Texas Crowd Kills Man After Car Hits Kid      
Jun 20 11:55 AM US/Eastern
     
                                   
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - A crowd attacked and killed a passenger in a vehicle that had struck and injured a child, police said Wednesday.

Police believe 2,000 to 3,000 people were in the area for a Juneteenth celebration when the attack occurred Tuesday night. The man who was killed had been trying to stop the group from attacking the vehicle's driver when the crowd turned on him, authorities said.

The Austin Police Department identified the victim as David Rivas Morales, 40. The child was taken to a hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

Police spokeswoman Toni Chovonetz said she had no further information, including how many people were involved.

The driver was able to get away is cooperating with investigators, police said.

Juneteenth marks the day Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston in 1865 to share news of the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves two years earlier on Jan. 1, 1863.

If you want to play WWF with the bad guys

"HELEN, Ga. - A former Marine killed a bear with a single blow — by tossing a log at its head.

The bear had snatched the family's cooler from their campsite in a national forest in northern Georgia. The 300-pound black bear was taking its loot back into the woods when Chris Everhart's 6-year-old son threw a shovel at it.

Everhart says the bear started charging, so he grabbed the first thing he could find, which happened to be a log from the family's firewood.

Everhart lobbed the chunk of wood, hitting the bear in the head and killing it.

"(I) threw it at it and it happened to hit the bear in the head," Everhart said. "I thought it just knocked it out but it actually ended up killing the bear."

The close call earned Everhart bragging rights — and a ticket. Park authorities say he didn't properly secure his campsite."

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19374624

www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=464921...

Russia lays claim to the North Pole - and all its gas, oil, and diamonds
Last updated at 15:38pm on 28th June 2007

Russian leader Vladimir Putin is trying to Annex the North Pole

His audacious argument that an underwater Russian ridge is linked to the North Pole is likely to lead to an international outcry.

Some commentators have already observed it is further evidence of growing Russian assertiveness under its authoritarian president.

The Russian media trumpeted the findings of a Moscow scientific mission to the region which boasts "sensational" geological discoveries enabling the Kremlin to make the territorial claim.

Populist newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda - a cheerleader for Putin - printed a map of the North Pole showing a "new addition" to Russia, a triangle five times the size of Britain with twice as much oil as Saudi Arabia.

The six-week mission on a nuclear ice-breaker claimed that the underwater Lomonsov ridge is geologically linked to the Siberian continental platform - and similar in structure.

The detailed findings are likely to be put to the United Nations in a bid to bring it under the Kremlin noose, and provide the bonanza of an estimated 10 billion tonnes of gas and oil deposits as well as significant sources of diamonds, gold, tin, manganese, nickel, lead and platinum.

Under current international law, the countries ringing the Arctic - Russia, Canada, the US, Norway, Denmark (Greenland) - are limited to a 200 mile economic zone around their coastlines.

Currently, a UN convention stipulates that none of these countries can claim jurisdiction of the Arctic seabed because the geological structure does not match that of the surrounding continental shelves.

The region is administered by the International Seabed Authority - the authority now being challenged by Moscow.

A previous attempt to claim the oil and gas resources beyond its 200 miles zone five years ago was rejected - but this time Moscow intends to make a far more serious submission to the U.N. Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.

The head of the government-funded expedition Valery Kaminsky, director of the All-Russian Oceanic Scientific Research Institute, said he has key photographic evidence to prove the geological claims. "These are very interesting facts for the world community," he said.

Yuri Deryabin, head of the Institute of North European Countries, said: "I estimate Russia's chances to gets its piece of the Arctic pie highly enough - but the main battle is just starting." He acknowledged the negotiations would be "complicated".

The claim is likely to provoke an outcry from green groups but there is also Russian opposition.

Sergei Priamikov, of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, said the notion was "strange" and warned other countries could make counter claims.

Canada "could say that the Lomonosov ridge is part of the Canadian shelf, which means Russia should in fact belong to Canada, together with the whole of Eurasia", he observed drily.

A diplomatic source said that Russia was "seeking to secure its grip on oil and gas supplies for decades to come. Putin wants a strong Russia, and Western dependence for oil and gas supplies is a key part of his strategy. He no longer cares if his strategy upsets the West".

DEARBORN, Mich. (AP) - A police officer in this Detroit suburb was allowed to resign after admitting he took marijuana from criminal suspects and, with his wife, baked it into brownies.

The department's decision not to prosecute former Cpl. Edward Sanchez left a bad taste in the mouth of at least one city official, who vowed to investigate.

