"She was raped from day one'' at the jail in Para state, a Children and Adolescent Defence Centre (Cedeca) spokeswoman said.

The number of men in the cell varied from 20 to 34 while the girl, a robbery suspect, was there.

"She was raped innumerable times and forced to exchange sexual relations for food,'' said Miere Cohen, the president of the Order of Brazilian Lawyers Human Rights Commission.

Media reports of the case have sparked outrage across Brazil, especially since it closely followed an earlier incident of a 23-year-old woman who was also jailed in Para state for one month together with 70 men.

The teenager, whose identity was not disclosed, was arrested in Para state capital Abaetetuba on October 21 on suspicion of robbery and put behind bars at a local police station jailhouse until an anonymous caller tipped off the media.

"Nobody really knows what she was charged with. She was a suspect in a robbery but police were unable to tell us which robbery. There was no formal charge,'' Ms Cohen said.

The girl's lawyers said police at one point said they believed the suspect was not under-age.

"Whether she was 15, 20, 50, 80 or 100 doesn't matter. A woman should not have been kept in a jail cell with men,'' Para Governor Ana Julia Carepa said.

She said she would mete out "exemplary punishment'' in the case.

The girl, whose family is very poor, "is distraught and very afraid, but said she's able to recognise the police officers who locked her up and the detainees who raped her. She's ready to talk", the Cedeca spokeswoman said.

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A Dad had to deliver his baby daughter after finding a 24-hour hospital reception deserted.

Quick-thinking Philip Allison, 34, helped girlfriend Vicky Kitching, 22, give birth to Hannah in a pal’s Renault Laguna.

Philip, who has two other kids, unwrapped the umbilical cord from the 7lb 14oz tot’s neck and cleared her airwaves outside Hull’ s Women and Children’s Hospital.

Vicky said: “Philip did a brilliant job. Everything worked out well but it could have been so different.”

Hull and East Yorkshire NHS Trust apologised and said it was a “serious incident”.

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A judge who ordered a woman to drop her pants and decided a custody dispute by flipping a coin was removed from the bench by the Virginia Supreme Court on Friday.

The decision against Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court Judge James Michael Shull of Gate City was unanimous.

According to the court, Shull admitted tossing a coin to determine which parent would have visitation with a child on Christmas. Shull said he was trying to encourage the parents to decide the issue themselves but later acknowledged that he was wrong.

The court said they occurred when a woman was seeking a protective order against a partner who she said had stabbed her in the leg. Shull knew the woman had a history of mental problems and insisted on seeing the wound, the court said.

The woman dropped her pants once to display the wound, then dropped them a second time after Shull left the bench for a closer look to determine whether the woman had received stitches.

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While confidence in government has increased modestly in recent years, the public is increasingly suspicious of itself.

In the most recent Pew Values Survey, fewer than six-in-ten (57%) say they have a good deal of confidence in the wisdom of the American people when it comes to making political decisions, a seven-point decline over the past decade and a much steeper 20-point decline since 1964.

In 1997, Democrats had expressed more confidence than either Republicans or independents in the political wisdom of the American people.

Today they have less confidence: 56% of Democrats say they have "a very great deal" or a "good deal" of confidence in the judgment of the people, down 13 percentage points from 1997.

At the same time, 60% of Republicans and 59% of independents express high levels of confidence in the American people’s political judgments, which are comparable to levels of a decade ago.

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A man has been threatened with court action - over a bill for £0.00.

Dave Abrams, of Baguley, Wythenshawe, was astonished when he received a letter from Powergen warning that he could be taken to court for an unpaid debt - of nothing.

What was even more surprising was that his flat was fitted with a pre-pay meter.

Mr Abrams, who is in his 50s and lives alone, switched energy providers from Powergen to npower several months ago after receiving `disappointing'service from the firm. He heard nothing from Powergen until the legal warning notice came through the door.

The letter, dated October 19, warned Mr Abrams he owed the company £0.00 for gas and electricity and said if he did not pay up immediately he would be visited by a debt collection agency. It added that he could also be taken to court and, as a result, may find it difficult to obtain credit in future.

