Once upon a time, most Americans had never even heard of "flash mob robberies" or "organized looting". Now they are considered to be a part of normal life in America. On Saturday, more than 20 teens stormed into a trendy clothing store in Chicago and stole more than $3,000 worth of jeans, but it barely made a blip on the national news because this kind of thing has become so common. After all, we just saw the exact same kind of thing happen in Jacksonville, Detroit, Baltimore and a whole bunch of other places. Flash mob crimes have become so common in Chicago that they take public opinion polls about them.

But when I first started writing about this phenomenon a couple of years ago, hardly anyone knew what "mob robberies" were. In fact, I had to explain what these "flash mobs" were doing to a couple of radio hosts because they had never heard of such a thing. But now everybody knows about the flash mobs. Another disturbing trend that we are seeing all over America is "organized looting". Groups of desperate criminals are going into empty or abandoned buildings and stripping out copper wire, copper pipes and anything else that they can sell for money. At one time these kinds of thefts made the news, but now they have also become so common that they don't get much notice anymore.

The sad truth is that the streets of America are changing. They are becoming a lot more hostile and a lot more dangerous.

Young people in America today do not have respect for authority, they do not have respect for those that are older than them and they do not even have respect for themselves.

Posted below is surveillance camera footage of the mob robbery mentioned above during which thousands of dollars worth of jeans were stolen. These kids obviously plotted to commit this crime well in advance. These kids have so little respect for themselves that they are willing to potentially jeopardize their futures over a few pairs of lousy jeans....


Will any of those kids go to jail eventually?

That is a very good question.

In other areas of the country, law enforcement is so overwhelmed that they just let cases such as this one go.

Pleasantville, N. J. - "I feel completely violated, there are six family members there," said Paula Lafolette of Wilmington.

Where there is supposed to be peace, there is unrest for Lafolette and other family members of Pauline Spinelli, who lived in Hammonton.

Police say her remains, buried in 1996 at age 98, were stolen late Thursday night or early Friday morning from the mausoleum she had built for her family at the Atlantic City Cemetery on Washington Avenue in Pleasantville.

Police said the sanctity of the tomb was shattered possibly with a boulder that still sits by the door.

"They then went through [the] process of forcibly removing the lock," said Pleasantville Police Captain Rocky Melendez.

Melendez said once inside, someone broke and moved the stone that covered Spinelli's interment space.

"The casket had been removed, had been pried open," he said.

And Spinelli's body, dressed in a powdered blue gown, according to her granddaughter Paula Lafolette, was taken

A Miami Beach man was led away in cuffs after he caused people to panic in a movie theater showing the new Batman movie.

Just after midnight police received a call about possible gunfire at the Regal movie theater on Lincoln Road. When officers arrived they found several people detaining 44-year old David Escamillo who was yelling and screaming that he "didn't shoot anybody".

Officers noted, according to the arrest affidavit, that Escamillo was agitated and smelled of alcohol.

The investigators had seen so much, but the image of the toddler clutching a stuffed rabbit floored them. They had to find him, and they did, building a case that led from a Milford man, Robert Diduca . . .. . . to a serial abuser in the Netherlands, Robert Mikelsons, and to child pornography traffickers in 7 countries and counting. It was a vast global network and, unthinkably, just the tip of the iceberg.

As soon as they saw the terrified boy's photo three years ago, federal agents Peter Manning and Gregory Squire had the same thought: we have to save him. The blue-eyed child, about 18 months old, was naked from the waist down and clutching a stuffed rabbit for comfort. There was no doubt he had been sexually abused. But that doesn't begin to describe his suffering.

The assailant reportedly hit the victim in the head several times and screamed obscenities at him.


A Spanish tourist was attacked by a hammer-wielding man, apparently at random, while sitting inside City Hall Park Monday afternoon, authorities say.

