Belgian pedophile accomplice gets early release
(leaving prison to join a convent seems more like a pallet swap than actual freedom. How often the guilty heart seeks solace in the arms of religion? Perhaps atonement can be achieved thru this penance who can know? I believe the purpose of reform has been achieved, the condemned feels genuine regret or can at least fake it enough to fool the parole board and is trading one form of confinement for another to keep her far from any potential victims and safely from the public eye. So as long as she doesn’t cash in on a book deal or try to make a movie of the week maybe,just maybe the system worked)
By RAF CASERT, APBRUSSELS — BRUSSELS (AP) — Belgium's highest court granted conditional early release Tuesday to one of the nation's most despised criminals, the accomplice and former wife of a pedophile and child killer, even though she let two of his victims starve to death.
The Court of Cassation ruled that no procedural errors were made by a lower court, which is allowing Michelle Martin to live in a convent after serving barely half her 30-year sentence for her part in the mid-1990s kidnappings, rapes and killings by her then-husband, Marc Dutroux.
"The court rejects the appeals," Judge Albert Fettweis said of motions by the prosecutor's office and some families of the victims.
It was unclear when Martin would go to Malonne, where she will live in a Clarisse convent and, in the words of her lawyer, seek atonement for her crimes.
But security forces were already preparing for Martin's arrival in Malonne, a verdant village in the hills 75 kilometers (45 miles) south of the capital, Brussels. Several policemen were stationed near the convent even before the verdict was announced.
Next to the convent, fluorescent graffiti protesting Martin's possible arrival was removed. At a religious statue near the gate, two teddy bears sat next to a picture of the two eight-year-old girls who starved to death in Dutroux's dungeon in 1996.
"Shame on the sisters," one poster said, referring to the nuns who were willing to take Martin in.
Martin depicted herself as a passive culprit of the psychopath Dutroux. But she is still blamed for aiding her husband as he went on a depraved and murderous spree, and she is particularly loathed for letting the two girls starve while Dutroux was imprisoned.
Dutroux, an unemployed electrician and convicted pedophile on parole at the time of the crimes, was arrested in 1996 and convicted eight years later of abducting, imprisoning and raping six girls between the summers of 1995 and 1996. He was also found guilty of murdering two of the six girls, who ranged in age from 8 to 19 years old.
The last two of Dutroux's kidnap victims came out alive after police took action.
Martin's lawyer, Thierry Moreau, insisted his client deserved a shot at a better life.
"There is something human remaining in Mrs. Martin, even though she acknowledges herself she is responsible for very serious acts," Moreau said. "She paid the price for it. She did it in respect of the law, and now there is this project where she wants to redeem herself and this will be another way to do her sentence."
Talk of Martin's release has spawned demonstrations over the past weeks, with demands to keep her in jail.
Christian in Pakistan blasphemy case ruled a minor
By REBECCA SANTANA, AP
38 minutes ago
ISLAMABAD — An official medical review of a Pakistani Christian girl accused of desecrating the Quran has determined that the girl is a minor, a lawyer for the girl said Tuesday.
The finding, which means the girl will be tried in the juvenile court system, could possibly defuse what has been a highly contentious case in Pakistan, where blasphemy can be punished with life in prison or even death.
The accusations against the girl have inflamed religious tensions in Pakistan, and sparked a mass exodus of Christians from the girl's neighborhood who feared retribution from their Muslim neighbors.
About 300 of the Christians who set up camp in a field outside the capital were evicted from the site Tuesday, and their makeshift church was burned down.
The attorney, Tahir Naveed Chaudhry, said a report by a medical board investigating the age and mental state of the girl determined she was 14 years old.
He also said the board determined her mental state did not correspond to her age. It was not clear whether that meant she was mentally impaired. Some Pakistani media reports have said the girl has Down syndrome.
Chaudhry said a bail hearing has been scheduled for Thursday, and that he would move to dismiss the case after the hearing, saying there was "no solid evidence" against his client.
He said he saw his client Saturday in the Rawalpindi prison where she's being held and that she was "weeping and crying."
The Associated Press is withholding her name because it does not generally identify underage suspects.
The girl was accused by a neighbor of burning pages of a Quran, Islam's holy book. But many aspects of the case have been in dispute since the incident surfaced a little less than two weeks ago, including her age, whether she was mentally impaired and what exactly she was burning.
The lawyer said a birth certificate provided by the church put her age at eleven years old, but in the end the medical board determined she was 14. Generally, birth certificates must be issued by the Pakistani government to be considered legal documents.
The case has spotlighted once again Pakistan's troublesome blasphemy laws that critics say can be used to settle vendettas or seek retribution. Many of Pakistan's minorities, including Christians, live in fear of being accused of blasphemy.
Hundreds of Christian families have fled the neighborhood where the girl lived, fearing a backlash from their Muslim neighbors.
Over the weekend a group of about 300 cleared out a section of land in a forested part of an Islamabad neighborhood and built the skeleton of a church from branches, complete with a cross, and were using it to hold prayer services.
Christians in the area said Tuesday that in the middle of the night, people burned their makeshift church to the ground. Then the group was evicted from the site.
By midafternoon a group of about 150 Christians had gathered in the park a few hundred meters (yards) from the clearing where the church once stood. Many had nothing to eat until an aid group delivered some rice.
"We are helpless. What can we do? We are just sitting here," said Naseem Javed, who was holding her 3-year-old son in her arms. "They don't even want us to have a place to pray."
Residents from nearby houses gathered in the clearing where the makeshift church stood. One of them, Babar Minhas, said according to city regulations the land was supposed to be an open space of trees and grass and was not to be used as a settlement.
In a sign of their clear animosity toward the Christian group, he questioned whether any of them were even from the Islamabad neighborhood where the blasphemy case originated.
