JERUSALEM – An Israeli military delegation has canceled an official visit to Britain, officials said Tuesday, the latest in a string of politicians and army officials to put off travel to the U.K. because of fears of war crimes prosecution.

Israel complained that the practice, spearheaded by pro-Palestinian activists, is harming relations, and Britain’s visiting attorney general said an urgent solution must be found.

The Israelis called off their trip because their British army hosts could not guarantee they would not be arrested, the Israeli officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. Neither the Israeli military nor the British government would comment.   MORE>>>

srael’s military has admitted forensic pathologists once harvested organs from dead bodies – both Israeli and Palestinian – without the permission of their families.

Four months ago Israel threatened legal action against a Swedish newspaper which published claims that Israeli soldiers had killed Palestinians to harvest their organs.

But now, Israeli television has broadcast part of an interview with the former head of Israel’s Abu Kabir forensic institute who has acknowledged pathologists did harvest heart valves, skin, corneas and bones from Israeli soldiers and civilians, Palestinians and foreign workers. (more…)

LEWISTON — In the early evening on the first day of summer, a large group of Somali boys approached a woman on the corner of Ash and Pierce streets. According to police reports, they intimidated the woman and slapped her in the back of the head before scattering into the downtown.

Five days later, shortly after midnight, a man was accosted by a group of Somali boys outside the Big Apple on Main Street. Police reports say several members of the group punched the man and took money from him. They then fled in a car.

Later that night, a woman in her late 60s was beaten by a group of Somali boys and relieved of cash while walking in Kennedy Park.

Five nights later, another man was jumped by a group of similar description. He resisted the gang and was beaten badly. He required surgery. (more…)

LIMA (Reuters) – Peruvian police said on Thursday they had broken up a gang that allegedly killed dozens of people and sold their fat to buyers who used it to make cosmetics.

Four Peruvians were arrested on suspicion of kidnapping, murder and trafficking in human fat.

The group stored the fat it collected in used soda and water bottles, which police showed reporters.

“We have people detained who have declared and stated how they murdered people with the aim being to extract their fat in rudimentary labs and sell it,” said Police Commander Angel Toldeo.

In addition to those taken into custody, police said they were searching for others who bought fat from the gang or might have worked with it.   MORE>>>

You can get 10-20 years in jail for a fight described as a ‘hate crime’, while terrorists get less than 10 years for plotting to blow up buildings.

Four men described as soldiers in a terrorism plot to destroy Chicago’s Sears Tower and bomb FBI offices have each been sentenced to less than a decade behind bars, far less than federal prosecutors sought.

U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard, in sentencing hearings Wednesday and Thursday, said the four were followers who participated far less than ringleader Narseal Batiste in discussions about possible terrorist attacks. The conversations were recorded by the FBI using an informant posing as an al-Qaida operative. (more…)

LONDON – The diaries of a British reporter who risked his reputation to expose the horrors of Stalin’s murderous famine in Ukraine were put on public display for the first time Friday.

Welsh journalist Gareth Jones sneaked into Ukraine in March of 1933, at the height of a famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Millions of people starved to death between 1932 and 1933 as theSoviet secret police emptied the countryside of grain and livestock as part of a campaign to force peasants into collective farms.

Jones’ reporting was one of the first attempts to bring the disaster to the world’s attention. (more…)

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM – A Jewish rabbi has issued a book giving Jews permission to murder non-Jews, including babies and children, who may pose an actual or potential threat to Jews or Israel. “It is permissible to kill the Righteous among non-Jews even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation,” Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro, who heads the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the Yitzhar settlement in the occupied West Bank, wrote in his book “The King’s Torah.”

He argues that goyem (a derogatory epithet for non-Jews) may be killed if they threaten Israel.

“If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments – because we care about the commandments – there is nothing wrong with the murder.”

Shapiro, who heads a small Talmudic school at the settlement of Yitzhar near Nablus, claims his edict “is fully justified by the Torah and the Talmud.” (more…)

Black Serial Killer/Rapist

CLEVELAND – Investigators trying to identify the bodies of six women found in the home of a convicted rapist are focusing the inquiry on eight or nine missing women, the coroner said Monday.

It could take days or weeks to identify the bodies using dental records or DNA mouth-swab samples from relatives. Cuyahoga County Coroner Frank Miller said his office has begun the “arduous” process of collecting materials from dentists and relatives.

The six women were black and five of them had been strangled, authorities said. The cause of death of the sixth hadn’t been determined.

