DARLINGTON, S.C. (AP) - A jury has found a convicted sex offender accused of raping two teen girls in an underground bunker not guilty of kidnapping, sex crimes and assault with intent to kill. Kenneth Glenn Hinson, 48, wiped his eyes and mouth and appeared to cry after the jury read its verdict, which followed about four hours of deliberations over two days.
Authorities had charged that Hinson snatched the then-17-year-old girls from their bedroom and dragged them one at a time to the underground room hidden beneath a tool shed, where he raped and bound them with duct tape. Prosecutors said Hinson expected the girls to die because the room had no air supply.
However, Hinson testified during the six-day trial that the girls had consensual sex with him. He said they made up the story so they would be able to take drugs from the underground room, which he used to store marijuana. The two young women were not in the courtroom when Hinson was acquitted. Their mothers wept.
If convicted, Hinson had faced a mandatory life sentence without parole under the state's two-strikes law because he was convicted of raping a 12-year-old girl in 1991.
The underground room was about the length and width of a mid-sized car with a ceiling about 4 1/2 feet high. Hinson testified Sunday that he had built the room over two years.
Defense attorney Rick Hoefer spent much of his nearly two-hour closing argument Sunday picking apart what he called inconsistencies in the teens' testimony, including how long it took them to call 911 after their alleged escape and whether they saw Hinson with a gun. Prosecutors said any discrepancies in their stories might have been a result of the trauma the teens went through.
Hinson was not freed because prosecutors asked that he be held on pending burglary charges.
#3
Reminds me of the time my mother heard some scrabbling and scratching coming from a cabinet. When she looked she found a mouse inside the bag of catfood - it had gotten in and couldn't get back out. The cat yawned and walked away.
For the first time, researchers have sequenced proteins from the long-extinct Tyrannosaurus rex, the mightiest of dinosaurs, leading them to the discovery that many of the molecules show a remarkable similarity to those of the humble chicken.
The research provides the first molecular evidence for the theory that birds are the modern-day descendants of dinosaurs and overturns the long-held palaeontological assumption that delicate organic molecules such as DNA and proteins are destroyed during fossilisation. It also hints at the tantalising prospect that scientists may one day be able to emulate Jurassic Park by cloning a dinosaur.
Mary Schweitzer, a palaeontologist at North Carolina State University, led a team of researchers in analysing the 68-million-year-old leg bone of a T-rex recovered in 2003 in Montana. To her surprise, she found it still contained a matrix of collagen fibres, a protein that gives bone its structure and flexibility.
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Posted by: Fred ||
04/23/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
Post-asteroid, etc. surviving dinosaurae critters became both competitors + food source for surviving mammal + other specias. The Big became small, the Small became big.
#2
So, based on mere 5 proteins, they decided that dinos are precursor of chicken. Brilliant!
Did you know that we share 38% of genetic material with cabbage?
Joe, there was no asteroid hit that schwacked dinos. If you mean the circular feature at the coast of Yucatan, it does not cut it as an asteroid hit. The resulting track must be, due to a whole range of factors, necessarily highly elliptical, with a compression and piling up of the material on the side of the direction of asteroid's trajectory. I am not telling you what it is, just what it isn't.
#6
Did you know that we share 38% of genetic material with cabbage? Everyone but the stork does. The rest of us believe that babies come from the cabbage patch.
BEIJING: A show crocodile in a Chinese amusement park has been shot to death after it dragged a nine-year-old schoolboy into its pond and devoured him. Several youths had climbed over the fence at the Yintan resort in Beihai and were hitting animals with sticks and rocks when one croc took hold of the boys clothes and pulled him into the water, the Beijing Morning Post said Sunday. A swarm of up to 11 crocodiles then ate the boy, the report said. The crocodiles are still being bred even though their performances at the park were halted several years ago, it said.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/23/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
Several youths had climbed over the fence at the Yintan resort in Beihai and were hitting animals with sticks and rocks
Evidently, mom and dad never instructed the lad about not annoying things bigger than you that have lots of sharp pointy teeth.
The handlers probably didn't even notice anything was amiss because the crocs still required their regular feeding. You know how it is with Chinese ... half an hour later, you're hungry again.
