On Monday, May 6, 2013, an amazing turn of events brought an end to the search for at least three missing women. Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michele Knight were all three discovered in a home in Cleveland, Ohio - and Amanda even gave birth to at least one child four years into her decade-long ordeal. The Salt Lake Tribune shared many of the details behind today's shocking developments, but ultimately it was NBC WKYC 3 that revealed that Amanda is indeed the mother of the young children found in the home with the three missing women. A disturbing element that is being speculated in this case is far more sinister than a mere kidnapping. It's possible these women were purchased in a human trafficking situation.

A mother in Citrus County, Florida, has confessed to killing her 2-year-old daughter by smashing the girl's head into the wall, deputies say.

Chelsea Huggett, 21, has been charged with murder and child abuse in the death Aliyah Marie Branum, WTSP reports.

Deputies were called to Huggett's Hernando home April 26, and say Huggett initially told them that her boyfriend had poisoned the toddler with bug spray, the Chronicle Online reported, then claimed that the perpetrator could have been her roommate. The girl died later that day.

Huggett, who is eight months pregnant, was arrested May 2, however, after she allegedly admitted to investigators that she had shaken her daughter, head butted her and smashed her head into a wall because of the 2-year-old's "whining."

As a gay man living in Brooklyn, 27-year-old Nick Porto constantly looked over his shoulder on his nightly walks home, but he never felt a twinge of fear while spending time in Manhattan.

All that changed on Sunday when Porto and his partner, enjoying the warm weather along with the rest of the city, were knocked to the ground and beaten by a crowd of rowdy New York Knicksfans shouting homophobic slurs - in broad daylight, just steps from Madison Square Garden, the victims said.

The pair were assaulted by four men on Eighth Avenue, between West 34th and West 35th Street about 5 p.m., cops said - as the Indiana Pacers played the Knicks on Sunday.

A six-year-old Florida girl was in critical condition Sunday after being shot by her 13-year-old brother Saturday night in a city just north of Fort Lauderdale.

Neighbors said the two children were playing a game when the shooting occurred shortly before 7 p.m. Saturday in Oakland Park, a city in Broward Country.

"They were playing hide and go seek. I don't know how it went down but he shot his sister," said neighbor Peter Milano, who saw a frantic woman he thought was the children's aunt running down the block.

A 19-year-old male suffered severe injuries to his hand, lower extremities and face after a bomb he made detonated while he was carrying it in northeast Harris County, according to police.

The Houston Police Department said that at about 7:40 p.m. on Saturday the teen and another 18-year-old male had gone down to a bayou near the 3100 block of Valley Rim Drive. The teens had materials to create what is being called a "combustible mixture" with the intention of going to go "blow up turtles."

Police said that at some point, the 19-year-old lit a cigar, and the ashes from his cigar fell near his pocket where he was carrying the explosive cartridges. Police said it is likely that the ashes ignited the cartridges.

After being charged with ... sexual assault

The first rule of preventing sexual assault: don't sexually assault people. That's some free advice for the head of the US Air Force's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, who was removed from his post today after being charged with sexual battery, NBC reports. Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski, 41, allegedly approached a woman in a parking lot in Arlington, Virginia, early Sunday morning and grabbed her breasts and buttocks.

According to the police report, he was drunk and she fought him off before calling the cops - scratches can be seen on his face in his mug shot.

NSW police officers discussed whether a "Catholic mafia" existed within the force, deliberately hindering the investigation of pedophile priests, an inquiry has heard.

Giving evidence at the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry into child sex abuse, Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox said he discussed these fears in 2002 with the current state Nationals MP, Troy Grant, then a serving officer.

Mr Grant "was highly critical of some senior police at Newcastle in what he perceived to be hindering his investigation" into alleged child abuse by clergy, Detective Fox said.

The MP, who will give evidence tomorrow, used the phrase "Catholic mafia" to describe two particular officers he felt were deliberately asking him to work on other criminal investigations, Detective Fox said.

"He was referring to what he perceived to be police who he felt to be aligned to the Catholic Church, who were attempting to discourage investigations into clergy," he said.

Gary Judson had just been removed from his shackles when they slapped the handcuffs on him. The 72-year-old Methodist minister had chained himself to the fence surrounding a compressor station -- part of the critical infrastructure associated with hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking -- a stone's throw from Seneca Lake in upstate New York. The sheriff and his deputies freed him only to arrest him for trespassing.

"They don't have the right to do this -- to put the lake in jeopardy. We'll all end up paying for their mess," Judson told a small group of supporters on hand to witness his act of civil disobedience. The "this" he was protesting, Sandra Steingraber recounts in a recent issue of Orion magazine, was the plan of Missouri-based Inergy Midstream to turn abandoned salt caverns beneath the lake's shores into storage areas for millions of barrels of natural gas piped in from Pennsylvania's fracking fields. "Inergy has been in violation of the Clean Water Act at this facility every single quarter for the past three years," Judson said. "Since 1972, there have been fourteen catastrophic failures at gas storage facilities. Each one of them has been at a salt cavern." A "failure" at Seneca Lake could be particularly catastrophic because, Steingraber writes, it provides the drinking water for 100,000 people. (Last month, Steingraber was jailed for 15 days for her own act of civil disobedience against Inergy.)

In Pennsylvania, where gas is currently being forced out of the shale rock in which it's resided for millions of years, "failures" are already an everyday affair, as TomDispatch regular Ellen Cantarow reports in the latest in her series of articles from fracking's front lines.

Hefazaat leader forced to leave Dhaka as clashes between anti-government protesters and police continue for second day.


The government in Bangladesh has cracked down on protests, taking a television station off-air and transferring the man at the head of the group that instigated the deadly protests out of Dhaka under police escort.

Allama Shah Ahmad Shafi was taken out of the Hefazaat-e-Islam headquarters on Monday before being put on an aircraft to the country's second largest city, Chittagong. Police said, however, that Shafi had not been arrested.

Tens of thousands of Hefazaat supporters rallied near a commercial district of Dhaka early on Monday.

Violence soon began spilling beyond the city, with at least two police officers and a border guard reported dead in Narayanganj, about 20km outside Dhaka.

At least 24 people have reportedly been killed in clashes on Monday alone.

New Zealand - A large animal carcass that washed up on a Bay of Plenty beach left some locals wondering if they'd come across the remains of a prehistoric animal.

The carcass was discovered by a group of quad bikers on a beach about 5km east of Pukehina Beach. The animal's jaw and teeth and parts of its body were still intact.

"People have been asking about it all weekend. It's caused a bit of 'What is it?' in the beach," says Luana Lovell-Dewes, one of the quad bikers who found the remains.

"We haven't seen teeth like that on an animal that's washed up."

Photos of the animal have been sent to the Department of Conservation and Kelly Tarlton's Aquarium for identification, but Mrs Lovell-Dewes says it has proven difficult to get any confirmation.