Man burns woman alive in Brooklyn building lift

Woman burnt in Brooklyn building lift

The surveillance video, its images disturbingly clear, ends with a woman being burned alive in the elevator of a Brooklyn apartment building on Saturday.

But in the beginning, it seemed routine: a man dressed as an exterminator, wearing gloves, with a protective mask perched atop his head and carrying a container on his back, takes the elevator to the fifth floor. Sometime later, an older woman carrying groceries took the same ride to the fifth floor.

Two cameras recording from different positions, one inside the small tiled elevator and another in a hallway, show the doors open and the man with the container approach. The man, who appeared to be in his 40s, first sprays the woman in the face, then douses her methodically from head to toe with what a city official said was an accelerant as she turned and cowered, raising her hands, the grocery bags hanging from her wrists.

Having cornered the woman in the elevator, the man struggles to light a barbecue lighter. He then ignites a Molotov cocktail - a wine or Champagne bottle filled with accelerant with a rag stuffed in its neck. He retreats and comes back again, spraying more liquid on his victim.

And suddenly the silent video goes white with a conflagration in the small space: the woman, on fire.

Investigators are poring over the footage, a disturbing silent film capturing what is perhaps a singular act of violence: a woman being burned alive. The crime took place on Saturday afternoon at 203 Underhill Avenue in Prospect Heights. The police identified the victim as Doris Gillespie, 64. One neighbour said that Gillespie was a postal worker.

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Gold ends up, sets biggest weekly drop in 3 months

Gold Bar

(Reuters) - A weakening dollar and short covering drove investors back into gold on Friday, lifting prices to end a sharp four-session pullback that still yielded the biggest weekly decline in almost three months.

Spot gold rallied as much as 1.7 percent to $1,600.49 per ounce, and steadied at $1,596.40 by 4 p.m. EST (2100 GMT,) up from a near 3-month low at 1,560.36 hit in the previous session.

U.S. gold rose 1.31 percent to close at $1,597.90 per ounce, after hitting a high at $1,598.10 per ounce.

David Lee, metals trader at Heraeus Precious Metals Management in New York said he thought gold's push higher on Friday was a function of the yellow metal being temporarily oversold after its nosedive from levels above $1,750 last week.

"Some people were taking the opportunity to scoop it up at lower levels. And, it's still up year to date. So, it wasn't surprising that people wanted to sell it off to raise cash for the year end," Lee said.

He warned, however, that the 1 to 2 percent rebound was not significant relative to the high priced of the yellow metal, adding that prices could come off again if the crisis in Europe worsens before year end.

"If comes back down to the day's low on Sunday night, for example, I'd say dump it really fast. I think it will continue to go down to around $1,550," said Lee.

A slightly weaker dollar against a basket of currencies also

helped boost precious metal prices .DXY. A softer U.S. currency makes dollar-priced commodities, such as gold, more affordable for holders of other currencies.

For the week, bullion lost around 6.60 percent, its biggest fall since late September. It remains vulnerable to a deepening euro zone debt crisis and rising funding stress.

"Gold took a beating this week and today bounced a bit as investors see this as a good moment to buy, but it is still vulnerable," Credit Agricole analyst Robin Bhar said.

"I expect gold will stay under pressure as the funding stress is increasing the need for liquidity, and gold is seen as one of the assets to liquidate."

The need for cash has overwhelmed gold's traditional status as a safe haven in the past few months, putting the metal on course for its first quarterly fall since end-September 2008 when the global credit crunch was at its worst.

Gold has, therefore, benefited recently from developments that have reduced risk aversion and the flight to cash.

It got a boost after Spain attracted solid demand for its bonds on Thursday, helping to ease concerns the country could be among the next to fall in the euro zone's debt crisis.

"At the moment a lot of people are resting their hopes on the fact that physical demand will pull gold back up again, but because of the amount of speculative investment that has gone into this market over the last years, it is obviously exposed on that basis," said Ole Hansen, a senior manager at Saxo Bank.

