Four children from the same family have been found dead in Haiti after being treated by a witch doctor who claimed to be able to cure them of a mysterious illness, a local official said Friday.

"Three girls and a boy, the eldest of whom was seven years old and the youngest only 15 months, suffered abuse from the healer who was treating them," said Wilfrid Brisson, an official from the southern town of Marbial, told AFP.

"They were then abandoned in their mother's bed."

According to neighbors, the sorcerer -- who was assisted by his brother -- persuaded the victims' mother that the children were possessed by a demon and said he could rid their soul of the devil.

Police say protesters marching through downtown Oakland smashed a window at President Barack Obama's campaign office.

Officials say the window at Obama's office at 16th Street and Telegraph Avenue was broken as more than 100 protesters marched around 9 p.m. Friday.

Police say the marchers also smashed several car windows.

Source: The Associated Press

The University of Colorado has hired a former U.S. attorney to review procedures and actions taken by the university and its employees in relation to former student James Eagan Holmes, who is accused of killing 12 people and injuring 58 others at an Aurora movie theater.

Robert N. Miller and his team began the investigation last week, according to a news release from the university.

According to court records, in the months before the July 20 shootings, Holmes, 24, was seeing CU Denver psychiatrist Dr. Lynne Fenton.

Fenton, medical director of student mental-health services at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus, was so alarmed by Holmes' behavior that she notified a campuswide threat-assessment team.

The former pastor of First Baptist Church of Hammond has confessed to having sex with a member of the church when she was 16, board members told the congregation Wednesday night.

The Board of Deacons addressed the church Wednesday to explain their sudden decision to fire pastor Jack Schaap, who had led the church for the past 11 years. The church plans to fully cooperate with an FBI investigation into allegations that multiple sexual encounters involving the same girl took place across state lines.

"Stick with us," the board asked of the 15,000 member congregation, according to the WGN.

Schaap's affair was outed accidentally, a former church member told CBS Chicago.

"Jack Schaap had left his cell phone on the pulpit and a deacon had seen it on the pulpit and had picked it up to bring it back to him," Trisha Kee, who maintains a Facebook group for ex-congregants, told the station. "From what we understand, the deacon then saw a text come through from a teenage girl in the church, and it was a picture of Jack Schaap and this girl making out."

Two Ipswich riding school owners have been convicted of animal cruelty for starving six horses on their property.

Troy Lawrence McIntosh, 30, and Mary Eliza Goodwin, 28, were the joint owners and operators of a riding school business Beleg Faer Equestrian at Minden.

Ipswich Magistrates Court heard the pair started the riding school in 2010 but a report was made to RSPCA Qld in August 2011 with regards to concerns for the welfare of the horses.

The RSPCA launched an investigation which found six horses had been starved by the pair.

Three of the horses relating to the charges were not owned by the defendants and had been leased from different owners.

Both pleaded guilty to six counts each of animal cruelty and were fined $2000 each without a conviction recorded.

They were also ordered to pay $4500 in costs but weren't banned from owning any animals.

The Queensland Times understands the couple are still operating a riding school under a different name.

The girl was murdered by her Pakistani parents for her Western ways. And it was her little sister who bravely told jurors how her mother and father suffocated the 17-year-old with a plastic bag - gripping testimony that led to her parents' murder conviction on Friday.

Justice Roderick Evans sentenced Iftikhar, 52, and Farzana Ahmed, 49, to life in prison for killing their daughter, Shafilea, in 2003. The couple - first cousins from the Pakistani village of Uttam - were ordered to serve a minimum of 25 years in prison.

"She was being squeezed between two cultures - the culture and way of life that she saw around her and wanted to embrace, and the culture and way of life you wanted to impose on her," Justice Evans said during the sentencing at the Chester Crown Court in northwest England.

In Britain, more than 25 women have been killed in so-called "honour killings" in the past decade. Families have sometimes lashed out at their children on the belief that they have brought their household shame by becoming too westernized or by refusing a marriage.

Shafilea was only 10 when she began to rebel against her parents' strict rules, according to prosecutor Andrew Edis.

