The Texas family court judge who was shown whipping his teenage daughter in a YouTube video has been suspended by the Texas Supreme Court. The seven and a half minute video was from a 2004 incident. It showed Judge William Adams viciously beating his daughter with a belt because she downloaded illegal music and games from the Internet. In rendering its decision, the court did not detail the reason for the order of suspension that was made public Tuesday.

A temporary Zynga employee was arrested this week for allegedly stealing $100,000 in merchandise. 21-year-old Keith Brown of San Ramon, California was arrested on Tuesday, according to District Attorney’s Office spokesman Omid Talai. He stands accused of stealing laptop and desktop computers and software valued at approximately $100,000 between Oct. 31 and the date of his arrest. Zynga security took him into custody and brought him to police, Talai said.

Two prototype Razer Blade laptops have been stolen, according to the company that makes them, but they claim that the theft is unlikely to impact launch plans for what it calls "the world's first true gaming laptop." Razer revealed this morning that two prototype Razer Blade gaming laptops had been stolen from its R&D offices earlier this month.

The 31-year old Aurora, Colorado man arrested and charged for disorderly conduct earlier this week after allegedly threatening to shoot Best Buy employees and blow the place up over Modern Warfare 3 purchase problems says that he is shocked at how much attention his story has gotten on the internet and that the words he used were just a figure of speech.

A man threatened to blow up his local game store yesterday after they informed him that they had sold out of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, according to police in Aurora, Colorado. Aurora Police Det. Bob Friel said that 31-year-old Lomorin Sar was arrested early Tuesday morning after he threatened the employees at the Best Buy at North Salida Court.

In the summer of this year law enforcement agencies in several European countries conducted raids and made arrests related to movie streaming links portal Kino.to and file-hosting sites such as Duckload.com. Duckload lost 400 servers to police, worth more than 2 million dollars in total. While police managed to nab most of the targets they were looking for one man managed to escape apprehension. The net has finally fallen on that man. After five months of evading police the man known believed to be Tim C has been arrested in Germany.

Two armed robbers managed to steal 6,000 copies of Modern Warfare 3 in France, according to multiple news reports. According to published reports (as translated by Eurogamer), at 8:00 AM on Sunday morning a car crashed into a van 10km southeast of Paris. The van was carrying unspecified video game cargo worth €400,000.

A teen murderer and rapist who confessed his crime in World of Warcraft to a friend (because he thought it would be safe to talk there) has been sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 10 years by a court in British Columbia. The 16-year-old, Kruse Wellwood, raped and murdered a classmate named Kim Proctor, who rejected his advances.

TV Station KTLA reports on a tragedy that resulted from one man trying to stop a theft. Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies have arrested four teenagers as a result. The boys were arrested after a fight over a DS ended in a shooting that wounded one teen and killed an unnamed 29-year-old male. The shooting occurred just after 3:00 p.m. Monday at a shopping center where a teen met with four other teen boys to sell a Nintendo DS game system.

A Tennessee man has been sentenced to 27 years in prison for killing his infant son because he bothered while playing a video game. Nineteen-year-old Andrew Keith Johnston pled guilty Monday to second-degree murder for the October 2010 death of his one-month-old son William.

The U.S. Attorney's office announced that a 29-year-old man from Washington D.C. has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for his part in an armed robbery of an Oxen Hill, Maryland GameStop. Terrence Terrell Conner was sentenced on Monday for "obstructing commerce by robbery" and "using a firearm during a violent crime." Conner pled guilty to all charges for a lighter sentence.

Project Zomboid developer The Indie Stone can't seem to catch a break lately. The company recently suffered a serious setback in the development of its browser-based game when thieves broke into the residence of two of its developers and stole two laptops containing a large portion of recent code. The game's developers say that the code that was stolen represents the majority of the work accomplished since the last update. On top of the theft, the code was never backed up, meaning that the team will have to start from scratch.

