Russian investigators confirmed on Monday a man beaten to death last week in Volgograd, south Russia, was the victim of a homophobic gang.

The naked body of the 23-year-old man with various injuries, including to his genitalia, was found in the courtyard of an apartment building on May 10, the day after Russia celebrated Victory Day marking the end of World War II.

The victim's skull was smashed with a 20-kilogram (44 pound) rock and he appeared to have been raped with beer bottles, regional media said. The report said the suspects also tried to burn the body but failed to do so.

"The motive for the crime was the [victim's] non-traditional sexual orientation," senior regional investigator Andrei Gapchenko said, adding two suspected attackers have been arrested and another man is a witness in the case.

The suspects are a 22-year-old man, who studied with the victim at school, and his 27-year-old friend, who was previously jailed for theft. The latter has admitted his guilt, investigators said.

Shots fired during an informal Mother's Day afternoon parade in New Orleans injured 17 people, a police spokeswoman said Sunday.

One of the injured was a girl, 9 or 10 years old, who was grazed by a bullet to her side, said Remi Braden, director of public affairs for the New Orleans Police Department.

She said there were no fatalities and "most of the wounds are not life-threatening.''

The shots were fired around 2 p.m. in the area of North Villere and Frenchmen Streets during what is locally referred to as "a second-line parade,'' Braden said.

The Times-Picayune newspaper said there were about 200 people at the event when gunfire erupted. Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas told reporters at the scene that at least 12 people were shot, Associated Press reported. Braden said later that "we believe 17 people were wounded,'' either while participating or observing the parade.

Braden said three or four people were in surgery, but he didn't have their conditions.

Do you know anything about this statue head?

Granted, this is not the kind of question you normally hear, but the statue head that was left at the East Hampton Library this weekend begs the question.

Dennis Fabiszak, the library director, tells Patch that some time between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning a statue of the head of a woman, attached to a piece of slate, was left inside the library construction site on top of an old fountain. The back of the statue has a piece broken out of it, where it appears birds made a nest inside of it at some point. Weighing about 50 pounds, it looks like it was made out of a thick red or orange clay that was then painted black. There's an inscription on the back (see photo below).

Where did this statue come from? Who left it at the library? Why was it left at the library? Who is the woman depicted in the statue?

A man in a bulldozer-like vehicle has gone on a rampage in the US state of Washington, damaging homes and cutting off electricity to thousands.


Barry Alan Swegle, 51, used a bulldozer-like vehicle to damage property and an electricity pole in a dispute with neighbours.

Four homes in Washington's Olympic Peninsula were badly damaged and one home was knocked off its foundations.

An electricity pole was also pushed down by the International Harvester TD-25 machine, cutting off electricity for thousands in the area.

A neighbour in the area told the Peninsula Daily News that the driver "just went nuts".

Mr Swegle was arrested and held over malicious mischief. No one was injured in the incident.

Student persuaded not to have an abortion by gynaecologist who was paid by childless couple

An Italian gynaecologist persuaded a young woman not to have an abortion so that he could sell her baby and pocket €25,000 (£21,000), according to police in Naples.

The doctor, Andrea Cozzolino, 57, was arrested this week on suspicion of corruption and abuse of office, after evidence emerged that two years ago he persuaded a 17-year-old student to carry her child to term, telling her that he would pass the baby on to a childless couple.

However, it is alleged that he didn't tell the mother that the couple he had found would pay him €25,000 to deliver the child to them.

The young woman, who became pregnant by her student boyfriend, was delayed in seeking a legal abortion (paid for by Italy's health service) because of her age and her refusal to allow her parents to be contacted, according to Alessandro Tocco, Caserta's deputy police chief.

During the debate over the Senate background checks bill last month, one consistent pro-gun talking point was that expanded background checks would not have prevented the Newtown massacre.

However, the parents of the Newtown victims often said the proposed bill wasn't for their slain children, but rather future children who may be killed by guns.

Since the Newtown mass shooting in December 2012, at least 71 children (age 12 or under) have been killed in the U.S. by guns, reports Mother Jones.

That rate, for just five months, actually exceeds some countries' yearly rates of total gun murder deaths. Japan had only seven in 2011, per the Associated Press.

Two 7-year-old Virginia boys were suspended from elementary school for playing a game of make-believe in which they pointed pencils at each other, pretending that they were machine guns.

Christopher Marshall, a second grader at Driver Elementary School in Suffolk, Virginia, was sent home and suspended for two days for making machine gun noises while pointing a pencil at his classmate, who was also suspended. A teacher noticed the two boys making the noises, and proceeded to pull them out of the classroom and take them to the principal's office on May 3.

"I got a call from Christopher's school at 12:30 on Friday," one boy's mother, 34-year-old Wendy Marshall, told Yahoo! Shine. "His teacher told me that Christopher and his friend were playing with pencils, making machine gun and 'bang bang' noises. I asked if they were pointing the pencils at anyone else, if they were angry or hostile, disrupting class, or refused to stop when asked -- and the teacher said no."

Paul Marshall, the boy's father, told Fox 43 that his son was simply pretending to be a Marine, like he was for many years. Both parents believe the school overreacted in suspending their child for two days, and refused to punish him for it.

A logging contractor from Seattle took neighbourly score-settling to a new level when he jumped into his bulldozer and demolished two houses, flattened a pickup truck and snapped an electricity pole, causing power-cuts for a 20 mile radius.

Neighbours in Port Angeles, a small town of 19,000 people situated on the coast 80 miles northwest of Seattle said that a long-running boundary dispute was behind the rampage.

Local police said that Barry Swegle, 51, was being held on suspicion of "malicious mischief in the first degree" after allegedly firing up his luminous-orange International Harvester TD-25 bulldozer with 'skidder' attachment and setting to work.

Aerial pictures showed that one property had been ripped clean off its foundations and shunted several hundred feet into a neighbouring plot. Remarkably, police said no one was injured in the wrecking spree.

Twin car bombs killed 43 people and wounded many more in a Turkish town near the Syrian border on Saturday and the government said it suspected Syrian involvement.

The bombing increased fears that Syria's civil war was dragging in neighboring states despite renewed diplomatic moves towards ending two years of fighting in which more than 70,000 people have been killed.

The bombs ripped into crowded streets near Reyhanli's shopping district in the early afternoon, scattering concrete blocks and smashing cars in the town in Turkey's southern Hatay province, home to thousands of Syrian refugees.

Restaurants and cafes were destroyed and body parts were strewn across the streets. The damage went at least three blocks deep from the site of the blasts.

President Bashar al-Assad's government was the "usual suspect", Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said.

Captivated jurors in a Cincinnati murder trial watched video Tuesday that prosecutors say shows a dying, paralyzed shooting victim who couldn't speak identifying a photo of his killer by blinking his eyes.

Over the unsuccessful and repeated objections of defense attorneys, prosecutors showed the jury a 17-minute video of shooting victim David Chandler, 35, in which he answers detectives' questions by blinking twice to say "no" and three times for "yes."

Ricardo Woods, 35, is charged with Chandler's October 2010 murder and has pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors say that in the video, Chandler clearly identifies Woods as his attacker, while Woods' attorneys argue that his blinks were inconsistent and unreliable. The video is considered the key piece of evidence in the trial. Jurors will have to determine whether Chandler appears alert and knew what he was doing when he said "yes" to Woods' photo.

In the video, police have to repeat some questions when Chandler fails to respond or when the number of times he blinks is unclear.