Last week at the Panera, I walked through the door and one of the first things that happened was I was passed a newspaper and told to read one of the articles. Afterwards, I made a note to run a google search so I could find an online version to share here. Thinking about the events of this past weekend reminded me and so, here it is.

Judge rejects plea deal in NJ child luring case

TOMS RIVER, N.J.: A New Jersey judge on Friday rejected a plea bargain that prosecutors reached with a man accused of trying to lure three young children into a specially rigged van filled with candy.

Under the deal, Brian Warner pleaded guilty in June to possessing a stun gun. In return, charges of child-luring and possession of bomb-making materials were to have been dismissed, and he would have been sentenced only to the time he already served.

Superior Court Judge Wendel E. Daniels did not publicly disclose his reasons for rejecting the deal. He set another hearing for Nov. 3.

It was not clear whether Warner, 49, would seek to rescind the guilty plea in the wake of Friday's ruling.

Warner stood trial on the charges in 2005, but the jury was deadlocked and a mistrial was declared. He has been free in bail since April 2005, having spent nearly a year in jail while awaiting trial.

Defense attorney Paul Casteleiro called Daniels' ruling "the wrong decision. They (prosecutors) came to us and wanted to do a plea, and we entered into because it made sense to put this behind him."

Michael Mohel, a spokesman for the Ocean County prosecutor's office, did not return a call.

Prosecutors said that in 2004, Warner tried to lure two sisters ages 9 and 10 and their 7-year-old brother into a van equipped with a candy-filled cooler — and also a police scanner, a cage, black louvers on the windows, sound-muffling padding and sensors to alert occupants if someone was approaching.

Prosecutors claimed Warner had rigged the van to snatch children for sexual assault. But his lawyer argued that Warner had the candy because he has low blood sugar and that he was only trying to be friendly to the children.

Now, maybe it's just me, but a candy filled cooler sounds like a spiffy idea. Hell, I don't even have low blood sugar and I think that might make for a nice car accessory. I'm not sure about the cage but you never know when you might run across a mountain lion or something. I'll admit, it might be harder to explain why the guy left a trail of candy that led to the van with signs saying 'Free Balloon Animals Inside', but I'm sure his lawyer can come up with something.

On a sidenote, is that an absolutely perfect userpic for this article or what?

Apparently things are even more disturbed in the case of the canadian beheading extraveganza than I thought. Take a gander at the news report out today:

TORONTO, Ontario (AP) -- A police officer at the scene of a grisly beheading on a Canadian bus reported seeing the attacker hacking off pieces of the victim's body and eating them, according to a police tape leaked on the Internet Saturday.

In the tape of radio transmissions, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer refers to the attacker as "Badger" and says he is armed with a knife and scissors and is "defiling the body at the front of the bus as we speak."

On the tape, which lasts about 80 seconds, officers continue to detail the attacker's movements until one reports, "Badger's at the back of the bus, hacking off pieces and eating it."

Vince Weiguang Li, 40, faces second-degree murder charges for the slaying of a 22-year-old man, whom friends and family identified as Tim McLean. Police have not confirmed the victim's identity.

Holy dog shit, batman. Things must be even worse up in the great wide north than here as far as the economy goes. Hell, at least we're not starting to eat one another yet. Well, unless you mean in the figurative sense and that takes place in just about any ghetto in the country.

Maybe it's time to schedule a couple of airlift food drops so those crazy Canadian whackjobs don't have to resort to cannibalism. You can almost see the reasoning behind the nut's action though. I mean, the victim's name was McLean. Wasn't that some sort of burger put out by McDonalds a few years ago? In this health conscious age where everyone is watching their cholesterol level, who wouldn't be worried about fat content?

I have to say, I'm also a bit confuzzled about the police naming the guy 'Badger'. I'm not quite sure we're talking about the same animal here. It's that small little beaver-like critter that looks like a fat ferret, right? I mean, if I saw some psychopath stab the fuck out of someone, sever his head, and then go to town like it were an all-you-can-eat buffet, I'm not sure if 'Badger' would be the first synonymous animal to come to mind. All I can think is that either the first cop on the scene was a fatuous moron or there's some species of crazed canadian badger heretofore unknown to those of us south of the border.

