A mother of three in St. Louis, Missouri has been sentenced to 78 years behind bars for waterboarding her children, as well as physically abusing them in other ways.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 34-year-old Lakechia Schonta Stanley admitted to carrying out the abusive acts - which included beatings, whippings, and, in at least two noted cases, hitting her children with a baseball bat.

"What the defendant did to three of her own children far exceeds the definition of child abuse and amounts to systematic torture," assistant circuit attorney Tanja Engelhardt wrote in a sentencing memorandum for the judge, as quoted by the newspaper.

"She was supposed to be their mother, the one person they could trust. Instead she became a symbol of betrayal and fear, using every tool at her disposal to beat and torture her own innocent children."

Angela Stoldt told officials she took a hacksaw to her neighbor's body last year and tried to cook away evidence of James Sheaffer.

One leg went in the oven. Other parts went into pots.

Stoldt's house in Deltona smelled of burning flesh, but she assured her daughter it was just a rat broiling in the oven, according to details made public last week after a grand jury charged her with first-degree murder.

"Thursday is when I was cooking him," Stoldt told investigators. "Friday is when I was dumping him."

The 42-year-old Deltona woman is accused of killing Sheaffer, 36, a limousine driver, in April 2013.

Court documents filed last week detail for the first time her alleged confession and attempts to make his body vanish. According to the documents, cooking didn't work. She allegedly ended up putting the remains into trash bags and dropping them into dumpsters in New Smyrna Beach.

Last week, a grand jury listened to those alleged details and upgraded the charges against Stoldt to first-degree murder. She previously was charged with second-degree murder.

Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty, said Spencer Hathaway, a spokesman for the State Attorney's Office.

Parents at an elite, magnet elementary school in Chicago were "horrified" when they saw the "obscene" sexual education materials their fifth graders would be learning. The curriculum included condom demonstrations and discussions of anal sex.

Andrew Jackson Language Academy (AJLA) hosted several parent workshops during report card pickup on Wednesday, including a meeting on Chicago Public Schools' (CPS) sex ed curriculum. Parents were given a binder that included the materials and topics that would be discussed, including the benefits of female condoms for extending sex and increasing pleasure, the use of lubrication and how to insert condoms into the anus for anal sex.

Parents were notified of Wednesday's presentation in a letter from school principal Mathew Ditto. The letter said a CPS representative would be at the meeting where "we will share the lessons and information that will be taught to your child." CPS has said some of the lessons are even intended for children in kindergarten, DNAinfo reported.

The letter said the topics included personal safety, human reproduction and childbirth, puberty, abstinence and healthy relationships. Fourth-graders and above would also learn information about HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections. Students in fifth grade and above would also learn about contraception and pregnancy prevention, and lessons would include a condom demonstration, the letter stated.

Dutch investigators have begun evacuating debris of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 from the crash site in eastern Ukraine. Human rights activists are addressing the UN and OSCE, warning the investigation is being either delayed on purpose or suppressed.

More human remains have been recovered by experts during the latest debris retrieval operation at the crash site, the Dutch government reported. The remains will be transported to the Ukrainian city of Kharkov for further examination, before being sent to the Netherlands as part of the investigation.

Estimated to last from five to 10 days, the recovery is partial, as investigators have opted to mark only those pieces of debris they are interested in, leaving the rest behind. The works are being supervised by the Dutch Safety Board investigators and observed by the OSCE.

A man known as the "20th hijacker" who is serving a life sentence for his admitted role in conspiring to murder Americans in the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 has come forward with some shocking new allegations, claiming that a Saudi Arabian royal helped fund the devastating terror events.

Zacarias Moussaoui, 46, has said, more specifically, that a Saudi prince paid to train him and the 19 hijackers in the time leading up to the attacks.

He issued these allegations in recently filed federal court documents, alleging that the prince was fully aware that the training was being done on behalf ofOsama bin Laden, according to the Daily Mail.

"I am ready to testify about all the above and more in your court in an Open Hearing that I request,"Moussaoui said in a handwritten court document dated October 23.

According to his account, Prince Turki Al Faisal AlSaud met with him, provided him with funding and also financially assisted the other 19 Sept. 11 terrorists.

Moussaoui also detailed an alleged Al Qaeda plan to shoot down Air Force One when Bill Clinton was in office - a purported plot that he said involved an employee at one of Saudi Arabia's embassies, according to the Oklahoman.

The Saudi government has denied any involvement in the 9/11 attacks in the past and some say that Moussaoui's own credibility is at issue in taking his claims at face value, especially considering that a defense psychologist once said he suffers from delusions as a result of paranoid schizophrenia.

Still, this isn't the first time Saudi Arabia has been accused of involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Western aid agencies are using the plight of Africa's Ebola orphans to fund a lavish lifestyle in $800-a-night hotels and leaving the children to fend for themselves, according to Liberia's development chief.

Children who were forced to watch their parents die and were then shunned by their community are being ignored while useless facilities are being built, according to Julia Duncan-Cassell, Liberia's minister in charge of saving the orphans.