"If you're a cop and you're arresting people and you're confiscating the marijuana and keeping it yourself, that's bad. That's real bad," City Councilman Doug Thomas told the Detroit Free Press for a story Thursday.

"That's like apprehending a bank robber and keeping some of the money for yourself."

The newspaper said Sanchez, who resigned last year, declined to comment Wednesday.

Police Cmdr. Jeff Geisinger left a phone message with a Detroit television station saying Sanchez resigned during an internal investigation. Geisinger did not return subsequent calls asking why Sanchez was not prosecuted.

The department's investigation began with a 911 call from Sanchez's home on April 21, 2006. On a 5-inute tape of the call, obtained by the Free Press under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act, Sanchez told an emergency dispatcher he thought he and his wife were overdosing on marijuana.

"I think we're dying," he said. "We made brownies and I think we're dead, I really do."

Sanchez later told police investigators that his wife took the marijuana out of his police vehicle while he was sleeping. In a subsequent interview, he admitted he got the marijuana out of the car himself, put it in the brownie mix and ate the brownies.

BEIJING - China on Tuesday executed the former head of its food and drug watchdog who had become a symbol of the country’s wide-ranging problems on product safety.

Zheng Xiaoyu’s execution was confirmed by State Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman Yan Jianyang at a news conference held to highlight efforts to improve China’s track record on food and drug safety.

Such cases “have brought shame to our administration and revealed serious problems. We need to seriously reflect on what lessons we can draw from such cases,” Yan said about Zheng and a separate case involving Cao Wenzhuang, the administration’s former pharmaceutical registration department director.

BEIJING - They're flush with pride in Chongqing, where a recently opened porcelain palace features an Egyptian facade, soothing music and more than 1,000 toilets spread out over 30,000 square feet.

Officials in the southwestern Chinese city plan to ask Guinness World Records to have the free four-story public bathroom listed as the world's largest, state-run China Central Television reported Friday.

"We are spreading toilet culture. People can listen to gentle music and watch TV," said Lu Xiaoqing, an official with the Yangrenjie, or "Foreigners Street," tourist area where the bathroom is located. "After they use the bathroom they will be very, very happy."

Footage aired on CCTV showed people milling about the sprawling facility and washing their hands at trough sinks. For open-aired relief, there's a cluster of stalls without a roof.

Some urinals are uniquely shaped, including ones inside open crocodile mouths and several topped by the bust of a woman resembling the Virgin Mary.

There are also plans to build a supermarket nearby, which will sell toilet-related items, CCTV reported.

Swedish Woman Gets Superfast Internet

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- She is a latecomer to the information superhighway, but 75-year-old Sigbritt Lothberg is now cruising the Internet with a dizzying speed. Lothberg's 40 gigabits-per-second fiber-optic connection in Karlstad is believed to be the fastest residential uplink in the world, Karlstad city officials said.

In less than 2 seconds, Lothberg can download a full-length movie on her home computer - many thousand times faster than most residential connections, said Hafsteinn Jonsson, head of the Karlstad city network unit.

Jonsson and Lothberg's son, Peter, worked together to install the connection.

The speed is reached using a new modulation technique that allows the sending of data between two routers placed up to 1,240 miles apart, without any transponders in between, Jonsson said.

"We wanted to show that that there are no limitations to Internet speed," he said.

Peter Lothberg, who is a networking expert, said he wanted to demonstrate the new technology while providing a computer link for his mother.

"She's a brand-new Internet user," Lothberg said by phone from California, where he lives. "She didn't even have a computer before."

His mother isn't exactly making the most of her high-speed connection. She only uses it to read Web-based newspapers.

College Application Causes Bomb Scare

Here's a tip for aspiring college students: Make sure your applications don't warrant a visit from the bomb squad.

Emergency crews evacuated an Eastern Illinois University building Friday, after a campus postal carrier discovered a disheveled-looking package heading for the college's admissions office.

"There was no return address, it was poorly written, poorly addressed to the university, there were misspellings," school spokeswoman Vicki Woodard said Saturday. "There was some tape over it. Just the overall appearance was rather strange."

The stuffed-and-stained envelope was strange enough that police alerted the bomb squad.

Explosives investigators X-rayed the package and blocked off a nearby street before they discovered the envelope contained only an application to the 12,500-student school.

Woodard said the application came from somewhere in northern Illinois, but wouldn't comment on whether the bomb scare would affect the prospective student's chances of admission.

"I'm sure it'll be processed like any other application at this point," she said.

Actually, the population is closer to 6.4 billion these days.