#3
The days of munching on the kiddies and living to tell about it are over...atleast in captivity. Out in the wild, it would be at the bottom of the swamp with a toothpick!
#7
Kids can be stupid. They look at crocodiles and think of them as oversized lizards. When in fact they probably kill more people than tigers or bears. Put together.
#10
Nobody in the amusement park thought it pertinent to make the kids get out of the croc pit? I'm all for accepting responsibility for ones actions , but geesh. Kids do stupid shit sometimes, I can't believe that nobody in the whole park intervened.
So far only a few, faint warnings have been raised, mainly by people who are so sensitised to the electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobiles, their masts and Wi-Fi that they become ill in its presence. The World Health Organisation estimates that up to three out of every hundred people are "electrosensitive" to some extent.
A recent authoritative Finnish study has found that people who have used mobiles for more than ten years are 40 per cent more likely to get a brain tumour on the same side of the head as they hold their handset; Swedish research suggests that the risk is almost four times as great. And further research from Sweden claims that the radiation kills off brain cells, which could lead to today's younger generation going senile in their forties and fifties.
Professor Lawrie Challis, who heads the Government's official mobile safety research, this year said that the mobile could turn out to be "the cigarette of the 21st century".
The first Stewart Report produced a series of sensible recommendations. They included...stopping the building of masts where the radiation "beam of greatest intensity" fell on schools....
Steven DenBeste covered this particular insanity a few years back.
#5
that the radiation kills off brain cells, which could lead to today's younger generation going senile in their forties and fifties.
I love it, all the Bluetooth showoffs, gangbangers, idiot drivers, and morons who just can't fdunction without a phone glued to their ear-drooling idiots (Short trip) by their Middle age.
Best of all it's self selective, morons in the first place.
Phones are a handy tool, not a permanent body accessory.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
04/23/2007 6:27 Comments ||
Top||
#6
After I saw Dr. Who (#10) and the Cybermen - no ear pieces for me!
But the Cybermen and the Daleks - what fun! The 4 v. 5m Cybermen, no contest.
OT: There's new B5 coming out in July on DVD, 10 years after the war, Sheridan, no Delenn, if popular, they'll do more...
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia - An elderly Saudi man dropped dead in court after it banned him from stopping his three daughters from getting married, newspapers reported on Sunday.
"I'm comin', Lizabeth!"
The man apparently had a heart attack once the cassation court judge in the Muslim holy city of Mecca told the three spinsters women, aged 36, 39 and 40, that they could marry over their fathers objections, Okaz reported.
How in the world did they make 36 and beyond? Were there no suitors when they were 6, 9 and 10?
The man had won a ruling from a lower court enforcing his right to prevent his daughters from marrying, as women in the ultra-conservative kingdom need the consent of a male guardian. The women whose father had on several occasions turned down their requests to marry can now marry honest men who follow their religious duties, the Islamic court ruled, according to Al Madina newspaper.
Honest men. Honest men with guns. Soon these three will be receiving benefits from the Widows Ammunition Fund. In name at least.
In July 2002, a local social study found that the number of unmarried women in Saudi Arabia was expected to jump to four million in 2007, compared to 1.5 million in 2002. Large dowries demanded by fathers are believed to be a major cause for the increasing number of unmarried women in the Gulf state, where Saudi nationals account for some 17 million out of a total population of around 22 million.
Posted by: Steve White ||
04/23/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
Now, if only we could get lots more Saudi men to drop dead. Especially royals.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
For the first time, researchers have sequenced proteins from the long-extinct Tyrannosaurus rex, the mightiest of dinosaurs, leading them to the discovery that many of the molecules show a remarkable similarity to those of the humble chicken.
So far only a few, faint warnings have been raised, mainly by people who are so sensitised to the electromagnetic radiation emitted by mobiles, their masts and Wi-Fi that they become ill in its presence. The World Health Organisation estimates that up to three out of every hundred people are "electrosensitive" to some extent.
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia - An elderly Saudi man dropped dead in court after it banned him from stopping his three daughters from getting married, newspapers reported on Sunday.
