25 years for killing retiree for his money

A British cleaning woman was sentenced to at least 25 years in prison Monday for killing an 82-year-old friend for his life savings.

The sentence was imposed on Ann Browning, 54, after a three-day hearing in Guildford Crown Court, the Daily Express reported. She admitted killing Bill Williamson but said it was an unpremeditated act carried out in a burst of anger.

"May God forgive your soul," she yelled at Judge Christopher Critchlow after bursting into tears.

Prosecutors argued that Browning convinced Williamson, a retired postmaster, to sell his home for 246,000 pounds (almost $400,000) and to move in with her in Godalming, Surrey. Williamson was killed with a bat used in rounders, a game similar to baseball, and then buried in Browning's back garden.

After his death, she told his friends he had moved into assisted living and spent much of his money.

Critchlow called the crime "the wicked murder of a vulnerable old man."

"Mr. Williamson was a lonely man whose yearning for companionship sadly led him into the clutches of Ann Browning," Detective Inspector Juliet Parker said. "She is a devious, calculating and callous individual whose greed led to this wicked crime."

Crisis meeting following British mayhem

Rioting in 10 London districts and three other British cities quieted by dawn Tuesday as Prime Minister David Cameron was to hold a crisis-response meeting.

Cameron reversed an earlier decision not to cut short his central Italy vacation and took a military plane home around 3 a.m. (10 p.m. EDT Monday) to lead an emergency Cabinet Office Briefing Room meeting to deal with the turmoil, which the government said had become a crisis.

Gangs of young people -- boys and girls, their faces covered with scarves or ski masks -- rampaged through neighborhoods, smashing windows, looting stores, overturning cars and trash bins and setting them ablaze, torching buildings including warehouses, terrorizing motorists and bus passengers, engaging in "mass muggings" of people in pubs, and attacking 1,700 riot police with wooden sticks, gasoline bombs, broken bottles, pieces of concrete, shopping carts and other makeshift weapons.

Police and witnesses said the youths communicated to each other by BlackBerry instant-message technology, along with social networking Facebook and Twitter Web sites, moving from district to district, spreading mayhem, and outmaneuvering police by racing through London's clogged traffic on bicycles and mopeds.

CNN said 15 teenagers took over a bus in west London's large Ealing area, forced the driver out and crashed the vehicle.

Residents of at least two London areas, Clapham Junction and Croydon, were told to evacuate. A 26-year old man in Croydon was hospitalized in serious condition early Tuesday after being found with gunshot wounds.

In Ealing and the south London district of Clapham, police used armored vehicles to clear the streets of gangs, The Daily Telegraph reported.

In other areas, officers appeared to let looting go unchecked, concentrating instead on stopping new violence outbreaks elsewhere, The New York Times reported.

Attacked boroughs and districts also included Hackney, Lewisham, Peckham, Woolwich and Enfield, moving late Monday night into the upscale Notting Hill and Camden neighborhoods.

More than 400 people in London had been arrested by dawn, police said.

The mayhem also spread for the first time beyond London to Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool, with similar violence, fires and bedlam, residents said.

An unstaffed police station in Birmingham was torched, ITV reported.

Birmingham police said they had thrown a half-mile cordon around the city center and had arrested at least 100 people, mostly teenagers.

Bristol and Liverpool also reported widespread arson and looting. an undetermined number of people were arrested.

The violence began Saturday night in London's Tottenham neighborhood, north-northeast of Charing Cross, when a small, peaceful march outside a police station -- to protest the killing of a local man, Mark Duggan, in a police shooting the week before -- got out of hand.

The march turned into a pitched battle between hundreds of officers, some on horses, and equal numbers of rioters, wearing bandannas and armed with makeshift weapons that included table legs.

Ballistics tests from the Duggan shooting were expected to be released Tuesday on a bullet found in a police radio, the Telegraph reported. The tests will help determine whether Duggan fired on police before he was shot by firearms officers.