Taos father upset after his sons, friends removed from Amtrak
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TAOS, N.M. -- Four children, ages 12 to 15, were removed from an Amtrak train in the dark, 600 miles from home, after accusations that one of them stole an iPod.

No charges were filed against any of the children, who spent the night at the Kingman, Ariz., police station after Amtrak put them off the train at 2 a.m. Saturday as they returned home from California. Police let the four stay in the conference room until a parent retrieved them.

Zackary Sharfin, 13, and his 12-year-old brother Christopher had traveled with family friends Carley Maestas, 15, and her 13-year-old brother Anthony to visit the Maestas' children's mother in Fresno.

The brothers' father, Peter Sharfin, said the problem likely started when Christopher lost his cell phone and Zackary began looking for it.

A Kingman police report also said Zackary was accused of stealing a cell phone and of touching a child.

Zackary said he was walking through the train, looking for his brother's phone, and bumped into a girl by accident. He also said he found the iPod in the train's game room and was trying to turn it in.

Peter Sharfin accused Amtrak of overreacting and abusing the children.

"I felt like it was child endangerment," he said. "These are children alone at night."

Sharfin said all four children have their own iPods and would not have been stealing.

Amtrak spokeswoman Vernae Graham said conductors have the right to remove passengers and that they always call police to pick them up at the next station.

Graham said the conductor removed the kids for disorderly conduct, although she did not have details.

"All I know is that it was disorderly conduct, and that could have been a variety of behaviors," Graham said. "It takes a lot for someone to be removed from a train."

Sharfin said the children didn't know where they were.

"They were hundreds of miles from home," he said. "It was dark. Their parents weren't there."

Graham said the children "weren't just put off in the middle of nowhere, mind you. They were put off in the custody of the police department."

Kingman police Sgt. Rusty Cooper said the children were never alone.

The conductor called the Mojave County sheriff because the alleged theft occurred near Needles, Calif. Sheriff's deputies could not get to the station, so Amtrak called city police, who waited at the closed station with the children for the deputies.

When they didn't show, officers took the four to the police station. Cooper said various officers took care of them there.

The Mojave County Sheriff's Department said there's no criminal case because when the train left the station, it took any complaining parties and witnesses with it.

Sharfin said Amtrak has called several times, but that he does not want to talk to them.

Faulty Forensic 'Experts' Sending the Innocent to Jail

At the end of August, there will be a hearing in Mississippi in the murder trial of 33-year-old Kennedy Brewer.

Brewer stands accused of the 1991 murder of Christine Jackson, the 3-year-old daughter of his then-girlfriend.

Brewer was initially convicted of raping and strangling Jackson to death in 1995. He was sentenced to death, and has spent the last 12 years on death row.

Brewer was convicted largely due to the testimony of Dr. Michael West. West, a dentist in Forest County, Miss., is a self-described forensic odontologist, or bite mark analyst. He has testified in dozens of cases over the years, almost always for the prosecution. West testified at Brewer's trial that he found 19 bite marks on Jackson's body which matched Brewer's teeth.

West claims he could make the identification because of a chip in one of Brewer's top teeth, and because his upper teeth are sharper than his lower teeth. A defense expert countered that the marks were actually insect bites — the result of Jackson's body being outside for two days before it was found.

The jury found Dr. West more credible. Forensic odontology is an imprecise field, and often draws scrutiny from other forensics experts. There's a troublingly long list of cases in which someone convicted on the word of a bite mark expert was later exonerated with improved DNA testing. In 1999, one forensic odontologist tested his colleagues with a sample crime scene bite mark during a conference workshop. Six of 10 wrongly traced the bite mark to an innocent person.

But even in an already imprecise field, Dr. West has taken forensic odontology to bizarre, megalomaniacal depths. West claims to have invented a system he modestly calls "The West Phenomenon," in which he dons a pair of yellow goggles and, with the aid of a blue laser, says he can identify bite marks, scratches, and other marks on a corpse that no one else can see—not even other forensics experts.

Conveniently, he claims his unique method can't be photographed or reproduced, which he says makes his opinions unimpeachable by other experts.

Using the "West Phenomenon," West once claimed to have found bite marks on a decomposed woman's breast that previous pathologists had missed. In another case, he claimed to have positively traced a half-eaten sandwich at the crime scene to the defendant. The defendant was convicted, but the case was later tossed out when West admitted to accidentally disposing of the sandwich after studying it. Because no one could replicate his methods, West said, the sandwich was no longer necessary.

