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Daily Telegraph (UK)
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Jun 13, 09 11:18 AM CDT
(Newser) -
Amanda Knox returned to the stand for the second day today with a familiar theme: Italian police abused her—verbally and sometimes physically—so much that she became confused about events the night Meredith Kercher was killed. She said police threatened her with serious jail time if she didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, the Telegraph reports. “If you don't start telling the truth,” she recalls police saying, “we'll put you in jail for 30 years.”
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CBS5 (San Francisco)
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Jun 12, 09 4:54 PM CDT
(Newser) -
Melissa Huckaby, the Sunday school teacher accused of kidnapping, raping, and murdering an 8-year-old girl in California, pleaded not guilty today, KPIX-TV reports. Sandra Cantu, a playmate of 28-year-old Huckaby’s daughter, was found in a suitcase in a nearby pond in April. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for September. Prosecutors had been pressing for a plea while Huckaby’s lawyer reviewed evidence.
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Bloomberg
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Jun 12, 09 3:57 PM CDT
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Two Japanese citizens were detained last week after allegedly trying to take $134 billion in undeclared US bonds from Italy to Switzerland, Bloomberg reports. Both countries are investigating the incident. “Italian authorities are in the midst of the investigation, and haven’t yet confirmed the details, including whether they are Japanese citizens or not,” a Japanese official says.
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Associated Press
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Jun 12, 09 2:01 PM CDT
(AP) -
A German man who called himself Clark Rockefeller and spun fantastic stories about himself during 3 decades in the US was sentenced today to 4 to 5 years for kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter. Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter was convicted of parental kidnapping today for taking the girl during a supervised visit and of assault for injuries suffered by the social worker who was with them.
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Boston Herald
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Jun 12, 09 11:11 AM CDT
(Newser) -
A Boston jury found the con man known as Clark Rockefeller guilty of kidnapping and assault today in the abduction of his young daughter last year, the Boston Herald reports. He faces up to 15 years in prison when he's sentenced this afternoon. The jury found him not guilty of using a false name—he was born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter in Germany—and on a lesser assault charge. His lawyers had mounted an insanity defense, which almost never succeeds in Massachusetts.
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Associated Press
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Jun 12, 09 8:14 AM CDT
(Newser) -
Amanda Knox, the American student accused of killing her British roommate while studying in Italy, says the police beat her during questioning, the AP reports. "Everything that I said was said in confusion and under pressure," Knox testified today. Knox also maintained that she spent the night of Meredith Kercher's 2007 murder at the home of her then-boyfriend, co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito. After starting in Italian, she switched to English, the Times of London reports.
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Guardian (UK)
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Jun 12, 09 7:36 AM CDT
(Newser) -
Alleged Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn has links to the British National Party, the whites-only extremist bloc that won two seats in the European Parliament in last week's vote, reports the Guardian . Von Brunn attended fundraising meetings of an American affiliate of the group, although he is not believed to have made any contributions. BNP leader Nick Griffin, who has been pictured with Klansmen, and has referred to black and Asian Britons as "racial foreigners," attended at least two meetings of the US group.
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NBC News
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Jun 12, 09 5:43 AM CDT
(Newser) -
A man convicted of fencing cadavers stolen from UCLA's willed body program has been sentenced to 10 years in prison, NBC reports. The lawyer for Ernest Nelson, 51, argued that his client’s sales to big-name customers such as Johnson & Johnson were all above board, and that the only thief is the UCLA program director who pocketed what Nelson paid him for the corpses.
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Guardian (UK)
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Jun 12, 09 3:33 AM CDT
(Newser) -
Shouting parents pounded on and hurled bottles at a van carrying a British daycare teacher charged with distributing child porn, reports the Guardian . Photos found in Vanessa George's home showed children as young as infants being sexually assaulted, according to law enforcement authorities. Parents lined up for hours to confront the teacher at a court appearance. They shouted as the van later rushed her from the courthouse, then ran down the street to attack the vehicle. Two men were arrested in the attack.
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Associated Press
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Jun 11, 09 1:49 PM CDT
(Newser) -
The suspect in yesterday’s Holocaust Museum shooting has been charged with murder, the AP reports, and could face the death penalty; hate-crime charges are also possible. Slain security guard Stephen Johns was opening the door for James von Brunn when the 88-year-old fatally shot him, CNN adds; guards fired back and wounded von Brunn.
