May 17, 2007
A man has been charged with indecent assault following the rescue of a South African boy who had allegedly been held captive in a dark room for 13 years. The boy, known as Bongani, is said to be traumatised and recoils from bright lights. He was allegedly seized when he was just five years old.
A couple kills a three-year-old boy they were planning to adopt when he fails to meet their expectations of ready-made family life.
A man is jailed for life after admitting he murdered his mother's lesbian partner and dumped her body in a coal bunker. Teresa, faced with losing her long term partner in the most violent of deaths in a murder carried out by her son, takes her own life a few months later.
A police officer has described his shock at discovering his wife had been having an intense affair with a woman who was murdered along with her family. Sergeant Stephen Lewis, 35, told Swansea Crown Court that his "life had collapsed around him" after Alison Lewis revealed the relationship - just hours after Mandy Power, her mother and two daughters were found dead.
She had been accompanying her elder child to the school bus stop on a winter's morning in 2002. She told investigators she had been out of the house for only minutes. When she returned her two-year-old son was dying. Later, Anna Maria's blood-soaked pyjamas were found by police next to the body of her son.
They call themselves Fatherless, a group of armed young men who have lost their fathers in gang wars in Trench Town, a Kingston inner city of bullet-pocked homes and birthplace of reggae. High on cocaine laced with marijuana and armed to the teeth, the gang is among the many in Jamaica which fight over turf, drug money and influence as muscle men for political parties.
May 15, 2007
A Muslim woman reported to have "married" four women denies the allegations, saying the reports of her wedding were false, and that she is not a lesbian. Lesbianism is illegal in her country and the Muslim law considers it a very serious offence. The woman fears for her life.
In a social experiment highly unusual for this most unplanned of countries, the Indian government has handpicked Nagpur, relatively small, forgettable city, to be fattened and primped into an international metropolis.
Boys, 12 and 16, face charges in connection with small fires.
A man about to be executed requests that his final meal be a vegetarian pizza donated to any homeless person located near the Maximum Security Institution where he is going to be executed at 2 a.m. But after he dies, prison officials refuse to honor his request, saying that they do not donate to charities. That apparently upset a few people willing to pay for and deliver a lot of pies themselves, and homeless shelters were inundated with donated pizzas.
A virus contracted through oral sex is the cause of some throat cancers, say US scientists.
Friar Galvao began a tradition among Brazilian Catholics of handing out tiny rice-paper pills, inscribed with a Latin prayer, to people seeking cures for all manner of ailments. Although he died in 1822, Brazilian nuns still toil in the Sao Paulo monastery where Galvao is buried, preparing thousands of the tiny pills for free daily distribution. Each one carries these words: "After birth, the Virgin remained intact. Mother of God, intercede on our behalf."
In a section of the Rush Street nightclub district sometimes called "the Viagra triangle," a huge billboard rose up recently with photographs of a sexy, scantily clad woman on one side and a buff, bare-chested man on the other. The text between the photos proclaimed: "Life's short. Get a divorce."
A teenage Japanese boy walks into a police station carrying a severed human head and claiming to have killed his mother.
Researchers are investigating a long unknown killing field in Cambodia with the graves of thousands of Khmer Rouge victims from the 1970s. But local villagers found it first. By the time the researchers arrived last week, some 200 graves had been dug open and the bones scattered through the woods by hundreds of people hunting for jewelry. After the assault on the burial ground, the village seemed filled with remorse and dread. Several people said they had been awakened at night by screams from the graves.
The young man wants to be the first amputee runner to compete in the Olympics. He was born without the fibula bone in his lower legs and with other defects in his feet. He had both legs amputated below the knee when he was 11 months old. At 20, his coach says, he is like a five-speed engine with no second gear.
Passannante earned a place in Italian history by trying to assassinate King Umberto I of Savoy; he was subsequently arrested, tortured and received a death sentence, later reduced to life in prison. As further punishment his entire family was jailed and Passannante's hometown, formerly known as Salvia, was forced to change its name to Savoia di Lucania. He went insane. In 1910 he was sent to an asylum and died shortly after. It was at that point that his head and brain were removed to be studied by sociologists.
May 14, 2007
A man manages to run away from a village attacked by the Janjaweed militia. But his wife, eight months pregnant, is still in the village, along with their four children, ages 3 to 12. ''There's no way for people to escape. The Janjaweed will rape and kill my family, and there's nothing I can do.”
May 06, 2007
A 13-year-old boy is making himself into a great speller by way of unhappiness and the immense pressure he feels to reunite his family, which was blown across two continents when his parents were sent back to India last year after being denied political asylum.
A pop singer sets out to save the world, and scores an early success by leading an international campaign to free an Iranian teenage girl from a date with the hangman.
After months of bored indifference, two giant pandas join for not one, not two but three frenzied bouts of mating.
A man is sentenced to death for the rape-cum-murder of a girl. His execution fails and the trauma it causes, results in his amnesia. Faced with a man who claims to be a different person and has no knowledge of his past, his executioners must find ways to refresh his memory, so that he may legally be executed.
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