An anti-abortion activist in Iowa with ties to Scott Roeder, the man who murdered abortion provider George Tiller, is under fire for calling for the shooting of the people who reopened Tiller’s abortion clinic. “If someone would shoot the new abortionists, like Scott shot George Tiller ... It will be a blessing to the babies,” Dave Leach says on a YouTube video. The video includes a recorded conversation between Leach and a man Leach identifies as Roeder, who is currently serving life in prison for Tiller’s 2009 assassination.

In an interview with The Des Moines Register, Leach said he would not personally harm any abortion providers.

"I'm 67 years old. I don't know anything about guns," he said. "I think I could accomplish more with words." He denied that his comments were meant to encourage anyone to kill abortion providers. "That's not exactly a call for that to happen," he said. "Any reasonable person looking at that statement would not equate that with a call for action."

USA Today:

In the YouTube video, the man Leach identifies as Roeder laughs as Leach talks about the prospect of someone shooting the new leaders of the Wichita clinic. Then the second man wonders aloud about the clinic director's motives. "To walk in there and reopen a clinic, a murder mill where a man was stopped, it's almost like putting a target on your back -- saying, 'Well, let's see if you can shoot me,'" he says.

Then the man quotes a fellow activist, who predicted that the abortion industry would end if 100 abortionists were shot. "I think eight have been shot, so we've got 92 to go," the man whom Leach identified as Roeder says. "Maybe (the Wichita clinic director) will be number nine. I don't really know. I'm not sure about that. But she's kind of painting a target on her."

Prison officials are investigating whether the man on the recording was indeed Roeder, and, if it was, how he was able to participate in such a phone call.

A spokesman for the Kansas Department of Corrections said inmates may speak on the phone only with people who are on a list approved by prison administrators.

It’s almost unspeakable. Three young sisters aged 5, 9, and 11 were walking home from school on Valentine's Day when they disappeared. Now, it’s being reported that the girls were found raped and murdered two days later, and the police never launched a proper investigation. After discovering the sisters’ bodies in an old well, police recorded their deaths as “accidental.” It was only after the people from the girls' remote village staged a protest that blocked a national highway Wednesday did officials look into the matter, leading to a medical investigation that revealed the rape and murder. The girls’ mother was offered one million rupees in compensation, but she says, “No amount of money is going to bring my girls back.”

The Guardian reports:

The young mother's tragedy in a remote village once again demonstrated how the police in India often fail to adequately respond to major crimes, especially when it involves women and children.

When a young physiotherapist was brutally gang-raped in a moving Delhi bus in December, the extraordinary public outrage across the country forced Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government to promise better policing and faster legal action to protect Indian women at home and outside.

But even as lawmakers prepared to discuss a new law against sexual offences on Friday, news of the latest atrocity, involving three young girls in a village more than a thousand kilometres from the Indian capital, was kept under a veil of silence until villagers rioted and blocked the national highway demanding a proper investigation.

"There was no nationwide outrage in response to the latest heinous incident of rape," said a CNN-IBN news anchor. "Why is the nation silent? Or have we become numb?"

A recent study released by Human Rights Watch that said one in three reported rape victims in India were children.

Phillip Sailors, 69, a war veteran and a former church missionary, is being held on charges of malice murder after a shooting at his residence on Saturday.

A group of friends in Lilburn, GA said they were going to pick up a girl who lived in the area to go ice skating around 10 p.m. when their GPS system sent them to the wrong home.

“The guy came out. He went in again and he came out with a gun in his hand and he shot into the air,” 15-year-old passenger Yeson Jimenez said.

The teens say after Sailors fired that one shot into the air, the driver got scared and tried to turn around. That's when Sailors allegedly fired the second shot, killing their friend.

Police took the other three who were in the car to the police station and questioned them overnight. Authorities say they then had enough evidence to arrest Sailors and charge him with murder.

Garcia, who has only been in the country for a few months, can't understand how any of this could have happened.

"That means that you cannot come to a house and be confused about it? And somebody will come out and say, 'Hello, may I help you? What are you doing here?' And you start shooting like a maniac," Garcia said through a translator.

Rodrigo Diaz, 22, who was driving the car, was shot in the head, according to the arrest warrant.

The passengers said Sailors never asked what they were doing there.

“’Shut up.’ That’s the only thing that came out of his mouth,” passenger Gandy Cardenas said.