When the M.E.N contacted Powergen, it confirmed the letter had been sent out in error - but said Mr Abrams actually owed the company £502 after paying too little for his energy when the price went up.

A spokeswoman said the meter should have been recalibrated with the new prices.

Mr Abrams was told the bill would be reduced to £300 - to reflect the company's mistake - to be paid within two years. It was only when he refused to pay it that Powergen cancelled the claim altogether.

Mr Abrams said: "I couldn't believe it when they phoned to apologise for the original bill, and then tried to tell me I owed £500.

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Sweden's government collected the highest share of national income of all rich countries, with neighbouring Denmark a close second, according to figures from 2006.

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In January, 1-year-old Joey Cosmillo wandered into the backyard and fell into the family pool. When his mother hauled him out, he wasn't breathing.

Rescuers were able to bring him back to life, but he suffered severe brain damage and cannot walk, talk or even swallow.

Now, his family faces another burden: One of the rescuers, Casselberry police Sgt. Andrea Eichhorn, is suing, alleging the family left a puddle of water on the floor that afternoon, causing her to slip and fall.

The boy's grandparents, named in the suit, are mystified and angry.

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Every once in a while you hear stories of companies having problems with their domain names, often because someone forgot to re-register the domain name or possibly because of a routing problem.

However, you don't really expect that to happen to a government website. However, after a California county agency had its gov't website hacked, the feds back in Washington DC accidentally turned off all of the ca.gov domain, causing quite a bit of confusion among California state gov't employees. It gets even better.

Apparently, it happened around noon Pacific Time which is 3pm back on the east coast. Yet, as the article notes: "Unfortunately that was about 3 in the afternoon and folks back East were already going home, so it took us some time to get hold of the right people in the General Service Administration to get this address reinstated."

Sure, I can understand time zone differences... but 3pm isn't exactly quitting time. Must be great to be a government employee, huh? Shut down an entire state government's email and web domains without realizing it... and head out the door by 3pm.

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Italy's 14,750 female police officers felt delighted when their new high-heeled shoes arrived. But the elegant shoes, which had been made inexpensively in Romania, didn't fit.

In Italy, the land of fashion and elegance, it's only natural that public officials want to look good too. And so the Italian police ordered high heeled-shoes for its 14,750 female police officers, who wanted to give their uniform a younger and sexier look.

However, the Interior Ministry made a fatal mistake when it tried to save money on the shoes. After studying various bids, it awarded the €600,000 ($850,000) contract to a factory in Romania instead of to Italy's famous but expensive shoemakers. The clinching factor was the Romanian company's elegant design -- and the low cost of €20 a pair.

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Most people don't realize that "0g Trans Fat" on a package doesn't mean that the product actually has 0 grams of trans fats. In fact, the product in question could have quite a bit of the trans fats that it claims to have none of, and it's all perfectly legal.

Here's how this little scam works: the measurement advertised on the front of a bag of chips represents the amount of trans fats per serving. And if the amount per serving is less than half a gram, the FDA allows them to round it down to 0. Hence, 0g doesn't equal zero grams. And when you see a giant bag of chips containing 20 servings or more, you realize how big this discrepancy actually is.

So you want to find out the truth about that bag of chips that claim 0g, but you're pretty sure they're not. How do you find out for sure? First, check the list of ingredients -- if you see partially hydrogenated oil, it means the bad stuff is in there.

Now you want to find out exactly how much is in the whole bag. Sadly the FDA-mandated rules (which we're sure weren't the least bit influenced by the food industry) don't give you any way to find this number. None. Well, they do offer this page where you can look up the general category of product, but again the numbers are per serving and are rounded to the nearest whole number. Even this WebMD article spells out specific products' per-serving numbers but not their per-package numbers.

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The recently released police “report” paints a dramatic picture--not in Meyer's favor--of what happened during Kerry's speech. Unfortunately, it also contradicts reality.

First of, let's start off with what actually happened, based on this this YouTube video, as Meyer approached the microphone :

Senator Kerry concludes his discourse, saying “to continue to pile name upon name upon some wall in the future for a strategy that has failed. That’s the distinction.”

He then turned his attention to Meyer, and called on him, pointing to him in a gesture to ask Meyer to speak, saying “Sir.”

