiyot, a Jerusalem suburb. of Jerusalem. The earth gave way, revealing a 2,000 year old cave with 10 stone caskets. Archologists were summoned, and the stone caskets carted away for examination. It took 20 years for experts to decipher the names on the ten tombs. They were: Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua.’
‘A cab driver arrived home to find his 12-year-old son’s body in a courtyard below their fifth-floor apartment, wrapped in blankets tied together like a rope.
Police said Jonathan Batista’s injuries were consistent with a fall and that the death was not suspicious. The boy had learning disabilities.
Teodoro Batista, 42, had just finished an overnight shift driving a cab on Wednesday when he discovered that Jonathan was missing from the Manhattan apartment where they live with Jonathan’s stepmother.
Jonathan’s bedroom window was open, and the window’s air conditioning unit was gone.’
‘An American senior citizen aboard a tour bus killed an alleged mugger by breaking his neck with his bare hands while his traveling companions fended off two other assailants in the Atlantic coast city of Limon, police said.
The American, who is about 70 years old and retired from the Marines, put the 20-year-old in a head lock and broke his neck after the suspect and two other men armed with a knife and .38 caliber gun held up the tour bus, said Luis Hernandez, the police chief of Limon, 80 miles east of San Jose.
“His neck was completely snapped,” Hernandez said.’
‘An “epidemic” of counterfeit therapeutic drugs is sweeping south-east Asia, costing hundreds of thousands of lives as victims take them under the mistaken belief that they are receiving vital treatment for their illnesses. A British doctor working in the Laotian capital, Vientiane, found that most of the anti-malarial medicines tested in a sample were sophisticated fakes, often displaying holograms on the packaging, originally aimed at making counterfeiting difficult.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 200,000 of the 1m malaria deaths each year would be prevented if all the drugs taken were genuine.
But the epidemic goes far beyond anti-malarials. [..]
Up to 50% of the drugs sold in Asia and Africa are fakes, in a trade estimated by the US Food and Drug Administration to be worth between $35bn and $44bn (£18.5bn-£23.1bn) annually. [..]’
‘Tasmanian devils could be extinct in just 10 years, researchers at a University of Tasmania forum in Hobart said yesterday.
Devil scientists overwhelmingly believed the last wild devil would die in under 20 years without major action.
That would spell the end for marsupials like bettongs and eastern-barred bandicoots.
“There was very strong consensus that if we don’t do something, extinction will happen on mainland Tasmania,” said Professor of Wildlife Research Hamish McCallum, senior scientist with the Devil Facial Tumour Disease program.’
‘It seems so innocuous: a baby doll, the very image of an innocent childhood plaything.
But, in a morbid and disturbing twist, there has been a surge in sales of “reborns”: lifelike dolls with beating hearts, hair, and even tiny veins, which are specially constructed replicas sold to the mourning parents of dead babies.
The dolls are being sold by the hundreds on eBay!, often marketed as a way for grieving parents to move on.’
‘A 37-year-old woman who died in a crash at Dilston yesterday morning had three stab wounds to the chest.
The woman’s Hyundai was found about 70 metres from the East Tamar Highway about 5.50 am.
A kitchen-type knife was found embedded in the woman’s chest.
She died at the scene after police arrived without speaking to them.
Detective-Inspector Mike Otley said police were investigating whether the wounds were self-inflicted.
“We are treating it as a sudden death,” he said.
It is believed there are no suspicious circumstances.’
‘Officer Ben Henrich of the Prescott Police Department tried to rescue the driver of a pickup truck after she crashed into a house.
The truck struck a natural gas line and three minutes later the house exploded killing the driver and injuring the officer.
Officer Henrich was three feet away from the house when it exploded and was pulled to safety by a fellow policeman.
Henrich suffered burns, cuts, and whiplash.
Authorities are investigating to determine why the pickup truck crashed into the house.’
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‘Two circus clowns have been shot dead during a performance in the eastern Colombian city of Cucuta, police say.
The attacker jumped into the arena and fired before fleeing, police chief Jose Humberto Henao told Efe news agency.
Local reports say the audience of about 20 people, mostly children, thought the shooting was part of the show before realising both men had been killed.’
‘A Romanian priest has been jailed for 14 years for conducting an exorcism that led to the death of a nun who he believed was possessed by devils.
Irina Cornici, 23, died after being starved and chained to a cross at a secluded convent in the north-east.
The ritual in 2005 was led by Daniel Petru Corogeanu, 31, the priest at the Holy Trinity convent in Tanacu village.
He and four nuns were convicted of manslaughter. The nuns got jail terms ranging from five to eight years. [..]
In 1999, when the Vatican issued its first new guidelines since 1614 for driving out devils, it urged priests to take modern psychiatry into account in deciding who should be exorcised.’
‘Rep. Don Young on Thursday added his voice to the speechifying about President Bush’s Iraq policy and bolstered it with what he thought was the voice of President Abraham Lincoln.
The man who Young quoted, though, was not the nation’s 16th president but a professor at a Washington, D.C., graduate school.
“I’d like to make a quote,” Young began after being granted his five minutes on the House floor. “‘Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.'”‘
‘”We’re going to talk a little bit today about the inevitable zombie uprising, the zombie apocalypse – also known as ‘zombocalypse.'” So begins William Spencer, addressing 150 science-fiction geeks at last October’s Archon convention in Collinsville, Illinois.
Spencer, a 31-year-old body-piercer who is dressed this day like a Commando character, is a founder of the Zombie Squad. A St. Louis-based survivalist group that uses the walking dead as a metaphor for the breakdown of society, the Zombie Squad’s primary mission is to teach disaster-preparation tactics to the public. What unites this quirky mix of tattooed hipsters, role-playing gamers and sci-fi nerds is an insatiable appetite for zombie flicks.’