She accused the agencies of handing out $235 daily allowances that are higher than her salary - and that the money invested is wasted on expensive hotels and driving around in big cars.

Meanwhile thousands of orphans have been abandoned to the care of neighbours and relatives who are struggling to find money and food to support them.

A MailOnline investigation has discovered that just 531 of Liberia's estimated 12,000 orphans are receiving formal help in government safe homes despite the hundreds of millions of pounds of Western aid pouring into the country.

Russia plans to create its own "Wikipedia" to ensure its citizens have access to more "detailed and reliable" information about their country, the presidential library said on Friday.

Citing Western threats, the Kremlin has asserted more control over the Internet this year in what critics call moves to censor the web, and has introduced more pro-Kremlin content similar to closely controlled state media such as television.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia assembled and written by Internet users around the world, has pages dedicated to nearly every region or major city within Russia's 11 time zones, but the Kremlin library said this was not good enough.

"Analysis of this resource showed that it is not capable of providing information about the region and life of the country in a detailed or sufficient way," the state news agency RIA quoted a statement from the presidential library as saying.

"The creation of an alternative Wikipedia has begun." It was not known whether the project might affect Russians' access to the existing Wikipedia in any way.

President Vladimir Putin has branded the Internet a "CIA special project", and the Kremlin has said it must protect its online realm from threats from the West, as ties between the Cold War-era foes have hit a new bottom over the Ukraine crisis.

Since August, bloggers in Russia with more than 3,000 followers must register with the Moscow's mass media regulatory agency and conform to rules applied to larger media outlets.

And since February, state authorities have been able to block websites without a court order. The webpages of two leading Kremlin critics were among the first to be barred.

The presidential library statement said that 50,000 books and archive documents from 27 libraries around Russia had already been handed over for the process of establishing the "alternative Wikipedia".

November 14, 2014. His Holiness, Patriarch Kirill, of Moscow and All Russia, has stated that around fifty churches of the Russian Orthodox Church have been either completely destroyed or heavily damaged as a result of actions of the Ukrainian military since the beginning of the armed opposition in Ukraine this spring.

The RIA News Agency has reported that the Patriarch delivered a speech during a meeting with learners of the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Federation Ministry for Foreign Affairs at the Christ the Savior Cathedral, in which he noted: "Currently there is a forceful opposition against our Church - three clergymen have been killed, over ten priests have been arrested, detained, and tortured, and many clerics have been expelled from the country. Approximately fifty of our churches are either completely destroyed or heavily damaged by precision strikes of the Ukrainian artillery."

Mark your calendar: January 1, 2020.

As this future year unfolds, the gap between how much cocoa the world wants to consume and how much it can produce will swell to 1 million metric tons, according to Mars Inc. and Barry Callebaut AG (BARN), the world's largest chocolate maker. By 2030, the predicted shortfall will grow to 2 million tons. And so on.

Because of disease, drought, rapacious new markets and the displacement of cacao by more-productive crops such as corn and rubber, demand is expected to outstrip supply by an additional 1 million tons every decade for the foreseeable future. Here, now, as you read these words, the world is running out of chocolate, Bloomberg Pursuits will report in its Holiday 2014 issue.

Last year, we again consumed more cocoa than we were able to produce. This year, despite an unexpected bumper crop, supply barely kept pace with the recent upswing in demand. From 1993 to 2007, the price of cocoa averaged $1,465 a ton; during the subsequent six years, the average was $2,736 -- an 87 percent increase.

Dr. Martin Salia, a surgeon who contracted the Ebola virus while working in Sierra Leone, has died at a hospital in Nebraska from the virus.

The 44 year-old was taken to hospital in Omaha on Saturday, but passed away on Monday according to hospital officials.

"We are extremely sorry to announce that the third patient we've cared for with the Ebola virus, Dr. Martin Salia, has passed away as a result of the advanced symptoms of the disease," the hospital said in a statement, which was reported by AFP. The other two patients who were treated at the facility were given clean bills of health.

The 44 year-old, who was a permanent US resident, contracted the virus while working at a hospital in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, according to his relatives. He was already suffering from advanced symptoms, including kidney and respiratory failure when he arrived at the Nebraska Medical Center, which is one of four US hospitals equipped to handle treatment of the disease and has the largest bio-containment unit in the country.

Salia, who was based in the state of Maryland, but spent a significant amount of time in Freetown, had originally been tested for the disease in early November. His test came back negative leading to jubilant celebrations and embraces from worried colleagues, the Washington Post reported. However, his symptoms did not go away and he took another test on November 10, which was positive forcing everyone who had been in physical contact with the 44 year-old into quarantine

"We were celebrating. If the test says you are Ebola-free, we assume you are Ebola-free," said Komba Songu M'Briwa, who cared for Salia at the Hastings Ebola Treatment Center in Freetown, the Washington Post added. "Then everything fell apart."

Salia, who was originally from Sierra Leone, was the tenth patient to be treated on US soil for the virus. He is the second person to have died in the United States from Ebola. In October, a Liberian man, Thomas Eric Duncan, died at a Texas hospital from