Celebrated Fort Hood officers losing jobs

The first two law enforcement officers to respond to the Fort Hood, Texas, massacre have left the base after being told they'd lose their jobs, officials said.

Mark Todd and Kimberly Munley have been told they would lose their jobs as part of broader military spending cuts, the Austin American-Statesman reported.

Todd's shots paralyzed suspected shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, from the waist down, ending the rampage that killed 13 people and wounded more than 30. Munley was shot three times after her gun malfunctioned, testimony at a hearing for Hasan indicated.

Both had received widespread praise after the November 2009 shooting, attending a State of the Union address as invited guests of President Barack Obama and being honored as National Law Enforcement Officers of the Year by the American Police Hall of Fame.

"We all hold Fort Hood in our hearts and never thought we would be facing cutbacks," said Munley, who has taken an unpaid leave of absence.

Todd left the Fort Hood police force for an overseas contractor job in July, officials at the base said. He could not be reached for comment but in a Facebook post said: "Thanks for coming out, God bless, goodnight.... I wish everyone good luck and quiet shifts. PS please keep me updated on (Hasan's) court-martial."

Military police soldiers will replace civilian officers, Fort Hood officials said.

Fort Hood turned to hiring more civilian officers in 2003 as military police officers were being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Statesman said.

"(Now) as more MP soldiers are available at Fort Hood, we return to the use of MPs for law enforcement," Christopher Zimmer, deputy director for the Directorate of Emergency Services at Fort Hood, said in a statement.

Maid files civil suit against Frenchman

The New York hotel cleaning woman who accuses the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund of sexual assault is suing him, her lawyer says.

The lawsuit, filed Monday by Nafissatou Diallo, a Sofitel hotel housekeeper originally of Guinea, in state Supreme Court in the Bronx, comes at an unusual time, as the criminal proceedings against Dominique Strauss-Kahn of France, have yet to be settled, The New York Times reported.

"Ms. Diallo has filed her lawsuit now because she wants to vindicate her rights and hold Dominique Strauss-Kahn accountable for the violent and deplorable acts that he committed against her," said her attorney, Kenneth Thompson.

Strauss-Kahn, who had been considered a top contender for president of France prior to his arrest, is due back in court Aug. 23, which is when Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance is expects to announce whether or not he will pursue the criminal case, the New York Daily News reported.

Strauss-Kahn, accused of attacking Diallo in a suite at the Sofitel in Times Square, has pleaded not guilty.

"With violence and depravity in his heart, and having the confidence of sexually assaulting other women in the past who did not immediately come forward, defendant Strauss-Kahn forced Ms. Diallo all the way to the back of the suite and down on her knees," the suit alleges.

Convicted killer enters penalty phase

Convicted serial killer Anthony Sowell said in an apology read Monday in the penalty phase of his Cleveland trial that his crimes were "not typical" of him.

Sowell, 51, was convicted in July of aggravated murder, abusing a corpse and tampering with evidence in the deaths of 11 women whose bodies were found at his home in 2009. He was also convicted of trying to kill three other people who survived, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer reported.

Relatives of several victims were in court to hear attorney John Parker help Sowell during the second week of the mitigation phase in his capital murder trial.

Sowell described his life, talking about his time already spent in prison and the jobs he worked after his release. He alleged he'd been abused as a child, beaten with canes and whipped, The Plain Dealer reported.

Although Sowell didn't outright admit killing all 11 women, he apologized.

"The only thing I want to say is I'm sorry. This is not typical of me," Sowell said. "I know it's not enough, but that's all I can give you."

The apology didn't sit well with some of the victims' relatives.

"It was rehearsed and weak," said Donnita Carmichael, daughter of victim Tonia Carmichael.

"That sorry statement was not good enough for me but that is all we are going to get," said Lynnette Taylor, sister of victim Amelda Hunter.

The defense closed its case Monday. The prosecution's rebuttal witnesses will take the stand this week, The Plain Dealer said.