‘A window said to be the one through which Lee Harvey Oswald shot US president John F Kennedy in 1963 has been sold for $3.8 million on eBay, the Internet auction house says.
The description of the window and frame sold to a person in the Netherlands says it was the one that stood in the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, from which Oswald killed Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
The window had been on display for 10 years at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, until its owner, Caruth Byrd, claimed it back.’
‘A German paraglider is being hailed as “the luckiest woman in the world” after surviving a storm cell that sucked her higher than Mount Everest during a flight in northern New South Wales.
Ewa Wisnierska, 35, spent 40 minutes unconscious while being carried to a height of approximately 30,000 feet, where she was pounded by hail, narrowly avoided lightning and was covered in ice.
A 40-year-old Chinese paraglider sucked into the same storm cell was found dead yesterday, a day after going missing.’
‘Police announced they uncovered a plastic bag stuffed with the skeletal remains of at least six newborns Sunday after searching the grounds of a Christian missionary hospital in the central Indian town of Ratlam.
Director General of Police A.R. Pavar said they found the remains hidden in a drainage ditch on the hospital’s property in Ratlam after scouring the grounds following a tip off from a local.
All 390 bone fragments are thought to be from newly born babies and fetuses, but Pavar said an investigation will offer more information. [..]
Bishop L. Maida, the senior official who represents the church that runs the hospital, told CNN the hospital is more than a century old and nothing like this has happened before.’
‘You people suck, you filthy bastards. How dare you do this to me you sick morons?’
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‘Early on the morning of Dec. 13, police officers responding to a 911 call arrived at a house in Hull, Mass., a seaside town near Boston, and found a 4-year-old girl on the floor of her parents’ bedroom, dead.
She was lying on her side, in a pink diaper, the police said, sprawled across some discarded magazines and a stuffed brown bear.
Last week, prosecutors in Plymouth County charged the parents, Michael and Carolyn Riley, with deliberately poisoning their daughter Rebecca by giving her overdoses of prescription drugs to sedate her.
The police said the girl had been taking a potent cocktail of psychiatric drugs since age 2, when she was given a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder and bipolar disorder, which is characterized by mood swings.
The parents have pleaded not guilty, with their lawyers questioning whether the child should have been prescribed such powerful drugs.’
‘A Chinese man has been sentenced to death for conning people out of 3 billion yuan ($387 million) in a giant scam to breed ants, local media said on Thursday.
Wang Zhendong, from the northeastern province of Liaoning, fabricated a business purported to be making wine, tea and medical elixirs using mature ants, the Beijing News said. [..]
More than 10,000 people, lured by the promise of returns of up to 60 percent, signed 100,000 contracts with Wang’s bogus company before the case came under investigation in June 2005. [..]
In his defense, Wang said he did not know the first thing about raising ants and was “quite unclear” about the costs, the Beijing News said.’
‘Two women are accused of soaking a homeless, drug-addicted prostitute with gasoline and burning her to death after she reported that one of them had robbed her.
Leslie “Jill” May, 49, was abducted from the street and killed at Candlestick Park the day she told the police that Mia Sagote, 30, robbed and beat her over a debt May’s boyfriend owed, authorities said.
Sagote and Leslie Siliga, 29, have pleaded not guilty to charges of murder and kidnapping.’
‘A 5-year-old girl fended for herself for days while she was left home alone with the body of her mother, who was found dead on her couch after apparently succumbing to bacterial meningitis, authorities said.
The body of Tina Tietz, 39, was discovered Sunday afternoon after a concerned longtime friend called 911.
Police had to force their way into her rural home in Muskegon County’s Fruitland Township, about 45 miles northwest of Grand Rapids. There they also found the woman’s daughter, Marissa, who had rummaged the house for food for an unknown number of days, and the family dog, which had been tied up inside.
Police found the cupboards open, rice and cereal spilled all over and the bathroom sink overflowing.’
‘Tennessee’s procedure manual for executing prisoners is a jumble of conflicting instructions that mixes new lethal injection instructions with those for the old electric chair, an Associated Press review found. [..]
The manual’s minute-by-minute guidelines for lethal injections includes the instruction: “The Executioner will engage the automatic rheostat.” A rheostat controls the voltage flowing to an electric chair.
The guidelines also tell the facility manager to disconnect the electrical cables in the rear of the chair before a doctor checks whether the lethal injection was successful.’
‘The man accused of killing his prison cellmate, then gutting him and hanging his intestines from a clothesline in his cell, has a history of brain injuries and untreated mental problems that would have made it difficult for him to think clearly, plot a murder or “resist impulses,” defense attorneys said today. [..]
In opening statements this morning, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brenda Taylor said the evidence is clear — and captured on a gruesome videotape — that William Sablan and his cousin Rudy Sablan killed Estrella. On the video, which guards began recording after they discovered Estrella dead in the cell, the Sablans are seen holding up Estrella’s organs, Taylor said. [..]
The 18 jurors, made up of 12 women and four men, are expected to see that video this afternoon.’
‘A woman eating from a bowl and talking on a cell phone walked past a railroad crossing gate and into the path of a freight train, police said Monday. She later died.
Investigators suspect the incident Sunday was an accident but have subpoenaed the 26-year-old woman’s cell phone records to find out whom she was talking to.
“She wasn’t paying attention,” Lt. Mark Duke said.’
‘With unbelievable restraint, Captain Eric Moody addressed British Airways flight 009 as his Boeing 747 drifted inexorably down towards the Indian Ocean.
Displaying the stiff-upper-lip spirit that built an empire, he uttered the words that are every air passenger’s worst nightmare: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get it under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.”
