The Lo Zone

A judge denied bail Sunday for a South Side father of five accused of repeatedly stabbing his wife after discovering she was talking to another man on the telephone.

James Rodgers, 47, of the 8000 block of South Dobson Avenue was charged with attempted first-degree murder. He is accused of dragging his wife by the neck to their kitchen Thursday night and stabbing her with a steak knife until the knife broke. Rodgers continued to stab her with a butcher knife, hit her in the head and strangled choked her, Cook County Assistant State's Atty. Karin Swanson said Sunday in Cook County Bond Court.

When their 3-year-old son walked in, Rodgers pushed him away and ordered the boy back to his room, prosecutors said. The woman was stabbed 15 times, including in her shoulder, breasts, neck and abdomen, Swanson said. She was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in serious condition and underwent emergency surgery.

A witness who was unable to stop the attack called police, and Rodgers surrendered when authorities arrived, Swanson said. According to court records, he did not remember how he got the knife but told police, "I stabbed her because I was angry with her."

When Johnny Anderson and two accomplices saw churchgoers filing into Israel of God's Church on the West Side two weeks ago, they were struck with an idea, police said Monday: Let's rob the church.

Anderson is accused of doing just that, interrupting a rollicking Wednesday night service by putting his gun to a man's head, firing a shot into the ceiling and threatening to shoot children if churchgoers didn't hand over their valuables.

"It was an opportunistic time for them to commit this robbery," said Steve Peterson, commander of Harrison Area detectives. "As far as we know, there was no planning."

Scientists have developed a chemical contraceptive that temporarily blocks the development of sperm but does not interfere with testosterone levels in men.

Trials on laboratory animals, according to a media report, have shown that the contraceptive effect is reversible and that there are no apparent long-term side-effects. Scientists hope that trials of the new male contraceptive could begin within the next few years.

A 30-year-old Ghanaian man could be jailed for up to five years after writing his wife's paper in a science exam, police in the West African country said on Wednesday.

Kofi Ochere and his wife Christiana Yeboah, 28, a teacher, had both registered for the exam at the Presbyterian Secondary School in Legon, a suburb of the capital Accra.

But Ochere, who did not need the qualification, offered to write his wife's paper while she wrote his.

"He feared the woman would not do well. But at the examination hall, they noted the paper had a feminine name," police spokesman Beneso Darkwa said.

The two had been arrested while investigations continued.

"Both of them could go to jail ... the maximum sentence is five years," he said.

So far eight people had been arrested in Accra for pretending to be someone else during exams run by the West African Examinations Council for private secondary school candidates, Darkwa said.

Many pupils for private schools in Ghana are people who did not have an opportunity to go to school as children.

Abel Gonzales, 36, a computer analyst from Dallas, tried about 15 different varieties before coming up with his perfect recipe -- a batter mix made with Coca-Cola syrup, a drizzle of strawberry syrup, and some strawberries.

Balls of the batter are then deep-fried, ending up like ping-pong ball sized doughnuts which are then served in a cup, topped with Coca-Cola syrup, whipped cream, cinnamon sugar and a cherry on the top.

"It tastes great," said Sue Gooding, a spokeswoman for the State Fair of Texas where Gonzales' fried Coke made its debut this fall. "It was a huge success."

Researchers are struggling to understand a rare medical condition where sufferers unknowingly demand, or actually have, sex while asleep, New Scientist magazine reported on Wednesday.

Research into sexsomnia -- making sexual advances toward another person while asleep -- has been hampered as sufferers are so embarrassed by the problem they tend not to own up to it, while doctors do not ask about it.

As yet there is no cure for the condition, which often leads to difficulties in relationships.

Jermaine Dupri — superproducer, rapper, and the boyfriend of — has confirmed to The Associated Press that he has quit as a top executive at Jackson's label, Virgin Records, amid disappointing sales of Jackson's new album.

"Since there are so many rumors running rampant about my position at Virgin Records, I feel that it is necessary to set the record straight," Dupri said Wednesday in a statement released to the AP. "I was not forced out of the company, I made a decision that it was in my best interest to leave."

