Law

In the latest mass shooting at a public place, one person was killed and three people are critically injured after separate shootings Friday morning at a mall and shopping center in Montgomery County, Maryland. Investigators are examining whether the shooting at Westfield Montgomery mall in Bethesda has any connection to a fatal shooting Thursday in a parking lot of a high school in Beltsville, Maryland, a source tells NBC News.

Live webcast from the scene below:

An Algerian man accused of sexual assault against a woman during New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne had his case thrown out by a German court on Friday after the victim failed to identify him. The Local reports: The panel said it had no evidence that the 26-year-old was part of a group of about ten men who allegedly surrounded, groped and robbed the woman at Cologne central railway station. The man was later found to be in possession of the woman’s mobile phone, but he told the court that he had bought the cellphone from an acquaintance.

Submitted by Soren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

• A 20-year-old asylum seeker from Iraq confessed to raping a 10-year-old boy at a public swimming pool in Vienna. The Iraqi said the rape was a "sexual emergency" resulting from "excess sexual energy."

• Those who dare to link spiraling crime to Muslim mass migration are being silenced by the guardians of Austrian multiculturalism.

A Russian court ordered the detention of a Ukrainian teenager on the basis of his teeth and the size of his genitals. The 13-year-old boy who was detained on suspicion of theft was considered an adult by a Russian judge after he was found to have larger than normal genitals for his age. The Moscow Times reports: Tomas, a Hungarian national born in Ukraine, came to Moscow with his aunt in March and was arrested the same month after police accused him of stealing a mobile phone, a charge Tomas denies, newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets reported Tuesday.

Voter fraud activist, Gary Welsh, who broke the story about the gay foam sex parties that Marco Rubio took part in, has been found dead in his apartment under suspicious circumstances.  Authorities are yet to give an official reason for his death, but have hinted that the death was potentially suicide. The political blogger had also written an ominous blog post last week predicting that Donald Trump would win Indiana, shortly before police found his body.