Gay rights groups are cautiously applauding a shift in tone from the Catholic Church on homosexuality.
'Crack in the ice'

TORRANCE, Calif. (AP) — A woman who spent 17 years in prison for the death of a homeless man hugged her grandchild for the first time and did a dance of happiness on Friday after she was judged innocent of murder and freed.

"I always knew that one day God would bring the truth to the light," Susan Marie Mellen, 59, told reporters after she was released from a Torrance courthouse shortly before 6 p.m.

About eight hours earlier, a Los Angeles County judge overturned her conviction, saying that her attorney failed to properly represent her and that a woman who claimed she heard Mellen confess was a "habitual liar."

"I believe she is innocent," Superior Court Judge Mark Arnold said. "For that reason I believe in this case the justice system failed."

The courtroom burst into applause after his ruling.

Based solely on witness testimony, Mellen was convicted of orchestrating the beating death of Richard Daly at a Lawndale home where Mellen and others lived.

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Susan Mellen, left, hugs her attorney Deirdre O'Connor, after she is exonerated of murder by Sup …

The mother of three was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

She was embraced by her three grown children after her release.

Mellen shrieked and clapped her hands as she kissed and hugged her 19-month-old grandson, Aiden.

"First time I held him," she told reporters.

"I'm a free woman now. Let me do the running man," she said, and did a few jogging dance steps before the microphones.

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Susan Mellen blows kisses back to her family waiting inside court, after been exonerated by Superior …

She joked and beamed but also described her imprisonment as "cruel punishment."

"I would cry every night" in prison, Mellen said, but never lost faith and even wrote "freedom" on the bottom of her tennis shoes "because I knew I was going to walk free one day."

Mellen's case was investigated by Deirdre O'Connor, head of a project known as Innocence Matters that seeks to free people who are wrongly convicted.

The witness who claimed she heard Mellen confess was June Patti, who had a long history of giving false tips to law enforcement, according to documents in the case. She died in 2006.

Three gang members subsequently were linked to the crime, and one was convicted of the killing. Another took a polygraph test and said he was present at Daly's killing, and Mellen was not there.

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Superior Court Judge Mark Arnold overturns the conviction of Susan Mellen on Friday, Oct. 10, 2014 i …

In a habeas corpus petition, O'Connor said the police detective who arrested Mellen was also responsible for a case in 1994 that resulted in the convictions of two men ultimately exonerated by innocence projects.

Mellen said she held no ill will against those who put her behind bars.

"No, no, I always forgave my enemies," she said. "Even your haters, you have to forgive them and sometimes you have to thank them because they bring you closer to God."

Mellen said she planned to go to dinner with her family and wanted to eat an avocado, steak, or maybe something she had never had.

She also hoped to have a McDonald's Happy Meal with her youngest daughter.

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Susan Mellen cries as she is exonerated of murder by Superior Court Judge Mark Arnold in Torrance, C …

"Me and her were at McDonald's when I got arrested and we didn't have a happy meal that day," she said. "... It's a happy ending right now...We're going to have a new beginning."

As Mellen's family waited outside the courthouse before her release, her son, who has little memory of his mother because he was so young when she was imprisoned, opened his shirt to show reporters a broken heart he had tattooed on his chest to honor her. Donald Besch, 25 and in the Navy, said he was hoping to have some time with his mother before he is deployed overseas in a few days.

Daughter Jessica Besch, 27, said she and her fiancé of eight years were waiting to get married until her mother could be at the wedding.

"We're going to go dress shopping together," she said.

Her third daughter, Julie Carroll, 39, brought Mellen's grandson.

The children were raised by their grandmother and other relatives while their mother was in prison. They said they never told friends where she was or that she had been convicted of a crime she did not commit.

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Seoul (AFP) - North Korea's state media said Saturday high-level talks with Seoul were now all but scrapped over the launch of anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets from the South, which triggered an exchange of fire across the tense border.

The two Koreas had agreed a week earlier to work on resuming a formal high-level dialogue that has effectively been suspended for seven months, raising hopes of a thaw in strained relations.

But the two Koreas traded heavy machine-gun fire across their border Friday, prompted by the North Korean military trying to shoot down balloons carrying the leaflets that activists launched from the South.

Some rounds fell on the Southern side, which then responded with high-calibre machine gun fire. No casualties were reported on the South's side, and none are believed to have taken place in the North.

"Because of the irresponsible and provocative acts by the puppet regime... the planned high-level meeting is all but scrapped," Pyongyang's official Internet news provider Uriminzokkiri said.

However it did not shut the door completely.

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Anti-North Korea leaflets showing pictures of Kim Jong-Il (C) and Kim Jong-Un (R) are seen before So …

"It is totally up to the South Korean puppets' attitude what would happen to the North-South Korean relations in the future," it added.

In Yeoncheon County, some 60 kilometres (37.5 miles) north of Seoul, residents parked trucks and tractors to block roads leading up to sites activists were using to launch leaflets, Yonhap news agency said.

"We've decided to stop the launches for our own safety," Lim Jae-Gwan, the head of Jung Village who led the blockade, was quoted as saying by Yonhap.

The activists later moved some 30 kilometres south to Pochon County and managed to launch only one of 15 gas-filled balloons they had prepared to send leaflets across the border.

"We physically stopped them from launching balloons as such activities might put the residents here in harm's way," a police official in Pochon told AFP, requesting anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to the media.

The agreement to hold bilateral talks had come last week during a surprise visit to South Korea by three top-ranking North Korean officials, two of them close aides to paramount leader Kim Jong-Un, ostensibly to encourage North Korean athletes and attend the closing ceremony of the Incheon Asian Games.