Texas town without water in heat wave

Kemp, Texas, had to shut off its water system due to 37 days of triple-digit temperatures depleting the town's water supply, officials say.

The Sunday afternoon shutdown was to give the town's aging water system time to refill its reserves, WFAA-TV in Dallas-Fort Worth reported.

The hot weather has caused 14 major water mains to break in the past three weeks, which has drained the city's water reserves, the TV station said.

Kemp Mayor Donald Kile says the old infrastructure has a lot to do with the problem. The local water treatment plant was last replaced 40 years ago, and a lot of the town's 30 miles of pipelines were installed in the 1930s and haven't been updated in years.

"It's sad to say, but it's poor planning," said Kile, who was elected mayor recently. "When they put that water treatment plant in, they should have implemented something then ... . It just wasn't ever done."

Local residents expressed their displeasure with the situation.

"You tell them this old woman is hot down here -- and not just because of the heat!" Kay Bloomfield yelled at a utility worker who gave her a notice of the water shutdown.

Clyde Scott, who relies on the city water for his ranch that houses 31 horses and his family, said he also was upset about the water shortage.

"They told me they can't fill me up with water. I've got seven kids ... . We can't be without water!" he said.

U.S. troops' remains to land at Dover AFB

The United States will succeed in Afghanistan despite 30 U.S. troop deaths in a helicopter shot down by Islamist Taliban militia, President Barack Obama said.

"We will press on, and we will succeed," Obama said Monday as the troops' remains were being prepared to be flown to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware Tuesday.

"Our responsibility is to ensure that their legacy is an America that reflects their courage, commitment and sense of common purpose," Obama said.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Monday the deaths were a sobering affirmation of the U.S. "resolve and commitment to complete the mission still at hand."

No news coverage will be allowed of the remains' arrival and solemn transfer ceremony at Dover because the individual bodies are officially unidentified, Pentagon officials said, although they acknowledged they knew exactly who was killed in the Saturday crash -- the single deadliest day for U.S. troops in the decade-long Afghanistan war -- and already invited next-of-kin to Dover for the ceremonial rite.

Officials, who also did not say when the service members' remains would arrive at Dover, insisted they were not trying to limit images of the aftermath of one of the most catastrophic incidents of the Afghan war.

They were simply upholding a policy to preserve the dignity of the remains transfer, they said.

Pentagon Press Association President Nancy Youssef said the association was "seeking a way for the public to have a record of this poignant, important ceremony."

In February 2009 the Obama administration relaxed an 18-year Pentagon ban on media coverage of returning U.S. war dead, leaving the decision to the families of the dead.

Dover is the home for the largest U.S. military mortuary and has been used to receive service members killed in war and peacetime.

The 30 service members killed Saturday were among 38 people in a Boeing CH-47 Chinook twin-engine, tandem-rotor, heavy-lift helicopter that was shot down and crashed while on a mission to reinforce troops trying to capture a Taliban leader in the Saidabad district of Afghanistan's central-eastern Wardak province, a longtime Taliban stronghold, the U.S.-led command in Afghanistan said.

The Taliban said they shot down the helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade.

Twenty-two of those killed were Navy SEALs from the Virginia Beach, Va., Naval Special Warfare Development Group, commonly known as SEAL Team Six -- the same unit that carried out the March 2 raid that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

Three Air Force controllers and five crewmembers also died in the shootdown. Eight Afghans were also killed in the crash -- seven commandos and a civilian interpreter.

The Chinook is one of the few Vietnam War-era aircraft still in production and in front-line service. Its primary roles include troop movement, artillery fortification and battlefield resupply.

There were at least two other fatal shootdowns by rocket-propelled grenades of Chinooks carrying special operations troops, in 2002 and 2005, Politico reported.

Obama said June 22 10,000 U.S. troops would be withdrawn by the end the year and 23,000 more troops by next summer. That would leave about 70,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan until 2014, the scheduled date for the withdrawal of all foreign forces from the country.