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Tampa Tribune
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Jun 11, 09 1:21 PM CDT
(Newser) -
The NBA ref imprisoned for betting on games will finish his 15-month sentence in a halfway house, the Tampa Tribune reports; he’ll be released Wednesday. A press release from a “prisoner advocacy group” said Donaghy is being sprung early because he “was injured during an assault in November of 2008. During the assault, another inmate claiming ties to the New York mob beat Donaghy with a heavy object.”
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New York Times
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Jun 11, 09 8:27 AM CDT
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With “flawed and flimsy” evidence and “no motive,” the murder trial of Amanda Knox seems more about a prosecutor’s ambitions than any likelihood the American student actually killed her housemate, Timothy Egan writes in the New York Times. “Any fair-minded jury would have thrown” the case “out months ago,” Egan says, citing an expert who called it “the railroad job from hell.”
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Washington Post
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Jun 11, 09 4:25 AM CDT
(Newser) -
Acquaintances of James von Brunn say the 88-year-old man who witnesses saw open fire in the Holocaust Memorial Museum had grown increasingly unhappy in recent weeks, reports the Washington Post . One fellow white separatist said von Brunn "was barely making it" after his Social Security payments were cut, which he blamed on "someone in Washington" looking at his white supremacist website. Von Brunn also told readers of his periodic emails that they should expect not to hear from him again.
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Times (UK)
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Jun 11, 09 2:08 AM CDT
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A group of ten British DJs have been arrested for allegedly using stolen credit cards to download their own music from iTunes and Amazon, the Times of London reports. The gang is believed to have made $300,000 in royalties from the $750,000 they spent buying 19 compilations they recorded, which shot up the charts because of the fraudulent purchases.
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Washington Post
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Jun 11, 09 1:44 AM CDT
(Newser) -
Colleagues at the National Holocaust Museum remember slain security guard Stephen Johns as unfailingly courteous and friendly, the Washington Post reports. The 39-year-old guard was killed in the line of duty yesterday when a gunman walked into the museum and opened fire. "There are no words to express our grief and shock over these events," said a statement from the museum.
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New York Daily News
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Jun 10, 09 9:26 PM CDT
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What a difference a wig—or lack of one—makes. California released the prison mug shot of Phil Spector today, revealing him to be a rather ordinary looking bald guy, the Daily News reports. The renowned music producer, always seen in public (and court) with a very full head of hair, has just begun serving a 19-year sentence for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson at his mansion. He plans to appeal.
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CNN
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Jun 10, 09 7:08 PM CDT
(Newser) -
Details about the twisted past of the elderly man who killed a guard at the US Holocaust Museum continues to surface. In a bizarre incident in 1981, James von Brunn, then 62, stormed into the Federal Reserve's headquarters in DC armed with two guns, a knife, and a fake bomb, and demanded to make a citizen's arrest of board members, reports CNN. Von Brunn, who said he was incensed at high interest rates, served 6 years in federal prison for the stunt, a sentence he blamed in part on a "Jew judge."
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New York Daily News
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Jun 10, 09 5:25 PM CDT
(Newser) -
The white supremacist who allegedly opened fire in the US Holocaust Museum today, killing a security guard, has a hatred of Jews and blacks that “ate him alive like a cancer,” his ex-wife tells the New York Daily News . She said James von Brunn—news reports have differed on whether he's 88 or 89—espoused such views all the time they were married in the 1960s until she divorced him because of it in the '70s.
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Chicago Sun-Times
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Jun 10, 09 3:56 PM CDT
(Newser) -
Chris Brown has beefed up his security detail after receiving death threats over his alleged beating of ex Rihanna, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. Insiders say Brown is surrounded at all times by three beefy bodyguards and three or four “incognito” protectors who are often women “easily as tough as any man.” Authorities think the “group” threatening the singer might actually be a single person.
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Washington Post
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Jun 10, 09 2:48 PM CDT
(Newser) -
White supremacist James Von Brunn is the injured suspect in today’s shooting of a National Holocaust Museum security guard, police tell the Washington Post . The guard has since died of his injuries at a local hospital, sources tell WJLA-TV. On his anti-Semitic website, von Brunn, 88, claims he served in World War II and that he was later convicted of an unstated crime by “a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison by a Jew judge.”
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