Dupri became head of urban music at Virgin, a unit of EMI Group PLC, just last year. His abrupt departure comes after the underwhelming performance of Jackson's latest release, "20 Y.O." Dupri was an executive producer of the record and helped determine its creative vision, along with Jackson and her longtime producers, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.

Jackson's album failed to debut at the top of the charts last month, then steadily fell. It has sold 443,000 copies since its release Sept. 26, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Jackson's 2001 album, "All for You," debuted at No. 1 with more than 605,000 copies sold in a single week.

Coming after the flat performance of 2004's "Damita Jo" and Jackson's infamous Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction, "20 Y.O." was seen as an opportunity for Jackson to re-establish herself as the multiplatinum hitmaker she has been for most of her 20-year-plus career.

Starbucks Pursues Aggressive Expansion

Starbucks Corp.'s recently announced goal of having 40,000 stores worldwide isn't just about spreading green awnings through middle America, the Middle East and other areas of the world not yet tempted by easy access to mocha Frappuccinos and pumpkin spice lattes.

The coffee chain's aggressive growth also hinges on what the company calls "infill" — adding stores in cities where its mermaid logo is already commonplace. In some cases, that means putting a Starbucks within a block of an existing store, if not closer.

Supermodel Naomi Cambpell has been released on bail after being arrested in London on suspicion of assault.

Sky's crime correspondent Martin Brunt said Campbell was arrested yesterday afternoon after a woman walked into a central London police station and made an allegation of assault.

Police arrested the 36-year-old model at a house in Westminster, central London. She was released on bail in the early hours of this morning.

The Sun newspaper reported that Campbell attacked her drug counselor.

The paper claimed the therapist made a complaint after she was "scratched all over her face" by the catwalk model.

A spokesman for Campbell said he believed there had been a "misunderstanding".

Danny H. Rolling, 52, was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. at Florida State Prison in Starke, about 30 miles northeast of Gainesville. Witnesses said he stared toward them and sang a hymn-type song just before the drugs were administered.

“Maybe now that we don’t have this on us,” said Dianna Hoyt, the stepmother of one victim, “we can try and relax and live with the memories we have of our children and be at peace.”
Mr. Rolling was 36 when he arrived in Gainesville shortly before the fall semester began at the University of Florida, a drifter with a criminal past who pitched a tent in some woods near campus. He followed two freshman roommates, Sonja Larson, 18, and Christina Powell, 17, to their off-campus apartment, raped Miss Powell, repeatedly stabbed both women with a hunting knife and mutilated their bodies.

The police discovered them on Aug. 26, after Miss Powell’s parents reported that their daughter was not answering her door or phone. Later that night, the police found Christa Hoyt, 18, dead in her off-campus duplex. Mr. Rolling had raped and stabbed her, severed her head and placed it on a shelf.

The next day, Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada, both 23, were discovered stabbed to death in their apartment, not far from where the other killings took place. Mr. Rolling attacked Mr. Taboada, a former high school football player, as he slept, then killed Miss Paules. All of the victims were University of Florida students except for Miss Hoyt, who was attending a nearby community college.

Five Chinese power bureau officials have been dismissed or demoted after an auditor died from a series of banquet binges, the Shanghai Daily reported on Tuesday.

The death of Zhang Hongtao, 25, who worked with the Yanshan County Audit Office in northern Hebei province, was blamed on alcohol after banquets provided in April for auditors by the Yanshan Power Supply Co., the newspaper said.

Instead of working, Zhang did little else but eat, drink, play cards and enjoy massages, the official China Daily said.

"Zhang called his family the day before his death, saying that he couldn't pick up his child because the power bureau had invited the auditors and some other supervision officials to another banquet," the newspaper said.

"That night, Zhang consumed a lot of alcohol and became very ill. When the bureau invited the group to dine again the next day, Zhang's lifeless body was found, which Zhang's family said was due to alcohol poisoning."

