Suspected Killer Child-Bride Begs Court: ‘Set me free!’

Wasila Umar, 14, the child-bride suspected to have killed her husband at Yansoro village, Kademi general area of Gaya local government council of Kano State broke down in tears while pleading with the trial judge handling her case at the juvenile court to set her free because she was home sick.
Wasila rhetorically asked why she had been held by the authorities in a place where she had no access to her loved ones over the past weeks.

Wasila’s father, Tasiu Muhammed

The child-bride’s dilemma underscored the state of confusion she found  herself in following her detention by the police culminating in her appearance before the juvenile court.
Between April 1 and May 21 that she appeared before the court,  in Kano, she had variously been a guest of three detention centres located in Kano and Gaya .
Interestingly, her situation attracted the attention of human right activists, including the Federation of Women Lawyers in Nigeria which practically took over her  upkeep and defence.
The women lawyers group protested the arraignment of the suspected  killer child-bride before a magistrate court, forcing the Kano State Judicial Council to transfer Wasila’s trial to the juvenile court.
The letter of transfer of the trial dated April 30, 2914, and signed by one Sani Shehu for the Registrar, Kano State High Court of Justice, obtained by Sunday Vanguard, was entitled, “Commissioner of police versus Wasila Umar, a juvenile accused of poisoning her husband and three others.”
“The Chief Registrar has directed that the above headlined matter which was pending before  Magistrate Court 34, Rijiyar Zaki , Kano is now transferred for continuation at the Juvenile Court to its conclusion”, the letter said.
That marked the beginning of the trial of the teenager who had been away from her Kaura village for 51 days.
‘Strange land’
However, in an exclusive chat with Sunday Vanguard before her arraignment at the juvenile court, Wasila revealed: “I miss my mum who has not been allowed to visit me in a strange land.
“What, however, keeps me going is the fact that my family are with me at this critical point in my life, and I am highly comforted by their prayers”.
According to her,  “my dad and aunt visited me a few days ago and conveyed my mother’s message but the vacuum created by  her absence can not be filled by anyone.

Wasila

“I have been receiving help from the people I did not know from Adam, I mean women who have shown concern, and cater for my needs at the remand home where I have been detained by the authorities.
“I know for sure this trial will come to an end one day and I would reconcile with my family”.
Meanwhile, Wasila’s dream of reuniting with her family one day might be a pipe dream.  In the event she wins the case against her by the state, she might not have a home to return due to the tension generated in her in-law’s Yansoro village by her alleged killing of her husband and three friends.
Bitterness
Sunday Vanguard’s visit to  the village unveiled a picture of bitterness by her in-laws who viewed her action as wicked and could not be forgiven.
The journey to Yansoro was rough; no access road, no school, no health centre, no pipe borne water.
The village is a classical example of  neglect and leadership failure. Yansoro is a village cut off from civilization. An interview conducted with Wasila’s father-in-law at the city centre attracted a crowd comprising of the young and the old who constantly interjected to voice out their anger.
Sani Garba, the late Umar’s father, told Sunday Vanguard: “I am talking to you with a heavy heart, because I am still nursing a fatal injury handed over to me by my daughter-in-law.”
“Do you know that I lost three children to her action and you are asking whether I have forgiven her? The act was too painful to be forgiven  and I don’t think I can forgive her”.
Shedding  light on the relationship between the child- bride and her late husband, he said, “They  courted for 12 months and my son spent a fortune on her.  The fact remains that the duo were no strangers to each other and it pains me the more when people try to cook up the  forced marriage theory”
Garba, believed to be in his early 60s, went on: “We understand the authorities have taken over the case, but whether they choose to stand by the truth remains their headache for I have since gone to my God who is sufficient for me.”