Pyongyang had repeatedly warned of a "catastrophic" end in cross-border ties unless South Korea halted the launch of the leaflets as the North marked the anniversary of the founding of its ruling Workers' Party.

"The real culprits of this leaflet-launching commotion are the United States and the puppet regime," it said.

Talks with S. Korea 'all but scrapped,' North says

North Korea bristles after anti-Pyongyang activists launch balloons carrying propaganda leaflets.
Trading gunfire

MAQLUBA, Iraq (AP) — The young Yazidi girl rocked apprehensively as she described the ordeal that took her from her family, snatched from her home by militants in Iraq, then sold as a slave in Syria before finally escaping to Turkey.

The 15-year-old is now with what is left of her family — two of her brothers and some more distant relatives — living in a makeshift roadside shelter in this tiny village in northern Iraq, along with other families shattered by the onslaught from the Islamic State militant group.

Her two sisters remain in the militants' hands, and her father, other brothers and other male relatives have vanished, their fates unknown.

The girl was among hundreds of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority captured by Islamic State fighters in early August when the militants overran her hometown of Sinjar in northwestern Iraq. Hundreds were killed in the attack, and tens of thousands fled for their lives, most to the Kurdish-held parts of northern Iraq.

Iraq's Human Rights Ministry said at the time that hundreds of women were abducted by the militants, who consider the Yazidis a heretical sect.

The Associated Press spoke to the girl and several other young women who escaped captivity by the Islamic State group. While specifics of their stories could not be independently confirmed, they reflected circumstances reported by the United Nations last month.

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Displaced Iraqis from the Yazidi community settle under a bridge in Dahuk, 260 miles (430 kilometers …

They each independently painted a similar picture of how the militants scattered them around the broad swath of territory controlled by the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq and sold the girls to the group's foreign fighters or other supporters for "marriage."

For weeks after being snatched from Sinjar, the 15-year-old girl and two of her sisters were shifted from one place to another, she said. The AP does not identify victims of abuse, and the girl also did not want to be named for fear of reprisals against her relatives still being held by the militants.

As she told her story, the girl rubbed her hands and avoided eye contact. But she spoke decisively and clearly, never hesitating when asked questions. She asked her relatives to leave the room, saying she was more comfortable speaking alone.

First, she said, she and other girls were taken to the nearby town of Tal Afar, where she was kept in the Badosh Prison. When U.S. airstrikes began around the town, the militants took her and many other girls with them to the Islamic State group's biggest stronghold, Mosul, in northern Iraq.

From the city of Mosul, she and her sisters were taken to the militants' de facto capital, the Syrian city of Raqqa. There they were held in a house with other abducted girls.

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The Kurdish peshmerga had managed to halt the advances of the Islamic State in Iraq earlier this yea …

"They took girls to Syria to sell them," she said, her body shyly hunched over as she spoke. "I was sold in Syria. I stayed about five days with my two sisters, then one of my sisters was sold and taken (back) to Mosul, and I remained in Syria."

In Raqqa, she said, she was first married off to a Palestinian man. She claims she shot him, saying the Palestinian's Iraqi housekeeper who was in a dispute with the man helped her by giving her a gun. She fled, but she had nowhere to run. So she went to the only place she knew, she said — the house where she was first held with the other girls in Raqqa.

There, the militants did not recognize her and sold her off again — for $1,000 to a Saudi fighter, she said. The Saudi militant took her to a house where he lived with other fighters.

"He told me, 'I'm going to change your name to Abeer, so your mother doesn't recognize you,'" she said. "You'll become Muslim, then I will marry you. But I refused to become a Muslim and that's why I fled."

She said she saw the fighters at time taking a powdered drug. So she poured it into tea she served to the Saudi and the other men, causing them to fall asleep. Then she fled the house.

She found a man who would drive her to Turkey to meet her brother. Her brother then borrowed $2,000 from friends to pay a smuggler to get them both back to Iraq. They ended up in Maqluba, a tiny roadside hamlet just outside the Kurdish city of Dahuk, where several other Yazidi families are staying.

The other women who spoke to The AP described difficult conditions, where the militant fighters would deprive them of enough food, water or even a place to sit. They all reported having seen dozens of other Yazidi women and children as young as 5-years old in captivity, and they all said that they have relatives who are still missing.

Amsha Ali, a 19-year-old, said she was taken from Sinjar to Mosul. Ali was around six months pregnant at the time. The last she saw of her husband and other men in her family as she was being dragged off, was the scene of the militants forcing them to lie on the ground, apparently to shoot them. Ali agreed to be identified, saying she wanted the ordeals of the women to be known.

In Mosul, she said, she and other women were taken to a house full of Islamic State fighters to be married off. "Each of them took one of us for themselves," she said. She too was given to a fighter. She said she was never raped by the man — likely because of her pregnancy, she said — but she witnessed other girls being raped.

After several weeks, she was able to slip out of a bathroom window at night and escape. A Mosul resident who found her in the streets helped her get out of the city to nearby Kurdish territory on Aug. 28, she said. She said she tried to convince other women to flee with her, but they were too afraid. "Because they were so terrified, they are left there and now I know nothing about them," she said.

Now Ali is with her father and a surviving sister living in an unfinished building in the town of Sharia, where some 5,000 Yazidi refugees live, also near Dahuk.

"The killing was not the hardest thing for me," she said of seeing fellow Yazidis slain in the assault on Sinjar. "Even though they forced my husband, brother-in-law and father-in-law on the ground to be murdered — it was painful — but marrying (the militant) was the worst. It was hardest thing for me."

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Iraqi girl tells of captivity in Islamic State group

Abducted from her family's home in August, a 15-year-old describes her ordeal with the militants.
'Marriage' before her escape