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The Shenandoah police chief and two officers under his command are charged with orchestrating a cover-up in the fatal beating of a Mexican immigrant by altering evidence or lying to the FBI in a hate crimes case against two popular football players. The former Shenandoah High School athletes, 19-year-old Derrick Donchak and 18-year-old Brandon Piekarsky, have now been charged with a federal hate crime, accused of beating Luis Ramirez in a park on a night in July 2008 as they headed home from a party, the Justice Department said Tuesday in Washington. State prosecutors who tried unsuccessfully to win ethnic...

POTTSVILLE — Two Shenandoah teenagers were acquitted late Friday night of killing illegal Mexican immigrant Luis Ramirez Zavala. Brandon J. Piekarsky, 17, of Shenandoah Heights, and Derrick M. Donchak, 19, of Shenandoah, were convicted of simple assault. The Schuylkill County jury also convicted Donchak on three counts of corruption of minors and three counts of furnishing alcohol to minors. The defendants hugged each other after the verdicts were read, and friends and family members clapped. Jurors deliberated for nearly eight hours before reaching their verdict around 10:45 p.m., Friday. The all-white jury of six men and six women began deliberating...

A 23-year-old Westminster woman who died after being beaten outside a Santa Ana nightclub earlier this year has saved the lives of countless others because of her desire to be an organ donor. Kim Pham was violently attacked outside The Crosby on Jan. 18. Days later, she died of complications from blunt force trauma to the head. “After two doctors announced that she was dead, we didn’t want to let go,” Pham’s sister, Katie Nguyen, said. When tests confirmed there was no brain activity, however, the Pham family began preparing. Not for a funeral, but to ensure that Pham’s last...

A conservative-leaning nonprofit, the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU), recently filed a federal lawsuit over allegations that Zavala County is “failing to make a reasonable effort to conduct voter list maintenance programs.” The ACRU claims the county—which supported the re-election of President Obama by 83%--allegedly holds a 105 percent voter registration rate. Lead litigator for the case, former DOJ attorney J. Christian Adams, argues to Breitbart Texas that despite Zavala County’s smaller population—voter roll maintenance failures can distort voter turnout and total tabulations in local races. ... The filed federal complaint claims, “Voter rolls maintained by the Defendant for Zavala...

The violent late-night fight that ended with the death of a 23-year-old California woman might have been sparked by a photobomb, a source told the LA Times. According to a friend, Kim Pham accidentally walked right in front of a camera while another group was snapping photos outside of The Crosby lounge in Santa Ana on Saturday. A verbal argument erupted between Pham's friends and the other group, which quickly dissolved into a brawl as the young woman was pummeled into the ground. Pham did not survive the beating. She was declared brain dead and taken off life support Tuesday.

Ecuadorean Preacher Fined $3,000, Banned From Politics for Calling Homosexuality ‘Immoral’ March 14, 2013 | Filed under: Highlights,Law & Government,Life & Society,Persecution,Top Stories,World | By: Heather Clark <p> An evangelical preacher in Ecuador who ran for president earlier this year has been sentenced after he was found guilty of violating the country’s electoral code by speaking against homosexual behavior.Nelson Zavala has been fined for more than $3,000 and banned from running for office or being involved with any political party for one year because of his speech, which reportedly occurred in February.Zavala is being penalized for comments that he made...

Through his well-chronicled derelictions of duty, Roger Mahony, the cardinal emeritus of Los Angeles, placed a number of ticking time bombs near his successor's feet. Last week, one of them went off. Archbishop Jose Gomez, who replaced Mahony last year, announced that Los Angeles auxiliary bishop Gabino Zavala had submitted his resignation to the Vatican after fessing up about two children he fathered years before.The media fatuously describes this scandal as Archbishop Gomez's first "controversy." But it belongs entirely to his predecessor. Cardinal Mahony appointed Zavala to his position in 1994. Did Cardinal Mahony know about Zavala's children? (The Los...