Wasila’s father in-law, Sani Garba

The crowd that converged at the city centre during the short interview appeared satisfied with the old man’s responses to questions and gave him a round of applause.
But one was clear from the interview, the deep seated anger they demonstrated during the encounter was a reminder that they could go to war to settle scores.
Absolute grief
However, the atmosphere at Wasila village, Kaura, adjacent to her in-law’s was that of grief. Like their counterparts at Yansoro, the residents live a life worse than slavery.
Wasila’s father, Tasiu Muhammad, told Sunday Vanguard: “What happened left a sour taste in our mouths but we don’t have to abandon the little girl.  That is why I identify with her at this moment of trial”. Tasiu linked the alleged action of her daughter to destiny which could not be prevented.
“In such situation, we only look onto Allah for divine intervention“, the father said. “What has happened came with a fatal consequence on my family, and I have visited my in-laws in the company of my kinsmen to seek for their forgiveness on behalf of my daughter”.
Commenting on their involvement,  the chairperson of the Federation of Women Lawyers in Kano, Hussaina Aliyu, revealed that no formal charges had been preferred against Wasila, stressing that the trial judge had fixed June 16 for mentioning.

Culled

Nahaf man stabs female police officer, 23, because she refused to give him her phone number

A man was arrested and charged with assault after allegedly stabbing a female police officer because she refused to give him her personal phone number, according to police reports in Israel.


The Haifa District Attorney’s office filed an indictment with the Haifa District Court on Thursday, against Omar Souad, 23, of Nahaf, after attempting to murder a national service volunteer, 19, serving at a police station in Carmiel.

The volunteer suffered serious injuries.

Souad, who is serving a sentence of community service at the Carmiel police station, asked the woman for her phone number several times, but she refused.

She told the suspect that she has no interest in him, and she reported the incident to her supervisor at the police station.

The supervisor warned the suspect to stay away of the police officer, but he ignored the order.

Two weeks ago, he came to the police station with a long kitchen knife. He waited at a nearby parking lot for the volunteer to arrive. When the volunteer arrived at the station, Souad approached her and stabbed her in the chest.

The volunteer tried to defend herself, but Souad continued to stab her 8 times. He fled from the scene with the volunteer's cellphone.


source: yjn

Girls were imprisoned in bedrooms for two years: Arizona police

 
An Arizona mother and stepfather were being held on kidnapping and child abuse charges Tuesday for allegedly imprisoning their three girls — who were found malnourished in a filthy home and hadn't bathed in months, police said.
Tucson police said officers responding to a 911 call found two girls, 12 and 13 years old, at a neighbor’s house at about 4 a.m. Tuesday. The girls told officers they had escaped their home after their stepdad kicked in the door to their bedroom and attempted to attack them with a knife, police said.
The girls also said, according to police, they had been held prisoners in the bedroom they shared for about two years.
When officers went to the house they discovered their sister, 17, locked in another bedroom, police said.
At a news conference on Tuesday night, Tucson police Capt. Mike Gillooly said all three of the girls were extremely dirty and malnourished and stated they said they had not bathed in several months.
“It was alleged by the little girls that they had been imprisoned  in their bedrooms for approximately the last two years,” Gillooly said.
“They were kept in filthy living conditions and alleged only being fed once a day,” said a Tucson police statement.
The stepfather,  Fernando Richter, 34, was booked into the Pima County Jail in Tucson on charges of kidnapping, sexual abuse of a minor and physical and emotional child abuse.
The mother, identified as 32-year-old Sophia Richter, is also charged with kidnapping and both physical and emotional child abuse.
The three girls were removed from the home.


source:nbcnews

Iceland's Police Shoot And Kill Suspect For First Time Ever

An armed police operation in Iceland has resulted for the first time in a death when police in the country's capital shot and killed a man Monday.
The unnamed victim, a man in his late 50s, was said to have been firing a shotgun inside his apartment and out of the windows Monday morning in east Reykjavik. Repeated attempts to calm him, in addition to a tear gas canister lobbed into his room, had been unsuccessful, reports the Agence France-Presse.
In a news conference, national police chief Haraldur Johannessen told the BBC the incident is "without precedent." It is the first time an armed police operation in the country has resulted in a death.
"Police regret this incident and would like to extend their condolences to the family of the man," added Johannessen.
Euronews reports that two Icelandic police officers were wounded in the operation, neither of them seriously. The suspect was removed on a stretcher and pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
Iceland enjoys a low crime rate -- a unique product of its large, stable middle class and its thorough screening requirements for gun permits, among other elements, per an earlier report by the BBC
A report from GunPolicy.org found Iceland suffered 4 deaths as a result of firearms in 2009, the last year for which data was available. By comparison, the United States had 31,347 that same year. That breaks down to 1.25 gun deaths per 100,000 people in Iceland, and 10.22 per 100,000 in the U.S.