We have reached a profound point in economic history where the truth is unpalatable to the political class - and that truth is that the scale and magnitude of the problem is larger than their ability to respond - and it terrifies them...Bad things are going to happen. - Hugh Hendry on CNBC

Once again we're going through another wash, rinse, repeat cycle with the housing market fairy tales. People who bother to pay attention to the news woke up this morning to a report from the Commerce Dept that housing starts rose the highest level since 2008 in June. I'm not sure why that would be considered good news, since 2008 is when the bottom really fell out of the housing market. The other anomaly that contradicts this Government-compiled data is that mortgage purchase applications continue to decline on a weekly basis. Note: the mortgage application data is compiled and released by a private, free enterprise organization so we can safely assume that the data report is infinitely more reliable than that of the Government's Commerce Department.

The other myth being propagated by the media and the economic wizards is that the housing inventory is declining. In fact, this housing inventory has largely been converted to rentals. In particular Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been unloading their foreclosed inventory into institutional investors using Taxpayer money to subsidize the transactions. Interestingly and anecdotally, I was perusing the home rental listings in the Denver area for a friend who may be moving to Denver and I noticed that rents had decreased by about 10% from just 6 months ago, when I was looking for a new rental. If in fact the total housing inventory, for sale + rentals, was declining then we would expect that rents would be stable or increasing.

So where's the black hole disconnect? For one, the data is highly suspect, especially since mortgage purchase applications do not correlated with sales and starts. To be sure, I'm sure home builders are taking advantage of near-zero interest rates and borrowing as much as they can to build. But, as Zerohedge crunched this morning's housing starts numbers, the number of homes actually completed is well below the run-rate of starts. A form of "channel stuffing" for home builders is to start a lot of homes but take a long time to complete them, since the stock market and investors only care about the headline "starts" data.

Drew Peterson told his third wife Kathleen Savio he would kill her six months before she was found dead in a bathtub, Savio's sister testified in Peterson's murder trial today.


Anna Doman said on the stand today that her younger sister, Kathleen, had talked to her about threats Peterson made in which he warned Savio he would kill her, according to ABC News affiliate WLS. When asked whether Doman ever told anyone about Savio's statements, she said that she had not.

"No one would listen," she said. "No one would listen. I tried."

Peterson, 58, was arrested for the murder of Savio, his third wife, in 2007, after investigators exhumed her body and reexamined it as part of the investigation into the disappearance of Peterson's fourth wife, Stacy Peterson. A new forensic report ruled that Savio's death was a homicide, not an accident as originally thought.

Employees of the Missile Defense Agency have been warned to quit using their workplace computers to watch porn online. Their actions do not only waste time, but could also put defense networks at risk of malware infection.

The agency's executive director, John James Jr., wrote in a memo obtained by Bloomberg News that a number of employees and contractors were caught "engaging in inappropriate use of the MDA network."

"There have been instances of employees and contractors accessing websites, or transmitting messages, containing pornographic or sexually explicit images," James wrote in the July 27 memo. "These actions are not only unprofessional, they reflect time taken away from designated duties, are in clear violation of federal and DoD and regulations, consume network resources and can compromise the security of the network though the introduction of malware or malicious code."

James warned that staff members caught breaking the rules could risk losing their security clearance and could eventually end up getting suspended or fired from federal service.

He also reminded personnel that the agency's network systems were subject to monitoring "at all times."

Washington - The U.S. government's only facility for handling, processing and storing weapons-grade uranium has been temporarily shut after anti-nuclear activists, including an 82-year-old nun, breached security fences, government officials said on Thursday.


WSI Oak Ridge, the contractor responsible for protecting the facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is owned by the international security firm G4S, which was at the center of a dispute over security at the London Olympic Games.

Officials said the facility was shut down on Wednesday at least until next week after three activists cut through perimeter fences to reach the outer wall of a building where highly enriched uranium, a key nuclear bomb component, is stored.

The activists painted slogans and threw what they said was human blood on the wall of the facility, one of numerous buildings in the facility known by the code name Y-12 that it was given during World War Two, officials said.

While moving between the perimeter fences, the activists triggered sensors that alerted security personnel. But officials conceded the intruders were still able to reach the building's walls before security personnel got to them.

Ellen Barfield, a spokeswoman for the activists who called themselves "Transform Now Plowshares," said three were arrested and charged with vandalism and criminal trespass.