Poll #1234484
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

This news story has.....

Other:

I received an IM from Brian a few nights ago to let me know that the burglar that's been hitting this area was recently arrested. My first response (once I figured out what he was talking about) was surprise. You have to be a pretty incompetent burglar to be caught nowadays. I dunno the details of the arrest so I'm not sure if he were caught in the act or not. He seemed like a pretty careful guy too, considering how few risks he took while breaking in here. Turns out, ours was only one of 7 houses he broke into all in this neighborhood.

At some point, someone's going to have to give the police a ring and see if there's anything left of what he swiped. Not that there's going to be much of value overall. It's not like we really want those packs of cigarettes back and the cell phone he took was ancient. About the only thing worth anything was the cash, and I figure he spent that almost immediately on hookers and blow.

Another (As if any sane person really needed one more) reason not to ride the bus.

Bus passenger beheaded seat mate, witness says

As horrified travelers watched, a Greyhound Canada bus passenger repeatedly stabbed and then decapitated a young man who was sitting and sleeping beside him, a witness said Thursday.
Police officers and cars surround the bus near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, on Wednesday night.

Police officers and cars surround the bus near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, on Wednesday night.

"There was a bloodcurdling scream. I was just reading my book, and all of a sudden, I heard it," Garnet Caton, who was sitting in front of the two men, said of the Wednesday night incident west of Portage la Prairie, Manitoba.

"It was like something between a dog howling and a baby crying, I guess you could say," Caton said. "I don't think it will leave me for a while."

Passengers exited the bus, and a trucker who stopped provided wrenches and crowbars to several of them so they could keep the suspect on the bus until police came, witnesses told Canadian TV. After a standoff, police took the man into custody early Saturday.

I thought at first that the killing might be justified. Like, maybe the dead guy had been sleeping with his head leaning on his seatmate. I figure that might be ample reason for decapitation. The news story goes on to say the guy was sleeping with his head against the window, so who knows what set off psycho there. Crazyass Canadians. Maybe he got some sort of brain-rotting STD off of a moose.

Has anyone had random, anonymous strangers start up an argument with one another in one of the back entries of their LJ before or is this a more or less unique phenomenon? Starting a few days ago, I've been getting a bunch of comment notifications from anonymous authors. I just assumed someone was spamming an old entry and didn't pay much attention to it. I only just looked back to find it's actually a bunch of people having a tit-for-tat argument, all by themselves. Is that a bit odd or what?

What they seem to be scrapping over is the case of Anne Knopf, a former teacher in Wisconsin who was boffing her daughter's 13 year old boyfriend. The seedy details had this kid driving over to her place in the middle of the night where she would molest him while her husband and daughter slept on upstairs. Previous anonymous strangers had offered up both defense and denouncement but the new crop of crusaders seem to be new. Based on the IP logging, there are four different computers currently clashing in the back alley of my LJ.

What I find remarkable is that someone just happened to stumble over the entry and then managed to find a couple other debating partners out of the blue. On the other hand, it's nice to know that Anne Knopf has since been convicted and her cover story was shown to be a tissue of lies. She had claimed that the kid's father had some sort of vendetta and there was a conspiracy to frame her. It's always nice to know how these sort of cases resolve after they make an initial splash in headline news and without all the anonymice, I never would have known how it turned out.

I guess I should pop back to the entry and add my two cents, but part of me is curious how long the raging anonymice will go if I just keep out of it. I will say one thing though, it was a crime that she only got 9 months in jail for what she did. That's a travesty of justice no matter how you slice it. You can only hope that karma plays a role and she gets shived or raped with a broom handle in prison.

