Massachusetts girl allegedly raped and forced to work by aunt

1 hour, 29 minutes ago

By The Associated Press

WORCESTER, Mass. - A Massachusetts woman has been charged with raping and beating her teenage niece and forcing her to work for the rest of the household in a "Cinderella-type situation."

Mara Escobar was ordered held on $25,000 bail after pleading not guilty at her arraignment Monday to multiple charges, including assault and battery on a child and rape of a child with force.

Police Sgt. Kerry Hazelhurst said the 16-year-old girl was forced to do housework and live in a sparsely furnished room while Escobar's two daughters had TVs, DVD players, video games and toys in their rooms.

According to court records, the rapes and assaults happened between June 2007 and Sept. 1.

Spanish police arrest 121 in child porn raids

Wed Oct 1, 7:11 AM

By The Associated Press

MADRID, Spain - Spanish police say they've arrested 121 people in the country's biggest-ever crackdown on child pornography.

Authorities say they seized discs containing millions of video and photo files shared by a network that distributed them in 75 countries.

Police released a statement saying two of the suspects produced pornographic material themselves using members of their own families.

They say those arrested came from all kinds of backgrounds, including pilots, salespeople, porters, taxi drivers and bank employees.

Police say the arrests were made last week and four of those in custody are minors.

Brazilian police helped with the operation, which began in July 2007.

A further 96 people have been named as suspects in the case, which involved raids on more than 250 homes across Spain.

Some of the videos and photographs that were seized featured extremely disturbing material, police said.

Most of the suspects are Spaniards, police said without naming the other nationalities. Police said the detainees used peer-to-peer, or P2P, servers to share at least three download sites.

Spanish authorities said they have arrested more than 1,200 people in connection with child pornography on the Internet in the last five years.

Wisconsin mom allegedly used daughter's ID to be cheerleader

Fri Sep 12, 7:14 PM

By The Associated Press

GREEN BAY, Wis. - A 33-year-old woman is accused of stealing her daughter's identity to attend high school and join the cheerleading squad.

Wendy Brown is charged with felony identity theft after enrolling in a Wisconsin high school as her daughter. The criminal complaint says Brown admitted to telling school officials she was 15 because she wanted to get her high school diploma and join the cheerleading squad.

She allegedly attended practices, received a cheerleader's locker and went to a pool party at the coach's house.

The complaint says Brown has a history of identity theft.

Her daughter lives in Nevada with Brown's mother.

There was no lawyer listed in Brown's online court records and her home number could not be found.

McCain: anti-Obama ads not 'lies'

2 hours, 24 minutes ago

NEW YORK (AFP) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Friday denied his barrage of hardball negative advertisements against Democratic rival Barack Obama amounted to "lies."

The Arizona Senator defended his campaign's tactics against Obama, which claimed his opponent called Republican vice presidential pick Sarah Palin a "pig" and advocated teaching sex education to kindergarten children.

"Actually, they are not lies," McCain said on the ABC television chat show "The View."

The Obama campaign had argued that McCain's camp deliberately misinterpreted Obama's recent comment that Republican claims to represent change were like putting "lipstick on a pig" as a sexist remark aimed at Palin.

"He shouldn't have said it. He chooses his words very carefully, this is a tough campaign," McCain said.

Earlier this week, the McCain campaign debuted an attack ad claiming that as a state lawmaker in Illinois, Obama backed a bill to teach "comprehensive sex education" to kindergartners."

"Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama. Wrong on education. Wrong for your family," the narrator of the advertisement said.

In reality, the legislation allowed local schools to teach "age-appropriate" sex education, meaning that kindergarten kids could be warned about sexual predators and inappropriate touching but not taught about sex.

The Obama camp hit back angrily at McCain over the advertisement.

"It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls," said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

"Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn't define what honor was. Now we know why."

The intense McCain barrage on Friday prompted the Obama campaign to launch a counter-attack, with ads which branded McCain as out of touch with the economic travails of everyday Americans and guilty of using smears against the Democrat.

Guelph, Ont., woman, 27, convicted of infanticide in deaths of infant sons

2 hours, 44 minutes ago

By Tamara King, The Canadian Press

GUELPH, Ont. - A 27-year-old woman from Guelph, Ont., facing first-degree murder charges in the suffocation deaths of two of her infant sons, was instead convicted Thursday of the rare crime of infanticide.