FUNDING STRESS

Gold benefits when central banks print money or cut interest rates or when money managers diversify assets.

"With access to liquidity being constrained, market participants have increasing problems to refinance," Credit Suisse said in a research note.

"As a result they have to sell their assets - including precious metals - to raise the much-needed cash. This is the main reason why gold prices fall on days of increasing funding stress."

In other precious metals, spot silver gained as much as 2.68 percent to trade at $29.97 an ounce, before pulling back to $29.64 per ounce late in the session.

Spot platinum rose to a high at $1,436.25, then changed hands at $1,415.24, up from $1,404 at Thursday's close.

Palladium climbed to a session high of $632.52 an ounce and then steadied around $620.72, higher than the previous close at $614.25 per ounce.

"As well as tracking gold, for platinum and palladium there are fears over weak industrial growth, and they may be hit harder as people look to liquidate risk," Bhar said.

"Some support however comes from costs. These metals are already trading very close to their costs."

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Lee Evans Not Guilty: New Jersey Man Acquitted Of Murdering 5 Teenagers In '78

Lee Evans

NEWYORK, N.J. — One of the nation's most baffling cold cases remains unresolved after a jury on Wednesday acquitted a New Jersey man of locking five teenagers in a vacant home in 1978 and burning them alive in retaliation for stealing his marijuana.

No bodies were ever found, and Lee Evans, who represented himself against 10 murder-related charges, was able to poke holes in the testimony of the star prosecution witness.

Despite hearing the phrase "not guilty" 10 consecutive times Wednesday morning in a Newark courtroom, Evans said he did not feel vindicated.

"It's a situation where I heard him say: `not guilty,' but the fact is, they put this horrible thing on you, and you still feel guilty," a visibly stunned Evans said moments after the verdict was read. He said of the verdict, "that was a jury, that wasn't the people," referring to the family members of the missing teens who packed the courtroom throughout the trial and have said publicly for decades they feel Evans is guilty.

Evans, now 58, said the revival of the long-dormant cold case had destroyed his life and livelihood.

"I'm literally tore up, ripped up inside from the case," he said. "How can you get past that?"

Several family members of the missing teenagers wept and hugged one another as the verdict was read.

"Not guilty does not mean innocent," said Terry Lawson, who was 11 when she saw last saw her older brother, Michael McDowell, climb into Evans' truck on the night he disappeared. "Mr. Evans may escape the law, but never the Lord."

McDowell said the families felt some relief by learning more about what happened to the boys.

"We are grateful this case has been brought before a jury, understanding it's difficult to ask 12 people to go back 33 years without the technology and DNA available today," she said, adding, "We know in our hearts what happened to the boys, and we know that Mr. Evans is a guilty man walking free today."

Acting Essex County Prosecutor Carolyn Murray said they were disappointed in the verdict.

"This is a case that has bothered the collective conscious of the Newark police force over 33 years," Murray said. "This case was never forgotten, it was never put on a back shelf."

Prosecutors sought to prove that Evans, who was 25 at the time, had planned to kill the teenagers as payback for breaking into his apartment and stealing a pound of marijuana a week before they vanished. Evans, who ran a handyman business, often hired the teens for odd jobs and paid them in marijuana, prosecutors said.

The case largely hinged on the prosecution's star witness, Evans' 54-year-old cousin Philander Hampton, who agreed to testify after pleading guilty in exchange for a 10-year prison sentence and $15,000 in relocation money. Hampton was sentenced under 1978 guidelines, and expected to be freed in a matter of months.

It was Hampton's comments to authorities in 2008 that helped revive the long-dormant case.

Hampton testified that Evans was angry about the marijuana theft and was bent on retaliation. He said he helped Evans lure the teens to a vacant Newark house on the night of Aug. 20, 1978, after asking them to help move some boxes, but then herded them into a closet and secured the door with a 6-inch nail. He said Evans poured gasoline around the perimeter, demanded that Hampton give him a match and set the house ablaze.

