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A Turkish woman accused of cutting off her lover's penis must wait 18 months for a verdict and sentencing while a court determines whether his re-attached penis still functions, a court source said on Thursday.

KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Making good on a threat of election day violence, the Taliban sliced off the index fingers of at least two people in Kandahar province, according to a vote monitoring group. After they cast their ballots, the fingers of Afghan voters are stained with ink to prevent them from voting multiple times. The fingers of the two women in Kandahar, a stronghold of the Taliban, were cut off because they voted, said Nader Naderi of the Free and Fair Election Foundation. The Taliban had vowed to disrupt Thursday's election and the risk was too great for some...

MIAMI (AP) -- A teenager was arrested early Sunday and accused of committing a string of gruesome cat mutilation deaths that had horrified residents of his Miami area community, authorities said. .... Some of the dead cats were missing fur and appeared to have been cut with a sharp, straight instrument, police said. .... Tyler Weinman, 18, was taken into custody early Sunday at a party, police said. Weinman was charged with 19 counts of animal cruelty, 19 counts of improperly disposing of an animal body and four counts of burglary.

As transgender activists protested outside the American Psychiatric Association (APA) meeting, speakers at the meeting were presenting on the same topic: gender identity disorder (GID). Some of their words would add clinical weight to the political slogans. Some of the speakers are activists themselves, including Rebecca Allison, MD, cardiologist who is transgender, widely published author Sarah Hoffman, whose son is gender variant, and Hewlett-Packard engineer Kelley Winters, PhD, founder of GID Reform Advocates. Winters1 has called on the APA to use the DSM-V revision to affirm that “in the absence of dysphoria, gender identity and expression that vary from assigned...

A Fulton County jury has awarded $1.8 million in damages to a boy whose penis was severed in a botched circumcision. The state court jury gave another $500,000 to the boy’s mother in the decision rendered Friday. The case involves a child, identified only as D.P. Jr., who was born at South Fulton Medical Center in 2004. In a suit filed two years later, his mother contended that the doctor who circumcised him removed too much tissue and that his pediatrician failed to respond when a nurse complained of excessive bleeding. The tip of the penis was placed in...

Machete-wielding gangs in South Africa are mutilating young people to provide body parts for the traditional medicine market, an investigation has found. The practice has brought terror to parts of South Africa, where it is estimated that at least 300 people are killed each year for the medicine, known as muti. One victim was Fortune Khumalo, a boy of nine, who was attacked as he relieved himself in bushes.

Cops save 45 girls from tribal abuse   By ANTHONY FRANCE Crime Reporter Published: Today     COPS rescued 45 British girls from horrific African tribal abuse in the past year, it has been revealed. Kids as young as four have had their genitals sewn up because parents believe it will protect their virginity until marriage. The practice is popular in many African countries but banned in the UK. Scotland Yard believes that 6,500 girls in London are at risk. Ages of victims rescued range from a few days old to 16. The total saved by the Met’s Project...

We can't tell you her name but she was able to tell a jury about what happened to her. And her determination to recount some of the most incredible savagery ever heard in a courtroom is testimony to her courage and her desire to see justice done. The recall of a Columbia University student that unfolded in a New York City hall of justice on Monday was almost too hard to hear. The 24-year-old victim sat in the witness box with her jaw clenched and her mind focused, as she retold the unimaginable ordeal she claims she suffered at the...

REGINA -- A macabre mystery that pops up around the world has surfaced once again on a secluded Saskatchewan farm. The most recent case of cattle mutilation occurred in the Stockholm area, just yards away from where Heather Harris and her husband slept. Harris was out tending the cattle the next day when she made the grisly discovery. "It's hard to describe what she looked like ...," Harris said, recalling finding the cow's corpse. "I told my husband, 'You don't even want to see this.' " The pregnant cow was missing its rectum, female organs, udder, navel, top and bottom...

<p>BAGHDAD _U.S. authorities in Baghdad have received five severed fingers belonging to four Americans and an Austrian who were taken hostage more than a year ago in Iraq , U.S. officials said Wednesday.</p> <p>The FBI is investigating the grisly development, and the families of the five kidnapped contractors have been notified, American officials said on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the case publicly.</p>

PARIS, France (AP) -- Police said Friday that a body found in the River Seine was that of Katoucha Niane, a former top model for Yves Saint Laurent and other top designers who spoke out against female genital mutilation after quitting the catwalks. The body of former top model Katoucha Niane has been found in the river Seine. 1 of 2 Paris judicial police said her body was found Thursday near the Garigliano bridge in Paris. Police said an autopsy showed no signs of foul play, pointing to the possibility that she may have accidentally fallen into the river. She...