[...] Richard and Cindy Little, a white couple living in a predominantly white neighborhood, filed a complaint with the Louisiana Department of Insurance. Eventually, they won full reimbursement for their repairs.

Doretha and Roy Kitchens, a black couple living in New Orleans' overwhelmingly black Lower Ninth Ward, simply gave up and took what their insurer gave them. They didn't know they could appeal to the state.

Though poor and minority neighborhoods suffered the brunt of Katrina's fury, residents living in white neighborhoods have been three times as likely as homeowners in black neighborhoods to seek state help in resolving insurance disputes, according to an Associated Press computer analysis.

The analysis of Louisiana's insurance complaints settled in the first year after Katrina highlights a cold, hard truth exposed by Katrina's winds and waters: People of color and modest means, who often need the most help after a major disaster, are disconnected from the government institutions that can provide it, or distrustful of those in power.

"The blacks didn't complain 'cause they got tired," said Doretha Kitchens, 58, who recalls numerous phone calls to her insurer that often ended with her being put on hold. Ultimately, she accepted her insurer's offer of about $34,000 for damages that actually total more than $120,000.

The insurance industry and state regulators say they made special efforts — even in the midst of Katrina's chaos — to reach out to poor and minority neighborhoods to inform them of options.

But their ad appeals on local radio did little to inform the thousands of mostly black residents who were displaced to Houston. And giving a toll free number for help didn't help poor minorities who stayed behind with no telephone or cell service. Officials acknowledge victims slipped through the cracks.

[...]

Nearly 75 percent of the settled cases were filed by residents currently living in predominantly white neighborhoods. Just 25 percent were filed by households in predominantly minority ZIP codes, the analysis found.

A major effort to draw Latinos and blacks into the Republican Party, a central element of the GOP plan to build a long-lasting majority, is in danger of collapse amid anger over the immigration debate and claims that Republican leaders have not delivered on promises to direct more money to church-based social services.

President Bush, strategist Karl Rove and other top Republicans have wooed Latino and black leaders, many of them evangelical clergy who lead large congregations, in hopes of peeling away the traditional Democratic base. But now some of the leaders who helped drive Bush to victory in 2004 are revisiting their loyalty to the Republican Party and, in some cases, abandoning it. "There is a fissure, and I doubt it will be closed in this election," said the Rev. Luis Cortes Jr., a Republican who founded the annual National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast that has featured Bush every year since 2002. His Philadelphia-based Esperanza USA boasts a national affiliate network of more than 10,000 churches.

The Latino backlash has grown so intense that one prominent, typically pro-Republican organization, the Latino Coalition, has endorsed Democrats in competitive races this year in Tennessee, Nebraska and New Jersey. The coalition is chaired by Hector Barreto, the former administrator of the Small Business Administration under Bush; its president is a former strategist for the Republican National Committee.

[...] the White House is cutting and running from "stay the course." A phrase meant to connote steely resolve instead has become a symbol for being out of touch and rigid in the face of a war that seems to grow worse by the week, Republican strategists say. Democrats have now turned "stay the course" into an attack line in campaign commercials, and the Bush team is busy explaining that "stay the course" does not actually mean stay the course.

Instead, they have been emphasizing in recent weeks how adaptable the president's Iraq policy actually is. Bush remains steadfast about remaining in Iraq, they say, but constantly shifts tactics and methods in response to an adjusting enemy. "What you have is not 'stay the course' but in fact a study in constant motion by the administration," Snow said yesterday.

A father pulled a gun on a youth football coach because his son wasn't getting enough playing time, police said.

Wayne Derkotch, 40, was arguing with the coach Sunday during a game of 6- and 7-year-olds when he drew the weapon, police said. No shots were fired.

A man accused of having sex with the family dog has been charged under the state's new animal cruelty law, which makes bestiality a felony, a prosecutor said.

Michael Patrick McPhail, 26, of nearby Spanaway, pleaded not guilty Thursday to one count of first-degree animal cruelty in Pierce County Superior Court.

