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Friday, May 31, 2013

Burglar collapsed and died after stealing £10,000


A burglar collapsed and died as he prepared to run off with up to £10,000 in stolen goods after an overnight raid on a heating firm.
The 50-year-old and and two other men were preparing to flee Glevum Heating in Gloucester with boilers, laptops, mobile phones and cash when the burglar collapsed.
One accomplice ran to get help and a relative of the man tried in vain to resuscitate him until police and paramedics arrived to take over, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.
Unexplained: The 50-year-old burglar collapsed and died during an overnight raid on Glevum Heating in Gloucester
Unexplained: The 50-year-old burglar collapsed and died during an overnight raid on Glevum Heating in Gloucester
The death of the man, who was from Gloucester, is being treated as unexplained.
 
The trio targeted the building in Lower Tuffley Lane in the early hours of Tuesday morning, and had amassed a haul worth between £5,000 and £10,000 when the 50-year-old collapsed and was taken outside by his accomplices.
Police arrived to find the man lying on the ground outside the building.
Officers are now studying CCTV footage from security cameras at the firm's headquarters.
A spokesman for Glevum said staff were in a sombre mood in the wake of the incident shortly after 1am on Tuesday morning.
'It's very sad,' he said. 'No matter what has happened, a man has died here and our thoughts are with his family.'
'Accomplices': Two other men were arrested, one, aged 47, was charged with burglary and appeared before Cheltenham Magistrates Court this week
'Accomplices': Two other men were arrested, one, aged 47, was charged with burglary and appeared before Cheltenham Magistrates Court this week
A Gloucestershire Constabulary spokesman said 'Officers were called to reports of a burglary in progress at a business address in Lower Tuffley Lane just after 1am on Tuesday.
'On arrival, a 50-year-old Gloucester man was found collapsed on the ground.
'Despite attempts to resuscitate him, the man was declared dead at the scene by the ambulance service.
'The death is being treated as unexplained at this time and the coroner and next of kin have been informed.'
Police added that a 19-year-old man from Gloucester had been arrested on suspicion of burglary in connection with the case and released on bail.
He is due to attend Gloucester police station on June 5 pending further inquiries.
A second man, aged 47, also from Gloucester, was charged with burglary and appeared at Cheltenham Magistrates Court this week.
The man has been remanded in custody, police said.

Austistic 15-year-old is pursuing a PhD in physics



Autistic Teen Working on Astrophysics PhD



TEDxTalks/Youtube(NEW YORK) -- An Indiana mother said that her determination to find a niche for her autistic son, who doctors had little hope for, led him to flourish into a budding astrophysicist with an off-the-charts IQ, and he is now pursuing a Ph.D. in physics.

Kristine Barnett's son, Jacob, 15, was diagnosed with moderate to severe autism when he was 2.  Because he had lost language, he was on the more severe end of the spectrum.  Psychologists and teachers believed that the young boy may not ever speak again.  As Barnett put it, they thought that he was lost.

"He was very precise," she told ABC News.  "He wasn't barreling through the world like other little boys.  He lined cars up precisely.  His mannerisms were precise."

"He seemed to like schedule and routine, even from infancy," she said.

After his diagnosis, Jacob was visited frequently by a number of psychologists under an Indiana program called First Steps, which included a developmental therapist, an occupational therapist, and a speech therapist, among others.

But early signs in Jacob's childhood hinted at an inner world that was harboring massive intelligence.  At a very young age, he would carry a set of beloved alphabet cards with him wherever he'd go.

At one point, he took a bundle of crayons and arranged them across the living room floor in the color spectrum, which he had distinguished from light coming through the living room window and hitting glasses perched on a table.

As Barnett would run a daycare out of her home, she would play with other people's kids outside while Jacob was slumped over the table inside, where he would work with therapists.  He was spending hours trying to put a ball in a cup.

One spring day, as the kids ran through a sprinkler, she decided to make a change.

"We were forgetting his childhood.  His spirit was being crushed by the opinion that everything was wrong," she said.  "I resolved to give it back to him."

That night, Barnett took Jacob out after dark, turned on the fog lights of her car, put on some Louis Armstrong, laid on the hood of the car with him and looked at the stars.

"Little did I know it would be those stars that would bring him back into our world," she said.  "They were what we had.  It was what we had to hold onto.  It was the beginning with a relationship with my child."

In an attempt to connect with her son and nurture the spark of interest he showed when they would go look at the stars, she decided to take him to a planetarium.

"I didn't get it.  They seemed like far-away dots to me," she said.  "He then showed me a nebula on the computer, and it gave me a peek into his mind -- into the way he sees the world."

Barnett decided to stop having Jacob meet with therapists.  She said that she was advised by everyone she knew, including her friends and her husband, not to remove Jacob from the system.