The woman - who cannot be identified because she was 17 at the time of her first son's death - had admitted to police that she smothered the two babies, using blankets and plastic baby carriage covers.

The boys were born four years apart to different fathers.

Ontario Superior Court Justice Cas Herold found that the woman's mind was disturbed by the effects of childbirth, fitting the legal definition of the lesser charge of infanticide.

"I am satisfied on a balance of probabilities, at least, at the time she killed... (her) mind was disturbed as the result of her not yet having fully recovered from the biological effects of giving birth," Herold said in his lengthy written verdict.

The decision prompted an obscenity-laden outburst from the father of the woman's first child, who was killed Sept. 30, 1998, when he was seven-weeks old.

"No matter what... you're an (expletive) murderer," the man shouted before supporters escorted him from the packed courtroom.

The father of the other victim, who was killed at nine-weeks old in 2002, reacted with tears.

"This was the outcome I was praying for. This will help her get help," the 40-year-old man said outside the courtroom.

"There is no justice. It's not going to bring back anybody."

The man is separated from the mother and takes care of their surviving children, a seven-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl.

In his decision, the judge cited the woman's "difficult childhood" of abuse, rejection and suicide attempts.

The woman suffered from a severe personality disorder that may have predisposed her to post-partum mental disturbance, he said.

Herold also talked of the woman's other attempts to harm the two babies.

She put Pine Sol in their bottles, "so as to give her respite from child care," said Herold.

"She told each of the infants they would be going to a better place," he said.

At trial, both the defence and the Crown relied on testimony of psychiatrists, who respectively argued she was jealous of her babies and was suffering from an emotional disorder and falsely reported extreme psychotic symptoms.

Court also heard the woman admitted to the deaths in a letter she wrote to her husband while she was staying at a Toronto addiction and mental health centre.

The woman had pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder.

Her lawyer, Craig Parry, had argued that she should be convicted of infanticide because she was "disturbed" by the effects of childbirth.

Infanticide convictions are rare. It was introduced to the Canadian Criminal Code in 1948, and amended in 1954.

Since then, only 12 other Canadian women have been convicted of the charge, according to Emma Cunliffe, an assistant law professor at the University of British Columbia who studies infanticide.

An infanticide conviction carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, while first-degree murder carries a life sentence.

The woman is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 26.

"It's unhealthy, to project onto children your own anxieties about death."

Frenchwoman, 59, gives birth to healthy triplets

Mon Sep 8, 1:27 PM

PARIS (AFP) - A 59-year-old Frenchwoman has given birth by Caesarian section to two boys and a girl, who are in good health, the Paris hospital treating her said on Monday.

"Everything went smoothly," said a spokesman at Cochin hospital where the triplets were born overnight Saturday.

The woman, of Vietnamese origin, is thought to have resorted to a private Vietnamese clinic willing to overlook the age limit for egg donation and in vitro fertilisation (IVF), set at 45 in Vietnam, according to press reports.

Egg donations are authorised in France but most fertility clinics here set a maximum age limit of 42 for would-be mothers.

But nothing prevents couples from seeking fertility treatment abroad and in 2001 a 62-year-old Frenchwoman gave birth to a child conceived through IVF, in the Riviera town of Frejus.

Earlier this year, an Indian woman said to be 70 years old gave birth to twins after receiving IVF treatment.

The baby girl weighed in at 2.42 kilograms (5.34 pounds) as did one brother, while the second boy weighed 2.32 kilograms.

The birth of triplets by a mother in her late 50s was unprecedented in France and possibly a world first.

But the news raised eyebrows among French health professionals concerned that science was pushing the limits of motherhood too far.

"Having children at that age is dangerous in terms of child development," said child psychiatrist Nicole Garret-Gloanec.

Women of child-bearing age are able to "draw the link between their own childhood and their baby," she said.

This case raises questions as to "how you can help a child grow, in educational terms and development," said Dominique Ratia-Armangol, president of the national association of early childhood psychologists.

She said a child born to an older woman can become confused about the role of grandmother and mother.

Garret-Gloanec suggested that the mother's late-in-life desire to have children was "a denial of ageing and of death."

"It's unhealthy, to project onto children your own anxieties about death," she said.

Ohio mother who killed baby in microwave gets life without parole

Mon Sep 8, 12:58 PM

By The Associated Press

DAYTON, Ohio - A woman in Dayton, Ohio, has been sentenced to life in prison without a chance of parole for killing her baby daughter in a microwave oven.