source: hoffpost

Addict Hospital Worker Infected Dozens With Hepatitis C

 
A traveling medical technician who stole painkillers and infected dozens of patients in multiple states with hepatitis C through tainted syringes was sentenced Monday to 39 years in prison.
"I don't blame the families for hating me," David Kwiatkowski said after hearing about 20 statements from people he infected and their relatives. "I hate myself."
Kwiatkowski, 34, was a cardiac technologist in 18 hospitals in seven states before being hired at New Hampshire's Exeter Hospital in 2011. He had moved from job to job despite being fired at least four times over allegations of drug use and theft. Since his arrest last year, 46 people have been diagnosed with the same strain of hepatitis C he carries.
U.S. Attorney John Kacavas said the sentence "ensures that this serial infector no longer is in a position to do harm to innocent and vulnerable people."
Kwiatkowski admitted stealing painkillers and replacing them with saline-filled syringes tainted with his blood. He pleaded guilty in August to 16 federal drug charges.
Before he was sentenced, Kwiatkowski stood and faced his victims, saying he was very sorry and that his crimes were caused by an addiction to painkillers and alcohol. He told investigators he had been stealing drugs since at least 2003 and swapping syringes since at least 2008.
"There's no excuse for what I've done," he said. "I know the pain and suffering I have caused."
Prosecutors asked for a 40-year sentence. Judge Joseph Laplante said he cut the last year as a reminder that some people have the capacity for mercy and compassion.
"It's important for you to recognize and remember as you spend the next 39 years in prison to focus on the one year you didn't get and try to develop that capacity in yourself," Laplante said.
The victims spoke angrily and tearfully of the pain that Kwiatkowski had inflicted by giving them hepatitis C, a blood-borne virus that can cause liver disease and chronic health problems. Authorities say the disease played a role in one woman's death.
"You may only be facing drug charges, but make no mistake, you are a serial killer," said Kathleen Murray of Elmira, N.Y., whose mother was infected in Baltimore and was too ill to travel to New Hampshire for the sentencing.
Linda Ficken, 71, said she is haunted by the memory of Kwiatkowski standing at her hospital bedside in Kansas for more than an hour applying pressure to the catheter's entry site in her leg to control bleeding.
"On one hand, you were saving my life, and on the other hand, your acts are a death sentence for me," Ficken, of Andover, Kan., told him. "Do I thank you for what you did to help me? Do I despise you for what your actions did and will continue to do for the rest of my life? Or do I simply just feel sorry for you being the pathetic individual you are?"
Prosecutors said Kwiatkowski deserved 40 years for creating a "national public health crisis," putting a significant number of people at risk and caused substantial physical and emotional harm to a large number of victims.
Assistant U.S. Attorney John Farley called Kwiatkowski's actions "exceedingly callous" and "unbelievably cruel" and noted that Kwiatkowski could've stolen painkillers without exposing his patients to hepatitis C.
Defense lawyers argued that a 30-year sentence would better balance the seriousness of the crimes against Kwiatkowski's mental and emotional problems and his addiction to drugs and alcohol, which they said clouded his judgment.
"David Kwiatkowski is not a monster," said attorney Bjorn Lange. "He didn't set out to infect himself or anyone else with the hepatitis C virus."
In all, 32 patients were infected in New Hampshire, seven in Maryland, six in Kansas and one in Pennsylvania. Though prosecutors have not included the Pennsylvania case in their count, a spokeswoman for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has repeatedly said the hospital had one confirmed case. Kwiatkowski also worked in Michigan, New York, Arizona and Georgia.
Two of the 16 charges stem from the case of Eleanor Murphy, a Kansas woman who has since died. Authorities say hepatitis C played a contributing role.
"You ultimately gave my mother a death sentence," Murphy's son, Ronnie, told Kwiatkowski.
Murphy said he would have preferred a life sentence for Kwiatkowski and didn't understand how he had been able to continue working after his repeated firings.
"His path and my mother's path never should have crossed," he said.
The judge noted that while Kwiatkowski's lack of a criminal record kept his sentence from going even higher, he said that was only because Kwiatkowski's employers handled his behavior as personnel matters instead of crimes. And Kacavas said his office has begun working with other agencies to draft policy recommendations to prevent future incidents.
"While the conclusion of this prosecution closes the criminal aspect of this case, it has cast a harsh light on the dirty little secret of drug diversion in the medical setting and it has heightened public awareness for the need for tighter reform and regulation in the hiring and management of medical health care workers," he said.