The bodies of 17-year-old Melvin Pittman and Ernest Taylor and 16-year-old Alvin Turner, Randy Johnson and Michael McDowell were never found. The boys were reported missing after the fire, and authorities at the time never connected the two events or examined the fire site as a crime scene.

The case was originally classified as a missing-persons case, despite the ongoing protests of family members who insisted to police that five grown teenagers wouldn't have simultaneously run away from home shortly after playing a game of basketball.

They insisted that Evans was the last person anyone saw the teens alive with. Evans told police at the time he'd dropped the boys off after hiring them for a few hours.

Over the years, investigators conducted a nationwide search for the teens, chased hundreds of dead-end leads and enlisted at least two psychics. The case went cold for decades, until a pair of Newark detectives on the cusp of retirement decided to rework it as an unsolved homicide.

During questioning by investigators in 2008, Hampton brought them to the site in Newark where he claimed the teens had been burned alive. The house had been destroyed in the blaze, and long since built over with new development.

Evans and the court-appointed attorney assisting him, Bukie Adetula, said the scenario to which Hampton testified would have been impossible and pointed out Hampton's criminal record and inconsistencies in his testimony.

Evans said he had lived and worked openly in the same community near Newark in the bordering city of Irvington, where many of the victims' families lived and saw him on a regular basis, and emphasized that fact as proof that he had nothing to hide.

Following the verdict, Evans was surrounded by family and supporters as he walked out of the Essex County Courthouse, saying he wasn't sure what he would do next or whether he would remain in the community.

Murray, the prosecutor, said, "with respect to this case criminally, this case is closed."


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Authorities foil NY protest bid to shut Wall Street

Wall Street, U.S.A

(Reuters) - New York police prevented protesters from shutting down Wall Street on Thursday, arresting at least 177 people in repeated clashes with an Occupy Wall Street rally that grew to several thousand strong.

Occupy Wall Street protesters took to the streets in rainy New York and elsewhere in the U.S. for a day of action seen as a test of the momentum of the two-month-old grassroots movement against economic inequality.

Demonstrators targeted bridges they considered in disrepair in cities such as Miami, Detroit and Boston to highlight what they said was the need for government spending on infrastructure projects to create jobs.

In the biggest New York protest since a police raid broke up the protesters' encampment in a park near Wall Street on Tuesday, organizers and city officials had expected tens of thousands to turn out.

A crowd that disappointed organizers throughout the day grew to several thousand after the standard workday ended and labor union activists joined a march across the Brooklyn Bridge, where last month more than 700 people were arrested during a similar march.

"If you look at the crowds today, they are getting larger and more diverse. It's wonderful when you see the unions get involved. It truly shows this movement represents people from all different walks of life," said Terri Nilliasca, 38, a United Auto Workers member from New York.

Many protesters complained of police brutality, pointing to one media image of man whose face was bloodied during his arrest and another of a woman who was dragged across the sidewalk by an officer.

Police reported seven officers were injured, including one whose hand was cut by a flying piece of glass and five who were hit in the face by a liquid believed to be vinegar.

Police barricaded the narrow streets around Wall Street, home to the New York Stock Exchange, and used batons to push protesters onto the sidewalk as they marched through the area to try and prevent financial workers getting to their desks.

Workers were allowed past barricades with identification and the New York Stock Exchange opened on time and operated normally.

Protesters banged drums and yelled "We are the 99 percent" -- referring to their contention that the U.S. political system benefits only the richest 1 percent.

At the Union Square subway stop, one of the busiest in the city, protesters tried to crowd the entrance but police repeatedly moved them against the walls to make way for subway riders.