When a girl is taken — usually by her mother — to a free circumcision event held each spring in Bandung, Indonesia, she is handed over to a small group of women who, swiftly and yet with apparent affection, cut off a small piece of her genitals. Sponsored by the Assalaam Foundation, an Islamic educational and social-services organization, circumcisions take place in a prayer center or an emptied-out elementary-school classroom where desks are pushed together and covered with sheets and a pillow to serve as makeshift beds. The procedure takes several minutes. There is little blood involved. Afterward, the girl’s...

The first time a knife was put to Anna Alwoch's face, her lips were hacked off by rebels. The next two times, sharp blades were used by surgeons to rebuild her mouth -- and the process is almost done. Alwoch (55) is on a list of candidates for plastic surgery to repair her face, along with other victims who were mutilated by members of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda. The LRA massacred thousands and abducted over 10 000 children to be soldiers and sex slaves during its 20-year rebellion against the central government. More than two...

The mutilation and killing of felines in San Antonio has reached an unprecedented level, officials say, with 11 incidents reported over the past three weeks. Most recently, on Wednesday morning, the remains of a cat were found at Northampton Drive and Wurzbach Road, in a manner not unlike the others that have been found in the city. Each had been cut with a "scalpel-like" instrument, veterinarian Melissa Draper said. "Someone is displaying them," Animal Control Director Jeff Hale said of the felines, adding that the department is investigating Wednesday's killing as the latest in a string that might have been...

KAFR Al MANSHI ABOU HAMAR, Egypt — The men in this poor farming community were seething. A 13-year-old girl was brought to a doctor’s office to have her clitoris removed, a surgery considered necessary here to preserve chastity and honor. The girl died, but that was not the source of the outrage. After her death, the government shut down the clinic, and that got everyone stirred up.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Women who get cosmetic breast implants are nearly three times as likely to commit suicide as other women, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday. The study, published in the Annals of Plastic Surgery, reinforces several others that have shown women who have breast enlargements have higher suicide risks. Loren Lipworth of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee and colleagues followed up on 3,527 Swedish women who had cosmetic breast implant surgery between 1965 and 1993. They looked at death certificates to analyze causes of death among women with breast implants. Only 24 of the women had committed...

Excerpt: ...This is not a choice," he said Friday. "It's something you try to deny and hide, but as time goes on, as you become more miserable in your own skin, you just can't take it anymore." Cummings said he was 3 when he realized he was born in the wrong body. His parents didn't understand. After they came to South Florida from Cuba, Maritza gravitated to boys' activities, like weightlifting, and she joined the Army. It didn't help. She abused drugs and alcohol, attempted suicide in her 20s. Then she found out that there was a medical explanation and...

Origins: On 6 January 2007, Knoxville, Tennessee, residents Christopher Newsom, Jr., 23, and Channon Christian, 21, went out for a dinner date at a local restaurant, then headed to a friend's house to watch a movie. They never came back. When the couple had failed to return by the following morning, their parents notified police. Christopher Newsom's body was found near some railroad tracks in East Knoxville that afternoon, but Channon Christian remained missing. A trace run on Channon's cell phone helped authorities locate her abandoned vehicle the next day, and fingerprints raised from an envelope inside the automobile led...

What does it take for a healthy man to choose to have his testicles removed? Roger Davies is one of a surprising number who have found salvation in castration. Like many sensitive teenagers, Roger Davies felt different from his peers. He wasn’t into sport and abhorred the aggression he saw in other boys. When, at the age of 22, he still hadn’t grown out of his sense of isolation, he took radical action: he travelled to America and underwent castration. “I’m really happy with who I am now,” says the 25-year-old cleaner and caterer from Southport. “I don’t have any...

Two held for killing & chopping man in 'love triangle' By Zheng Caixiong (China Daily) Updated: 2007-01-15 06:47 GUANGZHOU: Police have detained a young man and a woman suspected of dismembering a man and sending his body parts to three different cities by post. The man is an employee of a local logistics company, while the woman is a prostitute, according to the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis News. "The case is thought to involve a murder for love," the newspaper quoted a police source as saying yesterday. The victim was a 50-year-old man who had once visited the prostitute, the newspaper...