source:hoffpost

Girl,13, Taken Into Custody After Dozing Off In Dance Instructor's Car

A dance student from Tulsa, Okla., on a trip to Houston was taken into custody on Saturday after she was discovered in her instructor's car.
Landry Thompson, 13, was visiting Houston with her dance instructor, Emmanuel Hurd, to take a series of dance classes from top industry professionals.
On the way back to their hotel with Thompson and another dancer, Hurd, who also goes by the name Emmanuel Cross, stopped at a gas station to get his bearings.
"We were on the GPS trying to figure out where the hotel was and we sat there and we dozed off," Hurd said, according to NewsOn6.com.
Then, the police showed up and surrounded Hurd's car.
"They just pulled us out of the car. Put our hands behind our backs like we were criminals," Hurd said. "He asked me who's the girl. She's my student. I said I had a notarized letter from her parents stating that we have full guardianship over her while we're here."
Thompson and Hurd kept trying to tell their story, but said the officers weren't listening. Nor did they pay attention to the note. Instead, they put cuffs on Thompson and took her to Child Protective Services, and contacted her mother, Destiny Thompson, back in Tulsa.
“I was horrified,” Destiny Thompson told KHOU-TV. “She was with the people I wanted her to be with. She was with people I trusted. And now she was taken away from those people and in a shelter with people I didn’t know.”
At first, Thompson was told she'd have to come to Houston to get her daughter. After 11 hours, and repeated conversations with Houston officials, the teenager was finally freed into Hurd's custody.
Both Destiny and Landry would like an apology, but the Houston Police Department has yet to comment on the incident.


source:hoffpost

Grandfather Raped, Had Children With Granddaughter

Police in Puerto Rico have accused a 65-year-old man of raping his young granddaughter and having two children with her.
Angel Manuel Natal Bracety was charged Wednesday and is being held on an $800,000 bond.
It was not immediately clear if he had an attorney. Natal told reporters outside the courthouse that he did not have anything to say about the case.
Prosecutors accused him of sexually assaulting his granddaughter starting when she was 12 years old until she turned 15. Authorities say the alleged assaults began in 2008 in the central town of Cidra.



source:hoffpost

Inmate, Brutally Killed Cell Mate To Stay In Prison

An Arizona prison inmate who was approaching his release date apparently didn't want to leave, so killed his cell mate to keep staying in prison, cops said.
Roberto Venegas Fernandez, 43, is accused of brutally murdering 55-year-old Michael Patrick McNaughton on Saturday, KPHO reported.
Sheriff Paul Babeu said Fernandez choked, then stomped McNaughton to death, according to the Associated Press.
"Roberto wanted to find a way to stay in jail, so while the victim was sitting on his bed, he choked him until he fell onto the ground, then stomped on his head and continued to choke the victim until he was presumed dead," Babeu said in a statement.
Although investigators initially thought the killing stemmed from a fight between the two cell mates, Fernandez reportedly told detectives that he enjoyed being in prison, and didn't want to be released because he had nowhere else to go.
According to WFSP, Fernandez -- originally from Mexico -- was convicted for committing a sex crime in the U.S.
Fernandez's victim, McNaughton, was sentenced to more than 6 years in prison after pleading guilty to a child pornography charge.
Pinal County Sheriff's Office Spokesman Tim Gaffney said the sheriff's office was asking that a first-degree murder charged be filed against the suspect.


source:hoffpost

Prostitute Attack On Man Nearly Cost Him His Pen*s

What could have been a night to remember turned into a fully-fledged nightmare within a matter of minutes.