Twenty-eight-year-old China Arnold chose not to be in the courtroom for today's sentencing. Arnold was convicted of aggravated murder in the 2005 death of month-old daughter Paris Talley.

She was spared the death penalty because jurors could not reach a consensus on the punishment.

It was Arnold's second trial; the first ended in a mistrial when new witnesses surfaced.

Defence lawyer Jon Paul Rion has asked for a third trial, saying a former cellmate who said Arnold confessed has now changed her story.

Loretta Lux

Killings of five Afghan children inflame tensions

1 hour, 48 minutes ago

By Amir Shah, The Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan - Foreign and Afghan forces killed five children in two separate incidents Monday, further inflaming tensions in the country over the killings of civilians by troops from the U.S. and other countries.

NATO said it accidentally killed three children in an artillery strike in eastern Afghanistan. It said NATO forces fired the rounds after insurgents attacked its patrol in Gayan district of Paktika province and one of the rounds hit a house, killing three children and injuring seven civilians.

In a separate incident, foreign and Afghan forces killed a man and his two children and during a raid near Kabul, police and witnesses said. Angry men gathered at the victims' house in the Utkheil area east of the capital, where the three bodies were displayed inside a mud-walled compound. The man's wife was wounded in the operation, said Yahya Khan, a cousin.

In another sign of the sensitivity over civilian deaths, NATO issued an unusual statement warning that the Taliban planned to make a false claim about the killings of civilians in the south.

The latest deaths deepened strains between the Afghan government - under pressure from an increasingly irate public - and foreign forces in the country who are accused of killing dozens of civilians only in the past few weeks.

Afghan officials accuse foreign forces of killing up to 90 civilians during an Aug. 22 operation in the country's west. The U.S. denies the accusation, saying its troops and Afghan commandos killed 25 militants and five civilians in the operation.

The raid in the eastern outskirts of Kabul was conducted by U.S. troops backed by Afghan intelligence agents, said police officer Qubaidullah, who like many Afghans goes by one name. He said the raid killed a man and two of his children and wounded his wife.

The raid left the house with broken windows and bullet holes in the walls. Three other men, all the victims' cousins, were detained during the operation but later released, Khan said.

U.S. coalition spokesman 1st Lt. Nathan Perry said no American troops took part in the operation. NATO-led forces said they had no information about the raid and could not confirm their troops participated either.

Separately, NATO said it was anticipating a Taliban claim of further civilian casualties in the south. In a statement late Sunday, NATO said it had received information from "a reliable source" that insurgents planned to falsely claim international military forces killed up to 70 civilians in Sangin district in southern Helmand province.

The military alliance also said its forces had helped more than 20 wounded civilians who approached two of its bases in Helmand province.

NATO said the civilians were wounded in two separate incidents involving insurgents.

"Insurgents ransacked three compounds and killed three women and an unspecified number of children," in Helmand's Sarevan Qaleh village, NATO said in a statement, quoting one of those wounded. "He then reported that the insurgents had shot him in both kneecaps before fleeing," it said.

The claims could not be independently verified and have not been reported by Afghan authorities.

NATO said it condemns the "use of the plight of innocent civilians for propaganda gain by insurgents."

The warning of a possible civilian casualty claim came hours after the separate U.S.-led coalition command said its troops killed more than 220 insurgents in a week of fighting in the same province. The coalition did not say where the militants were killed.

It was unclear whether the two reports were related.

The issue of civilian deaths is a particularly sensitive topic in Afghanistan following the Aug. 22 bombing of the village of Azizabad in Herat province by the U.S.-led coalition. An Afghan government commission said 90 civilians were killed, a finding backed by a preliminary UN report.

The U.S. military has said 25 militants and five civilians were killed, and that it is investigating the incident.

The U.S. has long said insurgents use false civilian death claims as a propaganda tool to undermine support for international forces and the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Claims of civilian deaths can be tricky. Relatives of Afghan victims are given condolence payments by the government and the international military forces, providing an incentive to make false claims.

But Karzai has castigated Western military commanders over civilian deaths resulting from their raids. The Taliban and other insurgents use the deaths as leverage to turn Afghans away from the government, he says.

The top NATO spokesman in Afghanistan, Brig.-Gen. Richard Blanchette, said Saturday that the U.S.-led coalition, Afghan government and United Nations would jointly investigate the Aug. 22 raid.