The friends said that Sailors held them in the car at gunpoint until local police arrived at the home. The three passengers who were in the car are all local high school students.

Sailors' attorney told WSBTV that the man believed he and his wife were being attacked.

“He is very distraught over the loss of life from the defense of his home. This incident happened late in the evening hours when he was home with his wife and he assumed it was a home invasion and he maintains his innocence,” the attorney said.

[Via, Via ]

DemocracyNow! video discussion of the new evidence in the Terry Williams case. Williams was scheduled to be executed on October 3, 2012.

A state judge granted a stay of execution on Friday for Terry Williams, a death row inmate facing lethal injection in just five days, after ruling that prosecutors hid crucial mitigating evidence from defense attorneys before his trial nearly 30 years ago.

Williams faced death for killing Amos Norwood, a 51-year-old chemist, in Philadelphia in 1984. What the jury in that case did not know is that Norwood had sexually abused Williams and had allegedly violently raped him the night before. Furthermore, Williams had suffered years of physical and sexual abuse by older males. Most recently, evidence has emerged that prosecutors tried to make robbery seem like the motive for the murder, even though Williams’ co-defendant knew about the sexual abuse.

At trial, the lead prosecutor called Norwood an "innocent man" and told jurors that Williams committed the murder "for no other reason than that a kind man gave him a ride home." Williams was three months past his 18th birthday at the time of the killing.

Via:

Both accomplice Marc Draper, a policeman's son, and the trial prosecutor, Andrea Foulkes, gave new testimony before Sarmina in recent days. Draper said that he was promised a chance at parole if he told jurors the Norwood slaying was a robbery, not a sex-related crime.

He testified accordingly, but is serving a life term for felony murder. He said he did not understand that lifers in Pennsylvania are never eligible for parole.

Several Norwood jurors said they also misunderstood that when they sentenced Williams to death. Five jurors now support his bid for clemency, as does Norwood's widow.

Foulkes denied promising Draper a shorter sentence, or withholding evidence from jurors or the defense.

Under Saramina's ruling, Williams will get a new hearing before a jury to determine whether he should be executed or not. The judge did not overturn Williams' guilty verdict in the Norwood murder. If Williams prevails in court, he will serve life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Lawyers with the Federal Community Defenders Office in Philadelphia said the sex-abuse evidence might have steered the jury toward a life sentence, if not a different verdict on guilt.

Then Philadelphia District Attorney Ronald Castille -- who signed off on Williams' death penalty case -- now serves as chief justice of the state Supreme Court, which may now ultimately decide Williams' fate.

Advocates for child victims of sexual abuse are calling on Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett to grant clemency to Terrance "Terry" Williams, who is scheduled to be executed on October 3. In 1986, Williams was convicted of killing Amos Norwood. What the jury in that case did not know is that Norwood had sexually abused Williams and had allegedly violently raped him the night before. Furthermore, Williams had suffered years of physical and sexual abuse by older males. Most recently, evidence has emerged that prosecutors tried to make robbery seem like the motive for the murder, even though Williams’ co-defendant knew about the sexual abuse. A hearing on this part of the case was set to take place Friday in Philadelphia. Now, as Williams’ execution is set to take place in less than a month, five of the jurors in his case have since come forward to say they believe life without parole would have been the appropriate sentence because they did not know all the facts.

A full transcript is available at DemocracyNow!

Police in the California city of Anaheim, home of Disneyland, are facing allegations of murder and brutality after fatally shooting two Latino men and firing rubber bullets into crowds of protesters. Here is an interview with neighborhood children who were shot at with rubber bullets by police.

This Youtube video has good footage of the damage as a result of the July 18, 2012 riot at the Maruti Suzuki plant in India, but it is a continuous loop of the same images for over 6 minutes.

Outsourcing to cheap foreign labor may have to eventually become a thing of the past as now auto workers in India have resorted to deadly violence in their desperate efforts to have India's outdated labor laws overhauled, and their wages increased.

Reuters reports:

Hiding in his office near New Delhi as workers armed with iron bars and car parts rampaged through the factory, Maruti Suzuki(MRTI.NS) supervisor Raj Kumar spent two terrified hours trying to comprehend the warzone his workplace had become.

By the end of the day, one of his colleagues had been burnt to death and dozens wounded, many with broken bones, as a long-running struggle between the shop floor and management exploded at a factory racked by mistrust.