Remember a bit back when I was posting about how I was sure those limey assholes killed their own kid while Jon Benet's parents were likely to be innocent? It seems that just a bit after that, I was proven right, at least as far as Jon Benet went. Since her murder ages back, DNA technology has continued to improve until now, they've developed something called touch DNA tests. This is some seriously scary futuristic shit where they can pull your dna out of your fingerprints or anything else you might have touched. No longer do they need a chunk of your hair or a dab of your blood. You touch anything and they can get lucky and extract dna from it.

Anyway, they tested the underware she was wearing the night of her death and managed to find a DNA sample that matched right up to the blood that had previously been found. They ran it against the parents, the police, the EMS, and just about every other son of a bitch who had been in the house and found zero matches. The prosecutor even wrote a letter to John Ramsey apologising for having placed his family under a cloud of suspicion all those years. That's pretty remarkable since DA's are notoriously loathe to admit that they, or their office, were wrong.

I know civil libertarians always throw a fit about this, but I really think that everyone should be DNA'ed and fingerprinted at birth. I mean, we record people's heights and weights and pictures on a driver's license. I don't see why it's any more an invasion of privacy to collect a few skin cells you're not going to need anyway. The samples should be kept in a database and then only used to compare crime samples to. Just think about what it would do for crime solving and, more importantly, the certainty that the right person had been apprehended.

I thought I'd try to be a bit topical today. I was just looking through CNN and saw that the Portuguese police are finally going to close the case on Madeleine McCann. Frankly, it's probably well past time since they've been beating that dead horse for ages. There hasn't been a lead that's provided any new information in at least a year. I followed along pretty closely in the early days of the investigation and I'm still with those who say the parents did it. As much as movies and thriller novels would like to make us think otherwise, strangers don't usually walk into other people's homes and wander off with their children. The fact that the parents just happen to have left a freaking three year old and a pair of two year olds by themselves in a house so they could go out drinking with friends just tells you that something's not quite kosher. Seriously, who the fuck does something like that anyway?

The real kicker as far as I'm concerned is that no body was ever found. That really does suggest that whoever offed the kid had plenty of time to plan and dispose. I've never bought those assertions that some ring of pedophiles kidnapped her for use in their toddler sex rings. I mean, there are craploads of kids out there and probably poor parents willing to sell them to you. You'd have to be a complete idiot to swipe the kid of a tourist if you wanted to get away with the crime. Even if it were some sort of impulse snatch and grab, it's just hard to believe that you could dispose of the body so well in a short period of time that it's never found without any sort of planning. My personal theory is the kid kicked the bucket, likely through overdose or child abuse, and the parents pitched her into the ocean with a fisher price anchor tied around her neck. I have no good evidence for that idea but there's just no possibility of this being a stranger abduction and murder. The police supposedly found faint traces of her blood in the house. What kinda freak who just happens to walk past a house wanders in, kills/bloodies a kid, cleans up after themselves, and then carries the body out the door with them?

In the end, we'll never know exactly what happened. It's like the John Benet Ramsey case all over again. It's odd, but in that situation I believed the parents had notta to do with it. I dunno why exactly but something about the McCann's just give me the willies. I just don't like them nor find them trustworthy in any way. At least with all this publicity we can be pretty sure they won't kill their remaining kids. Well, not without an airtight alibi ready anyway.

Poll #1217143
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Who killed/abducted Madeleine McCann?

Police: Man Stabs Mom, Assaults Another Woman With Chicken

YPSILANTI, Mich. -- Police said an Ypsilanti man is accused of stabbing his mother with a fork and hitting another woman over the head with a frozen chicken.

Frederick McKaney, 40, was arraigned in a Jackson courtroom on Thursday on two felony assault charges, one count of assault and battery and one count of resisting an officer.

"He stabbed his mother in the back of the neck when she refused to give him money, and then, an hour later, he attacked a neighbor woman with a chicken," Jackson County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Mark Blumer told the Ann Arbor news.

Police said McKaney went to his mother's house and demanded money. When she refused, he stabbed her and took off on his bicycle, police said.

A short time later, he encountered two other women talking on the sidewalk on Woodbridge Street.