Assistant Pierce County Prosecutor Karen Watson said McPhail was the first person in Pierce County to be charged with the new bestiality offense.

[...]

McPhail's wife told investigators that she found her husband on their back porch Wednesday night having intercourse with their 4-year-old female pit bull terrier, the Pierce County sheriff's office report said. The dog was squealing and crying, according to charging papers.

The woman took photos with her cell phone and called the sheriff's office.

Calls to McPhail's public defender, David Katayama, were not immediately returned Friday.

The bestiality law, which took effect in June, was prompted by a case near Enumclaw in which a Seattle man died after having sex with a horse. Before the law was enacted, Washington was one of 14 states where bestiality had not been explicitly prohibited.

...which was based on Vladimir Nabokov's seminal novel, Lolita.

A nymphet is a sexualized adolescent girl in the early days of puberty. The term was coined by Vladimir Nabokov in the novel Lolita [...]

"Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their nature, which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose designate as "nymphets."

...our very own stealth Lo Zoner, Mel Jackson...

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“The melee has set off World War III on the show and may cost Isaiah his job,” an insider told The ENQUIRER.

“The cast is divided over the shameful event.”

As The ENQUIRER exclusively revealed last week, Patrick and Isaiah clashed over cast members being late to the set, right before shooting a scene at Prospect Studios in Los Angeles.

A heated discussion quickly escalated to violence when Isaiah snapped, revealed an eyewitness.

At one point, Isaiah yelled, “I’m not your little faggot like (name deleted),” according to the source. Those who heard him were stunned.

Because of the extreme nature of the slur, The ENQUIRER is withholding the name of the co-star targeted by Washington. During the brawl, an enraged Isaiah grabbed Patrick by the throat and shoved him a few feet.

...who, allegedly, has admitted he is indeed gay.

A federal judge Tuesday vacated the conviction of Enron's late founder Kenneth Lay, wiping out a jury's verdict that he committed fraud and conspiracy in one of the biggest corporate scandals in U.S. history.

Lay was convicted of 10 counts of fraud, conspiracy and lying to banks in two separate cases on May 25. Enron's collapse in 2001 wiped out thousands of jobs, more than $60 billion in market value and more than $2 billion in pension plans.

Lay died of heart disease July 5 while vacationing with his wife, Linda, in Aspen, Colo.

U.S. District Judge Sim Lake, in a ruling Tuesday, agreed with Lay's lawyers that his death required that his conviction be erased and his indictment dismissed. They cited a 2004 ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that found that a defendant's death pending appeal extinguished his entire case because he hadn't had a full opportunity to challenge the conviction and the government shouldn't be able to punish a dead defendant or his estate.

Rapper Fabolous was shot early Tuesday as he stood at a Manhattan parking garage, spurring a sequence of events that left him both hospitalized in stable condition and under arrest, police said.

The 28-year-old rapper, whose legal name is John Jackson, was shot once in the thigh when a male with a gun approached him and three others and opened fire, police spokesman Sgt. Mike Wysokowski said.

The four jumped into a vehicle and fled, attracting the attention of police when they ran a red light. Officers stopped them and discovered two loaded guns in the vehicle, both of which were apparently unlicensed, Wysokowski said. All four men were arrested, and charges were pending.

The rapper was taken to a hospital. Police were searching for the shooter.

Elsewhere, 60 Iraqis died in attacks and 16 tortured bodies were found.

School investigators are probing allegations that a Harlem teacher had a spring break fling in the Caribbean with a student - only to be spotted when a fellow teacher checked into the same hotel, sources said.

Spanish teacher Johnny Cuevas, 37, allegedly vacationed in the Dominican Republic with an 18-year-old female student from A. Philip Randolph High School, according to sources close to the investigation.

Investigators also are exploring whether Principal Maurice Collins was told in May 2005 of the alleged trip to Santo Domingo but improperly failed to report it - and then engaged in a coverup.

