Mutilation

Skylar Deleon, charged with murdering an Arizona couple at sea, tried to cut off his penis with a razor blade while in Orange County Men's Central Jail awaiting trial, sheriff's officials said Friday. Deleon, 29, was hospitalized after the March 13 incident. His penis was reattached and he was returned to jail the next day, said Damon Micalizzi, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff's Department.

In a surprise decision welcomed by human rights groups, the Justice Department moved Monday to expand the opportunities for asylum for women subjected to genital mutilation. Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey, a former federal judge, threw out a decision by an arm of the Justice Department denying asylum to a 28-year-old woman from Mali who had been subjected to genital mutilation as a girl.

A South Los Angeles man who allegedly dismembered his father's body and dumped the pieces beside a freeway near Fresno had a "history of mental issues," police said Monday. Los Angeles Police Cmdr. Pat Gannon said Mulushewa Tebedge, 33, used a knife to cut off his father's arms and head in the family's apartment last week to better "handle the body." But Tebedge apparently had less of a problem handling his sister.

An Ethiopian immigrant was convicted of aggravated battery and cruelty to children for the genital excision of his 2-year-old daughter and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in what was believed to be the first such criminal case in the United States. Prosecutors in Lawrenceville said Khalid Adem, 30, used scissors to remove his daughter's clitoris in his family's Atlanta-area apartment in 2001.

Re "A horrific practice," editorial, Feb. 20 The Times' attack on female genital mutilation is the latest salvo in a decades-long campaign that is essentially a continuation of a simple concept: The West knows best. The logic in this campaign is full of faults. How exactly will ending female circumcision end inequality in Africa? You pointed to those thousands of villages that have given up the practice. OK, are women in those villages any better off? Are they no longer sold off into marriage?

A woman who has been subjected to genital mutilation is automatically eligible for asylum in the United States, the federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled Thursday. The decision is the second this week from the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that has broadened asylum rights. Earlier, the court ruled in favor of asylum claims for men whose wives were subject to forced sterilizations.

A Pakistani man and some of his relatives chopped off his wife's feet after accusing her of being promiscuous, police said. She survived but remains hospitalized. "It is a shameful act of cruelty against a woman and we are taking it seriously," said Talat Ali, a police official in Punjab province. "Those who have carried out this crime will not be spared."

She lost her boyfriend, her best friend and both her grandparents in the same year, any one of which would have been traumatic. But Jolene Siana was only 16. She was already struggling with difficult life issues. She didn't know her father, because he was never told she'd been born. And she says her mother was emotionally and physically abusive.

Coroners have determined that a headless torso discovered in Lincoln Heights and bagged body parts found three days earlier in Pico Rivera are from the same corpse, officials said Tuesday. "It appears the parts do match," said Capt. Edward Winter of the Los Angeles County coroner's office. "We are doing further tests." The woman's torso and an arm were found Monday in a trash bin at a Los Angeles Fire Department maintenance facility on Avenue 19.

A dismembered body, pieces of which were found scattered from San Bernardino to Hesperia over the weekend, could not be identified through computer fingerprint databases, leaving San Bernardino County investigators with few leads in the slaying, authorities said Monday. "We still don't have the identity of the victim determined," said Sgt. Frank Bell. "We're checking a second time through the fingerprint files and the FBI. So far we've had no matches."