Hackers broke into Sarah Palin's Yahoo account and posted screenshots and personal emails, reports the AP.

Rick Davis, campaign manager for the McCain-Palin campaign, issued a statement about the hack: "This is a shocking invasion of the Governor's privacy and a violation of law. The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them. We will have no further comment."

And for real: why don't we hear more often about hackers being punished? Like TrainReq, who broke into Miley Cyrus's phone - he's still happily blogging away.

So what are the rules? LawForKids.org has a summary:

It's been a while since we looked at TMZ, but judging by the videos they have up today, they just hang out at airports waiting for stars to misbehave. And they hit paydirt today: Kanye West got so angry at the paparazzi that he and his bodyguard smashed two cameras and tried to grab the TMZ videotape. Kanye and the guard were then arrested and taken to jail.

What is going on with buses in Canada?

A woman just attacked a Toronto bus driver with a hammer for not dropping her off soon enough, the AP reports.

Our theory: Greyhound jinxed the industry with that marketing campaign "There's a reason you've never heard of bus rage."

They pulled the ads after the recent Greyhound bus decapitation in Manitoba, but not soon enough to remove the bus rage curse . . .

A man on a Canadian Greyhound bus decapitated his seatmate and ate parts of the body as the rest of the bus passengers fled in horror, CNN reports. Then a man decapitated his girlfriend in Greece and carried her head through the streets before being apprehended by police, says Newser. Two beheadings is two too many for a week. Let's bring back last week's fat cat trend.

Twenty years ago, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson published their now-classic book Homicide. This book overturned a whole generation of liberal scholarship. It is still a welcome antidote to the kind of nonsense that some liberals, unacquainted with the data, continue to spout today.

For instance, it is not unsual to hear that "with the exception of the police and the military, the family is perhaps the most violent social group, and the home is the most violent social setting in our society. A person is more likely to be hit or killed in his or her home by another family member than anywhere else or by anyone else."

Once this was the conventional academic wisdom. Indeed Daly and Wilson encountered precisely this quotation in a textbook by two leading criminologists in the 1970s. One can see the political purpose to which such conclusions are put. Then, as now, they are used by feminists, homosexual activists and others to justify legal assaults on the nuclear family and to provide justifications for divorce, gay marriage, and other "alternative" family arrangements.

Daly and Wilson are scholars of evolution, and to them this idea that genetically related people pose the greatest social danger to each other's lives made absolutely no sense. So they began to review the data. Indeed they went way beyond what anyone had studied previously, dissecting not only the facts from the United States and other Western countries, but also performing cross-cultural comparisons in some cases going back to ancient times.

Daly and Wilson found that the liberal scholars were simply wrong. In some cases the errors were statistical. For instance, consider the statement that "more people in America are murdered each night in their beds than on the street." This is probably true, and it's because vastly more people are in their beds than on the streets. The statistic in no way shows that the bedroom is a more dangerous venue than the street! When intelligent people make such simple errors the usual reason is that their ideological prejudices are guiding the way they read the data.

But Daly and Wilson made a more startling, and significant, finding. They discovered that the data on homicide typically did not distinguish between blood-related individuals and non-blood-related individuals. For instance, when you separate murders of children committed by their fathers from murders of children by mothers' boyfriends and step-fathers and other unrelated persons, you discover that the latter group poses a far greater danger to children than the former group. Specifically, Daly and Wilson found that infants are 20 to 100 times more likely to be killed by a step-parent than by a natural parent.

Since Daly and Wilson's book there has been a wealth of data extending their conclusions. The data on child sex abuse, for example, follows the same pattern. Biological parents are much less likely to sexually abuse their children than mothers' boyfriends or step-parents. Here the natural genetic aversion to incest is an obvious explanation, but so is the fact that biological parents tend to be more closely attuned to the welfare of their offspring.

Until Daly and Wilson's book, genetic relatednedss was not considered a relevant factor in measuring infanticide and child abuse. But Daly and Wilson showed that it is the single most important predictive factor. And their pioneering work is now supported by a whole ream of data. The point of course is not that most step-parents pose a danger to children but that children face a greater risk of violence from step-parents than they do from natural parents.

These facts of course fit perfectly with common sense. And even though the cultural left will continue to make excuses, the facts also makes biological sense.No wonder that increasing divorce rates in society have produced a dramatic increase in violence against children. And if these biological and historical patterns hold, a further increase in the legitimation of "alternative lifestyles" can only be expected to produce more victims.

Remember how back in December, we were all talking about how sad the Megan Meier case was, and how it was awful that there was no way to prosecute her middle-aged harasser, Lori Drew?

[If you need a refresher here's the AP summary. Basically, this insecure girl Megan Meier, 13, met a 16-year-old "boy" on MySpace who turned cruel and pelted her with vicious messages, including one that said the world would be better off without her. Distraught, Megan hanged herself in her closet while her mother was downstairs. It was later revealed that this boy Megan had a crush on was in fact a fiction created online by a classmate's vindictive mother, Lori Drew.]

Well, it looks like there is justice after all.

KNBC has a fascinating report on an escaped convict caught by police after three decades on the lam. Susan Lefevre got into drugs as a teenager and was caught participating in a $200 drug deal (there she is looking pretty cracked out in her mug shot). She received a sentence common at the time, but which seems unduly harsh now: 10 to 20 years in prison.

