An 11-year-old girl in Houston is about to give birth following months of sexual abuse, according to police, who said it was one of the most heinous crimes they've seen.

"This case will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," Sara Marie Kinney, public relations director for the Harris County District Attorney, told KTRK.

KHOU 11 News reported a 21-year-old male relative of the girl was arrested on Tuesday for allegedly sexually assaulting her almost every day for nearly seven months. He was charged with continuous sexual assault of a child and is being held on a $50,000 bond.

"It was continuous over a long period of time," Kinney told KHOU 11. "This wasn't just one sick act."

A 42-year-old Nashville woman accused of inappropriately touching and soliciting a Murfreesboro preteen for sex at his home in February was arrested on two outstanding indictments last week, according to police.

Elizabeth "Leigh" Garner, 42, of 806 Highland Park Court in Nashville, was indicted by a grand jury this month on one count each of aggravated sexual battery and solicitation of a minor for child rape in reference to the incident, according to a report filed by Murfreesboro Police Detective Tommy Roberts.

The detective reported he began investigating the incident in February with Department of Children's investigator Kevin Smith after the boy disclosed to his mother he had been molested by Garner.

During an interview with police at his school, the boy said Garner was at his home drinking, and at some point late in the evening he went to use the restroom when Garner followed him, according to police.

A Milwaukee man is facing felony charges after allegedly failing to pay child support and flashing his cash on Facebook.

Christopher Robinson flaunted wads of money and booze, according to CBS58. Court documents claim the 23-year-old has a 2-year-old child and has never made a child support payment.

The two teens charged with allegedly threatening the rape victim in the Steubenville trial via twitter will not be getting out of detention anytime soon. One of them allegedly made a specific threat of homicide against Jane Doe, the other threatening bodily harm.

Judge Samuel Kerr held a hearing for the two girls to Tuesdayto determine whether they should stay in juvenile detention or be released to their parents. Both teens are charged with intimidation of a victim, aggravated menacing and telecommunications harassment.

As Judge Kerr ordered the girls to return to the detention center, sobs immediately flooded the room. Defense Attorney Fran Coranci held her client close to her as she wept in her arms.

Coranci said she knows her client personally and that she is a good girl who has never been in trouble before.

A North Carolina church says that it will not host any wedding ceremonies or sign any marriage licenses until couples of the same sex are provided the same opportunity to marry as straight couples.

In an interview that aired on Monday, Green Street United Methodist Church Senior Pastor Kelly Carpenter told WXII that heterosexual members of his congregation wanted same sex couples to "share a sense of the love that they have found."

On Friday, the church posted a statement to its Facebook page explaining that "the church sees injustice in the legal position of state government and the theological position of our denomination."

"North Carolina prohibits same sex marriage and all the rights and privileges marriage brings," the statement said. "The Leadership Council has asked that their ministers join others who refuse to sign any State marriage licenses until this right is granted to same sex couples."

By the end of today, the inhabitants of the Westboro Baptist Church compound in Topeka, Kansas, should have a new view out their windows, just past their FAG MARRIAGE DOOMS NATIONS sign: a new gay-rights center across the street, painted in brilliant rainbow colors, with a pride flag flying from a 30-foot flagpole.

Right now, a crew of volunteers is at work on the siding of a house opposite the headquarters of the publicity-hunting hate-preacher Fred Phelps.

The center is the work of a roving do-gooder named Aaron Jackson, a 31-year-old community-college dropout whose other projects have included opening orphanages in India and Haiti and buying a thousand acres of endangered rain forest in Peru. This year, his charity, Planting Peace, also intends to de-worm every child in Guatemala.

Jackson was drawn to Topeka after reading about Josef Miles, the local boy who last year, at the age of nine, photobombed one of the Westboro protests with a handmade sign that read "God Hates No One." Jackson had been looking for a way to support equality, anti-bullying programs, and some sort of pro-LGBT initiative, he said.

"I've been accused in the past of being all over the place, and they're probably right on some level," Jackson told me last night by phone. "Right now we are standing up to bigotry and promoting equality."