The woman said he said something nasty to them and hit one of them over the head with 10 pounds of frozen chicken.

The woman went to the hospital and got stitches in her head.

McKaney's mother suffered minor injuries from the stabbing.

I stumbled over this story while at Origins and figured I just had to relate it. It's not every day you see a news story about someone assaulting someone else with poultry. I wonder if they classify the chicken as a deadly weapon. I mean, it was frozen. I'm sure you could possibly kill someone with a 10 pound bowling ball so death is just as likely with a 10 pound oven stuffer roaster.

In other news, I've finished uploading the videos from the con up to the laptop. I just have to go through and stick some of the clips together and then port them up to google. I'm a bit stymied at the moment since watching some of that shaky camera footage has made me a weeee bit nauseous. I'm taking a break and hoping the urge to spew vomit passes quickly. I should have taken more care not to wiggle the flip ultra around while I was filming. Then again, it just might be the percocets which are causing the problem. It's hard to tell.

Police Find, Defuse Chicken Bomb

SIMSBURY - — 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.

You just know there's some crazyass story behind this.

I ran across a couple of similarly bizzare news stories over the past few days and it got me to thinking. First though, here are the stories:

Stockton Man Beaten -- With His Own Artificial Leg

STOCKTON, CA - Police are looking for three suspects who attacked an elderly couple early Wednesday evening and used an unusual weapon to attack them -- the man's artificial leg.

Ma Khamchai, 66, and his wife, 62 year-old Noi were walking near their Lindsay Street home when they were confronted by two women and a man who demanded Noi's purse.

Ma fought back, kicking at his attackers, but in the scuffle his artificial leg came off. The robbers then used the leg to beat the couple.

Man hurls hedgehog at teen, pays fine

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - A New Zealand man accused of assault with prickly weapon — a hedgehog — has been fined by a court and ordered to pay most of his fine to his teenage victim.

Whakatane District Court was told Thursday that William Singalargh picked up the hedgehog and threw it several yards to hit a 15-year-old boy in the North Island east coast town of Whakatane on Feb. 9.

Police told the court the creature had hit the victim in the leg, causing a large, red welt and several puncture marks. The teen did not need medical treatment.

It remained unclear whether the hedgehog was dead or alive at the time of the attack, but Senior Sgt. Bruce Jenkins said earlier that it was dead when collected as evidence.

So, if you had a choice would you rather be beaten by your own artificial leg or have a, possibly living, hedgehog hurled at you hard enough to break the skin?

Poll #1197115
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I would choose....

Penis theft panic hits city

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

"You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've had a number of attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks after being beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

"I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said.

"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.

Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.

"It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

I wonder if there's actually a law on the books against penis thievery. I'm afraid I'm going to have to charge with a 10-13, that's aggravated genital theft punishable by up to 5 years in prison and being subjected to the dunking stool.

Every once and a while, you run across a blurb for a news/magazine article and just can't help but want to read the rest. In this case Harper's magazine did a 6-page story on the magical penis thieves of Africa. See? You're interested already, aren't you? Unfortunately, the only way to access the article at the moment is to pay $17 to Harper's magazine for an online subscription and while I might be curious, I don't think I'm $17 curious. So instead, I figured I'd just do some reading on the history of penis thievery without taking a look at the article.

It turns out that the idea of penis theft is pretty common in Nigeria and other countries in that area. The crime includes not only the outright theft of penises but the shrinking of them as well. Hell, I've known a few women in my time who had the same effect. Maybe they should be charged with something based on that.

Anyway, magical penis theft has often grown into an epidemic of cultural hysteria. I guess it'd be sort of like seeing non-stop 'SUMMER OF THE SHARK' stories on cable news.