While police investigate and the carmaker counts its mounting losses, the July 18 clash has rattled corporate India and shone a light on outdated and rigid labour laws in a country where cheap labour drives manufacturing and draws foreign investment. High inflation, a shortage of skilled labour and rising aspirations have emboldened workers' demands.

"There was always a strong sense of unease," Kumar, 43, told Reuters as he stood outside the locked factory gates more than a week after the riot in the industrial town of Manesar.

"We are living in fear... The kind of violence these guys showed was unbelievable."

Hyundai and Honda plants located in India have also seen labour unrest in their plants as some labor laws date as far back as 1920.

Since July's rioting, Maruti Suzuki has remained on shut down, with its some 2,500 workers in hiding fearing punishment from the company, criminal charges or both.

Troubles for Maruti began as far back as 2000, when workers hunger-striked for better wages. The best and highest paid manufacturing workers in the area are paid 25,000 rupees a month, the equivalent of just $445.79 in U.S. currency.

James Holmes has been officially charged with 24 counts of murder and 116 counts of attempted murder. Holmes is the sole suspect in the shooting at a Colorado movie theater that killed 12 and injured 58. Before his appearance in court today, his second so far, the former head of the Colorado public defender’s office predicted, “There’s probably charges that can be brought [on behalf] of anybody who was present. The state will need to decide how they approach all of those charges." The judge was also set to hear arguments regarding a package Holmes mailed to his psychiatrist that his lawyers argue was illegally apprehended and leaked to the public by the government.

"Anonymous" sources and DNA "evidence" that turns out to be false attempt to tie Occupy movement to a brutal murder.

On Tuesday, the local New York City NBC affiliate ran a story based on an unnamed source leaking information on a murder case, with the following headline, "DNA links Occupy protest scene to 2004 murder." There had been a break in the eight-years-cold investigation of the murder of Sarah Fox in Inwood Hill Park. DNA evidence recovered from her CD player, found near her corpse, matched DNA taken from a chain used to hold open a subway door in the fare strike conducted by wildcat transit union members and Occupy Wall Street activists.

The article appeared to be based on a single unnamed source, seemingly speaking from within the NYPD investigation, though not even the basis of the source's expertise was given.

Then it seems the police already had a main "person of interest" in the case, Dimitry Sheinman, a person with no ties to Occupy Wall Street (He's lived in South Africa until recently), well before the DNA evidence surfaced. At the end of the article it states that "Sheinman remains a leading person of interest."

So...the NYPD is collecting DNA from Occupy protest scenes? Outrageous, not to mention how incredibly expensive it would be to do DNA testing on all of any such samples.

Then on Wednesday, comes this New York Times report:

A link between DNA from the unsolved killing of Sarah Fox, a Juilliard student, in 2004 and DNA taken from a chain placed at the site of an Occupy Wall Street action in March may be the result of a laboratory error, according to two people briefed on the investigation.

One of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it appeared that the DNA recovered from skin cells on the slain woman’s portable compact disc player and from the chain found this year came from a Police Department employee who works with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

And now Thursday, that same local NBC affiliate reports this:

Two sources said officials are investigating whether at an NYPD lab technician came into contact with both pieces of evidence, causing the match.

How would both samples be tainted unless they weren’t working from a database match, but from some manufactured reason to check the DNA samples side by side?

NBC also reports that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was "Asked Wednesday why police tested the chains for forensic evidence, Kelly said, "If we are able to identify someone who committed a crime using forensic evidence, we are going to use it."'

Also a statement from an Occupy Wall Street spokesman, "I hope the person or persons who killed this young woman are found and brought to justice," said Bill Dobbs, a spokesman for Occupy Wall Street. "We don't know anything about it... I hope no one jumps to any conclusions."

As the media has already "gone there," I hope they also now continue to hammer Ray Kelley about his program of collecting DNA from protest sites, because that's the only actual scoop in this whole story.

A foreclosure and eviction from one's home is always a tragic situation, and in this case it's especially so.

(CNN) -- A locksmith hired to help in the process of evicting a California tenant was shot dead, along with the sheriff's deputy serving the eviction notice, police said Friday.

In addition to the two men shot dead, a lone body has been found inside the charred ruins of the Modesto, California, apartment building, Modesto police Officer Chris Adams told CNN on Friday.

He did not say definitively that this was the same person being sought out for the eviction notice, adding that it could take days or weeks to positively identify the body. But he did say that police are no longer looking for any suspects in the case.

Condolences to all the families involved.