The investigation will pay close attention to missing women who were living alone, were homeless or had drug or alcohol problems, Miller said. MORE>>>

Leader of torture and murder group sentenced to death

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – A Tennessee man convicted of kidnapping, rape and murder charges in the fatal carjacking of a couple on a date has been sentenced to death.

The defendant, 28-year-old Lemaricus Davidson, showed no reaction Friday as jurors announced the death sentences for the murders of 21-year-old college student Channon Christian and her 23-year-old boyfriend, Christopher Newsom.

Davidson was found guilty of abducting the couple in Knoxville during a 2007 carjacking by several armed men.

Both were raped, Newsom was fatally shot and Christian suffocated after she was choked and stuffed in a garbage bag and trash can.

Davidson’s brother was convicted in the same attack in August and is serving life in prison without parole. Two other defendants from Kentucky are awaiting trial.    MORE>>>

TV anchor’s killer

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A man accused of killing a popular Arkansas television personality is going on trial.

Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday in Little Rock in the trial of Curtis Lavelle Vance. He has pleaded not guilty to capital murder, rape and burglary.

KATV-Little Rock anchorwoman Anne Pressly was found brutally beaten in her bed in October 2008. She died days later without regaining consciousness.

Prosecutors say they plan to use DNA evidence and taped confessions from Vance. MORE>>>

Police believe as many as a dozen people watched a 15-year-old girl get beaten and gang-raped outside her high school homecoming dance without reporting it.

Two suspects were in custody Monday, but police said as many as five other men attacked the girl over a two-hour period Friday night outside Richmond High School.

“She was raped, beaten, robbed and dehumanized by several suspects who were obviously OK enough with it to behave that way in each other’s presence,” Lt. Mark Gagan said. “What makes it even more disturbing is the presence of others. People came by, saw what was happening and failed to report it.” (more…)

Megan Williams’ shocking accusations initially strained the imagination: Seven white people beat her with sticks, forced her to eat feces, raped her and taunted her with racial slurs over several days in a ramshackle trailer in West Virginia.

But the suspects eventually confessed to their actions and pleaded guilty. All but one were sent to prison. Now Williams, who is black, is taking it all back.

Williams lied in 2007 because she wanted to get back at a boyfriend who had beaten her, her attorney, Byron Potts, said Wednesday at a news conference in his Columbus office.

Williams no longer wants to live a lie, Potts said. (more…)

Everyone I know has been shocked, saddened and dismayed by the violent and brutal attack that killed a black teen that was walking home from school last week in Chicago. It is unimaginable that the city whose politics produced the first black president of the United States could also produce perhaps more murders of black youth by black youth than anywhere else in the nation. Chicago, once a haven for black culture and economic progress, has become more dangerous for black youth than Mississippi was for their forebears before the great migration. Black youth gangs have become a greater threat to black youth than the Ku Klux Klan had been for their great grand parents!

The real irony of this ghastly development is that the religious movement that garnered the most respect for its ability to transform young black thugs into responsible men also has its home in Chicago. Controversial as it was and perhaps still is, the Nation of Islam, better known as the Black Muslims, cornered the market on its ability to transform the lives of prison inmates, urban thugs and street hustlers whose lives were not productive and whose lifestyles were self destructive. Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan were both feared and revered for their potential to mesmerize black people – mostly men – and convert them into impeccably dressed, enviably disciplined, faithful adherents to new values that uplifted entire neighborhoods. (more…)

By L. Brent Bozell-   Something wildly unexpected happened the other day: Film director Roman Polanski was taken into custody inSwitzerland for his rape of a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson’s house in 1977. The grand jury transcript is stomach-turning. His victim, Samantha Gailey, said the director plied her with champagne and drugs and asked her to remove her clothes for pictures in a hot tub. Polanski then had sex with her despite her resistance and requests to be taken home. He pleaded guilty to the lesser offense of sex with a minor, but fearing a prison term, he fled the country.

Now something utterly expected is happening: Morally bankrupt libertines in Hollywood and other artistic banana republics are rushing to Polanski’s defense.

Welcome to the world of Roman Polanski, Child Rapist/Victim.