Ilechukwu reports on "epidemics" of temporary magical penis loss in Nigeria during the mid-1970s, and again in 1990. A major Nigerian episode of "vanishing" genitalia in 1990, mainly affected men, but sometimes women, while walking in public places. Accusations were typically triggered by incidental body contact with a stranger that was interpreted as intentionally contrived, followed by unusual sensations within the scrotum. The affected person would then physically grab their genitals to confirm that all or parts were missing, after which he would shout a phrase such as "Thief! my genitals are gone!". The "victim" would then completely disrobe to convince quickly gathering crowds of bystanders that his penis was actually missing. The accused was threatened and usually beaten (sometimes fatally) until the genitals were "returned."

While some "victims" soon realized that their genitalia were intact, "many then claimed that they were 'returned' at the time they raised the alarm or that, although the penis had been 'returned, it was shrunken and so probably a 'wrong' one or just the ghost of a penis". In such instances, the assault or lynching would usually continue until the "original, real" penis reappeared.

I must admit, I'm sort of enamored with this idea. I can just imagine some Nigerian guy saying, 'Yeah, well, it was bigger before but then there was that magical penis thief that came to town.' It's also fun to imagine just what things would be like if it were possible to steal penises. Excuse me, but we caught this guy climbing out of your bedroom window last night and he had a giant bag of penises with him. Could you please look at the contents and tell us which penis is yours? At which point you could anticipate a bit of a scuffle as many of the victims tried to trade up for a larger model.

In the end, I guess what goes around comes around. I think the next time I get a phishing scam from Nigeria, I'll just respond that if they don't leave me alone I'll send someone to steal their penis.

I ran across something unexpected while reading the CNN headlines earlier. It seems that Lori Drew is going to get what's coming to her after all. In case you don't recall, she was the mother from that myspace suicide case a while back. The last I had heard about it, a grand jury had been issuing subpeonas, but I never anticipated that the case would amount to much. It seemed that they were simply grasping at straws. Well, it looks like the prosecutor ended up hitting paydirt.

Mom indicted in deadly MySpace hoax

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- A federal grand jury indicted a Missouri woman Thursday for her alleged role in perpetrating a hoax on the online social network MySpace against a 13-year-old neighbor who committed suicide.

Lori Drew of suburban St. Louis is said to have helped create a false-identity MySpace account to contact Megan Meier, who thought she was chatting with a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans. Josh didn't exist.

Megan hanged herself at home in October 2006 after receiving cruel messages, including one stating the world would be better off without her.

Salvador Hernandez, assistant agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI office, called the case heart-rending.

"The Internet is a world unto itself. People must know how far they can go before they must stop. They exploited a young girl's weaknesses," Hernandez said. "Whether the defendant could have foreseen the results, she's responsible for her actions."

Drew was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the girl.

Drew has denied creating the account or sending messages to Megan.

U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien said this was the first time the federal statute on accessing protected computers has been used in a social-networking case. It has been used in the past to address hacking.

"This was a tragedy that did not have to happen," O'Brien said.

Both the girl and MySpace are named as victims in the case, he said.

MySpace is a subsidiary of Beverly Hills, California-based Fox Interactive Media Inc., which is owned by News Corp. The indictment noted that MySpace computer servers are located in Los Angeles County.

Due to juvenile privacy rules, the U.S. attorney's office said, the indictment refers to the girl as M.T.M.

FBI agents in St. Louis and Los Angeles investigated the case, Hernandez said.

Each of the four counts carries a maximum possible penalty of five years in prison.

Drew will be arraigned in St. Louis and then moved to Los Angeles for trial.

I don't really know how I feel about this case anymore. I agree that the mom was a douche and should have faced scorn but I just don't know if I believe there should be criminal charges. It's not exactly her fault that the girl was an unbalanced nutjob exactly. It'd be different if she had handed her the rope but I'm not sure it's exactly foreseeable that she would off herself.

The other aspect of this case that bothers me is the new information that's come out since that shows that it was Drew's 19 year old employee who actually created the account and also issued the fateful 'the world would be better off without you' message that is believed to have precipitated the suicide. I'm sure she was acting, at least to some degree, at Lori Drew's behest, but there's no reason she should have escaped being charged as well. With that information out there and the lack of other indictments, it just makes this look like a witch hunt. I'm also not sure that it bodes well to have this case as a precedent either.