Having been on a night out with friends, the man in question went to a local brothel near the southern Spanish city of Malaga.
There he decided to engage in an orgy with three prostitutes.
Once all the action was over, the women demanded €70 each for their services, but the man refused to pay one of them.

"I realize now I must have been a bit of a pain because of the alcohol I’d had," he said.

After a heated argument between the four, the mood changed as two of the women started to stroke and seduce the client to make him calm down.
What happened next caught him completely off guard.
One of the sex workers pulled out a knife and slashed the man’s genitalia.

"I didn’t see it coming, she must have been in a really foul mood," the man, who preferred to remain anonymous said.

I used some bandages to apply a tourniquet to my penis and I caught a taxi to the nearest health centre.

"The cut was so deep doctors referred me to another hospital in Marbella."

His situation was so critical upon arrival, doctors had to give him a blood transfusion before he underwent surgery.

“The operation lasted two hours. Everything went well but doctors told me I was very close to dying or being impotent for the rest of my life.
I’ll never go back to a place like that. It’s over me now, never again.”

Naij

Granny Who Ran Family Drug Ring, Slapped With Sentence

A woman who enlisted generations of family members in a drug-dealing operation she ran for more than a decade was sentenced Tuesday to 15 1/2 years in prison. Theresa Anderson, a grandmother in her 50s, pleaded guilty in June to conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. In U.S. District Court, she choked up as her attorney read a letter she wrote to Judge Richard Arcara in which she described being "consumed by addiction." "I have been using drugs since I was 14 years old," the letter said. "My poor choices were a way for me to finance my own addiction." Prosecutors said Anderson, of Buffalo, oversaw an around-the-clock operation in which crack cocaine was sold from several houses she bought on two streets to ensure a monopoly in the area. She was arrested in February 2012 along with her common-law husband, son, three adult daughters, two of the daughters' boyfriends and a granddaughter. All have since pleaded guilty to drug charges. U.S. Attorney William Hochul said, "This defendant not only destroyed her own family by leading them into a life of illegal narcotics trafficking, she also damaged the neighborhood where the drug trafficking took place." The government has seized more than $50,000 and nine houses used by the organization, Hochul's office said. In sentencing papers, defense attorney Robert Ross Fogg said Anderson was addicted to alcohol, heroin, cocaine, crack, methamphetamine and prescription drugs while running her business. He said drugs and drug contacts became more available each time she participated in drug counseling, and he blamed her addiction for a criminal record dating to 1975. Anderson told the judge she's "not a bad person." "I have a good heart," she wrote in her letter. source:hoffpost

Meet The 'Assassination Market' Creator Who's Crowdfunding Murder...

As Bitcoin becomes an increasingly popular form of digital cash, the cryptocurrency is being accepted in exchange for everything from socks to sushi to heroin. If one anarchist has his way, it’ll soon be used to buy murder, too.

Last month I received an encrypted email from someone calling himself by the pseudonym Kuwabatake Sanjuro, who pointed me towards his recent creation: The website Assassination Market, a crowdfunding service that lets anyone anonymously contribute bitcoins towards a bounty on the head of any government official–a kind of Kickstarter for political assassinations. According to Assassination Market’s rules, if someone on its hit list is killed–and yes, Sanjuro hopes that many targets will be–any hitman who can prove he or she was responsible receives the collected funds.
For now, the site’s rewards are small but not insignificant. In the four months that Assassination Market has been online, six targets have been submitted by users, and bounties have been collected ranging from ten bitcoins for the murder of NSA director Keith Alexander and 40 bitcoins for the assassination of President Barack Obama to 124.14 bitcoins–the largest current bounty on the site–targeting Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve and public enemy number one for many of Bitcoin’s anti-banking-system users. At Bitcoin’s current rapidly rising exchanges rate, that’s nearly $75,000 for Bernanke’s would-be killer.