Thinking she wouldn't be out of jail before she was too old to have a family, and that it was impossible to appeal, she let her grandfather bust her out of prison.

Then she changed her name to Marie Day, got a job, and became a wife and mother of three. Now she's been caught and put back into jail more than 30 years later.

Have you heard this terrible story yet? This 73-year-old monster in Austria locked his 18-year-old daughter in the basement and kept her there for 24 years. During that time, he repeatedly raped her and fathered seven children by her, one of whom died.

The daughter and her kids (now aged five to 19) lived in the windowless cellar until recently. Three of them never saw sunlight. The mother was upstairs the whole time, but didn't know about the soundproof rooms below the house.

The only reason they found the kids at all was that the eldest child was found unconscious and sick in the building and taken to a hospital and the secret room was discovered.

Vicki Glembocki just wrote a piece for Babble called "Bad Parent: Driven To It. I breastfed in a moving car." In it, she describes being stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic with a screaming baby in the back seat. While her mother drives in stop-and-go traffic, Vicki takes the baby from the car seat and nurses her, all the while convinced that she's going to jail.

When it's all over, she does some research and discovers:

If a cop pulls us over, I probably won't get arrested, just slapped with a $100 fine. Though the punishment in each state varies, this is the max for the offense here in Pennsylvania. (Of course, there was that Ohio women who was sentenced in 2003 to three months of house arrest and a $300 fine when a trucker saw her breastfeeding in her car. But she was driving.) If we get in an accident and, God forbid, the baby dies, I could be charged with involuntary manslaughter (if a prosecutor doesn't think that losing a child is punishment enough) for "the doing of an unlawful act in a reckless or grossly negligent manner . . . [that] causes the death of another person," which, in Pennsylvania, could mean up to ten years in prison.

More than four hundred children on the Yearning for Zion compound in Texas were removed by police after a sixteen-year-old girl called a family services hotline and complained of being beaten and raped.

Here's the AP description of the tipster's call: Her husband sexually assaulted her, and when he was angry, he would beat her while other women held her infant, she told a family violence shelter in a series of secret calls that triggered an investigation of the polygamist sect here.

An ad on Craigslist said that everything in an Oregon home was free for the taking. People descended on the house like locusts and cleaned it out. The only problem? The ad was a hoax. The owner, Robert Salisbury, was robbed blind by strangers who, based on an online post, thought they had the right to take all his stuff.

The Washington Post has a chilling story about a 12-year-old Maryland boy who killed a 64-year-old man who was attacking his mother, a widow, in the kitchen of their boarding house.

The man was a friend and roommate, but apparently went crazy one night and tried to choke the woman to death. When her son came upon the scene, he grabbed a knife and cut the man's throat.

According to the article: The 12-year-old boy said yesterday that he was not happy about what he had done but that he knew that it was the right thing.

According to Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, speaking on Anderson Cooper's CNN show Monday night, Eliot Spitzer should not resign nor should he be prosecuted because prostitution is a "victimless crime."

Dershowitz gave us the usual nonsense about how Europeans would regard all this as no big deal, but what does this prove other than the fact that many Europeans have reached the nadir of moral debauchery? Yes, we all know that in France the discovery that a politician has a mistress or even patronizes prostitutes can raise their poll ratings. Is this really an area in which we wish to emulate French degeneracy?

I'm more interested in Dershowitz's claim that Spitzer is guilty of a crime that doesn't have any victims. Is this really true? Let's make a list of all of Spitzer's victims.

His wife: Spitzer's wife of 20 years not only has to cope with the public knowledge that her high-profile husband frequents prostitutes, but she also has to stand alongside him while Spitzer makes a press statement on his sexual and legal offenses. Converting your wife into a political prop--what could be more humiliating?

His daughters: For years the girls could think of their dad as a champion of legal and moral rectitude, fighting Wall Street crooks, shutting down prostitution dens, and so on. Now these innocent children must endure the knowledge that their father is far from what he portrayed himself to be. Spitzer has made shipwreck of his family and disgraced his children in public. What are his daughters going to say when they next see their friends?

New York citizens: Isn't there something outrageous when a high public official, and in this case a former attorney general, somehow gets the idea that he is above the law? That he can break the law with impunity? Why should other New Yorkers be held accountable to the law but not Spitzer? Spitzer of all people has worked to emphasize the idea that no one is above the law. So if Spitzer gets away with this, he will have screwed more than the $4000 hooker.

Alan Dershowitz: There is something about Democratic malfeasance (Barney Frank's relationship with a male prostitute, Clinton sex scandals, the latest Spitzer prostitution scandal) that causes liberal Harvard professors who agree with the politics of the culprits to lose their normal good sense. Whether Dershowitz thinks the law in question is a good one or a bad one is irrelevant here. Laws are made to be followed, and it's odd when law professors think that this doesn't apply to laws about sex. Clearly Alan Dershowitz's legal and moral intelligence has become the latest victim.

According to this Star Tribune article, a Minneapolis woman's home was robbed and among the valuables taken were her dead mother's ashes.

Assisted by the funeral home and the police, Michele Siedow has begun a campaign to get the ashes returned, no questions asked.

The story quotes Siedow as saying, "I would like to have them back so I can dispose of them properly. It just bothers me that they might be lying in a garbage can somewhere."

So if a Midwestern meth addict tries to sell you some ashes marked "Mattson Funeral Home," call the Forest Lake Police Department (651-464-5877) or the funeral home (651-464-3556) immediately.