Has-been actress Debra Winger joined the first line of ludicrous defense, since she was president of the jury of the Zurich Film Festival, where Polanski was headed to receive a lifetime achievement award when he was apprehended. Let’s hope Winger is never allowed to serve on a real jury. She simply doesn’t care about Polanski’s guilt. He is a filmmaker and an artist, and for this crowd anything and everything goes. (more…)

The anger spread almost as quickly as the news: an unarmed black man was fatally shot by two white police officers inside a northern Illinois church-run day care filled with children.
Competing stories about how 23-year-old Mark Anthony Barmore died last month have reopened racial wounds in the struggling city of Rockford, sparking outrage that has resonated for weeks — not just about whether the shooting was justified.
Barmore’s death has become a symbol of unequal opportunities in this manufacturing town of about 160,000 where blacks lag far behind whites in jobs, education and income. The meandering Rock River divides the town largely along racial lines — whites on the east and blacks on the west, where aging and shuttered buildings line streets.
“It was really unsettling, because you’re supposed to rely on police to protect you,” black resident Maryann King, 41, said of Barmore’s death. “It’s really put division in the community. People are mad.”
Barmore, a lifelong Rockford resident, was spotted Aug. 24 by patrol officers Oda Poole and Stan North outside the Kingdom Authority International Ministries Church he occasionally attended. Wanted for questioning in a domestic dispute, Barmore ducked into the adjoining House of Grace Daycare and Preschool. Police followed. (more…)

This chilling video shows the terrifying abduction of a woman who passed out at a Manhattan nightclub and was dragged out by a Queens construction work who took her home and raped her.

Luis Zambrano, 39, pleaded guilty last week to kidnapping and rape in exchange for 3 ½ years in jail.

The horrific night began at the Marquee Club on March 22, when Zambrano approached the woman as she lay unconscious on a couch by the bar.

Zambrano was caught on club surveillance tape trying to kiss her motionless body and then drag her to her feet.

The tape was obtained by Inside Edition to be aired tonight as part of a segment on the dangers women face in Big Apple clubs. MORE>>>

Senister Smith faces charges for trying to rob a West Allis credit union. Surveillance video shows Smith came into the Guardian Credit Union wearing a hood and mask. He handed a note to each of three tellers demanding money and stating he had a gun.

54-year-old Matt Knetzger of Wauwatosa was standing in the credit union at the time. He saw what was happening and decided to tackle the suspect. After a brief struggle, Knetzger managed to pin the 21-year-old suspect and hold him until police arrived.

The criminal complaint says Smith used to be a customer at the credit union. The complaint says he admitted robbing the place because he was having financial problems.   VIDEO & MORE>>>

UNITED NATIONS – A U.N. investigation concluded Tuesday that both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, raising the prospect that officials may seek prosecution in the International Criminal Court.

The probe led by former South African judge Richard Goldstone concluded that “Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity,” during its Dec. 27-Jan. 18 military operations against Palestinian rocket squads in the Gaza Strip.

In a 575-page report, Goldstone and three other investigators also found evidence “that Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes, as well as possibly crimes against humanity.”

Goldstone said the probe, which included interviews as well as a review of documents, photos and 30 videos, was completed Tuesday morning, just hours before the hastily called news conference. (more…)

A Johns Hopkins University student armed with a samurai sword killed a suspected burglar in a garage behind his off-campus home early Tuesday, hours after someone broke in and stole electronics.

Some shocked neighbors said they heard bloodcurdling screams in an area just blocks from the university. Police held the student, a junior chemistry major who turns 21 on Sunday, for several hours, but no charges were filed by early afternoon, said police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.

Around 1:20 a.m., the student heard noises behind the home and noticed a door to the garage was open, Guglielmi said. He grabbed the sword and confronted the intruder, who was crouching beneath a counter. (more…)

Pedestrian hit, companion robs driver instead of calling for aid

Lashawn Henderson was hit by a truck, but she was still alive when her mother saw her from a distance, lying at the side of Seventh Avenue. 

The 17-year-old girl was dead minutes later, in a helicopter on its way to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital.

For her family, especially her mother, “it’s just not adding up.”

“I can’t even begin to think about how I’m going to bury her,” Tracy Miller said Tuesday, four days after the strange Friday night crash killed her daughter, an incident police said appeared to be a freak accident.

“If this was a white girl, this guy would be in jail right now.” (more…)

Police in the United States have arrested an alleged serial killer whose DNA was found on nine women murdered over a 21-year period, eight of them prostitutes.

Walter Ellis, 49, was charged Monday with two of the murders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and police said further charges would be filed this week.

Authorities said in May they were hunting for a serial killer who had been murdering prostitutes over two decades and typically dumping their bodies in vacant houses in the north side of the city.

The breakthrough in the hunt for the so-called “North Side Strangler” came when police obtained a sample of DNA off Ellis’s toothbrush during a search of his flat and matched it up to DNA samples on the nine murdered women. (more…)