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A 29-year-old father who butchered his wife in a jealous rage and then hacked to death his two, slumbering toddler daughters was sentenced to 45 years in state prison on Friday, WPIX-TV reported. Before sentencing Miguel Mejia-Ramos, Queens Supreme Court Justice Kenneth Holder delivered an epic tongue-lashing against the killer. “It is truly difficult to find words to describe how sickened people are in this courtroom at the sight of you,” Holder said, saying what he did repulses even the most hardened of criminals. Calling him a “vile and despicable man,” the justice, seething with outrage, said the convicted killer...

WEST CALN TWP., Pa. (WPVI) -- Police say a man and his girlfriend are charged with murdering the girlfriend's 3-year-old son in what a prosecutor described as an "unspeakable act of depravity.". Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan announced the arrests of Gary Fellenbaum and Jillian Tait Thursday morning. He says Fellenbaum, his wife, and girlfriend, Tait, all lived together in a mobile home in West Caln Township and worked at a local Walmart. On Tuesday authorities were called to their residence for the report of an unresponsive child. Responding EMTs found 3-year-old Scott McMillan suffering from bruises, lacerations and...

WEST CALN TWP., Pa. -- Police say a man and his girlfriend are charged with murdering the girlfriend's 3-year-old son in what a prosecutor described as an "unspeakable act of depravity.". Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan announced the arrests of Gary Fellenbaum and Jillian Tait Thursday morning. He says Fellenbaum, his wife, and girlfriend, Tait, all lived together in a mobile home in West Caln Township and worked at a local Walmart. On Tuesday authorities were called to their residence for the report of an unresponsive child. Responding EMTs found 3-year-old Scott McMillan suffering from bruises, lacerations and puncture...

Laylah Petersen was sitting on her grandfather's lap Thursday evening when two people approached the house and fired at it numerous times, with one bullet piercing a wall and striking the girl in the head, police said. The window was scarred with five bullet holes. Four more could be seen in the siding above the window and another below it. "She was our wild child; she was full of life," said Laylah's aunt, Amanda Legler. "Just last week we went trick-or-treating and she told me Ti-Ti Manna, I love you more than science. That was just Laylah, she was so...

In a killing described as "an American horror story," a man and his girlfriend were charged with murder for beating her 3-year-old son to death in their West Caln mobile home, Chester County District Attorney Thomas Hogan said Thursday. Hogan said his office would seek the death penalty against Gary Fellenbaum, 23, and Jillian Tait, 31, for torturing Tait's son Scott McMillan to death over three days with a homemade whip, a curtain rod, a piece of aluminum siding, and their fists, at one point while he was taped to a chair. The boy was discovered Tuesday after he died,...

PORTLAND Ore. (Reuters) - An Oregon mother accused of killing her 6-year-old autistic son by throwing him from a bridge is being held on $1 million bail, a Lincoln County District Court clerk said on Wednesday.

It is no small irony that when I accessed Richard Cohen’s Washington Post column praising terminal brain cancer patient Brittany Maynard’s “courageous” assisted suicide, an ad for Source America appeared with the article featuring Denise Kasten, a woman with Downs Syndrome. “Courageous” mothers typically kill off children like Denise through abortion. Downs syndrome children, after all, live Brittany Maynard’s great fears. They’re limited and dependent as long as they live. That, in a society obsessed with independence defined as personal autonomy, constitutes for many people Lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy of life.” A friend contrasted Brittany Maynard’s suicide with Lauren Hill’s...

A Christian couple in Pakistan have been beaten to death by an angry crowd after being accused of desecrating a Koran, police say. Their bodies were burned at the brick kiln where they worked in the town of Kot Radha Kishan in Punjab province. Police identified the victims only as Shama and Shehzad, AFP reports. Blasphemy is a highly sensitive issue and critics argue the laws are often misused to settle personal scores and that minorities are unfairly targeted. "Yesterday an incident of desecration of the holy Koran took place in the area and today the mob first beat the...

November 2nd was the tenth anniversary of the Islamic assignation of Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam. Islam is the religion of death and slaughter. Those who understand and therefore oppose it are targets of Islam. Often, in formerly free western nations, they are prosecuted for "hate speech." Obama, Kerry and other "leaders" of the international community call Islam the "religion of peace" which is not to be disparaged.Mr. Wilders' address is in English. For those who would prefer to read it, the text is available at New English Review. Here's a short excerpt: Van Gogh warned us in  strong language, as clear as the colors that...

Are you guilty of murder, because you didn’t act based on your “fears alone,” but based on your reasonable fears plus some other motive? The conventional answer is no: The LaFave treatise, for instance, expressly says that if a defender “acts in proper self-defense, he does not lose the defense because he acts with some less admirable motive in addition to that of defending himself, as where he enjoys using force upon his adversary because he hates him.” The comment to Model Penal Code § 3.04, likewise states that self-defense “does not demand that [the belief of necessity of defensive...