Police are actively looking for an African American male who stole nearly $4,000 in Madden NFL 12 video games from an Orange Park, Florida Walmart. The incident happened at the Walmart on County Road 220 on the afternoon of August 31. The suspect has been at large ever since, but police are showing off surveillance footage (to your left) from the store in hopes of apprehending him.

Kyoto police have arrested 50-year-old Japanese man Hiroyuki Kaneda for allegedly stealing an eight-year-old boy's game software and game machine and selling it. According to an Andriasang report, the theft allegedly took place in late May at a local supermarket.

A new proposal before the City Council of Madison, Wisconsin has some residents and civil rights groups up in arms this week. An effort to collect the personal information of individuals who sell various used items (books, DVD's, music CD's, iPods, games, and more). Under the proposed Madison city ordinance, if someone sells items to a second-hand store they will have to provide personal information and a photo will be entered into a police database. Local business owners, civil rights advocates and the public are not pleased.

British police have arrested two men yesterday as part of a what is being called a trans-Atlantic investigation into cyber attacks committed by hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec. According to a C&VG report, Scotland Yard has confirmed that it picked up two men (one 24-year-old, and another 20-year-old) from two separate UK addresses. Law enforcement took the men into custody and seized a computer.

Law enforcement in Lubbock, Texas are on a manhunt for three suspects that they claim have stolen more than $13,000 in video game hardware from local Wal-Mart stores. The suspects allegedly stole Nintendo DS and DSI handheld games from the two local Walmarts (one at 1911 Marsha Sharp Freeway and another at 6315 82nd St).

The suspects are described as a white or Hispanic male, a Hispanic male, and a white or Hispanic woman. They were last seen driving away from the scene in a "black SUV, possibly a Chevrolet Trailblazer or Jeep Cherokee."

Oklahoma City police have arrested a 13-year-old boy in connection with the death of his nine-month-old baby sister after a questionable story of what happened to the child was told to the staff at a metro hospital. ER doctors became suspicious and called the local police. Officers were called to a metro hospital on August 16 after doctors noted that the baby's injuries were not consistent with an explanation given by the girl's parents.

The Georgian teen that murdered his great grandmother and injured his grandmother with a sword after being told to stop playing video games and do his chores, will be tried as an adult, according to a Reuters report. The 15-year-old's name was also released, along with the names of the victims in the incident. The 15-year-old has been identified as Gevin Prince, and the 77-year-old great-grandmother who died from multiple stab wounds has been identified as Mary Joan Gibbs.

A 14-year-old from Douglasville, Georgia is now in the custody of Douglas County Sheriff’s office after fatally stabbing his 77-year-old great grandmother and wounding his 55-year-old grandmother with a sword, according to multiple media reports. The incident occurred at around 5:00 p.m. on Monday at a home on Spring Ridge Drive in Douglasville. When the great grandmother told the teen to stop playing video games and do his chores, he apparently got a 3-foot sword and attacked the 77-year-old woman, who later died from multiple stab wounds.

Bungie's IT guy, Jeff Fletcher, is an information specialist for the Halo creators during the day, but sometimes he's a gun-toting vigilante, according to this report from Seattle news station KING 5.

Wesley Snipes proves that you don't have to be free to do anything with his new iOS game, Julius Styles: The International. Snipes is currently serving three years in a federal prison for tax evasion, but that hasn't stopped him from being creative (Snipes' projected date from prison is July, 2013).

The New York Times is reporting that minions of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il have found an interesting way of earning some much needed cash - MMO's. According to South Korean authorities, their neighbor to the North has created an army of young hackers and unleashed them on South Korea's most popular MMORPG's. This group is finding ways to exploit systems, gather in-game credits and convert it all back to cold hard cash.

South African newspaper Beeld is reporting that an unnamed man has been arrested for jailbreaking the PlayStation 3 in Parktown, Johannesburg today. This marks the first time someone has been arrested for such a crime in the country. The raid was conducted by the South African Police Service's Commercial Crime Unit, after receiving criminal complaints from the South African Federation Against Copyright Theft (SAFACT). Members of the police were assisted by the South African Revenue Service (SARS) Computer Forensics Lab.