Collins allegedly called Cuevas into school on Martin Luther King Day 2006 so the duo could get their stories straight, a source said.

It was the first time a woman has acted as a surrogate mother for her daughter in Japan, local media reported.

The case is set to stir debate in Japan where surrogate births are opposed by the government and a key medical group.

Japan's justice ministry also views the woman who gives birth as a child's mother - not the biological mother.

Canadian troops fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan have stumbled across an unexpected and potent enemy -- almost impenetrable forests of 10-feet-high marijuana plants.

[...]

"The challenge is that marijuana plants absorb energy, heat very readily. It's very difficult to penetrate with thermal devices ... and as a result you really have to be careful that the Taliban don't dodge in and out of those marijuana forests," he said in a speech in Ottawa.

"We tried burning them with white phosphorous -- it didn't work. We tried burning them with diesel -- it didn't work. The plants are so full of water right now ... that we simply couldn't burn them," he said.

An argument between Isaiah Washington and Patrick Dempsey got physical and led to a temporary pause in production, the New York Daily News reported in its Wednesday editions.

The actors shared a heated exchange Monday about cast members delaying a scene when Washington, 43, grabbed Dempsey, 40, by the throat and shoved him, according to the newspaper.

Representatives for the actors said the two have made amends.

In the new study, researchers attempt to calculate how many more Iraqis have died since March 2003 than one would expect without the war. Their conclusion, based on interviews of households and not a body count, is that about 600,000 died from violence, mostly gunfire. They also found a small increase in deaths from other causes like heart disease and cancer.

"Deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before the invasion of March 2003," Dr. Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

A Bulgarian woman who killed her son was released from prison because of terminal cancer. She then went home and killed her husband, police said Tuesday.

The 57-year-old was sentenced to 15 years in jail for killing her 29-year-old son with a garden hoe in April 2005 while he was sleeping.

Last month, authorities judged her to be in the final stages of cancer and let her go home, where she stabbed her husband in the throat with a knife.

"It was established she was in the last stage of cancer, she had it all over her body," said a spokeswoman for the Bourgas regional police.

"They presumed she was feeling bad and she would treat herself and rest. But nothing of the kind. She got aggressive and ... she killed her husband."

The two biggest challenges: elephants are the size of semi-trucks, and their testicles -- the size of a "respectable cantaloupe," Stetter said -- are behind 2 inches of skin, a foot of muscle and 4 inches of fat.

"What we want to do is get to the middle of something that's in that semi-truck, and we want to do it without emptying out everything that's in the truck," Stetter explains.

Using the tools doctors use for arthroscopic knee surgeries on humans -- a laparoscope and a video monitor -- Stetter can perform what he says is a two-hour procedure to sterilize male elephants without disrupting their important testosterone production.

The elephant must first be shot from a helicopter with an anesthesia dart, guided to an open area, and propped up by a crane truck so that he can stand while sleeping.

A fugitive doctor charged in the cyanide poisoning death of his wife was arrested in Cyprus and will be brought back to the United States to face trial, the FBI said Monday.

[...]

Essa disappeared three weeks after his wife, Rosemarie, collapsed in her car about five miles from the couple's home and died Feb. 24, 2005.

Before she collapsed, she called a friend on a cell phone, gasping for air, and said her husband made her take calcium pills and she didn't feel well, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors have said they believe Essa, an emergency room doctor, was having an affair with a nurse and wanted to be free of his 38-year-old wife. Prosecutors characterized the killing as a "divorce substitute."

The fifth week was the toughest for Katie Couric, whose viewership on the "CBS Evening News" has dropped each week since her debut the day after Labor Day.

Her broadcast averaged 7.04 million viewers last week, third to NBC's "Nightly News" (8.56 million) and ABC's "World News" (7.97 million), according to Nielsen Media Research.

CBS points out that the "CBS Evening News" is the only one of the three network newscasts with more viewers last week than the same week a year earlier. NBC's margin of victory last year was 2.2 million.

