A Montana man serving a prison term for sexually assaulting a 12-year-old is now facing charges that he contacted the victim via Skype while he was out on bail and urged her to kill herself while he watched.

Michael John Morlan, 21, is currently serving seven years in Montana State Prison after being convicted on two felony counts of sexual intercourse with a minor, according to the Billings Gazette.

Last week Morlan was charged with three felonies: aiding or soliciting suicide, intimidation,and tampering with witnesses and informants after his victim, now 16, came forward and said he had contacted her on the on-line video-chat service Skype on Sept. 1, 2013, and urged her to kill herself while he watched.

According to court documents, Morlan told the girl he wanted to watch her kill herself to make sure she did it right. The victim said that when she started crying, Morlan told her to stop wasting his time and get it over with.

In a statement given to police, the victim alleges Morlan pressured her to cut her wrists and take all the anti-depressants she had on hand. According to the victim, as she cut her wrists, Morlan encouraged her to cut deeper.

The victim states that she panicked after taking the pills, disconnected from Skype, and went to her parents for help.

Attempting to serve a search warrant by entering a house through a window got Killeen, Texas, Police Detective Charles Dinwiddie shot in the face and killed last May. It was yet another SWAT raid organized for a purpose other than the reason they were invented. The police had a search warrant looking for narcotics at the home of Marvin Louis Guy, 49. They decided to serve this warrant at 5:30 in the morning and without knocking on his door. He opened fire on them, killing Dinwiddie and injuring three others.

Though they found a glass pipe, a grinder, and a pistol, they did not find any drugs. Former Reason Editor Radley Balko took note of the deadly raid in May at The Washington Post. A police informant apparently told them there were bags of cocaine inside the house, which sounds a lot like another familiar drug raid in Virginia that got an officer killed.

The Virginia case ended with Ryan Frederick in prison for 10 years despite his insistence he thought he was defending himself against in home intruders. He may end up lucky compared to Guy. Prosecutors in Texas are going to seek the death penalty against him. KWTX offers a dreadfully written summary that says next to nothing about the circumstances of the raid but gives Dinwiddie's whole life story. Guy faces three additional charges of attempted capital murder for shooting the other officers. The story mentions the no-knock raid but fails to explain why it happened or the failure to find any drugs.

The Truthdig columnist speaks to a crowd in Wisconsin over the weekend about the prevailing power structure and "the abject surrender of our political class ... to cash-rich lobbying groups."

A nurse who works at a private hospital in Mersin, a city and province on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, has told Turkish authorities and Parliament that she is sick and tired of treating members of the terrorist organization the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which now calls itself the "Islamic State."

The nurse, who was identified only by her initials, E.G., in a news story published by the Taraf daily on Wednesday, said of ISIL militants: "We treat them, and they go on to decapitate people. I am sick of treating wounded ISIL militants." E.G. has also written a letter to Parliament and the National Police Department, saying she and her colleagues are extremely disturbed by the fact that they have to treat people "who chop off heads."

Taraf reported that other health workers in Mersin and other provinces close to the Syrian border are uneasy about having to help wounded ISIL militants, who are responsible for extreme violence and bloodshed in northern Iraq and Syria.

In the letter she wrote to Parliament and the Police Department, E.G. said she has been employed at a private hospital in Mersin for a long time. She said her hospital has treated many wounded Syrians so far, who have introduced themselves as "opposition members."

However, she noted that she had found out that most of the Syrians recently admitted to the hospital were ISIL members. "I was extremely distressed about this. I am very sorry about this situation. I am disturbed by the fact that these people are being treated in our hospitals while our people are being held by them," she wrote, according to Taraf's report.

Every summer, when Minoo Phakey's water runs out, she does what most people do in her middle-class neighborhood: She calls the mafia.

Within an hour, a man in a tanker arrives, carrying a load of dubious water drawn illegally from the city's groundwater. With India's capital gripped by its annual hot season water shortage, the city's so-called tanker mafia is doing a roaring trade. An estimated 2,000 illegal tankers ply New Delhi's roads every day, lifelines to millions whose taps have run dry, and symptoms of a much bigger problem - the city's desperately dysfunctional water system.

The tankers don't come cheap. But some Delhi-ites have no choice.

"You need water, you will pay anything, right?" says Phakey, a marketing executive.

The State of Texas executed its second female convict for the year on Wednesday after the Supreme Court declined to grant a last-minute request to halt the procedure.

Lisa Coleman, 38, was executed via lethal injection and became only the 15th woman to be put to death in the United States since 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment. She is the 30th inmate to be killed this year.

Coleman was originally sentenced to die after she was convicted of starving and torturing the nine-year-old son of her partner, Marcella Williams. The boy, Davontae Williams, was reportedly emaciated when his body was found by police in July 2004. Coleman and Marcella Williams both shared an apartment, where the boy suffered from starvation and 250 different injuries - cigarette burns, scars, and more.

Davontae was only 36lbs (16kg) when his body was found, shockingly light for a child of nine.

"There was not an inch on his body that not been bruised or scarred or injured," Dixie Bersano, one of Coleman's trial prosecutors, said to the Associated Press.