Sanjuro’s grisly ambitions go beyond raising the funds to bankroll a few political killings. He believes that if Assassination Market can persist and gain enough users, it will eventually enable the assassinations of enough politicians that no one would dare to hold office. He says he intends Assassination Market to destroy “all governments, everywhere.”
“I believe it will change the world for the better,” writes Sanjuro, who shares his handle with the nameless samurai protagonist in the Akira Kurosawa film “Yojimbo.” (He tells me he chose it in homage to creator of the online black market Silk Road, who called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts, as well Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto.)  ”Thanks to this system, a world without wars, dragnet panopticon-style surveillance, nuclear weapons, armies, repression, money manipulation, and limits to trade is firmly within our grasp for but a few bitcoins per person. I also believe that as soon as a few politicians gets offed and they realize they’ve lost the war on privacy, the killings can stop and we can transition to a phase of peace, privacy and laissez-faire.”
I contacted the Secret Service and the FBI to ask if they’re investigating Assassination Market, and both declined to comment.
Like other so-called “dark web” sites, Assassination Market runs on the anonymity network Tor, which is designed to prevent anyone from identifying the site’s users or Sanjuro himself. Sanjuro’s decision to accept only Bitcoins is also intended to protect users, Sanjuro, and any potential assassins from being identified through their financial transactions. Bitcoins, after all, can be sent and received without necessarily tying them to any real-world identity. In the site’s instructions to users, Sanjuro suggests they run their funds through a “laundry” service to make sure the coins are anonymized before contributing them to anyone’s murder fund.
As for technically proving that an assassin is responsible for a target’s death, Assassination Market asks its killers to create a text file with the date of the death ahead of time, and to use a cryptographic function known as a hash to convert it to a unique string of characters. Before the murder, the killer then embeds that data in a donation of one bitcoin or more to the victim’s bounty. When a target is successfully murdered, he or she can send Sanjuro the text file, which Sanjuro hashes to check that the results match the data sent before the target’s death. If the text file is legit and successfully predicted the date of the killing, the sender must have been responsible for the murder, according to Sanjuro’s logic. Sanjuro says he’ll keep one percent of the payout himself as a commission for his services.
Just reading about that coldly calculative system of lethal violence likely inspires queasy feelings or outrage. But Sanjuro says that the public’s abhorrence won’t prevent the system from working. And as a matter of ethics, he notes that he’ll accept only user-suggested targets “who have initiated force against other humans. More specifically, only people who are outside the reach of the law because it has been subverted and corrupted, and whose victims have no other way to take revenge than to do so anonymously.”
Even setting aside the immorality of killing, doesn’t the notion of enabling small minorities of angry Bitcoin donors to assassinate elected officials sound like an attempt to cripple democracy? “Of course, limiting democracy is why we even have a constitution,” Sanjuro responds. “Majority support does not make a leader legitimate any more than it made slavery legitimate. With this market the great equalising forces of capitalism have the opportunity to work in politics too. One bitcoin paid is one vote closer to a veto of whatever legislation you dislike.”
Sanjuro didn’t actually invent the concept of an anonymous crowdfunded assassination market. The idea dates back to the cypherpunk movement of the mid-1990s, whose adherents dreamt of using encryption tools to weaken the government and empower individuals. Former Intel INTC +0.12% engineer and Cypherpunk Mailing List founder Tim May argued that uncrackable secret messages and untraceable digital currency would lead to assassination markets in his “Cryptoanarchist’s Manifesto” written in 1992.
A few years later, another former Intel engineer named Jim Bell proposed a system of funding assassinations through encrypted, anonymous donations in an essay he called “ Assassination Politics.” The system he described closely matches Sanjuro’s scheme, though anonymity tools like Tor and Bitcoin were mostly theoretical at the time. As Bell wrote then:

If only 0.1% of the population, or one person in a thousand, was willing to pay $1 to see some government slimeball dead, that would be, in effect, a $250,000 bounty on his head. Further, imagine that anyone considering collecting that bounty could do so with the mathematical certainty that he could not be identified, and could collect the reward without meeting, or even talking to, anybody who could later identify him. Perfect anonymity, perfect secrecy, and perfect security. And that, combined with the ease and security with which these contributions could be collected, would make being an abusive government employee an extremely risky proposition. Chances are good that nobody above the level of county commissioner would even risk staying in office.

