KBR Told Victim She Could Lose Her Job If She Sought Help After Being Raped, She Says

A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.

A large series of explosions has rocked a gas plant in Lake County, causing multiple deaths and injuries and forcing the evacuations of residents at least a mile away, authorities said.

A night shift crew was working, and many people are thought to have been killed, said Lt. John Herrell, a Lake County Sheriff's Office spokesman.

"There's going to be a lot," Herrell said.

The explosions began a little before 11 p.m. at Blue Rhino, a propane-tank business at 300 C.R. Road 448, and lasted for more than half an hour. All the explosions happened inside the plant, blowing the roof off, Lake County Sheriff Gary Borders said.

14 police officers with helmets and facemasks and assault rifles stormed in, family says.

Pittsburgh SWAT officers must face claims that they raided a family's home, violently dragged a child from the bathtub, and "terrorized" them at gunpoint, a federal judge ruled.

Georgeia Moreno and her family sued Pittsburgh, its police chief and 14 police officers in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania.

The events unfolded as Georgeia, her husband, William; and her stepfather, Mark Staymates were watching television in their living room as Georgia's sick mother, Darlene, slept upstairs at 7 p.m. on Dec. 7, 2010. They suddenly heard a loud explosion and saw bright lights, "as if grenades were going off," the complaint states.

Pittsburgh Police SWAT officers wearing helmets and facemasks then broke and "stormed through" the front and back doors of the home, according to the complaint.

Those officers allegedly never identified themselves, pointed assault rifles at the family, shouted obscenities and destroyed their property.

Although the team purportedly sought to arrest William for quarreling with a drunk, off-duty police officer at a local veterans club early that morning, the family says that their "terrorization" continued for another 45 minutes after William was apprehended.

The officers threw to the floor, kicked and handcuffed Georgeia, her stepfather and her adult son Billy. They also injured Mark's shoulder and forced Billy to lie face down in broken glass, according to the complaint.

When Georgeia pleaded repeatedly that she had young children in the house, at least one officer allegedly stated, "You think you can get one of ours, and we won't get one of yours?"

The family says the police proceeded to drag Georgeia's 10-year-old son Trentino violently from the bathtub, injuring his ankles. They allegedly then made the boy stand naked at gunpoint next to his 4-year-old sister Briseis.

Officers have continued to harass and threaten the family since the raid, telling them "that's how we do things here" and that they should move out of Pittsburgh, the complaint states.

Villagers in parts of Mhondoro and Chikomba districts are living in fear following the recent falling of foreign objects in their area.

Police said they were still to ascertain the origin and type of the objects. National police spokesperson Senior Assistant Commissioner Charity Charamba said investigations were still in progress. "Investigations are still going on at the army engineers. We do not have any conclusions yet," she said.

Minister of State Security Sydney Sekeramayi said he was still to receive a detailed report on the investigations. Two objects landed in the Mhondoro area at the Zimplats Mine and at Denya Village in Mamina while one landed in Unyetu in Chikomba district.
The object that landed at the Turf Village, Zimplats Mine in the Battlefields area is made of aluminium material and resembles a rocket. It is three metres long and a has 1,8 metre diameter while the spherical objects that landed in Mamina and Unyetu were said to weigh above 10kg.

The explanations of the people in all the areas were similar despite the distance between them. People interviewed separately confirmed they heard three loud bursts and hissing sounds that they thought were gun fire followed by jet sound. The sounds were followed by thuds that shook the ground and were felt and heard several kilometres away.

Speculation is high that the objects could be from satellite spying on Zimbabwe with residents in the affected areas insisting that the people responsible for launching the objects should be named and made to explain.

A Massachusetts couple could face a $5,000 fine after they rushed to rescue an injured baby seal at a Marshfield Beach.

Mark Hodgon was scuba diving at about 1:30 p.m. when he found the baby seal covered in shark bite marks. He said the seal was barely floating and breathing laboriously.

