Mind Soup

A son stabbed his 100-year-old mother in the neck then told his brother "I've just gone mad," a court has heard. Hannah Fitzgibbon lived in Stepney with her son BBC : Michael Fitzgibbon, 62, admitted the manslaughter of Hannah Fitzgibbon at the Old Bailey. She died from a stab wound to her neck at the terraced home they shared in Stepney, east London in February. Fitzgibbon denied murder and the prosecution accepted his manslaughter plea on the grounds of diminished responsibility. The unemployed former black cab driver was initially charged with murder. But prosecutors accepted a plea to the lesser charge after psychiatrists agreed he was suffering depression of "moderate severity" as well as the early stages of Parkinson's disease. Crispin Aylett QC, prosecuting, said: "This is a case in which the defendant stabbed his mother when she was 100 years old. Deteriorating health "This occurred at a time when it seems that in fact th...

Lebanon is reeling from the shock of five brutal killings, four of which targeted members of the same family and the fifth that of the Egyptian man suspected of their murders. He was dragged from police custody,  beaten to death  and lynched by an angry vigilante mob Thursday in the small mountain town of Ketermaya. Graphic footage and video of the murder suspect's lynching (way too graphic to be posted here) began circulating immediately, leading many to criticize the breakdown of law and order. The suspect, Mohammad Salim Mssalem, was arrested after the fatal stabbing on Wednesday of Youssef Abu Merhi, his wife Kawthar and their two granddaughters Amina, 7, and Zeina, 9.  Mssalem was reportedly reenacting the murders for investigators at the scene of the crime when an angry mob overpowered the security officers, dragging the suspect into the streets and beating him severely. The officers were able to retrieve the badly wounded Mssalem and get him to a hospital, bu...

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By Robert Fisk What we found inside the Palestinian camp at ten o'clock on the morning of September 1982 did not quite beggar description, although it would have been easier to re-tell in the cold prose of a medical examination. There had been medical examinations before in Lebanon, but rarely on this scale and never overlooked by a regular, supposedly disciplined army. In the panic and hatred of battle, tens of thousands had been killed in this country. But these people, hundreds of them had been shot down unarmed. This was a mass killing, an incident - how easily we used the word "incident" in Lebanon - that was also an atrocity. It went beyond even what the Israelis would have in other circumstances called a terrorist activity. It was a war crime. Jenkins and Tveit were so overwhelmed by what we found in Chatila that at first we were unable to register our own shock. Bill Foley of AP had come with us. All he could say as he walked round was "Jesus Christ"...