"Where we were last week or even in the weeks to come is not as important as where we are next year and even the year after that," said CBS News President Sean McManus. "As we have said from the very beginning, we are focused on the long term and on making slow and steady progress, which we are doing."

But the steady erosion is a discouraging sign, especially after 13.6 million people tuned in for Couric's first broadcast.

And this...

Oh, and this...

A talkative 9-year-old boy came to Helen Briggs on Valentine's Day 2000. She was a foster mother with years of tough love and scores of troubled kids behind her. But she grew to love this boy. Within the year, she'd talked her husband into adopting him.

Now, six years later, Briggs and her husband, James, a maintenance worker for the city of Alexandria, are taking the highly unusual step of trying to unadopt him.

In 2003, when the boy was 12, he sexually molested a 6-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl still in diapers. She said it was only then, as she waited outside the courtroom for his sexual battery hearing and caseworkers handed her his psychological profile, that she found out just how damaged the boy had been when he came into her life.

[...]

Briggs said she did not know he had lived in five foster homes since he was 16 months old. Nor that his alcohol- and drug-addicted biological parents had physically abused him, injuring his brain stem and impairing his ability to gauge the passage of time.

He'd been hospitalized seven times in psychiatric institutions and diagnosed as possibly psychotically bipolar. He'd thrown knives, kicked in walls, pulled out all his hair and threatened to kill himself. He'd heard voices telling him to do bad things. His confidential case file shows he most likely was sexually abused.

"I did not know any of that," Briggs said, though Virginia policy states that caseworkers should provide "full, factual information" about a child to adoptive parents. "They just told me he was hyperactive."

The survey of 1,505 American adults, conducted by market research firm Harris Interactive, found that over half of the respondents admitted to "re-gifting" with passing on gifts becoming a far more common and acceptable phenomenon.

In fact 78 percent of consumers who were polled felt that it was acceptable to re-gift some or most of the time.

NASA scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered what they believe are 16 new planets deep in the Milky Way, leading them to conclude there are probably billions of planets spread throughout the galaxy.

A former employee of R. Kelly said in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that the singer beat him during a dispute at Kelly's home in February and cheated him out of songwriting royalties.

Henry "Love" Vaughn said in the lawsuit that he had been a longtime "mentor and guide" to Kelly.

Yet when Vaughn visited Kelly's home in Olympia Fields on Feb. 19, Kelly and others dragged him to the basement and "Kelly repeatedly struck [Vaughn] about the face and body with his fists," according to the lawsuit filed in Cook County Circuit Court.

Vaughn said Kelly also reneged on an oral agreement to pay him one-half of the money he earned from a song that was ultimately titled "Step in the Name of Love."

Vaughn provided Kelly with the "concept" for the song by suggesting that they create a song for the dance known as "Steppin,'" the lawsuit said.

It's called the OhMiBod, and it just might be what the doctor ordered.

OhMiBod is a sleek, sophisticated new generation of vibrator that combines elegance of design with the excitement of your favorite music. The audio enabled integrated microchip allows the OhMiBod to vibrate to the beat and rhythm of your music while you listen. Measures 5 1/2" long (insertable) and 1 1/8" in diameter. OhMiBod comes with an additional multi-speed endcap for use without an iPod or music player. It really is 2 products in one! Our motor provides strong yet quiet, intense rhythmic vibrations. With polished chrome detail and pearl white body this product is the ultimate iPod acsexsory!

I'm just sayin'.*

Disgraced former Rep. Mark Foley said through his lawyer Tuesday that he was sexually abused by a clergyman as a teenager, but accepts full responsibility for sending salacious computer messages to teenage male pages.

Attorney David Roth said Foley was molested between ages 13 and 15. He declined to identify the clergyman or the church, but Foley is Roman Catholic.

He also acknowledged for the first time that the former congressman is gay, saying the disclosure was part of his client's "recovery."

"Mark Foley wants you to know he is a gay man," Roth told reporters as Republicans struggled with fallout from Foley's resignation.