A teen accused of rape spent three months in custody because police did not disclose texts that proved his innocence. His alleged victim wrote in one message: "I'm not just going to mess his life up, I'm going to ruin it lol."

Connor Fitzgerald, 19, had the rape charge against him thrown out when prosecutors discovered the texts. Fitzgerald, of South Norwood in south London, lost his job as a BT engineer because of the claim.

To no parent's surprise, too much smartphone use makes teens unhappy.
So says a new study from San Diego State University, which pulled data from over one million 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the U.S. showing teens who spent more time on social media, gaming, texting and video-chatting on their phones were not as happy as those who played sports, went outside and interacted with real human beings.

But is it the screen time bringing them down or are sadder teens more likely to insulate themselves in a virtual world? Lead author of the study and professor of psychology Jean M. Twenge believes it's the phone that contributes to making them unhappy, not the other way around.

"Although this study can't show causation, several other studies have shown that more social media use leads to unhappiness, but unhappiness does not lead to more social media use," Twenge said.

First, there was Dr. Jordan Peterson's infamous takedown of feminist Cathy Newman, whose debate on feminist issues has garnered almost 5 million views on YouTube and almost 75,000 comments to date, not to mention a slew of op-eds.

Now, there's President Trump's refusal to call himself a feminist.

I have high hopes that America is waking up to the farce that is feminism. "For the first time in decades, if not ever, [feminism's] tenets are being publicly challenged," writes Corey Schink for Signs of the Times.

It is long overdue, for we can now expose feminism for what it is: a war on men, on children, and on family.

A Louisiana man, who for 37 years maintained his innocence in a rape case, has been freed after a Jefferson Parish judge overturned his conviction.

Judge June Darensberg vacated Malcolm Alexander's 1980 conviction based on the Innocence Project's application arguing that his counsel provided "ineffective assistance." The effort was bolstered by DNA testing that excluded Alexander as a suspect, according to Innocence Project Director Barry Scheck.

"Thank you from the bottom of my heart for getting my child out of that place," Alexander's mother, Maudra, 82, who is wheelchair bound, told attorneys from the Innocence Project, according to the New Orleans Times Picayune.

Two large protests against migration have woken up the Germans: On 20 January, at least 2,500 participants were protesting in Cottbus and last Sunday, on 28 January, there was another big protest in Kandel.

The protests started in Cottbus after Syrians attacked several Germans within a matter of days. For example a German man and a German boy were attacked with knives by Syrians. After other incidents, tensions in the town became so high that it stopped the acceptance of new refugees.

But also in Kandel people have had enough of migrant violence. In December, a 15-year-old German girl, called Mia, was brutally murdered by an Afghan refugee in a drug store. Mia was well-liked, she helped organise the local carnival every year.

The Syrian Army units found the bodies of a number of soldiers in three mass graves in their mop-up operation in the newly-freed Abu al-Dhohour airbase in Southeastern Idlib, field sources reported on Tuesday.

The sources said that the army's engineering units continued their cleansing operation near Abu al-Dhohour airbase in cooperation with the country's Red Crescent in and outside the airbase and discovered the bodies of 45 Syrian soldiers killed by the Al-Nusra Front (Tahrir al-Sham Hay'at or the Levant Liberation Board) and buried in three mass graves.

The sources guessed that more bodies will be discovered in the airbase as the terrorists executed 71 soldiers when they once captured the military airport.

A man who describes himself as a shy and helpless romantic at heart, a former mall Santa Claus, is now an accused serial killer who, Toronto police allege, buried the skeletal remains of his victims' dismembered bodies in the bottom of outdoor planters and flower pots.

Parts of more human bodies may be hidden in planters or gardens at homes throughout Toronto. No one knows exactly which ones.

In an investigation unlike any before seen in the history of the nation's largest city, police have charged 66-year-old freelance landscaper Bruce McArthur with five-counts of first-degree murder, most of the victims men who had been reported missing from Toronto's gay village area.

The remains of at least three people were recovered from large planters at a midtown Toronto property linked to McArthur and where he may have previously landscaped.

Over the past year, the Baltimore Police Department has undoubtedly gained national attention in a corruption scandal involving the Gun Trace Task Force, running wild on the streets of Baltimore.

Members of this elite group were charged with "racketeering and other corruption, accused of robbing citizens, making illegal arrests and filing for thousands of dollars in overtime they never worked," said the Baltimore Sun.

Maurice Ward, one of the Gun Trace Task Force detectives, took the stand Tuesday in the case of officers Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor who were charged with robbery, extortion, fraud and firearm charges.

Ward's testimony provided a somewhat shocking account of how detectives used GPS locators to follow drug dealers, and then, eventually rob them of their cash and drugs.

The arctic air that has frozen the northeastern U.S. over the first weeks of 2018 has prompted New Englanders to crank up the heat and New England's utility companies to scramble for fuel.

This season's above-average heating and electricity demand has tested grid reliability at a time when the topic has had particular political salience. Most reporting on the matter has lauded the resilience the grid has shown, but a fuel-security analysis performed by the group that oversees New England's power system delivers a pessimistic chill. ISO New England's analysis reveals that in winters to come fuel insecurity will plague the region.

Insecurity despite abundance

What makes ISO New England's report so tragic is that the United States is now a veritable world energy superpower.

Ten years ago, concerns about energy prices and fuel security were a standard element of the national zeitgeist. But a decade removed from the oil price peak of $147 per barrel in July 2008, our national concern over resource depletion has been rendered moot. Spurred by the high prices of the mid-2000s, American companies embarked upon nothing less than a domestic energy renaissance. Since 2005, oil production in the United States has increased by 50 percent, oil exports have seen a tenfold increase, and oil imports have fallen by a quarter.

At 2:40 a.m. on June 9, 2013, Sergeant Detective Gary Hayward was dispatched to an address near the center of the tony town of Topsfield, in the North Shore region of Massachusetts. There, he found an elderly woman on a bench outside the town library in her bathrobe, sobbing, her disheveled and distraught companion beside her.

Hayward, a patient man with a calm demeanor honed over nearly 30 years in law enforcement, sat with the woman, Glenda Duckworth, as she described being forced to climb out of her bedroom window to escape her 6-foot-2, 240-pound son, Daniel Morley, after he attacked her, yelling, "Witch, burn in hell!" She said her son snatched her eyeglasses off her face and began melting them on the stove, threw her in a chair and forcibly drew cat whiskers on her cheeks with a marker, and then chased her into her bedroom, where he jumped on top of her longtime partner, David Bloss. As Bloss begged, "Help me, Glenda!," she climbed out of the window. Bloss wriggled out from under the 27-year-old Morley and escaped out that same window. Together they called 911 from Bloss's cellphone.

Hayward took copious notes as the terrified couple described Morley's breakdown, which had been building over the previous eight weeks, since the day two bombs were detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Morley's mother had grown so concerned about his behavior that she'd made a psychiatrist appointment for him, which she reminded him of as he assaulted her - "I am your mother, and you need help!" - according to the affidavit she swore out later that day to get a restraining order against him. Her son, Duckworth explained, had long struggled with mental health issues, but since the Boston Marathon bombing, he had become "very dark."