By the age of 3, Jacob began to talk again, and everyone was asking Barnett for the secret to the sudden recovery.  Typically, it takes years for an autistic child to recover speech.

By the age of 3-and-a-half, Jacob had taught himself to read.  This is what he'd been doing while taking books off to the corner, Barnett said she realized.

She decided then to take a second trip to a planetarium.  When they arrived, a college-level lecture was taking place.  Hesitant, she took her boy in.  Jacob immediately began reading the slides, and when the professor asked a question about the density of Mars' moons, Jacob answered the question -- correctly.

"At that point, my view changed, and I realized that his mind is remarkable," Barnett said.  "He understood complex concepts.  My outlook for his future was completely changed."

Today, Jacob is now working towards a Ph.D. at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI).  Several IQ tests have been administered on him, and Barnett said that it's been concluded that he can't be measured, so he is always given the top number.

Speaking with ABC News, Jacob said that when he entered grade school, he was already hoping to be beginning algebra.

"In kindergarten, I knew that it was for kids to play and develop social skills," he said.  "By first grade, I thought we'd do some mathematics -- algebra.  Then, in second grade, still no algebra.  They told me not until high school.  So, I guess this came out of my desire to learn more mathematics."

Barnett credits his success to putting her son in as many rich situations as she could find.

"If you find the passion in a child and tap into it, that will become what their drive," she said.  "And if somebody had drive, they can accomplish anything."
Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

Man's plot to be a hero led to the death of teenage girl


A man's bizarre plot to be a hero by kidnapping and then "rescuing" a teenage girl who had rebuffed his advances resulted in her death, according to an indictment charging him with murder.
Kyle Dube, 20, of Bangor, Maine, was arrested for the murder of Nichole Cable, 15, after he lured her from her home while pretending to be one of her Facebook friends promising her marijuana, the indictment states. The indictment was unsealed on Wednesday.
According to police, Dube waited in the nearby woods wearing a ski mask on May 12 as Cable walked to the end of her driveway to meet Bryan Butterfield, a friend of hers who she'd been speaking with online. Dube allegedly jumped from the bushes, duct taped Cable and threw her in his dad's pick-up truck.
When Dube removed Cable from the truck, she was dead, his brother Dustin Dube told police, the indictment claims.
"Kyle intended to kidnap Nichole and hide her … he would later find her and be the hero," Dustin Dube told police, the court document states.
VIDEO: Kidnap, Murder Suspect Wanted to Be a Hero
Kyle Dube had set up a phony Facebook profile for Butterfield, a man who Cable knew. Posing as Butterfield, Dube repeatedly requested to meet with Cable. On the night she vanished, Cable texted to a friend that she had planned to meet Butterfield.
When interviewed by police the day after Cable disappeared, the real Bryan Butterfield said that he suspected Dube, who he said wanted to have sex with Cable, but had been rebuffed by Cable.
While searching for Cable, investigators logged into her Facebook account and noticed frequent communications between her and the fake Butterfield account. Detectives made an emergency request to Facebook to produce records to identify the owner of the fake account and the IP address linked to an account that belonged to Dube's parents, according to authorities.
Facebook also provided the last four digits of the smart phone used to log into the fake Facebook account, and they matched the last four digits of Dube's phone number, the indictment states.
During an interview with police, Dube stated that he had a relationship with Cable, and had exchanged text messages with her the day she disappeared, but was at work in Bangor when she vanished. He consented to a DNA sample, which later proved to match DNA on a sock found In a wooded area where police were searching for Cable, police said. Cable's DNA was also found on the sock.
On May 20, Sarah Mesinger, Dube's girlfriend, told police that he had detailed to her where he left Cable's body in a clearing, covered with branches and that he had thrown her clothes out of the truck's window, according to court papers.
Police deployed aircraft and dogs in the search for Cable's body, while hundreds of civilian volunteers had spent days searching. Her body was found on the night of May 20.