"The mayor wanted to shut us down at Zuccotti Park, but try shutting this down," said Travis McConnell, 27, of Brooklyn. "They can't. This movement is now worldwide and the more politicians and police try to stop us, the stronger we become."

PROTESTS ACROSS U.S.

In St. Louis, more than 1,000 protesters marched through downtown in support of the Occupy St. Louis movement which was evicted last week from its campsite near the Gateway Arch. The Thursday march was by far the largest since Occupy St. Louis began in support of the New York demonstrators.

In Los Angeles, hundreds of anti-Wall Street demonstrators blocked a downtown street, snarling traffic on surrounding freeways, before police moved in and arrested 23 people.

The Los Angeles protest took place near demonstrators' encampment on the City Hall lawn, and a handful of people in grinning Guy Fawkes masks -- a style hallmark of the Occupy movement -- joined the march.

"I think we're all saying the same thing, but in a million different ways," said Good Jobs LA organizer Sandra Gonzalez, 42, in explaining the relationship between her group, which organized the march, and the nationwide Occupy protests.

At least 300 people gathered at Chicago's Thompson Center, giving speeches in English and Spanish. The protest was focused on jobs with signs reading "We need jobs, not cuts" and "Jobs, schools, equality: end the wars."

The Washington gathering was smaller than hoped for by organizers. One protester in McPherson Square said he expected about 1,000 people while perhaps 200 showed and many left within the hour.

In Dallas more than a dozen people were arrested when police shut down their six-week-old camp near City Hall.

Before dawn on Thursday, police cleared away a protest camp from a plaza at the University of California, Berkeley, where 5,000 people had gathered on Tuesday night.

Protesters say they are upset that billions of dollars in bailouts given to banks during the recession allowed a return to huge profits while average Americans have had no relief from high unemployment and a struggling economy.

They also say the richest 1 percent of Americans do not pay their fair share of taxes.

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Former '60 Minutes' commentator Andy Rooney dies

Andy Rooney

NEW YORK (AP) — Andy Rooney so dreaded the day he had to end his signature "60 Minutes" commentaries about life's large and small absurdities that he kept going until he was 92 years old.

Even then, he said he wasn't retiring. Writers never retire. But his life after the end of "A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney" was short: He died Friday night, according to CBS, only a month after delivering his 1,097th and final televised commentary.

Rooney had gone to the hospital for an undisclosed surgery, but major complications developed and he never recovered.

Rooney talked on "60 Minutes" about what was in the news, and his opinions occasionally got him in trouble. But he was just as likely to discuss the old clothes in his closet, why air travel had become unpleasant and why banks needed to have important sounding names.

He won one of his four Emmy Awards for a piece on whether there was a real Mrs. Smith who made Mrs. Smith's Pies. As it turned out, there was no Mrs. Smith.

"I obviously have a knack for getting on paper what a lot of people have thought and didn't realize they thought," Rooney once said. "And they say, 'Hey, yeah!' And they like that."

Looking for something new to punctuate its weekly broadcast, "60 Minutes" aired its first Rooney commentary on July 2, 1978. He complained about people who keep track of how many people die in car accidents on holiday weekends. In fact, he said, the Fourth of July is "one of the safest weekends of the year to be going someplace."

More than three decades later, he was railing about how unpleasant air travel had become. "Let's make a statement to the airlines just to get their attention," he said. "We'll pick a week next year and we'll all agree not to go anywhere for seven days."

In early 2009, as he was about to turn 90, Rooney looked ahead to President Barack Obama's upcoming inauguration with a look at past inaugurations. He told viewers that Calvin Coolidge's 1925 swearing-in was the first to be broadcast on radio, adding, "That may have been the most interesting thing Coolidge ever did."

"Words cannot adequately express Andy's contribution to the world of journalism and the impact he made — as a colleague and a friend — upon everybody at CBS," said Leslie Moonves, CBS Corp. president and CEO.