It's hard nowadays to open a newspaper or read any sort of political commentary online without running across some story on Gitmo. Considering that most reporters are self-declared hippies, most of them favor having the place shut down and its prisoners released. Think about it. How many exposes have there been now where some magazine or newspaper features some poor misfortunate who supposedly wound up as an enemy combatant 'by mistake'. Of course, the mistake in question is usually being found in a war zone with an AK-47 and shooting at US troops.

This is not to say that there probably haven't been mistakes. There are no doubt people out there who have been swept up who only dabbled instead of fully participated in terrorism. I'm sure there must be at least a couple instances of guilt by association. If your three best friends just happen to have been suicide bombers, your uncle runs the radical mosque you attend, and Al Zawahiri happens to come over once a week for potluck, it's very likely you're going to be viewed with suspicion and picked up whether you yourself have ever actually participated in their actions.

Despite all the press about the supposed innocent and the push to have more prisoners released, what we don't often see is that many of those that have been detained have ended up rejoining Al Qaeda. Think of it this way, of those who have been released, they were deemed the most likely to be innocent and the most likely to not constitute a threat. Of those, a not insignificant number have been later found to have rejoined the fight. There's one just reported in CNN today.

Pentagon: Ex-detainees returning to fight

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A Kuwaiti man released from U.S. custody at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in 2005 blew himself up in a suicide attack in Iraq last month, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.

Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi was one of two Kuwaitis who took part in a suicide attack in Mosul on April 26, the officials said. Records show that an attack in Mosul that day targeted an Iraqi police patrol and left six people dead, including two police officers.

An announcement on a jihadist Web site earlier this month declared that al-Ajmi was one of the "heroes" who carried out the Mosul operation. A second man from Kuwait also took part in the suicide attack, the Web site said.

Pentagon officials who had been keeping track of al-Ajmi said they were aware he had left Kuwait for Syria, a launching ground for terrorists into Iraq.

A video posted on various jihadist Web sites shows a number of images of al-Ajmi, followed by text reading, "May God have mercy on you Abdullah al-Ajmi. I send you a warm greeting O you martyr, O you hero, O you, a man in a time where only few men are left."

U.S. military records of Guantanamo detainees indicate that a man with the same name and nationality was held at the Cuban prison.

Those records said al-Ajmi, 29, was picked up in Afghanistan as he tried to enter Pakistan after the 2001 U.S. invasion. He claimed to have fought for the Taliban, the records show, and said he fought in a number of battles against the Northern Alliance.

Though he was never charged with any crime, al-Ajmi was held at Guantanamo through 2005. Military documents show he later claimed that his statements about fighting for the Taliban were made after he was threatened while in U.S. custody. He asserted that he was in Afghanistan to study the Quran.

It's fucking ridiculous. Frankly, someone owes those poor bastards in Mosul an explanation for this sort of thing. Maybe we can get some of the hippies who supported this asshole's release to travel there and tell the family members why their loved ones are dead. Maybe they can tell them how the guy 'pinky swore' he really wasn't a terrorist and that's why they fought to get him released.

There should be a price to be payed when people are wrong about bullshit like this. At the very least the families should be allowed to sue the ACLU or whoever advocated for this asshole's release.

Parents Fight Over Which Gang Toddler Should Join

COMMERCE CITY, Colo. -- A couple fighting about which gang their 4-year-old toddler should join caused a public disturbance that resulted in the father's arrest, Commerce City police said Thursday.

On Saturday, Joseph Manzanares stormed into the Hollywood Video store where his girlfriend worked, threatened to kill her and knocked over several video displays and even a computer, Commerce City police Sgt. Joe Sandoval said.

After he ran out of the store, police were called and the 19-year-old was arrested at his home.

His girlfriend told police that they had been arguing about the upbringing of their son and which gang he should belong to. The teen mother, who is black, is a member of the Crips. Manzanares is Hispanic and belongs to the Westside Ballers gang, the woman said.

