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LONDON - Two children, including a 3-week-old baby, were killed and some 30 people had to be rescued when fire ripped through a high-rise apartment building in London yesterday, emergency services said.
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The trial of Michel Fourniret — who reportedly enlisted his wife’s help to seize virgin girls to rape and kill — began March 27, 2008, with Fourniet refusing to speak unless court went into closed session and refusing to let the press take his photograph. The Times of London reported the gory details:
“The couple resembled ordinary French pensioners, he with his arms folded in a professorial pose, she sucking in her cheeks like a watchful grandmother. Behind the façade, however, lay a cold-blooded sexual predator who raped and killed victims with the help of his wife and accomplice, a court was told yesterday.
As Michel Fourniret and Monique Olivier sat in a glass-fronted dock on the opening day of their trial, jurors were told chilling details of the grey-haired couple alleged to be among the most horrific criminals in the history of France. Using an image of happily-married respectability, Olivier would gain the confidence of the girls and women they had identified as prey.
After they had been bound, gagged and sometimes drugged by her husband, she would examine them to check they were the virgins he desired.
She would then hand them over to Fourniret ‘in the sole aim of allowing him to fulfil his fantasies,’ according to a report read out in the court in Charleville-Mézières, in the Franco-Belgian border region where they once lived. He would assault his victims — ‘beautiful little subjects’ was how he referred to them — before shooting or strangling them, the report by investigating magistrates said.
One, a ’serious, prudent and intelligent’ 20-year-old student, had air injected into her veins to provoke a heart attack, the magistrates said.
Fourniret, 65, is on trial charged with the murder of seven girls and women aged between 12 and 21 in France and Belgium between 1987 and 2001. He has confessed to the crimes.
Olivier, 59, who is charged with one count of murder and complicity in four other killings, has admitted helping her husband but has sought to minimise her role with a claim that she was in his psychological grip.”
The “Ogre of the Ardennes” and his wife were expected to also stand trial in the future for other slayings in which they are suspects; this trial, though, was expected to take about two months. Fourniret apparently expected to get life in prison, but Olivier was reportedly hoping for leniency on a platform of being the manipulated wife.
Fourniret was caught in 2003, when a Belgian would-be victim, 13, broke free after being kidnapped. She reportedly told police that Fourniret bragged he was “far better” than Belgian serial killer Marc Dutroux.
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Diprivan, a powerful sedative, has been found in the home where Michael Jackson suffered a fatal cardiac arrest, a US law enforcement official has said.
17,500 tickets will be available to fans wanting to go to the Jackson memorial
The drug is an intravenous anesthetic widely used in hospitals to induce unconsciousness in patients before operations.
It is also administered to terminally ill patients who are in pain or who have just days to live.
Other prescription drugs have been found in Jackson’s Holmby Hills home since the star’s death on June 25.
Officials have previously said they think the singer was addicted to the pain killers Demerol and OxyContin.
They also revealed the singer received an injection of Demerol shortly before he died.
See more stories, video and picture galleries on our special Michael Jackson page.
Meanwhile, it has been announced that 17,500 tickets will be on offer to fans who want to pay their respects at Jackson’s public memorial.
The event will take place on Tuesday next week at 10am local time at Los Angeles’ Staples Centre.
Tim Leiweke, president, CEO of AEG Live, which owns the Staples Centre and was Jackson’s promoter, said fans will have to enter a draw to be randomly selected.
He also said the memorial will be broadcast to fans around the world.
It has also emerged that AEG took out a $17.5m (£10.7m) insurance policy in the event of Jackson’s 50 London concerts falling through.
TMZ.com said AEG’s chief executive Randy Phillips revealed the policy covered an overdose but not death from natural causes.
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Marvel Comics has released a synopsis for its upcoming mini-series Dark X-Men.
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North Korea fired a barrage of short-range missiles off its east coast in a possible prelude to the launch of a long-range missile toward Hawaii over the U.S. Independence Day holiday.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: Iranian authorities have barred journalists for international news organizations from reporting on the streets and ordered them to stay in their offices. This report is based on the accounts of witnesses reached in Iran and official statements carried on Iranian media.
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California State Attorney General Jerry Brown says his office has now taken a role in the inquiry involving possible drug abuse in the sudden death of singer Michael Jackson — with his department…
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It is jokingly dubbed ‘the most expensive B&B in the world’. Then again the trailer camp is the only ‘bed and breakfast’ that also provides lunch, dinner, a gym, 24-hour Internet access and a relatively secure place to stay in Basra.
Situated within the newly-acquired American military base in this southern-Iraqi province, the B&B provides private accommodation for anyone passing through the area who would prefer to avoid staying in Basra city.
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Another school very evident at Chelsea Flower show was Writhlington School. Pupils embarked in March 2009 on a trip to Sikkim in the Himalayas to take part in the Gangtok Schools’ Orchid project. This has furthered the work of the botanical team at the school and resulted in a stand in the Continuous Learning area in the Grand Pavilion. Pictured here is Luke Barnes, laboratory manager and pupil at the school, examining seedlings brought back from the expedition
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