What will it take for Google to block child porn



Google and Microsoft last night faced demands to act over the shocking ease with which child killer Mark Bridger used the internet to fuel his perversion.
Bridger, sentenced yesterday to spend the rest of his life in jail for murdering five-year-old April Jones, had a sickening library of violent child pornography.
It follows the revelation that Stuart Hazell, the man convicted earlier this month of killing 12-year-old Tia Sharp, regularly downloaded child abuse images on his mobile phone.
Mark Bridger
Mark Bridger
Locked up: April Jones's killer Mark Bridger is pictured in drag. He had a sickening library of child pornography
Jailed: Sexual predator and murderer Mark Bridger is taken from court this afternoon to start his whole life sentence in jail
Jailed: Sexual predator and murderer Mark Bridger is taken from court to start his whole life sentence in jail
Children’s charities and online protection experts are now calling for search sites to crack down on the way paedophiles can feed their fantasies with simple online searches.
The verdict on 47-year-old Bridger, a former slaughterman, was delivered as:
  •  April’s parents begged him to reveal where he dumped her body, adding they would forever live with guilt for allowing her out to play that night;
  •  The heartbroken family asked for the return of 17 fragments of skull from Bridger’s home, the only traces of April that have been found, so they can lay her remains to rest;
  •  The Mail reveals Bridger’s history of lies and deceit, taking on multiple identities, cross-dressing and using brute force during a series of violent relationships with vulnerable young women;
  • The mother of one of Bridger’s six children tells how he punched her in the stomach when she was a pregnant 17-year-old to try to force a miscarriage;
  • The financial cost of his lies is exposed, with his refusal to confess costing the public up to £9million to cover exhaustive police searches for April, as well as lawyers’ fees and court costs.
Bridger used the search engines Google and Bing, which is owned by Microsoft, to look up terms including ‘naked five-year-old girls’, ‘nudism five-year-olds’ and ‘pictures of naked virgin teens’.
Mother and daughter: Coral Jones cuddles smiling April tightly, and today described how the family will never recover from her death
Mother and daughter: Coral Jones cuddles smiling April tightly. She described how the family will never recover from her death
He also used Facebook to access  photographs of local girls, including  April and her half-sisters aged 13 and 16, and went online to save images of murdered Soham schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.
Child safety charities, including the NSPCC, demanded that the internet giants introduce immediate controls to stop paedophiles gaining access to child pornography.
John Carr of the Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety said: ‘If these images were not available on the internet then men like Hazell and Bridger might not go on to kill.
 
‘We cannot blame the internet for these people but it has opened pathways that lead them on to violent pornography and paedophile material.’
After five weeks of horrifying evidence at Mold Crown Court in North Wales, the jury of nine women and three men unanimously found Bridger guilty of abduction, murder and perverting the course of justice.
Mr Justice Griffith Williams told him: ‘You are a pathological and glib liar. There is no doubt in my mind that you are a paedophile who has for some time harboured sexual and morbid fantasies about young girls, storing on your laptop not only images of pre-pubescent and pubescent girls, but foul pornography of the gross sexual abuse of young children.’
Bridger stared ahead blankly and nodded as the judge imposed a whole life order, which condemns him to die behind bars. Only 47 other criminals in the UK have been handed such a sentence.
Mark Bridger
Mark Bridger
Fantasist: Mark Bridger, who is 'pathological liar and cold-blooded killer', will never leave jail  and waiting people yelled 'b******' as he was taken in cuffs to the man 
Brave: April Jones's mother Coral spoke outside court today, beside her husband Paul, and said they were relieved that Mark Bridger was found guilty
Brave: April Jones's mother Coral spoke outside court, beside her husband Paul, and said they were relieved that Mark Bridger was found guilty
Bridger abducted April on the evening of October 1 last year as she played on her pink bicycle with her best friend close to their homes on the Bryn-y-Gog estate in Machynlleth, Mid-Wales.
He lured April into his Land Rover Discovery and drove her to Mount Pleasant Cottage, the remote rented home where he had been living alone since his girlfriend dumped him.
There, police believe, Bridger murdered her, dismembering her body before disposing of it in different locations.
Despite a huge effort by police and volunteers, April has never been found. Tiny fragments of a child’s skull, however, were discovered in Bridger’s wood burning stove, alongside a boning knife.
On his Acer laptop, detectives found an incriminating library of vile images. He had found the violent child porn by searching on Google for simple terms, including: ‘France: British schoolgirl raped and murdered.’
April Jones
Mark Bridger
Trial: Mark Bridger faces life in prison for the murder of April Jones, after the jury accepted compelling evidence he had abducted and murdered her in a  'sexually motivated' attack
Happier times: Paul and Coral Jones, hold April and their other children on their wedding day, before their 'beautiful daughter' was taken from them
Happier times: Paul and Coral Jones, hold April and their other children on their wedding day, before their 'beautiful daughter' was taken from them
Bridger saved photographs of various child murder victims, including ten-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, murdered by paedophile school caretaker Ian Huntley in 2002.
He had also downloaded numerous sadistic cartoons representing ‘extremely young girls’ suffering sexual abuse.
Facebook photographs of local young girls were also found on his laptop, with files specifically dedicated to April’s half-sisters aged 13 and 16.
Pictures of April, who had cerebral  palsy and was born with a hole in her heart, were accessed just eight days before she was abducted.
Bridger admitted killing April, but insisted he accidentally ran her over before ‘blacking out’ and forgetting what he did with her body.
Brave: Paul and Coral Jones, the parents of April Jones arrive at Mold Crown Court, where they have been every day during their daughter's killer's murder trial
Brave: Paul and Coral Jones, the parents of April Jones arrive at Mold Crown Court, where they have been every day during their daughter's killer's murder trial 
Tragic: April Jones was abducted while she played on her bike (pictured), probably lured by Bridger into his car with the promise of a sleepover with his daughter
Tragic: April Jones was abducted while she played on her bike (pictured), probably lured by Bridger into his car with the promise of a sleepover with his daughter
Cold-blooded: Killer Mark Bridger had pictures of himself holding this gun on his Facebook profile
Cold-blooded: Killer Mark Bridger had pictures of himself holding this gun on his Facebook profile
Grim discovery: Mark Bridger's burnt knife recovered from his property in Ceinws, where April may have died
Grim discovery: Mark Bridger's burnt knife recovered from his property in Ceinws, where April may have died