"You could just tell his whole body was in the shark," Hodgon said. "It had to have been."

Hodgon swam closer with a raft and helped the seal onto it then swam back to shore to take a better look at its injuries. Pictures of the event show the pup kissing Hodgon on the chin.

Debbie Bourne, 45, was at her apartment in the Liberty Village housing projects in Plainfield, N.J., on the afternoon of April 30 when police banged on the door and pushed their way inside. The officers ordered her, her daughter, 14, and her son, 22, who suffers from autism, to sit down and not move and then began ransacking the home. Bourne's husband, from whom she was estranged and who was in the process of moving out, was the target of the police, who suspected him of dealing cocaine. As it turned out, the raid would cast a deep shadow over the lives of three innocents - Bourne and her children.

The murder of a teenage boy by an armed vigilante, George Zimmerman, is only one crime set within a legal and penal system that has criminalized poverty. Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jails and prisons, however, they each can generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year. This use of the bodies of the poor to make money for corporations fuels the system of neoslavery that defines our prison system.

A woman who was reunited with her family nearly 25 years after she was kidnapped from a New York City hospital cannot sue the city for damages, a state judge has ruled.

Carlina White, whose dramatic story spawned headlines and a Lifetime television movie, was taken from Harlem Hospital in 1987, when she was 19 days old, and raised by her kidnapper in Connecticut.

After essentially solving her own case and finding her birth parents, White sued the city for $2 million last year.

Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Kathryn Freed, however, said that White could not sue because her parents had already done so on her behalf in 1988, reaching a $750,000 settlement that included money set aside for White if she were found before her 21st birthday.

An obese South African chef weighing 130 kg (286 lbs) is being kicked out of New Zealand for being too fat - but he's not leaving without a fight.

Albert Buitenhuis was told his weight may put too much demand on the country's health service - despite his losing 30 kg (66 lbs) since arriving in New Zealand six years ago.

Buitenhaus, who stands at five feet ten inches, has a body mass index of 40 - making him clinically obese. Immigration New Zealand (INZ) said that an applicant's BMI must be under 35.

"INZ's medical assessors have said to consider to what extent there might be indications of future high-cost and high-need demand for health services," a spokesman said, as quoted by the Huffington Post.

Both Buitenhaus and his wife are now facing deportation, which they say is unfair.

Before arriving to New Zealand, the chef weighed 159 kg (350 lbs). Much of that weight was gained after Buitenhaus quit smoking. His wife Marthie told the media that their visas had been approved every year since they arrived in 2007.

The FBI says they've recovered 105 missing and exploited children over the weekend by orchestrating a massive crackdown on crime rings that trafficked minors for sex.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation made the announcement Monday morning, and reportedly has arrested 150 pimps involved in selling minors through an underground sex trade that exploited missing children ages 13 through 17 around the country.

According to a statement made early Monday by Ronald Hosko, the agency's assistant director of their criminal investigative division, the coordinated raids in more than 70 cities under the name "Operation Cross Country" marked the largest effort of its type ever undertaken by the FBI.

Two years ago, when the craze for social media startups was in full swing, a former Facebook (FB) engineer summed up the situation with a memorable lament: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," the engineer, Jeff Hammerbacher, told Bloomberg Businessweek at the time. "That sucks," he added.

It might be over.

Social media companies drew only 2 percent of the venture capital headed to Internet-based enterprises last quarter, according to data published on Tuesday by CB Insights, a research firm that tracks venture-capital investment. In the two-year stretch that ended in the middle of 2012, social media companies took in at least 6 percent of overall venture capital invested in Internet companies each quarter. But for three of the last four quarters, those social startups have brought in 2 percent or less (with the outlier quarter largely the result of a huge investment in Pinterest earlier this year). The peak came in the third quarter of 2011, when social companies led by Twitter took in 21 percent of the total $3.8 billion in Internet deals by venture capital firms.