These days, it's not entirely uncommon to hear that Jesus' image has been found in the most unlikeliest of places. On pieces of toast, windows and in other bizarre locations, the Christian figure's likeness has purportedly appeared. Last week, though, a new location was added to the ever-growing list of apparitions, as Brian Krantz, a resident of Saugus, Mass., claims he found Christ's face on a drop-cloth.

In an interview with WHDH-TV, Krantz explained that he first used the cloth when he was painting his shutters four years ago. Then, he subsequently used it 50 or 60 additional times after that, before noticing what he believes could be a sign from God.

"My heart went a million miles an hour. I was hyperventilating," he told the outlet. "I can't deny this. This is what it is. It looks like Jesus Christ."

If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, "the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons" then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.

Bonnie Kerness and Ojore Lutalo, both of whom I met in Newark, N.J., a few days ago at the office of American Friends Service Committee Prison Watch, have fought longer and harder than perhaps any others in the country against the expanding abuse of prisoners, especially the use of solitary confinement. Lutalo, once a member of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers, first wrote Kerness in 1986 while he was a prisoner at Trenton State Prison, now called New Jersey State Prison. He described to her the bleak and degrading world of solitary confinement, the world of the prisoners like him held in the so-called management control unit, which he called "a prison within a prison." Before being released in 2009, Lutalo was in the management control unit for 22 of the 28 years he served for the second of two convictions - the first for a bank robbery and the second for a gun battle with a drug dealer. He kept his sanity, he told me, by following a strict regime of exercising in his tiny cell, writing, meditating and tearing up newspapers to make collages that portrayed his prison conditions.

"The guards in riot gear would suddenly wake you up at 1 a.m., force you to strip and make you grab all your things and move you to another cell just to harass you," he said when we spoke in Newark. "They had attack dogs with them that were trained to go for your genitals. You spent 24 hours alone one day in your cell and 22 the next. If you do not have a strong sense of purpose you don't survive psychologically. Isolation is designed to defeat prisoners mentally, and I saw a lot of prisoners defeated."

Lutalo's letter was Kerness' first indication that the U.S. prison system was creating something new - special detention facilities that under international law are a form of torture. He wrote to her: "How does one go about articulating desperation to another who is not desperate? How does one go about articulating the psychological stress of knowing that people are waiting for me to self-destruct?"

"Americans have a remarkable ability 'to look reality right in the eye' and deny it."
~Garrison Keillor~

The World Health Organization defines mental health as "a state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community." A state of well-being is obviously more than just the absence of disease. It assumes that a human being is reasonably functional mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Similarly, this definition can be applied to healthy communities with the addition of social functionality as another aspect of well-being.

However, most readers are aware of the decline in mental health treatment within the past three decades. Whereas thirty years ago many working people had insurance benefits for outpatient psychotherapy as well as in-patient treatment, not only have the benefits dramatically decreased, but massive unemployment makes it virtually impossible for millions of people to pay for any kind of health care, physical or mental.

Meanwhile, nearly all inhabitants and communities of industrial civilization are struggling to cope with living in societies in unprecedented decline. Energy depletion, climate change, economic contraction, and the collapse of myriad institutions such as healthcare, education, infrastructure, and police and fire services weigh heavily on the wallets and emotions of millions. In the United States, the realities of the sequester debacle will only exacerbate the unraveling, and for many, avoiding homelessness and starvation are top priorities with nothing left over for any kind of healthcare. Yet it is precisely this demographic who are contending with monumental stress, and for many of them, just as they may be one paycheck away from being homeless, they may also be one stress away from mental and emotional meltdown.

The head of the Colorado Department of Corrections has been shot and killed at his home, and authorities say the gunman is on the loose.

Sheriff's Lt. Jeff Kramer says Tom Clements was shot to death around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday night when he answered his front door in Monument, north of Colorado Springs. Police are searching for the shooter.

Clements, 58, lived in Monument and was appointed to serve as the head of the DOC by Governor John Hickenlooper in January 2011, reports CBS station KCNC in Denver. He oversaw operations of state and private prisons and parole operations. Clements came to Colorado from Missouri, where he worked for 31 years in the Missouri Department of Corrections.