With Kerry's explicit permission, Meyer then began speaking into the microphone, where he was already standing, beginning with: "I first and foremost want to thank you for your time."

Here’s Officer Nicole Lynn Mallo’s interesting little version of the event, as stated in the police "report":

As Senator Kerry was ending his speech, a man disrupted the senator by screaming, yelling, and flailing his arms. The man moved his way down the aisle yelling, "Why don’t you answer my questions, I have been waiting and listening to you speak in circles for the last two hours." "These officers are going to arrest me". The man was screaming and yelling obscenities until Senator Kerry told him to calm down and that he would take his question, but he needed to calm down. At that point, the man stated, "You will take my question because I have been listening to your crap for two hours"

Mallo says that this all happened before Meyer even asked a single question.  Good work, Officer-Just-Covering-My-Ass. The cameras were rolling; your little ‘report’ was completely made up!

This bizarre and complete fabrication begs an important question: Is this how police reports are normally made?

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIYTJ75U4NU

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A Clay County woman's family said it's seeking justice after their loved one died shortly after being shocked 10 times with Taser guns during a confrontation with police.

The family of 56-year-old Emily Delafield said it would take the Green Cove Springs Police Department to court, according to a WJXT-TV report.

In April 2006, officers with the police department said they were called to a disturbance at a home in the 400 block of Harrison Street just before 5 p.m.

In a 911 call made to the Green Cove Springs, Delafield can be heard telling a dispatcher that she believed she was in danger:

Dispatcher: And what's the problem?

Delafield: My sister is waiting on my property.

Dispatcher: Your what?

Delafield: My sister (inaudible) is on my property trying to harm me.

Officers said they arrived to find Delafield in a wheelchair, armed with two knives and a hammer. Police said the woman was swinging the weapons at family members and police.

Within an hour of her call to 911, Delafield, a wheelchair-bound woman documented to have mental illness, was dead.

Family attorney Rick Alexander said Delafield's death could have been prevented and that there are four things that jump out at him about the case.

"One, she's in a wheelchair. Two, she's schizophrenic. Three, they're using a Taser on a person that's in a wheelchair, and then four is that they tasered her 10 times for a period of like two minutes," Alexander said.

According to a police report, one of the officers used her Taser gun nine times for a total of 160 seconds and the other officer discharged his Taser gun once for a total of no more than five seconds.

A medical examiner found Delafield died from hypertensive heart disease and cited the Taser gun shock as a contributing factor, the report said. On her death certificate, the medical examiner ruled Delafield's death a homicide.

The family said it plans to sue the Green Coves Springs Police Department now that it has all the reports regarding their loved one's death.

"We're going to try to compensate the estate and the family and try to get justice," Alexander said.

He said he believes the evidence weighs heavily in favor of Delafield's family and that justice will be served.

"I think that this evidence is going to show, along with some of the evidence we've collected outside of here, that there is no reason Emily Delafield should have died that day," Alexander said.

He said he plans to file a notice to sue sometime before the end of the year.

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A 70-year-old woman arrested in a dispute over her brown lawn pleaded not guilty Tuesday, then stood by as a Los Angeles lawyer waved handcuffs for the cameras outside court.

Betty Perry, left, sits with attorney Gloria Allred in Utah's Fourth District Court on Tuesday in Orem, Utah.

Betty Perry is charged with resisting arrest and failing to maintain her landscaping, both misdemeanors.

She was arrested July 6 after failing to give her name to a police officer who visited her home.

During a struggle, Perry fell and injured her nose. She spent more than an hour in a holding cell before police released her.

"I ask the citizens of Orem: How many of you would like to have your great-grandmother taken from her home with bruises and blood and placed in handcuffs for failing to water her lawn?" attorney Gloria Allred said.

"Let's bring sanity back to law enforcement," she said.

The mayor and City Council apologized, and the police department said the situation could have been handled differently. But the city attorney still is pressing charges, and Perry is due back in court next month.

A state investigation found that Officer James Flygare acted properly in arresting Perry after trying to get her to cooperate.

Perry's water had been turned off for about nine months, at her request, although she was living at the house at the time of the arrest. Orem has a shutoff policy for people who are away for extended periods.

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