Jeff Fager, CBS News chairman and "60 Minutes" executive producer, said "it's hard to imagine not having Andy around. He loved his life and he lived it on his own terms. We will miss him very much."

For his final essay, Rooney said that he'd live a life luckier than most.

"I wish I could do this forever. I can't, though," he said.

He said he probably hadn't said anything on "60 Minutes" that most of his viewers didn't already know or hadn't thought. "That's what a writer does," he said. "A writer's job is to tell the truth."

True to his occasional crotchety nature, though, he complained about being famous or bothered by fans. His last wish from fans: If you see him in a restaurant, just let him eat his dinner.

Rooney was a freelance writer in 1949 when he encountered CBS radio star Arthur Godfrey in an elevator and — with the bluntness millions of people learned about later — told him his show could use better writing. Godfrey hired him and by 1953, when he moved to TV, Rooney was his only writer.

He wrote for CBS' Garry Moore during the early 1960s before settling into a partnership with Harry Reasoner at CBS News. Given a challenge to write on any topic, he wrote "An Essay on Doors" in 1964, and continued with contemplations on bridges, chairs and women.

"The best work I ever did," Rooney said. "But nobody knows I can do it or ever did it. Nobody knows that I'm a writer and producer. They think I'm this guy on television."

He became such a part of the culture that comic Joe Piscopo satirized Rooney's squeaky voice with the refrain, "Did you ever wonder ..." Rooney never started any of his essays that way. For many years, "60 Minutes" improbably was the most popular program on television and a dose of Rooney was what people came to expect for a knowing smile on the night before they had to go back to work.

Rooney left CBS in 1970 when it refused to air his angry essay about the Vietnam War. He went on TV for the first time, reading the essay on PBS and winning a Writers Guild of America award for it.

He returned to CBS three years later as a writer and producer of specials. Notable among them was the 1975 "Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington," whose lighthearted but serious look at government won him a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting.

His words sometimes landed Rooney in hot water. CBS suspended him for three months in 1990 for making racist remarks in an interview, which he denied. Rooney, who was arrested in Florida while in the Army in the 1940s for refusing to leave a seat among blacks on a bus, was hurt deeply by the charge of racism.

Gay rights groups were mad, during the AIDS epidemic, when Rooney mentioned homosexual unions in saying "many of the ills which kill us are self-induced." Indians protested when Rooney suggested Native Americans who made money from casinos weren't doing enough to help their own people.

The Associated Press learned the danger of getting on Rooney's cranky side. In 1996, AP Television Writer Frazier Moore wrote a column suggesting it was time for Rooney to retire. On Rooney's next "60 Minutes" appearance, he invited those who disagreed to make their opinions known. The AP switchboard was flooded by some 7,000 phone calls and countless postcards were sent to the AP mail room.

"Your piece made me mad," Rooney told Moore two years later. "One of my major shortcomings — I'm vindictive. I don't know why that is. Even in petty things in my life I tend to strike back. It's a lot more pleasurable a sensation than feeling threatened."He was one of television's few voices to strongly oppose the war in Iraq after the George W. Bush administration launched it in 2002. After the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, he said he was chastened by its quick fall but didn't regret his "60 Minutes" commentaries.

"I'm in a position of feeling secure enough so that I can say what I think is right and if so many people think it's wrong that I get fired, well, I've got enough to eat," Rooney said at the time.

Andrew Aitken Rooney was born on Jan. 14, 1919, in Albany, N.Y., and worked as a copy boy on the Albany Knickerbocker News while in high school. College at Colgate University was cut short by World War II, when Rooney worked for Stars and Stripes.

With another former Stars and Stripes staffer, Oram C. Hutton, Rooney wrote four books about the war. They included the 1947 book, "Their Conqueror's Peace: A Report to the American Stockholders," documenting offenses against the Germans by occupying forces.

