California nuns stole school funds for Vegas gambling, travel

A Siberian policeman who raped and killed women after offering them late-night rides was found guilty of dozens more murders on Monday, making him Russia's worst serial killer of recent times.

A Russian court on Monday found a former policeman guilty of 56 murders, while he is already serving a life sentence for killing 22 women, making him one of Russia's most prolific serial killers.

The arrest of "Godfather" Settimino Mineo has dealt Cosa Nostra a crucial blow as it tries to reorganise after the violent leadership of the Corleone family, Italy's top anti-Mafia policeman told AFP.

Twelve people -- including five hostages -- were killed in northeast Brazil on Friday after police foiled a gang of armed robbers staging simultaneous pre-dawn assaults on two banks in the town of Milagres, officials said.

An American Catholic priest wanted for allegedly sexually abusing Filipino altar boys as young as seven has been arrested in the Philippines and now faces deportation, officials said Thursday.

A Pakistani man was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of stabbing to death a teacher in broad daylight outside a university in the Paris suburbs.

A Turkish court issued arrest warrants Wednesday for two suspects close to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, increasing pressure on the kingdom's de facto leader.

Police arrested dozens of suspected mobsters in Europe and South America on Wednesday in a huge international swoop targeting Italy's notorious 'Ndrangheta mafia clan, officials said.

New encryption laws in Australia are likely to be a major litmus test for encryption legislation around the world. The initial proposal was ultimately modified in a bipartisan approach, but there are many questions to be asked yet, let alone answered.

Italian police on Tuesday arrested new Mafia boss Settimino Mineo and dozens of other suspects in a major swoop against a resurgent Cosa Nostra.

Hundreds of criminal convictions -- including those meted out to some of Australia's most notorious gangland figures -- hang in the balance, after their defence lawyer was revealed as a police informant Monday.

The former right hand man of notorious Mexican druglord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was sentenced Friday to life in prison, judicial sources said.

A German court on Friday sentenced a Syrian refugee to six and a half years in jail for planning an Islamist attack using a car bomb.The 20-year-old, named as Yamen A.

Nine drug smugglers were sentenced to death in Vietnam on Friday for selling methamphetamine and heroin in a country with some of the toughest drug laws in the world.

A Honduran court on Thursday found seven men guilty in connection with the murder of Berta Caceres, a Honduran indigenous environmental activist shot dead for opposing the construction of a dam.

Three Philippine policemen were sentenced on Thursday to decades in prison for murdering a teenager during an anti-narcotics sweep, a first conviction of officers carrying out President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs.

A Mexican former pilot and one-time friend of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman told the kingpin's New York trial Wednesday how the defendant had ordered him dead four times.

An American neo-Nazi on trial for murder will argue he was trying to defend himself when he rammed his car into a group of counter-protesters at a white supremacist rally, his lawyer said Tuesday.

A German man who launched a shrapnel bomb attack on the team bus of football club Borussia Dortmund in April 2017 to make money on the club's shares diving was on Tuesday sentenced to 14 years in jail.

A Russian-born German man who launched a shrapnel bomb attack on the team bus of football club Borussia Dortmund last year, wounding two people, faces his verdict and sentence Tuesday.

A German former hospital nurse who has admitted to killing more than 100 patients in his care apologised Thursday to victims' grieving relatives.

An Israeli-American convicted of making more than 2,000 threats against US Jewish institutions, airlines, police stations and even a professional basketball team's plane was sentenced to 10 years in prison Thursday by an Israeli court.

A South Korean cult leader was convicted Thursday of the multiple rape of eight female followers -- some of whom believed he was God -- and jailed for 15 years.

Police on Wednesday began bulldozing eight villas built illegally in a suburb of Rome by an alleged mafia clan renowned for its violence and gaudy lifestyle, as those evicted cried foul.

Tajikistan's Supreme Court on Wednesday sentenced an Islamic State jihadist to life in prison for organising an attack this summer that killed four Western tourists on a cycling trip.

A former cartel operative told the US trial of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Tuesday that he bribed a former Mexican cabinet minister with millions of dollars stuffed into two suitcases and hand delivered in a restaurant.

Relatives of a woman who hid her baby in the maggot-invested trunk of a car insisted Wednesday that they had no idea of her secret, at a trial that has drawn horror in France.

Drug baron Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is the "scapegoat" of a cartel that bribed Mexican presidents, the defense told his New York trial Tuesday, as the prosecution branded him a ruthless criminal boss who murdered in cold blood.

Fifteen alleged members of a vast crime ring accused of laundering Colombian drug money through luxury jewellery and using shadowy middlemen from the Lebanese diaspora go on trial in Paris on Tuesday.

Ukraine on Monday arrested a man suspected of being involved in the deadly acid attack on anti-corruption campaigner Kateryna Gandzyuk.

Police investigating a major Australian strawberry needle contamination scare that sparked nationwide panic on Monday identified a former farm supervisor as their main suspect.

A woman has been charged after a "complex" investigation into an Australian strawberry scare where needles were found stuck into the fruit, police said Sunday, in a crisis that sparked nationwide panic.

Venezuelan authorities ordered more than 600 arrests over the last eight months for "speculation" on the currency market, Attorney General Tarek William Saab announced Thursday.

An HIV-infected Thai sergeant major has been arrested and charged with raping an estimated 75 mostly teenage boys after luring them to meet him in the northeast of the country, a senior law enforcement offical told AFP Thursday.

Ukraine faced a deepening political crisis on Tuesday after an anti-corruption campaigner died from a brutal acid attack that critics have accused the country's authorities of not doing enough to investigate.

As a child living in poverty in Mexico, he peddled fruit just to eat. A lifetime later, as the world's most wanted drug lord, his empire was so vast he commanded a fleet of submarines to move his wares.

A gunman killed two people and wounded five others at a yoga studio in Florida's state capital Tallahassee before taking his own life, police said Saturday.

The Vatican has opened its archives to detectives hunting for clues to the identity of a skeleton discovered in its embassy in Rome, as another potential murder victim emerged Friday.

The man suspected of gunning down 11 people at a synagogue in the US city of Pittsburgh pleaded not guilty on Thursday to federal charges that could see him sentenced to death, US media reported.