Coleman was declared dead at 06:24 CDT, the AP reported. Once the lethal dose of pentobarbital was administered, it took approximately 12 minutes for Coleman to pass. She took "a couple of short breaths" and told her friends and aunt in the audience, "Love you all" before she died.

Before Texas commenced with its procedure, Coleman's defense team had petitioned the Supreme Court asking for a stay of execution on the grounds that the crime was not a capital murder case. Murder committed during a kidnapping is considered to be a capital murder, but Coleman's lawyer argued that despite the fact that Davontae's hands were tied at different times, he had not been kidnapped. Therefore, Coleman should not be put to death.

A Baltimore Police officer is facing $5 million dollar brutality lawsuit after a video surfaced showing him repeatedly punching a man.

The video, which was released on Monday from the man's lawyers, shows Police Officer Vincent Cosom repeatedly beating Kollin Truss, while another officer holds Truss's arm as the blows are delivered to his head and torso. Officer Cosom punched Truss six times.

"Much like the public, I'm shocked, I'm outraged, I'm disgusted by what I saw by an employee of the Baltimore City Police Department," Commissioner Anthony Batts said during a press conference addressing the video.

The attack happened three months ago on June 15 when Officer Cosom had a verbal exchange with Truss outside a liquor store. The officer's report said Truss was intoxicated at the time and that he told the man to move when he was loitering in front of the shop.

Truss visited the store to make a purchase and came out sometime later, when he encountered Cosom again. The video showed Truss' female friend pushing him away from her as more words were exchanged. Eventually Truss was backed into a nearby bus stop, where the alleged act of police brutality happened, according to the attorneys.

"The thing that bothers us is that the officer writes in his statement of facts that our client assaulted his girlfriend, but in fact that never happened," Truss' attorney Ivan Bates told Fox.

Should the National Football League suspend or ban any player caught assaulting a wife or girlfriend? That seems to be the conventional wisdom since video emerged of running back Ray Rice knocking his wife unconscious in an elevator, even as reports surface that many more NFL players have domestic-abuse records.

While I have no particular objection to a suspension of any length for such players, the public focus on NFL policy seems strange and misplaced to me. Despite my general preference for reducing the prison population, an extremely strong person rendering a much smaller, weaker person unconscious with his fists, as Rice did, is a situation where prison is particularly appropriate. More generally, clear evidence of domestic abuse is something that ought to result in legal sanction. Employers aren't a good stand in for prosecutors, juries, and judges.

Mark Steyn writes:

[Tuesday] marked a not unimportant court deadline in the upcoming Mann vs Steyn trial of the century, and I wouldn't want to let it pass without comment. Ever since this tedious suit was launched by Doctor Fraudpants in defense of his global-warming hockey stick, Michael Mann's supporters have insisted that it's not, as I and my fellow defendants have insisted, about free speech. Instead, as they see it, it's about science finally fighting back against a sustained assault by Koch-funded "denialists". This sub-headline encapsulates the general line:

Michael Mann is taking a stand for science.

Gotcha. Michael Mann is not doing this for Michael Mann, or even for Michael Mann's science, or even for climate science. He's doing it for science. Mann is science and science is Mann.

A few weeks ago, you'll recall, the ACLU, The Washington Post, NBC News, The Los Angeles Times and various other notorious right-wing deniers all filed amici briefs opposed to Michael Mann and his assault on free speech. They did this not because they have any great love for me, but because their antipathy to wackjob foreign blowhards is outweighed by their appreciation of the First Amendment - and an understanding of the damage a Mann victory would inflict on it. After noting the upsurge of opposition to Mann, Reuters inquired of Catherine Reilly (one of his vast legal team) whether there would be any amici filing pro-Mann briefs:

I asked Reilly if the professor would have any supporting briefs next month when he responds to the defendants in the D.C. appeals court.

"At this point, we don't know," she said.

Brenda Konkel, a vocal Madison advocate for the homeless, and her partner, Robert Bloch, are facing potential fines of up to $300 a day if they don't stop allowing homeless people to sleep and store belongings in lockers on the porch of their North Hancock Street house.

After a complaint from a neighbor, the city of Madison's Building and Zoning departments sent the couple notices of violation about the lockers, sleeping bags and other gear stored alongside the house, and people sleeping on the porch.

"The issue with the lockers is silly because all sorts of people store things on their property outside, and this is because the people who are storing the stuff don't live here. But I don't understand how this is a zoning violation," said Konkel, a former Madison City Council member who works as executive director of the Tenant Resource Center.

People who are sleeping on the porch have nowhere else to go, she said.

"They have zoned homeless people out of everywhere. If they have no more days in shelter left or can't get in that night, there's no legal place to go," said Konkel.

She worked with members of Occupy Madison a couple of years ago as they tried without success to get city approval to erect a homeless encampment and was instrumental in the group's success in getting zoning approval for a village of "tiny houses" now under construction on the city's east side.

Madison Zoning administrator Matt Tucker said that only people who are part of a dwelling unit - who have access to and share the interior for housekeeping services - can legally elect to sleep outside of a dwelling unit in the city. A few such cases, perhaps involving people living in RVs on someone's property, come up each year, he said, and the zoning code is enforced.