He has allegedly found bite marks on bodies that had been submerged in swamps for weeks, and on others that had been buried for well over a year.

West has also been influential in preventing the state of Mississippi from adding some much-needed oversight to its forensic experts. In the mid-1990s, he served as the elected coroner for Forest County, Miss. At the time, the state medical examiner in Mississippi, a doctor named Emily Ward, was trying to institute some standards in the way autopsies were conducted in the state, including requiring minimal training and continuing education for the state's coroners.

West, with the help District Attorney Forest Allgood—the man who prosecuted Kennedy Brewer, and who has relied on West's testimony to secure convictions for years—led a revolt against Ward that ended with her resignation. The position of state medical examiner in Mississippi has remained vacant ever since.

West has received his share of media scrutiny, including exposés in "Newsweek" and on "60 Minutes." A 1994 article in the National Law Journal reported that when one defense attorney asked West on the stand about his error rate, he replied that it's "something less than my savior, Jesus Christ."

He has compared his virtuosity in bite mark analysis to the musical talent of Itzhak Perlman. In his "60 Minutes" interview, he boasted of a phrase he uses at trial that he considers his trademark: "Indeed, and without a doubt." It expresses a level of certainty that other forensic experts say simply isn't compatible with sound scientific analysis.

Defense attorney John Holdridge, now with the American Civil Liberties Union, told the National Law Journal, "I know of five other convictions he was involved in, all of which were death penalty cases." After the media exposés and persistent work of Holdridge, West resigned from two professional organizations, and was suspended for a year from another.

Despite all of this, Mississippi's State Supreme Court affirmed Kennedy Brewer's conviction in 1997 in an opinion that validated Dr. Michael West and his status as a bite mark expert, even while acknowledging his one-year suspension from the American Board of Forensic Odontologists (still in effect at the time of the Brewer trial), and that his testimony was thrown out in the bologna sandwich case.

Nevertheless, the court determined, Dr. West possessed the "knowledge, skill, experience, training and education necessary to qualify as an expert in forensic odontology."

In 2002, Brewer's lawyers were able to get the state to test the DNA of the semen found inside Christine Jackson's body. At the time of his original trial, the sample was too small for testing, and Brewer's lawyers had to fight to keep it from being destroyed. DNA technology unavailable during the trial found traces of semen in the little girl belonging to two men, but neither of them was Kennedy Brewer. His attorneys are now looking into a similar murder of another little girl at about the same time and in the same area that Christine Jackson was killed.

Based on this new evidence, Brewer was awarded a new trial, but prosecutors still refused to exonerate him or release him from prison. Instead, they're going to try him again. Dr. West has said he stands by his analysis, which prosecutors say suggests Brewer was still in some way involved in Jackson's death (when reached at his private dental practice, West said he was "not interested" in an interview for this article).

District Attorney Allgood told the Chicago Tribune in 2004 that he would "absolutely" use Dr. West again in the new trial.

The case has since been reassigned to a special prosecutor named Ben Creekmore. Creekmore has since taken the death penalty off the table, but has indicated he will still use Dr. West's testimony in Brewer's new trial (there are other problems with Dr. West's examination of Jackson, including a video never shown to the original jury that the trial court judge noted showed West and his assistants acting "rather callous" during the examination, blaring "inappropriate" music during the procedure, and "carrying on conversations" unrelated to the examination).

The Kennedy Brewer case highlights a serious flaw in our adversarial criminal justice system — the use of expert testimony in complicated, advanced scientific fields. A charlatan like Dr. West, who has little respect from his peers, can with charisma and personality convince a jury to take his word over that of an expert far more careful and deliberate in his analysis. In some cases, indigent defendants can't afford to hire their own experts at all, leaving a state's expert like West as the only testimony on the available forensic evidence.

Forensic scandals have been troublingly common of late, with phony experts and fake results recently uncovered in Virginia, Maryland, Kansas, Illinois, and Texas, to name just a few. Courts need to take a more active role in weeding out the Michael Wests of the world before they ever take the witness stand.

But professional organizations also need to be more vigilant about policing their own. Dr. West's peers should more vocally have questioned his methods long before he was permitted to testify more than 70 times in courts across the country. One would think they'd step up their standards to protect the integrity and reputation of their respective fields. But these continuing scandals suggest another, far more important reason: to prevent bad science from sending innocent people to prison.

Russian dissidents called mentally ill

MURMANSK, Russia - Heavy sedatives keep Larisa Arap languishing in a woozy haze at a mental asylum, the victim not of a troubled mind, her family says, but of a Soviet-era practice that continues to muzzle and punish dissent in today's Russia.