Bell would later serve years in prison for tax evasion and stalking a federal agent, and was only released in March of 2012. When I contacted him by email, he denied any involvement in Sanjuro’s Assassination Market and declined to comment on it.

Sanjuro tells me he’s long been aware of Bell’s idea. But he only decided to enact it after the past summer’s revelations of mass surveillance by the NSA exposed in a series of leaks by agency contractor Edward Snowden. “Being forced to alter my every happy memory during internet activity, every intimate moment over the phone with my loved ones, to also include some of the people I hate the most listening in, analysing the conversation, was the inspiration I needed to embark on this task,” he writes. “After about a week of muttering ‘they must all die’ under my breath every time I opened a newspaper or turned on the television, I decided something had to be done. This is my contribution to the cause.”

Assassination Market isn’t the first website to suggest funding murder with bitcoins. Others Tor-hidden websites with names like Quick Kill, Contract Killer and C’thulhu have all claimed to offer murders in exchange for bitcoin payments. But none of them responded to my attempts to contact their administrators, and all required advanced payments for their services, so they may be scams.
And how do Assassination Market’s users know that it’s not a similar fraud scheme designed to steal users’ bitcoins? “You don’t,” Sanjuro admits. But he argues that if it were a scam, it would be a very complex and risky one, given that even threatening to harm the president of the United States is a felony.

Forbes

Pastor Charged For Conducting Same-Sex Marriage for Son Goes on Trial.

A Pennsylvania pastor charged under United Methodist law with officiating his son's same-sex marriage is scheduled to go on trial. The Rev. Frank Schaefer could be defrocked if a jury comprised of fellow Methodist clergy convicts him of breaking his pastoral vows by officiating the 2007 ceremony in Massachusetts.
The nation's largest mainline Protestant denomination accepts gay and lesbian members, but rejects the practice of homosexuality as "incompatible with Christian teaching."
The issue has split the church. Hundreds of Methodist ministers have publicly rejected church doctrine on homosexuality, and some of them face discipline for presiding over same-sex unions.
Schaefer's trial will take place Monday at a Methodist retreat in Spring City, Pa.

Huffypost

OMG! Armed to the teeth ritualists Invades Hopital Demanding For Day Old Babies

Wonders will never end, as reports gathered that five armed to the teeth gunmen, attacked the government hospital in Ado-Ekiti, demanding for new born babies.

News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the gunmen who were said to be numbering about five, arrived at the hospital at about 1:00 a.m. demanding for a day old babies, and beating up staff who could not give satisfactory answer.
A senior health officer, who pleaded anonymity, said that the armed men invaded the hospital located along Irona area at about 1:00 a.m. and suddenly began molesting medical officials on night duty.
According to the officer, the invaders, who were fully armed, are rhetorically demanding for the whereabouts of a particular baby, said to have been delivered earlier in the day.
“They got more annoyed when they were told that no baby was available in the hospital as at the time they came, it angered then the more and they went berserk,’’ the officer said.
This development, NAN learnt angered the men who beat up the hospital staff and injured some of them.
“As a senior person on duty, I tried to convince them that all new born babies have been discharged from the centre in the last couple of days, but they refused to be convinced.

“This angered them the more and they descended on the staff  beating us, some of them were busy ransacking the place in search of babies,’’ the source said.
When contacted, the Chairman of Ado Local Government, Mr Tope Olanipekun confirmed the incident, saying “this is a new twist to crime in the area’’.
Olanipekun, who claimed to have visited the hospital to see things for himself, described the incident as “highest point of callousness on the part of the perpetrators”.
“As I speak, the incident actually happened and I want to assure you that we are taking step to forestall a recurrence.’’
The chairman said that he had already ordered that night duty be suspended in all the hospitals in the council, pending when tight security measures, which would include fencing of all health centres be taken.
The State Police Public Relations Officer, Mr Victor Babayemi, ASP, who was surprised at the development, however said the incident was yet to be reported to the police command. (NAN).

InfoNigeria