"They have different ideas on how the baby should be raised. Basically, she said they cannot agree on which gang the baby would 'claim,'" Sandoval said.

At worst, if you pick the wrong college it might just mess up your future a bit. Pick the wrong gang to join though, and you might not have a future.

It's almost sort of commendable in an insane sort of way. These parents are planning for their kid's future. You almost think there should be a clothing line they sell in the ghetto. Little baby jumpers with 'Future Crips' or 'Future Baller' written on them. Instead of little blue birds and yellow butterflies there can be guns and crack pipes. I think it could sell and sell big. I mean, gangs usually have disposable income, right? All that drug money has to go somewhere.

Usually, I'm the sort of person who gets sorta pissy when uppity Europeans turn their noses up at what they term, American puritanism. They never seem to get why sex scandals occur, and blame the media dust-ups on prudishness. It's sort of like what I've suggested before when it comes to porn desensitization. After all, it's no wonder you might feel that someone watching normal missionary porn as being sort of boring and vanilla when the sites you frequent feature dickgirls backdooring donkeys. The same must be true of European sex scandals. They don't mind if their politicians are running around diddling hookers because that would be bland by comparison. This is the sort of thing that they end up seeing:

Sex scandal puts future of Formula One official in doubt

LONDON -- The scandal probably would have been a ho-hum tale of sex and bondage of little interest to jaded Europeans were it not for two things. The man holding the whip was one of the most powerful men in motor racing. And when he ordered his "prisoners" to submit, he was speaking in a practiced German that called up disturbing images of a distant past.

The man was Max Mosley, president of the international body that governs Formula One racing -- and the son of Oswald Mosley, the controversial founder in the 1930s of the pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists.

Mosley's five-hour encounter with five women in a bondage orgy has prompted accusations of Nazi role-playing and engulfed the Formula One world in a leadership crisis, prompting the sport's ruling body Wednesday to announce that its governing assembly would meet June 3 to decide whether Mosley can keep his post.

Better yet, it turns out there was video taken of the orgy and clean excerpts have been posted online. Here's one video that gives you an idea:



In case you're curious for more, one of the tabloids in England is leading the charge. You can see all the videos and interviews and everything else on their site. All I know for sure after this is that Elliot Spitzer was overcharged. He ended up forking over $4,000 for a night with his hooker. For only 2,500 pounds, this guy got 5 girls for 5 hours and even had costuming and props to boot. This just teaches you that you have to shop around for the best price.

Police Say Girl, 10, Tried To Rob Store

POSTED: 6:11 pm CDT March 26, 2008

FRANKLIN, Tenn. -- Police in Franklin said a 10-year-old girl tried to rob a Mapco Express late Monday night.

The clerk said the main reason he called police was that he was worried about the girl being out so late and trying to rob a store.

He said he wasn’t sure what the girl wanted until she threw a rock that struck him in the chest. The rock was all she was armed with. The clerk said he was so stunned that the girl had to ask the clerk three times for the money.

"At that time, the clerk said, 'You need to leave the store,' and came around the counter toward the front of the store. At that time, the child ran out," said Franklin Police Detective David Dixon.

It was the first attempted robbery at the busy Mapco, which is located just off Interstate 65.

The clerk said the main reason he called police was because he was worried about the young girl being out so late and trying to rob a store.

"I think he did the right thing, and the child was returned safely, and that’s what counts," said Mapco employee Cordelia Ream.

The girl had run away from home that night, and police said they believe if they charge her, they might be able to find out what's going on in her life that might lead her to attempt a robbery.

"That’s our main concern, is kind of getting behind, you know, what the problem was, and we want to make sure we take care of that problem," Dixon said.

Police said it appears that the child has a stable home life and was well taken care of.

What a precocious little bitch. Holy crap! Aggravated armed robbery at 10? She'll be genociding small countries by the time she hits her tweens.