Earlier this summer, Arap, an activist with former chess champion Garry Kasparov's opposition movement, co-wrote an article that alleged abusive practices at local psychiatric clinics. When Arap appeared at a Murmansk clinic to pick up a routine medical certificate July 5, a doctor called police and had her taken to a local asylum.

The doctors handling Arap's case have made it clear why they want her committed to a mental institution, says Arap's daughter, Taisiya.

"One of the doctors asked whether I thought it was normal to write such things," Taisiya Arap said. "She said, 'It's not possible to write such things. It's forbidden.'"

The Soviet Union routinely locked up dissidents in asylums, a practice that attracted worldwide condemnation because of the protests of Andrei Sakharov and other human-rights activists. Today, 16 years after the Soviet collapse, authorities are increasingly returning to psychiatry to suppress political opponents or punish activists, according to human-rights organizations and other watchdog groups.

The trend reflects a government that has yet to fully divest itself from a Soviet way of thinking and governing, says Yuri Savenko, president of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia.

"We're returning to this Soviet scenario when psychiatric institutions are used as punitive instruments," said Savenko. "I call this not even punitive psychiatry but police psychiatry, when the main aim is to protect the state rather than to treat sick people."

Soviet psychiatrists revised definitions of mental illnesses, describing paranoia as an obsession with "the struggle for truth and justice," says Vladimir Bukovsky, a writer and dissident who spent 12 years in Soviet labor camps and asylums.

Pumped with drugs

"Delusion of reform -- that was another Soviet definition of psychological illness," said Bukovsky, now 64 and living in London.

Arrested in the early 1960s for arranging poetry meetings in the center of Moscow, Bukovsky spent nearly two years of his imprisonment in an asylum in Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg. Doctors heavily sedated inmates to control them.

"Once they pump you with drugs, they can forget about you," Bukovsky said. "I saw people who basically were asleep for years. It's like being poisoned. Every morning I asked myself, 'Am I still sane?'"

Bukovsky, who has declared his intent to run for president in the March 2008 election, says he fears a return of the authoritarian mind-set that imprisoned him. "As far as the current lot in power is concerned," he said, "using psychiatry for political purposes is a perfectly acceptable way of dealing with opponents."

Russian law allows authorities to commit someone to a psychiatric institution if the person represents a danger to himself or others, or is incapable of caring for himself. Ultimately, a judge must approve the forced placement of someone in an asylum.

In practice, however, judges routinely accept the psychiatric evaluation submitted by local authorities without question, and rarely allow the individual to submit an independent psychiatric evaluation, Savenko says.

Court-ordered psychiatric examinations are often conducted by the Serbsky Institute for Social and Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow, notorious during the Soviet era as an instrument of Premier Nikita Khrushchev's brand of psychiatric repression.

Man Accused Of Killing 6-Yr.-Old Boy With Meat Cleaver Over "Video Games"

A ghastly case of murder and senseless motives has shocked a U.S. state that's used to the extreme. Police in the California city of Thousand Oaks have arrested a cab driver accused of attacking and killing a six-year-old boy with a meat cleaver. The alleged reason for his rage? The child was playing too many video games.

The case began on Sunday night, when the mother of little Sev'n Molina tried desperately to prevent the blows from raining down on her only child. But authorities contend 27-year-old Calvin Sharp's fury was just too strong and he couldn't be stopped.

Sandra Ruiz and Sharp had apparently split up after living together for some time, when an argument broke out about how often the child sat in front of the TV playing video games. As startled neighbours would later recount, the boy burst out of the apartment and into the building's courtyard, with Sharp holding a meat cleaver in hot pursuit. Witnesses heard him screaming "Die! Die!" as he allegedly began bludgeoning the helpless youngster.

Neighbours who tried to intervene maintain Sharp threatened them with the deadly blade, even as the attack continued. The 33-year-old Ruiz also suffered severe cuts, with reports indicating one of her hands was nearly severed by the blows.

Finally, a heroic older woman tackled the accused and two men jumped into the fray and were able to subdue him and hold him down for police. They were forced to Taser the man before taking him into custody.

An autopsy showed the boy died from sharp force head injuries, while his mother remains in critical condition on life support. Authorities believe it was a domestic dispute that went horribly wrong, but they can't account for why the self-employed cab driver allegedly went into his rage and couldn't seem to control himself. It's expected he'll be charged with first degree murder in the boy's death and two counts of attempted murder, depending on whether the mother recovers.