A private jet apparently experiencing mechanical trouble crashed Sunday in a northern Indiana neighborhood, leaving multiple people dead after it hit three homes, becoming lodged in one of them, authorities and witnesses said.

The Beechcraft Premier I twin-jet had left Tulsa, Okla.'s Riverside Airport and crashed near South Bend Regional Airport, Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Roland Herwig in Oklahoma City said.

"Fatalities have been confirmed at the scene," said Deputy St. Joseph County Coroner Michael O'Connell. He would not say how many people are dead.

CBS affiliate WSBT-TV reported that there were at least two fatalities.

The plane is registered to 7700 Enterprises of Montana LLC in Helena, Mont. The company is owned by Wes Caves and does business as DigiCut Systems in Tulsa, Okla. It makes window film and paint overlay for automobiles. Herwig said he did not know how many people were aboard the jet.

A woman identifying herself as Caves' wife answered the phone at their home Sunday and said, "I think he's dead," before hanging up.

For a theist there's nothing quite like watching an atheist get an intellectual walloping from a preacher. There's just something apocalyptic about it, and it most easily occurs when the atheist tries to chop up religion to irrelevancy without realizing that he is himself awfully religious.

It happened again recently at the Cambridge Union debating society when former Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams took on the best known name in contemporary atheism, Richard Dawkins. They were debating whether religion has a role in the 21^st century.

Dawkins said it didn't.

Williams said it did.

In the end, Williams was handed a decidedly strong victory with more than two times as many votes from the audience as the infamous atheist, Dawkins. It was a triumphant day for the faithful and a shameful one for the irreligious.

But actually no one really is irreligious.

This world beats to the rhythm of religion in a thousand ways, and absolutely everyone is religious -- including atheists.

Religion certainly includes an idea of a God under whom man is inherently subservient, but religion also governs the belief system undergirding the way people think about, and live, their lives.

It tells them who their authority is and it informs their values and behavior. It gives them their sense of morality and goodwill, and it guides them in the way they treat themselves and others. Religion does nothing less than construct one's view of the world.

Atheists are, in fact, some of the most religious people.

First, they have a functioning God under whom they are subservient (normally it's science or rationality, but mainly themselves), and that idea of God informs the way they live and interpret their lives. It informs their biases and determines their values, and governs any sense of morality or ethics they adhere too, or ignore.

Once that's all settled all that's left is the preaching.

And they preach all the time.

In Steubenville, Ohio two teenage boys - a 17-year-old and 16-year-old - are on trial for allegedly stripping a very inebriated and nearly unconscious 16-year-old girl naked, attempting to make her perform oral sex on them (although she could not even open her mouth), urinating on her, using their fingers to penetrate her and carrying her from one location to another, to continue sexually violating her.

The texts they allegedly sent one another when the girl heard rumors from friends about what happened to her while she was too drunk to be aware of it, or even remember it, are chilling. They refer to her as a dead body, gleefully recall humiliating her and contain degrading statements about all females being worthy of sexual degradation.

In one text, the 17-year-old, knowing he has been identified as a possible assailant, tells a friend that he might as well have raped the girl (not just digitally, but using his penis), given the possible consequences he could face:

A military judge has sentenced an Air Force instructor to four years in prison for raping a female trainee at the South Texas base where he worked.

Lt. Col. Matthew Van Dalen also sentenced Staff Sgt. Eddy Soto to a dishonorable discharge after convicting him of rape Saturday during a military trial at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland.

Sgt. Mourad Mourad racked up three suits while he was a plainclothes cop on Staten Island, and Officer Jovaniel Cordova racked up two at Brooklyn's 70th Precinct - all alleging various civil rights violations including illegal stop and search and false arrest.

The NYPD sergeant and cop involved in the fatal shooting of Brooklyn 16-year-old Kimani Gray have been named in five federal lawsuits - which cost the city a total of $215,000 in settlements, court records show.

Sgt. Mourad Mourad racked up three suits while he was a plainclothes cop on Staten Island, and Officer Jovaniel Cordova racked up two at Brooklyn's 70th Precinct - all alleging various civil rights violations including illegal stop and search and false arrest.

Prosecutors later dismissed all but one of the arrests against the six plaintiffs, and the criminal cases were sealed.

Mourad and Cordova had been placed on desk duty while the NYPD and the Brooklyn district attorney's office continue to investigate the circumstances surrounding the March 9 shooting in East Flatbush that has since sparked riots. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said Gray was shot after he pointed a .38-caliber revolver at the sergeant and cop, who had approached a group of youths on the street.

Nearly 330 million abortions have been performed in China in the 40 years since it first implemented measures to limit population growth in the world's most populous nation, official data showed.

China has announced structural changes to its family planning system which oversees the controversial one-child policy during the ongoing annual meeting of the national legislature in Beijing.

Data posted on the health ministry website earlier this year shows that from 1971 - shortly before China started encouraging people to have fewer children - through 2010 a total of 328.9 million abortions were carried out in the country, which has a population of 1.35 billion.

China says that its one-child policy introduced in the early 1980s has prevented overpopulation and boosted economic development. The policy exempts some rural families, ethnic minorities and couples who are both only children.

The Church of Scientology has lashed out at a new book by its leader's niece, which recounts a stolen childhood and how she was brainwashed and cut off from her family before eventually escaping.

In Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology And My Harrowing Escape, Jenna Miscavige-Hill - whose uncle David Miscavige runs the secretive group - also claims she was forced to work as a child.

But a spokesman for the Church said her claims were "false" and denounced "efforts to exploit Mr Miscavige's name."

"The Church has long respected the family unit while accommodating and helping those raising children," Karin Pouw, spokeswoman for the Church of Scientology International, told AFP.

"The Church does not engage in any activities that mistreat, neglect or force children to engage in manual labor. The Church follows all laws with respect to children," she said, accusing Miscavige-Hill of "apostate behavior."

The severed heads of a Hong Kong couple were found in a refrigerator at a bloodstained apartment in a gruesome murder for which their 29-year-old son has been arrested, according to reports.

Police said in a statement Friday that "some sections of human body" had been found at a flat in Tai Kok Tsui on the outskirts of the city and that they suspected the victims were a 64-year-old man and his wife.

They had been reported missing last Saturday, police said.

The couple were identified as Chau Wing-ki, 64, and his wife Siu Yuet-yee, 63, by Hong Kong newspaper the South China Morning Post(SCMP).

Their heads had been found in the refrigerator and parts of their arms and legs were also discovered in the flat, according to the SCMP, while their bodies remain missing.

Two members of the high school football team that is the pride of Steubenville were found guilty Sunday of raping a drunken 16-year-old girl in a case that bitterly divided the Rust Belt city and led to accusations of a cover-up to protect the community's athletes.

Steubenville High School students Trent Mays and Ma'Lik Richmond were sentence to at least a year in juvenile jail, capping a case that came to light via a barrage of morning-after text messages, social media posts and online photos and video. Mays was sentenced to an additional year in jail on a charge of illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material, to be served after his rape sentence is completed.

The two teens broke down in tears after the verdict was read and later apologized to the victim and to the community. Both were emotional as they spoke, and Richmond struggled at times to talk through his sobs.

Mays, 17, and Richmond, 16, were charged with digitally penetrating the West Virginia girl, first in the back seat of a moving car after an alcohol-fueled party on Aug. 11, and then in the basement of a house. They were ordered to avoid contact with the victim until they're 21.