But his despicable web of lies was destroyed by April’s best friend. The seven-year-old girl became the central  witness in the case, bravely describing  seeing April climb into Bridger’s car, ‘happy and smiling’. Yesterday, as the  jury dismissed his pathetic cover story, experts spoke about how his obsession with online porn, and the ease with  which he could access the vile images, contributed to his ‘sexually motivated’ attack on April.
Jon Brown of the NSPCC said: ‘Internet companies make millions and millions of pounds every year.
‘Google need to do more in terms of blocking searches for child abuse imagery but they also need to alert the authorities if someone is blatantly doing these searches.
Arrival: The media watch as Mark Bridger arrives in a prison before he is found guilty of killing the five-year-old
Arrival: The media watch as Mark Bridger arrives in a prison before he is found guilty of killing the five-year-old

‘We are very concerned that the ease with which they can get child abuse images to fuel their fantasies.’
A report by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre has identified a link between viewing child porn online and ‘contact’ sexual offences against children.
Scott Rubin, director of communications and public affairs at Google, said: ‘Google has a zero-tolerance policy on child sexual abuse content. When we discover child abuse imagery or are made aware of it,  we respond quickly to remove and report it to the appropriate law enforcement authorities.’
A spokesman for Microsoft added:  ‘When we are made aware of any illegal content we remove it from our services, including our search engine, and report it to the police.’
Upsetting: April Jones was shown on CCTV inside her local leisure centre after going swimming. The time shows almost 5.30pm and within two hours she had disappeared
Upsetting: April Jones was shown on CCTV inside her local leisure centre after going swimming. The time shows almost5.30pm and within two hours she had disappeared
Video: April is then seen heading through the doors after swimming with her sister and best friend - the last image that exists of the missing schoolgirl
Video: April is then seen heading through the doors after swimming with her sister and best friend - the last image that exists of the missing schoolgirl

Evil: The jury saw images of Bridger's Land Rover Discovery heading away from town - April would already have been in the passenger seat after being abducted near her home
Evil: The jury saw images of Bridger's Land Rover Discovery heading away from town - April would already have been in the passenger seat after being abducted near her home
Images: The jury were show Mark Bridger leaving his house and walking his dog on the day after he took April Jones
Images: The jury were show Mark Bridger leaving his house and walking his dog on the day after he took April Jones

Lounge: This is Mark Bridger's living room, where forensics found blood and bone fragments, a room which was shown to jurors today
Lounge: This is Mark Bridger's living room, where forensics found blood and bone fragments, a room which was shown to jurors

MARK BRIDGER'S PATH TO MURDER: HOW APRIL'S ABDUCTION UNFOLDED

17.20 After spending morning watching child porn, Mark Bridger attends parents evening at Machynlleth Junior School. One teacher thinks he may have had a 'couple of drinks'
17:55 - 19:10 numerous sightings of Bridger on the Bryn-y-Gog estate in his car, including by a 10-year-old girl who was asked by Bridger if she wanted to go on a 'sleepover' at his house.
Around 19:00 April Jones is playing on her bike with friends near her home on the Bryn-Y-Gog estate when she goes missing. According to a child witness, she is taken away in a van or a four-wheel drive vehicle and there are no apparent signs of a struggle or an accident.
19:19 Camera sees what is believed to be Bridger's vehicle at the war memorial in Machynlleth and then past a nearby garage with April probably inside.
22:40 Dyfed-Powys Police issue a statement saying they are "increasingly concerned" for April. 
08.42 Bridger spotted carrying a rolled up plastic binbag on a riverbank or in Ceinws.
10:42 Police helicopter footage shows him walking a dog. Footage also focuses on his house. There is smoke coming from his chimney. The jury was told that fragments from a 'juvenile skull' were found in his wood burner.
14.10 Bridger joins a group of 20 people who are searching for April telling them he had been searching all morning near his home for her. 
15.00 Police search his house, finding it had been cleaned from 'top to bottom' and the heating cranked up
15:30 Bridger is arrested walking on the road between Ceinws and Machynlleth in connection with April's abduction and is later charged with her murder.