Once someone is labeled as a blasphemer, even if they are never convicted, they can face vigilante justice by outraged Pakistanis. In July, thousands of people dragged a Pakistani man accused of desecrating the Quran from a police station, beat him to death and set his body alight.
The potential public backlash has also deterred many from speaking out in favor of changing or repealing the blasphemy law. Last year two prominent politicians who criticized the law were murdered, one by his own bodyguard, who then attracted adoring mobs.
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Associated Press writers Zarar Khan and Asif Shahzad contributed to this report.
British police call off search for supposed lion
By RAPHAEL SATTER, AP
1 day ago
LONDON — So, were the locals lying about the lion?
Police said Monday that they've found no evidence to support area residents' claims that they'd spotted a big cat prowling the countryside near the idyllic village of St. Osyth, in the southeastern English county of Essex.
Sunday's reported sightings alarmed many of the village's 4,000 people, and authorities sent about 40 officers, tranquilizer-toting zoo experts, and a pair of heat-seeking helicopters to the area in an effort to find the beast.
But a police spokeswoman said that, after an extensive search, "we've found no evidence" of a lion. The creature spotted Sunday night may have been a large domestic cat or a wildcat, she added.
So does that mean there never was any lion?
The official, who spoke on customary condition of anonymity, demurred, noting that the people interviewed by police were convinced they'd spotted a lion. That aside, she said, "we've stopped searching for it."
It seems the mysterious "Essex Lion" will join a number of other mythical beasts that at times appear and then disappear into Britain's forests and seaside — particularly in the dead of summer, when journalists struggle to fill papers and news bulletins.
The best-known mystery big cat in Britain was the "Beast of Bodmin," a panther that was allegedly spotted so many times that it prompted a government probe into the matter. The 1995 investigation concluded there was no evidence of exotic large cats roaming the nation's countryside.
In 2011, there was the Hampshire White Tiger, whose alleged appearance near a sports field stopped a cricket game and led to a police alert (the tiger turned out to be a stuffed toy).
And in 2007, the British media went wild over a man who claimed to have photographed a great white shark off the coast of Cornwall, in southwestern England. The man, a bouncer, later admitted that the pictures were actually taken while on vacation in South Africa, adding that he couldn't believe anyone had been foolish enough to take the hoax seriously.
Argentines plan to shoot gulls to save the whales
By MICHAEL WARREN, AP
8 minutes ago
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Saving the whales is something Argentines take so seriously that authorities are planning to shoot seagulls that have developed a habit of attacking the huge marine mammals.
Environmentalists say the plan is misguided. They say humans are the real problem, creating so much garbage that the gull population has exploded, endangering the whales.
Both sides agree that what was bizarre animal behavior a decade ago has now become a real hazard for threatened southern right whales in one of their prime birthing grounds, turning whale-watching from a magical experience to something from a horror movie.
Seagulls off the coast of the Patagonian city of Puerto Madryn have discovered that by pecking at the whales as they come up for air, they can create open wounds. Then, each time the whales surface, it's dinner time: Gulls swoop down and dig in, cutting away skin and blubber with their beaks and claws.
"It's not just that the gulls are attacking the whales, but that they're feeding from them, and this way of feeding is a habit that is growing and becoming more frequent," said Marcelo Bertellotti, who works for the National Patagonia Center, a government-sponsored conservation agency. "It really worries us because the damage they're doing to the whales is multiplying, especially to infant whales that are born in these waters."
Whales also are changing their behavior in response: Instead of breaching the water and dramatically displaying their tails, they rise just barely enough to breathe through their blow-holes before descending to safety, Bertellotti said.
Bertellotti's answer: Shoot the gulls that display this behavior with air rifles and hunting guns, and recover each downed bird before they are eaten along with the ammunition, causing still more damage to marine life. His "100-day Whale-Gull Action Plan" was approved by the government of Chubut, and provincial officials came out Tuesday in defense of it.
"We are preparing a pilot plan that seeks to stop the damage from the gulls that pick at the flesh of the whales, because this is putting at risk the resource. It will be a minimal intervention to protect the life of the southern right whale and thus provide a response to the complaints of the sightseeing businesses that operate in the place," Gov. Martin Buzzi posted on his Facebook page.
Whale-watching is big business for Chubut. Southern right whales have recovered to about 8 percent of their original population since becoming a protected species worldwide, and hundreds come to the relatively calm and warm waters of the gulf formed by the Valdez Peninsula to give birth and raise their newborns each July to December.
Seeing them surface from nearby boats can be a magical experience, and gull attacks were rare until about eight years ago, said Milko Schvartzman, who coordinates the oceans campaign for Greenpeace in Latin America. But more gulls have caught on, and the population has boomed to the point where whales are attacked at least every fourth time they surface, he said.
Now the tourists are suffering along with the whales, Schvartzman said. "It's not so pleasant anymore."
Environmentalists say the only way to effectively reduce the seagull population is to deny the birds food by closing open-air garbage dumps around the gulf and stopping fishermen and a nearby seafood packing plant from dumping scraps into the water. Activists have been lobbying Chubut for many years to develop plans to reduce, recycle and properly contain garbage, but politicians have resisted, Schvartzman said.
Chubut's environmental minister, Eduardo Maza, blamed the problem on previous governments, and said the province is now working on permanent solutions. Shooting the gulls "is surely not the most pleasant measure, but it's necessary to do something to control a situation that has been growing after many years of inaction," Maza said.
"At year's end, we're going to inaugurate garbage-separation plants," Maza said. "All the garbage in the protected Peninsula Valdes area that isn't recyclable will be properly disposed of, which will enable us to mitigate the open-air garbage dumps."
Schvartzman said that if humans don't solve the problem quickly, the whales will simply stop coming.