According to Southern Chinese news agency Sanxiang City News a couple sold off their three children to fund their obsession with playing online games at Internet Cafes. The couple met in 2007 and quickly bonded because of their hobby. A year later their gaming was already getting in the way of being parents. In that year the couple had their first child - a son. Days later they left the young child home alone while they went to play online games at an Internet cafe 30 km away.

A year later the bad parenting escalated to unimaginable levels. In 2009 the 21-year-old couple had a baby girl. It was at that point they came up the idea to sell her for $500 USD. When that worked for them the couple sold their first child for $4,600 USD. Finally the couple has a third child, which they sold for another $4600 USD. Keep in mind that the couple did all this to fund their Internet cafe activities.

Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian man who has been arrested for killing over 76 people in a bomb attack in Oslo on Friday and a subsequent mass shooting at a political youth group retreat, claims in an exhaustive manifesto that he trained for the attacks using Modern Warfare 2. That claim comes from a 1500 page manifesto entitled "2083 – A European Declaration of Independence," which is making the rounds today (you can find a copy of it here via this blog).

In it, Breivik complains about the "rise of cultural Marxism/multiculturalism" and "Islamic colonization and Islamisation of Western Europe." He goes on to lay out how "fellow patriots" can combat the situation - and most his solutions end with violence.

Yesterday we reported that Square Enix had filed a lawsuit against unnamed Italian citizens who (they allege) stole a preview build of Deus Ex: Human Revolution (see this story). The latest wrinkle in the story is that the company wants Valve Software to help them because the stolen build was a copy that was hosted on Valve's Steam service.

For its part, Valve says that it has plenty of information on those individuals responsible for stealing and leaking the file onto the internet, but it is unable to give that information to Square Enix without them presenting Valve with a court ordered subpoena.

It may seem like an odd position for Valve to take with a publishing partner, but the company is simply protecting itself and following procedure.

We'll let you know how this situation plays out.

The High Court in Belfast, Ireland has ordered a 13-year-old boy to surrender his Xbox 360 as a condition of being released from jail. The boy, whose name was withheld because he is a minor, was being held in jail for allegedly committing a number of burglaries in the Downpatrick area of Co Down.

During a hearing to obtain a release the boy was asked what was the most important thing he owned. He responded by saying that his Xbox 360 meant a lot to him.

The judge then ordered him to give the Xbox 360 to the authorities as a condition of release. He added that it would be returned to him when the charges were dealt with.

The judge told the boy that he was taking the Xbox 360 to show him what it was like to have something he valued taken from him.

The family of famed gangster and bank robber John Dillinger have lost a 20-month federal court legal battle against Electronic Arts. The Dillinger clan sued EA for using the gangster's name to represent a special machinegun in the Godfather and Godfather II video games. The EA-developed video games are extensions of the storylines of the popular Mario Puzo novels and the Francis Ford Coppola-directed movies.

On Thursday Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson of the U.S. District Court of Southern Indiana ruled against the family, saying that their claim of copyright infringement was not valid.

Two women are going to prison for a September 2010 crash that took the life of a prominent Relic Entertainment developer, injured his pregnant wife and killed two passengers in the woman's Chevy Blazer. The two women were found guilty of three counts of vehicular homicide each, with the driver Jordyn Weichert sentenced to eight years in prison and the passenger Samantha Bowling receiving a five year sentence. Wood was the lead developer on Company of Heroes Online.

The accident happened on Highway 20 near North Whidbey, Washington on September 3, 2010. According to police reports, Weichert tried to remove her sweater while driving her Chevy Blazer, and asked the passenger, Bowling, to steer. This lead to the confusion that caused the driver to lose control of the vehicle, which veered to the left and into oncoming traffic.