Rooney and his wife, Marguerite, were married for 62 years before she died of heart failure in 2004. They had four children and lived in New York, with homes in Rowayton, Conn., and upstate New York. Daughter Emily Rooney is a former executive producer of ABC's "World News Tonight." Brian was a longtime ABC News correspondent, Ellen a photographer and Martha Fishel is chief of the public service division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

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Wall Street protests swell in New York, Boston

New York (CNN) -- A group of union-backed organizations joined the loosely defined Occupy Wall Street movement again Tuesday, leaving behind the confines of New York's financial district for the posh neighborhoods that dot Manhattan's Upper East Side, according to multiple group representatives.

Crowds also swelled in Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, where demonstrators waved placards and chanted slogans attacking corporate greed and social inequality.

The union-organized march, meanwhile, took protesters past the homes of well-to-do residents like billionaire David Koch, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

Organizations such as UnitedNY, the Strong Economy for All Coalition, the Working Families Party, and New York Communities for Change were accompanied by protesters typically based in Zuccotti Park, a privately owned park in New York's financial district.

The Upper East Side march was "in support" of the Occupy Wall Street movement, but was not organized by it, said T.J. Helmstetter, a spokesman for Working Families Party, a coalition of New York community and labor groups.

Protesters hopped on the subway, emerging at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street near Central Park, where organizers held a press conference that addressed both New York-centric themes, such as state taxes, and the movement's broader concerns of social inequity.

"We are the 99%," the group chanted, a reference to their insistence that most Americans lack the influence in their country's political and financial affairs enjoyed by the elite 1%.

"I think it's time that these people realize that people are hurting in this country and it's time to reform what's going on in Washington," said New York resident Lenore Silverstein, who attended Tuesday's march.

Emily Monroe , a North Carolina college student and marcher, said the city's wealthiest "are buying billion-dollar apartments and living lavishly, while we are just trying to sustain ourselves."

"The American dream is no longer possible because these people are stealing from the middle class," she told CNN Radio.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, meanwhile, said authorities will defend protesters' right to demonstrate, but he doesn't appreciate "the bashing of all of the hardworking people who live and work here."

"Our city depends on the jobs that the financial services industry provides," Bloomberg said during a news conference in the Bronx.

He added that he didn't understand what the picketing of wealthy and prominent New Yorkers is intended to achieve.

The mayor's comments coincided with a state comptroller report released Tuesday that predicts Wall Street could lose an additional 10,000 jobs by the end of next year, raising the total number of jobs lost in the securities industry since 2008 to 32,000.

Earlier, in Boston, 129 protesters were arrested during a similar demonstration Tuesday, mostly for "unlawful assembly and trespassing," said police spokesman Eddy Chrispin.

The group allegedly blocked traffic and refused to disperse while marching to "areas of the city where they hadn't been previously," he said.

Protesters have been occupying Dewey Square Park in downtown Boston, but expanded to the neighboring Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway on Monday night. Protesters were given a 1:30 a.m. deadline to move back to Dewey Square. Those who did not were arrested.

The nationwide Occupy movement has been largely peaceful, though it has led to some skirmishes with police and arrests. It has also stoked fervent public debate, including among politicians. Democrats have generally offered sympathy for protesters' concerns while several Republicans, among them 2012 presidential candidates Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, have described the demonstrations as "class warfare."

The movement shows few signs of slowing down. Rallies and marches have been held in numerous towns and cities in recent days, with many more planned.

That includes a "Call to Action Against Banks" planned for Saturday, which New York's Occupy Wall Street announced on its Facebook site.

"No longer will banks take our homes. No longer will banks rob students of our future. No longer will banks destroy the environment. No longer will banks fund the misery of war. No longer will banks cause massive unemployment. And no longer will banks create and profit from economic crisis without a struggle," according to the online message Monday.

It then urges people to "visit your local Bank of America, Wells Fargo or Chase (branches) and let them know, we will not allow business as usual."

"We. Will. Occupy. Everywhere," the posting ends.

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