The 31-year-old tourist from Barcelona was sitting in the park at Murray Street and Broadway when a man dressed in a suit and tie began hitting him with a hammer, witnesses told investigators.

India suffered its second huge, crippling power failure in two days Tuesday, depriving as much as half of the vast and populous country, or up to 600 million people, of electricity and disrupting transport networks. The first power grid collapse, on Monday, was the country's worst blackout in a decade. It affected seven states in northern India that are home to more than 350 million people.

One woman's mummy dearest has her in some legal trouble.

Police charged Linda Chase, 72, with forgery after they found her mummified boyfriend, Charles Zigler, inside her Jackson, Mich. home.

Chase previously admitted to cashing Zigler's benefits checks, but she said the only reason she allegedly kept the man's lifeless body for 18 months was that she was lonely.

"It's not that I'm heartless. It's just that after so many bad things happen to you, I don't know," Chase told MI Live earlier this month. "I didn't want to be alone. He was the only guy who was ever nice to me."

Prosecutors charged Chase with cashing $28,000 worth of fraudulent checks in Zigler's name, MI Live reports.

A 19-year-old Ohio student has been arrested by police after posting a Twitter message in which he said he planned to 'shoot up' Kent State University campus.

William Koberna, 19, was arrested at his parents' Brunswick home on Sunday on charges of inducing panic and aggravated menacing related to the tweet.

Koberna gave himself up without incident after Brunswick police arrived at his home and the sophomore student will be arraigned in court on Monday.

He is also facing a university hearing which could possibly result in his suspension or dismissal from Kent State.

One of his Koberna's friends, Ashley Mikulec confirmed that he was indeed arrested for his indiscreet tweet saying, 'Holy sh*t I can't believe bill got arrested for a tweet. If they saw half of his tweets and took them seriously he'd be in a mental asylum.'

She followed this up by saying, 'I would say this violates freedom of speech but at the same time he could have induced some panic.'

A woman who audaciously kidnapped a 3-week-old girl from a Manhattan hospital on a summer day a quarter-century ago and raised her to adulthood was sentenced on Monday to 12 years in prison.

"This was not a crime of greed, this was not a crime of vengeance," Judge P. Kevin Castel of Federal District Court in Manhattan said in imposing the sentence on the woman, Ann Pettway. "But it was an act of selfishness, a crime of selfishness" that he said "inflicted a parent's worst nightmare on a couple."

The sentence drew a muted response from a packed courtroom populated with friends and relatives on both sides of the harrowing case.

In terse remarks before sentencing, Ms. Pettway, 50, apologized to the family of the kidnapped girl, Carlina White, and said, "I am here today to right my wrong and ask for forgiveness."

Ms. White, who is now 25 and lives in Atlanta, did not attend the hearing and has distanced herself from the case. According to Ms. Pettway's lawyers, she has a movie deal.

The parents, Joy White and Carl Tyson, who separated a year after the kidnapping, made emotional pleas for a prolonged prison term.

James Holmes showed no visible reaction Monday as he learned that he faced 142 criminal charges and the possibility of the death penalty for a deadly shooting rampage inside a Colorado movie theater.

Holmes, making his second court appearance, was formally charged with 24 counts of murder and 116 counts of attempted murder - two for each of the 12 people killed and 58 wounded. For each victim, Holmes was charged once for showing deliberation and once for showing extreme indifference to human life.

He was also charged with illegally possessing explosives, a nod to the hive of explosive booby traps that police found inside his apartment after he was arrested outside the movie theater, just moments after the July 20 shooting.

The court hearing focused mostly on procedural issues and offered a glimpse of how slowly the complex and voluminous legal case against Holmes will probably move in the months ahead.

It could be a year or more before a jury sits to decide whether Holmes is guilty of walking into a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises and opening fire on the sold-out crowd. When he was apprehended outside the Century 16 multiplex, he had three weapons, with one weapon left behind in the theater, and was wearing a black commando-style outfit, authorities said.