This is a perfect example of why I'm for late-late term abortions. It's patently wrong to kill the innocent, and few things in this world are as innocent as an unborn child. It's another thing entirely to kill a 10 year old or teenager who's shown themselves to be nothing but a boil on society. They're the ones that should get lanced and aborted. It's about time that we get some legislation passed about this.

Boyfriend: Phobia caused woman's 2-year bathroom stay

WICHITA, Kansas (AP) -- A 35-year-old woman who sat on her boyfriend's toilet for so long that her body was stuck to the seat had a phobia about leaving the bathroom, the boyfriend said.

"She is an adult; she made her own decision," said her boyfriend, Kory McFarren. "I should have gotten help for her sooner; I admit that. But after a while, you kind of get used to it."

The case drew nationwide attention after Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said it appeared the Ness City woman's skin had grown around the seat in the two years she apparently was in the bathroom.

"We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital," Whipple said. "The hospital removed it."

McFarren, 36, said he can't be certain how long Pam Babcock stayed in the bathroom because "time just went by so quick I can't pinpoint how long." He said beatings she received in her childhood caused her phobia.

"It just kind of happened one day; she went in and had been in there a little while, the next time it was a little longer. Then she got it in her head she was going to stay -- like it was a safe place for her," McFarren said.

But McFarren said she moved around in the bathroom during that time, bathed and changed into the clothes he brought her. He brought food and water to her. They had conversations and had an otherwise normal relationship -- except it all happened in the bathroom.

McFarren said he finally called police February 27 after he became worried because Babcock was acting groggy -- like she didn't know what was going on, except she was awake.

What emergency responders found when they went into bathroom has left residents of this small western Kansas town buzzing, and law enforcement officials incredulous.

Police found the clothed woman sitting on the toilet, her sweat pants down to mid-thigh. She was "somewhat disoriented," and her legs looked like they had atrophied, Whipple said.

"She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body," Whipple said. "It is hard to imagine. ... I still have a hard time imagining it myself."

She initially refused emergency medical services, but was finally convinced by responders and her boyfriend that she needed to be checked out at a hospital.

"She said that she didn't need any help, that she was OK and did not want to leave," he said.

Whipple said the county attorney will determine whether any charges should be filed against McFarren.

McFarren, who works at an antique store, said he has been taking care of Babcock for the 16 years they have lived together. He insisted that he tried to coax her out of the bathroom every day.

"And her reply would be, `Maybe tomorrow,"' Whipple said. "According to him, she did not want to leave the bathroom."

You know, in today's information age, you see a lot of whacky news stories each day. I think this one might just take the cake though. I can't even imagine how long you would have to sit on a toilet seat for your SKIN to grow around it. I mean, WTF? How in the world did she not lose circulation to her legs within the first couple of days? How long was she on that toilet?

I'm also not quite sure what to think about the boyfriend. Did he go above and beyond the call of duty by caring for a woman who refused to leave the bathroom for 2 years or was he some sort of crazed nutjob too who had a fetish for women glued by their own flesh to toilet seats? Hell, you thought making a Bonsai Kitten was hard, imagine trying to get someone to participate in this for 2 years.

This is almost enough for me to want to get a giant sackful of cats.



And luck for me, I know exactly where to go to acquire the cats. Thank you crazy cat lady.

70 Cats Seized From Unsanitary Home

Humane Society Officers Forced To Get Warrant For Cats

NORTH STRABANE, Pa. -- Washington County Humane Society officers removed more than 70 cats from a North Strabane home Friday, citing unsanitary conditions.

Humane Society officers said they were forced to get a warrant to enter the home along Acme Road.

Once inside, they said they began loading all the cats into crates and then took them to the Humane Society for evaluation.

Officers said the cats were well fed, but the home was filled with feces and garbage and was unsuitable for not only cats, but also humans.

"They all seem to be as far as good weight and there are some cats that are sick," said Vicki Schmalzried, with the Humane Society. "It's just that basically there are so many cats living in unsanitary conditions."

Humane Society officers said they are not sure if charges will be filed against the owner.

Once the cats are evaluated, they will be available for adoption.