Federal prosecutors are seeking a maximum 580-year prison sentence for a man who sexually abused six children, including two Amish girls he kidnapped in northern New York.
Stephen M. Howells, 40, and Nicole Vaisey, 26, admitted in May that they sexually exploited children. Authorities say victims were drugged and recorded during sex acts.
The abuse ended after the couple was arrested for kidnapping two young Amish girls at a farm stand in northern New York in August 2014. The girls were released after a day.
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Booking photos of Stephen Howells II and Nicole Vaisey.St. Lawrence County Sheriff via AP
A gunman armed with an AK-47-style weapon burst into a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs Friday, shooting at police from inside the building during the ensuing five-hour standoff.
Three people, including a police officer, died during the incident, Colorado Springs Police Department Lt. Catherine Buckley said. Nine others, including five officers, were wounded. All nine were in good condition at area hospitals, she added.
The slain officer was identified as Garrett Swasey, 44, of the University of Colorado Colorado Springs police force.
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Multiple Injuries in Shooting at Planned Parenthood Facility in Colorado
Two young men were charged Monday in the murder of an Indianapolis pastor’s pregnant wife during a home invasion as court documents alleged the gunman shot her “so he wouldn’t be scratched.”
Larry Taylor, 18, allegedly gave his accomplices a blow-by-blow of how he killed Amanda Blackburn, 28, during the Nov. 10 burglary, according to a probable cause affidavit that cited a cooperating witness.
“Taylor stated that she charged at him and he shot her somewhere in the upper body so he would not be scratched,” the affidavit says.
The case of Abigail Hanna–the pretty, blonde 21-year-old who allegedly kidnapped a toddler she once cared for before shaving her head, burning her with cigarettes, and leaving her by the side of the road some eight miles from her home–has the media fascinated, and it’s easy to understand why: It’s a dramatic, made-for-TV sort of case featuring a small child who endured horrific torture allegedly at the hands of someone who had once been charged with keeping her safe.
That Hanna was a bright, beautiful–and, it must be said, white–college student seems to have amplified the appeal and turned the story into international news, with everyone asking, in one way or another, how someone with so much potential can commit such a heinous crime. How can someone like her become, as the Daily Beast calls her, “the babysitter from hell”?
A woman who brought a sexual misconduct suit against the former co-director of the Kabbalah Centre, a spiritual group whose brand of Jewish mysticism has drawn many celebrity devotees, was awarded $177,500 in damages by a jury on Tuesday.
The Los Angeles County Superior Court jury found Yehuda Berg, 43, known in Hollywood as “a rabbi to the stars,” liable for inflicting emotional distress on a former follower, Jena Scaccetti, according to her lawyer, Alain Bonavida.
The center has attracted such stars as Madonna, Lindsay Lohan, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher among its followers, who are often identified by red-string wrist bracelets worn as a talisman.
Abu Khaled looked at me across the outdoor hookah café table in the touristy Laleli district of Istanbul. Across the street cars nearly careened into each other every other second in a busy interaction, semi-subterranean shops, their windows half-buried by the pavement, advertised everything from cellphones to toothpaste to the latest designer women’s fashions—or, at any rate, cheap knockoffs for those who didn’t know the difference or much care. Amid the din of an international city at rush hour was the scheduled call of the muezzin, leading the call to prayer, and an unremitting stream of awful European pop music being pumped through the café’s loudspeakers, which we’d asked in vain to have turned down.
Even though ISIS terror had struck inside Turkey the week before, the organization calling itself the Islamic State, al-Dawla al-Islamiya, felt very far away. Truly, Abu Khaled told me, the people who run it want their subjects to live as if in a world of their own, captive minds in a closed society. But the real world is a small place, and this defector from the ISIS intelligence services said he was not the only one who had grown restive.
France has identified all 129 people killed in Friday’s deadly attacks in Paris, officials said on Wednesday, though they didn’t release any names.
People from at least 15 countries were killed in the attacks. At least 100 families traveled to France to identify the bodies.
Details have slowly begun to emerge about the identities of those who lost their lives, among them a 23-year-old design student from America. Many of the those killed or injured were young people hailing from around the globe, with victims from countries including Spain, Sweden, Portugal, Belgium, Mexico and Chile.
Dozens of New York City-area energy industry executives and truck drivers were arrested Tuesday as part of a law enforcement probe into a suspected scam on customers.
DNAinfo reports the bust includes over 40 “owners, executives and truck drivers from some of the city’s largest fuel oil companies” who police accuse of rigging oil trucks to shortchange customers on heating oil. The alleged scammers, who DNAinfo reported include eight owners of fuel companies and three transportation depots, are accused of scamming developers and city agencies, including police and fire departments and those serving “the homeless and city schoolchildren.”
Alleged victims also included the owners of smaller buildings who purchased oil from the companies implicated.
Prosecutors said the trucks were equipped with “diverter valves” that gave fake readouts of how much oil each customer was being delivered, DNAinfo reported. They also allegedly used other tricks to fool measuring devices designed to prevent fraud.
Security footage shows a man suspected in the slaying of an Indianapolis pastor’s pregnant wife during a home burglary, police announced Friday, cautioning that they were still working to identify him.
“For those who killed Amanda, we are coming,” Indiana State Police Superintendent Doug Carter said during a news conference. “We are coming, and I hope it’s not long.”
Police said the video of the suspect was taken from a nearby home on Tuesday morning, when Amanda Blackburn, 28, was shot in the head during a break-in. She died at the hospital on Thursday.
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Indianapolis Pastor’s Pregnant Wife Fatally Shot in the Head
Illegal marijuana growers in California are not only breaking drugs laws, they are also killing animals protected under the California Endangered Species Act. Pacific fishers, small carnivores that look like a cross between a weasel and a teddy bear, are inadvertently being poisoned by contraband farmers who pepper their crop fields with rodenticides.
Fisher populations have been declining precipitously for the last century, and today the animals occupy just 20 percent of their historic range. Researchers estimate that the southern Sierra Nevada fisher population, for example, includes just 300 individuals and fewer than 120 breeding females.
While the biggest threat to the species’ survival is development, marijuana farms exacerbate this already precarious situation. These farms are known to sprinkle poison scented with bacon or peanut butter flavoring to keep pests away from their crops.
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The weasel-like fisher, an already at-risk animal, faces threats of poison from pot farms. (Michael DeYoung/CORBIS)
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Lives cut short!
Oil truck
James' World 2 