A 33-year-old woman and her older boyfriend were sleeping in their Vero Beach bedroom about 2:30 a.m. when the boyfriend's wife stormed in with a rifle.

The wife, identified as Brenda Schumann, 51, pointed the weapon at her 42-year-old husband and his younger girlfriend, threatening to kill them both, according to accounts given by Schumann's husband and his girlfriend.

The husband got the gun away, but that didn't stop Schumann's apparent rampage.

She urinated on the carpet outside the master bedroom, defecated on the kitchen floor, grabbed a second rifle and started destroying Christmas decorations and other things.

Binge drinking is an under-recognized problem for US women, nearly 14 million of whom engage in it about three times a month, downing about six drinks each time, says a study released Tuesday.

The practice is most common among women aged 18 to 34 as well as high school students, whites, Hispanics and women with household incomes of $75,000 or more, said the report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That US government institution defines binge drinking as having four or more drinks on a given occasion for women and girls.

And half of all high school girls who drink alcohol admit to binge drinking, said the new study.

Excessive drinking, including binge drinking, is responsible for about 23,000 deaths among women and girls in the United States each year.

A small town in Utah is responding to the recent mass shooting of 20 children in Connecticut by pushing through a resolution that calls for every home to have a gun, and the town wants to provide free concealed carry training for all elementary school teachers.

"The first recommendation was that we require, or we recommend, every household have a gun and be properly trained to use it," Spring City Councilman Neil Sorensen, who authored the resolution, told KSL on Monday.

But some residents - including the Sanpete County sheriff - were a little uncomfortable with requiring all residents to be armed so Sorensen agreed to dial back the resolution.

City officials are hoping to quickly get the ordinance onto the city books. Little resistance is expected at a public hearing next month.

The Boy Scouts of America must release two decades of files detailing sexual abuse allegations after the California Supreme Court refused the organization's bid to keep the records confidential.

The decision came after a Santa Barbara County court ruled last year that the files must be turned over to attorneys representing a former Scout who claims a leader molested him in 2007, when he was 13. That leader later was convicted of felony child endangerment.

The former Scout's lawsuit claims the files, which date to 1991 and involve allegations from across the nation, will expose a "culture of hidden sexual abuse" that the Scouts had concealed.

The Boys Scouts of America has denied the allegations and argued that the files should remain confidential to protect the privacy of child victims and of people who were wrongly accused.

The former chief executive of an upscale Colorado-based grocery chain accused in a child prostitution case in Phoenix was sentenced Tuesday to four weeks in jail for his guilty plea to misdemeanor attempted pandering.

Authorities say then-Sunflower Farmers Market CEO Michael C. Gilliland agreed to pay $100 for sex in February 2011 in a police sting in which an undercover officer posed as a 17-year-old prostitute. Prosecutors say Gilliland showed up at a Phoenix hotel to meet the undercover officer even though she told the businessman during an earlier phone conversation that she was 17.

"I sincerely regret the mistake that I made that brought me here today. I understand the damage I have caused," Gilliland said in court, adding that he has taken responsibility for his actions. The 54-year-old was ordered to start serving his sentence Tuesday afternoon.

Jakarta - Annisa Nurul Jannah, 11, was learning about how devices transmit heat, sound and electricity. "I like science because it teaches me a lot," the sixth grader at Petamburan 04, a school in a working-class part of Jakarta, said about her favorite subject. "I'd be sad if it was removed from school."

Millions of children in Indonesian elementary schools may no longer have separate science classes starting in June, the beginning of their next school year, if the government approves a curriculum overhaul that would merge science and social studies with other classes so more time can be devoted to religious education.

A draft of the proposal was posted online in November and December for public comment. The government is analyzing the feedback and will meet with a team of experts shortly to develop new lesson plans.

Ibnu Hamid, an Education Ministry spokesman, said feedback showed that people generally agreed with the curriculum changes but were worried that there would not be enough time to train teachers and prepare new books. The comments have not been released to the public, however, and some critics question whether they truly reflect broader opinion.

Officials who back the changes say that more religious instruction is needed because a lack of moral development has led to an increase in violence and vandalism among youths, and that could fuel social unrest and corruption in the future.

"Right now many students don't have character, tolerance for others, empathy for others," Musliar Kasim, the deputy minister of education, said in an interview in November. He proposed the changes in September.

He is part of a team of officials, academics and advisers from the office of Vice President Boediono working to streamline the curriculum in 2013.

Mr. Hamid said that the aim was to create a "balance between attitude, skills and knowledge."

Turkey has decided to build its first nuclear power plant at a controversial location on the Mediterranean coast that had been previously dropped, Energy Minister Hilmi Guler said Tuesday.

"The place where everything is currently ready (for construction) is Akkuyu," Guler told the NTV news channel.

An earlier plan to build a nuclear reactor at Akkuyu, in the southern province of Mersin, was dropped in July 2000 amid financial difficulties and protests from environmentalists in Turkey and neighbouring Greece and Cyprus. Opponents raised safety concerns, arguing that the proposed site is only 25 kilometres (15 miles) from a seismic fault line.

The government is expected to make the tender announcement on February 21 and the winning company should start construction later this year. The plant is expected to become operational in 2013 or 2014.

Calling the Delhi gang-rape "the worst in the world", police officers are calling for urgent amendments in the archaic Indian Penal Code (IPC) to provide justice to women in distress.

Even police officers who have over the decades seen countless bodies and battered humans are unable to control their emotions as they talk about the savagery committed Dec 16 on the victim who finally died Dec 29.

"We have never seen a beastly crime like this," one officer told IANS. "Forget the details... I can tell you with authority that there has never been a rape like this anywhere in the world."

This is a rare case when most police officers surprisingly are in agreement with what protesters are demanding on the streets: death for all six rapists.

"What happened on Dec 16 was shocking," another officer added. "We too are human, we too have daughters, wives and mothers. It is impossible to tell anyone what this woman underwent in the (moving) bus."

Spiritual leader Asaram Bapu was Monday reported as saying that the Delhi gang-rape victim should have called her attackers "brothers" and recited the Saraswati mantra to avert the tragedy.

This provoked both the ruling Congress and the opposition BJP to lash out at the comments as disturbing and condemnable.

Asaram Bapu reportedly said, "The victim is as guilty as her rapists", adding one hand cannot clap.

The victim should have "begged" in front of the culprits, he said.

Speaking to a gathering of followers at Tonk town, some 100 km from Jaipur, Asaram Babu said: "The five or six drunken men were not the only ones guilty. The girl was also responsible..."

The residents of Hong Kong, like many in Asia, have a thing for shark fin soup. There's been efforts to educate and regulate... But despite it all, the appetite for it is still going strong, which leads to tens of millions of sharks getting mutilated and thrown back in the water to slowly die, every single year.

The photos in this slideshow were taken on the rooftops of buildings in Hong Kong (a big hub in the shark finning industry), and they show thousands and thousands of mutilated shark fins. Remember: Each one represents a dead shark that was killed just for this little piece of cartilage. I find those photos extremely sad, and if you go all the way to the last slide (you can navigate with the arrows on the top right of the images), there's a video showing the same location. Truly sickening.