Asa Ames is a mysterious and tragic figure. The young sculptor died from consumption when he was 27 years, 7 months, and 7 days old. Though his own life was short, he immortalized family members and neighbors in the vicinity of Evans, Erie County, New York, in a legacy of twelve three-dimensional portraits of children and young adults carved between 1847 and his death in 1851.

Via

Defence: Ohio mother didn't kill baby in microwave, someone else did

Mon Aug 18, 1:55 PM

By The Associated Press

DAYTON, Ohio - A defence attorney in Ohio says it wasn't the mother, but someone else who killed a month-old baby by burning her in a microwave oven.

Defence attorney Jon Paul Rion told jurors during opening statements Monday that a cousin of the baby told to two friends: "I know who killed that baby."

Rion says in that conversation, days after the 2005 death, the cousin allegedly confessed that he had put the baby in a microwave.

China Arnold, 28, has pleaded not guilty to a charge of aggravated murder in the death of her daughter, Paris Talley.

Prosecutors say evidence will show Arnold was responsible for the death.

Arnold could face the death penalty if convicted at her retrial.

Baby pronounced dead lives after hours in cooler

Mon Aug 18, 3:53 PM

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A stillborn Israeli baby who was pronounced dead by doctors "came back to life" on Monday after spending hours in a hospital refrigerator.

The baby, weighing only 600 grams at birth, spent at least five hours inside one of the hospital's refrigerated storage units, before her parents, who had taken her to be buried, began noticing some movement.

"We unwrapped her and felt she was moving. We didn't believe it at first. Then she began holding my mother's hand, and then we saw her open her mouth," said 26-year-old Faiza Magdoub, the baby's mother.

The baby was pronounced dead several hours earlier, after doctors at Western Galilee hospital in northern Israel were forced to abort her mother's pregnancy because of internal bleeding. Magdoub was 23 weeks into her pregnancy.

"We don't know how to explain this, so when we don't know how to explain things in the medical world we call it a miracle, and this is probably what happened," hospital deputy director Moshe Daniel said.

The baby was then taken to the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit for further treatment, but doctors were not sure how long she will live.

Motti Ravid, a professor of internal medicine, told Israel's Channel 10 that the low temperature inside the cooler had slowed down the baby's metabolism and likely helped her survive.

(Writing by Avida Landau, Editing by Mike Collett-White)

Via

Photographs by Brian Ulrich Via

Roman Laurent

These dresses with their lace collars and sweet messages embroidered on the bodices, were the symbol of the Turkish state, but the girls who wore them were simply little girls.

Girl's death sparks rioting in China: reports

2 hours, 14 minutes ago

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING (Reuters) - Rioters torched a police building and vehicles in southwest China on Saturday, in unrest triggered by allegations of a cover-up over a girl's death, according to Chinese accounts on the Internet.

The reports of the clash in Weng'an County, Guizhou province, could not be immediately verified and government and police did not answer phone calls in the early hours of Sunday.

But the accounts spreading on the Internet, despite China's state censorship, depicted a violent outburst involving thousands of people and lasting several hours.

Residents were enraged by allegations that police had ignored a family's claim that their 15-year old daughter, whose body was found in a river a week ago, appeared to have been raped and possibly murdered, the accounts said.

Blogs linked to the popular Sina.com Chinese website (www.sina.com.cn) showed pictures of thousands of people surrounding a police headquarters, riot police guarding the burning shell of the building, and burnt and overturned police vehicles.

The reports come as China seeks to quell any unrest ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games in August. President Hu Jintao has said ensuring stability is a top priority ahead of the Games.

The accounts said a youth alleged to have attacked the girl may have been the son of a senior county official or police officer.

"Without conducting a full autopsy, the police believed the girl committed suicide by jumping in a river, and they did not take mandatory measures against the suspect and ignored the family's call for a full autopsy," said one account.

"This drew the anger of the family and public and later sparked this conflict."

Repeated calls to the Weng'an County Public Security Bureau were not answered or did not connect, and calls to the county government were not answered after midnight on Saturday. State media carried no reports of the incident.

Some Internet reports said school students were at the forefront of the unrest in the poor, mountainous region.

Chinese websites quickly removed many messages about the incident, but others remained accessible.

"I hope that the Internet will be able to swiftly oversee the government in uncovering the truth as soon as possible and delivering justice to the family," said one message.

(Editing by Andrew Roche)