The above chart was created from UNODC data. Many comparisons have been made between the homicide rates of the the United States and various European countries.  They have been made between members of the G-8, or among "developed" or "advanced" countries, or "economically developed" countries, though all of these comparisons suffer from various unstated assumptions, typically that "economic" development is the prime predictor of homicide rates., which clearly is not correct. Here is a comparison of homicide rates among new world countries where the official language is English.   This creates an interesting set of common characteristics.   All of these...

A manhunt for a suspected road-rage killer who California police say gunned down an Oakland mother of four on a weekend grocery run ended Wednesday night 100 miles away when a SWAT team descended on a home near Sacramento and arrested a suspect, police said. The suspect, identified by investigators as Carl Stephen Dubose, was nabbed in Elk Grove at about 5 p.m. Wednesday after agents surrounded a home there. Local reports said he had barricaded himself in the home before surrendering, while other accounts said he turned himself in without incident.

Police are investigating after a man reportedly committed suicide by jumping in front of a Long Island Rail Road train after brutally beheading a woman on Long Island Tuesday. A woman in her 60s was found dead on Secatogue Avenue in Faramingdale, near the LIRR station, officials said. Witnesses say she was the victim of the beheading. They told PIX11 News they originally believed it was a Halloween prank.

Las Cruces police were called to the lobby of the Hotel Encanto around 12:30 a.m. Monday, said spokesman Dan Trujillo, where they found Deputy Jeremy Martin, 29, who had been shot "multiple times." Martin, who was found bleeding profusely just outside the elevator, was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, police said. The other deputy, who is being identified only as a 27-year-old man, is in custody, police said. He is being interviewed by detectives and charges are pending, police said.

A man accused of killing two sheriff's deputies and wounding two other people in a bloody chase through Northern California was arrested nearly a decade ago in Utah, but authorities didn't connect him with his criminal past or previous deportations. The man known as Marcelo Marquez and his wife were scheduled to make their first court appearances on Tuesday in a Sacramento County courtroom. Prosecutors in that county and neighboring Placer County were trying to sort out what charges to file after Friday's rampage and said they would announce the counts. No attorneys were listed for either suspect in jail...

Reverend Franklin Graham, son of world renowned evangelical pastor Billy Graham, said that President Barack Obama was “fundamentally mistaken” about radical Islam; questioned why peaceful Muslims do not collectively condemn jihadist terrorism; and argued that Islam “is a false religion” and that “it is impossible for a false religion to be a true religion of peace.” Rev. Franklin Graham also cited examples from a speech he recently gave outside the White House, decrying the actions of followers of a “peaceful religion” who practice “female circumcision,” hijacking, kidnapping, “honor” killings, and decapitation. Rev. Graham commended President Obama for sending some U.S....

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — The goalkeeper and captain of South Africa's national soccer team was fatally shot when armed men broke into the house where he was staying, police said Monday. Senzo Meyiwa was killed Sunday after two gunmen entered a house in Vosloorus township near Johannesburg while an accomplice waited outside, the national police force said on its Twitter account. The three assailants then fled, according to the police service, which offered a reward of nearly $14,000 for information leading to arrests in the case. South African soccer club Orlando Pirates confirmed Meyiwa's death, saying in a statement that it...

(CNN) -- Kyle Nolan did his research -- his mother made sure of that. She didn't want her 18-year-old son heading to the Amazon jungle at all -- let alone, without learning everything he could about the supposed "medicine" with the bizarre name that he insisted would help him turn his young life around. "I really tried to discourage him ... I kept telling him over and over, there are no easy answers in life," Ingeborg Oswald said. But she knew she couldn't stop him. Overshadowed by his "overachieving" triplet brother and sister, Oswald said Kyle "was going through this...

He knew the way even in the dark. Murder suspect Jacob Ferrero was riding with Columbus police homicide detectives about 2 Wednesday morning. He directed them east across Franklin County, away from the Far West Side apartment that he shared with Samantha Greenlee, a 22-year-old woman who had told her family she was 3 months pregnant with Ferrero’s child. Just east of Madison Christian Church at 3565 Bixby Rd. in Groveport, Ferrero directed detectives to stop and pull into a gravel drive. It was the church’s rustic outdoor chapel, just a few wooden benches and an altar clustered among a...

The minute they heard their son was one of the missing normalista students believed to have been killed by police in Mexico, Manuel and Hilda González got on a bus and traveled nine hours to make it here, the Raul Isidro Burgos Ayotzinapa Normal School, in the southern state of Guerrero. Their son, César Manuel González Hernández, is 19 and a second-year teaching student at Ayotzinapa, a Revolutionary-era rural teachers college known nationally for the ardently leftist politics that guide everything the students do and study. César is now among the 43 normalista students missing since September 26, when a...