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Black Magic

Mad world: Mumbai woman beheaded in gory tantrik ritual

Sanskrity Sinha
International Business Times
Mon, 16 Dec 2013 07:22 UTC
Image
© Reuters
A black magic holyman holds a human skull at Guwahati's Kamakhya Temple, which is believed to be the highest seat of Tantra or black magic. A tantrik has been arrested for killing a woman in a human sacrifice in Mumbai.
A 50-year-old Indian woman has been killed in a human sacrifice ritual by six people, including a tantrik, in Nalasopara, a suburb of India's commercial capital, Mumbai.

All six men have been arrested a day after the western Indian state assembly of Maharashtra passed an anti-superstition bill.

The woman, who was killed as a sacrifice, was identified as Kalavati Gupta when her son recognised her headless body in photographs.

According to The Times of India (TOI), Kalavati regularly visited Sarvajeet Kahar, who works as a technician in Air India's transport department and practised black magic at home. She was seeing Kahar for a cure for her 30-year-old paralysed son.

Kalavati's neighbour Ramdhani Yadav (33) and his brother Gulab (28), were also visiting the tantrik and were advised by him to perform a human sacrifice for health, wealth and prosperity.

The police said that the tantrik first asked for an animal sacrifice but later stressed on a human one.
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Eye 2

Tourist walks off pier while browsing on Facebook


The Guardian
Tue, 17 Dec 2013 19:31 UTC
pier
© James Lane/AAP
St Kilda Pier in Melbourne
Police rescue woman from dark and chilly Melbourne waters still clutching her mobile phone

A tourist is lucky to be alive after she fell into Melbourne's Port Phillip Bay while browsing on Facebook, police say.

The woman was walking along St Kilda pier engrossed in social media when she walked off the pier into the dark and chilly water about 11.30pm on Tuesday.

A quick-thinking witness raised the alarm. Police officers were able to point out the distressed woman floundering in the water to the water police, who rescued her about 20 metres from the pier. It is believed the woman did not know how to swim. She was taken to hospital for treatment.

There will be no need for a lost property report as the woman kept hold of her mobile phone throughout the ordeal.
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Black Magic

Alleged animal sacrifice discovered at Lake Merced, San Francisco

Rob Nagle
SF Examiner
Tue, 17 Dec 2013 21:37 UTC
Animal Sacrifice
© Courtesy @DStevensonKTVU/Twitter
Two chukars were found at Lake Merced in what Animal Care and Control described as an animal sacrifice.
San Francisco police and Animal Care and Control were called out to Lake Merced on Tuesday morning to clean up the scene of what appeared to be an animal sacrifice, officials said.

Police were contacted about 11 a.m. regarding two dead animals seemingly sacrificed in the area of John Muir Drive and Lake Merced Boulevard, Officer Gordon Shyy said. Police then forwarded the call to the Animal Care and Control department.

Once there, ACC officers determined that the two animals were chukars, a type of partridge, which can generally be found at live food markets sold as game birds, spokeswoman Deb Campbell said.
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Star of David

Israel worries U.S. boycott could go contagious


PressTv
Wed, 18 Dec 2013 00:43 UTC
A demonstrator displays a sign reading
© Unknown
A demonstrator displays a sign reading "Boycott Israel" in Dublin, Ireland. (file photo)

Israel has expressed alarm over a boycott of its academic institutions by a powerful group of American scholars, saying other academic organizations in the United States could take similar action.

On Sunday, the American Studies Association (ASA), which has nearly 5,000 members, approved the academic boycott of Israel to protest its treatment of Palestinians, indicating that a movement to isolate the apartheid regime of Israel that is gaining momentum in Europe has also hit the US.

"The ASA condemns the United States' significant role in aiding and abetting Israel's violations of human rights against Palestinians and its occupation of Palestinian lands through its use of the veto in the UN Security Council," the organization said in a statement explaining the endorsement.

On Tuesday, Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Ze'ev Elkin termed the ASA as a "radical leftist group", but added that "we need to prepare for the danger that it (boycott call) will pass to other, more serious academic forums."

He stated that Israeli officials were striving hard to discourage other American groups from following the ASA's lead.
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Handcuffs

Prison industrial complex! Colorado and other states illegally jail poor people unable to pay exorbitant court fines


RT America
Tue, 17 Dec 2013 00:00 UTC
Image
© AFP Photo / Justin Sullivan
Jails in multiple cities throughout Colorado regularly imprison people who were previously given a fine by a court but are simply too poor to pay it, according to a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union that calls for an end to this practice.

The ACLU conducted investigations in municipal courts of Westminster, Wheat Ridge, and Northglenn, Colorado - all of which are located just outside Denver - and found that each of the cities regularly hand out "pay or serve" warrants that lock up those who cannot foot the bill.

One of the subjects was Linda Roberts, a 55-year-old grandmother who struggles with a disability and survives on food stamps. She was arrested in June 2012, according to the ACLU, for stealing $20 worth of groceries. Upon pleading guilty, she was ordered to pay a $371 fine, which was then raised to a $746 fine when she did not pay the initial amount.

Ms. Roberts was arrested in October of that year and served 15 days in the county jail. She now maintains that, during her stint behind bars, she appeared in front of a court and was forced to serve the duration of the 15 days unless she could pay the fine.

Roberts' story and others like it come after a number of recent ACLU investigations found similar circumstances at prisons in Ohio, Georgia, and Alabama. Yet the practice has been illegal since the 1830s, and a Supreme Court ruling from 1983 upheld that "a sentencing court cannot properly revoke a defendant's probation for failure to pay a fine and make restitution..."

Part of the motivation to keep this practice alive in some states is the growing influence of private prison firms, which always need inmates in their facilities in order to earn a profit. Yet this does not seem to be done for the benefit of the taxpayer.
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Megaphone

Outcry in Italy over video of naked refugees being disinfected in public

Lizzy Davies
The Guardian
Tue, 17 Dec 2013 15:41 UTC
Parliamentary speaker Laura Boldrini condemns treatment of migrants seen stripping naked at Lampedusa reception centre

Video footage appearing to show migrants at the reception centre on Lampedusa standing naked in the open air while waiting to be sprayed for scabies has provoked a storm of protest in Italy.

Broadcast by the Rai 2 television channel on Monday night, the pictures appeared to show a practice that was labelled "unworthy of a civilised country" by Laura Boldrini, the speaker of the lower house of parliament. Coming barely two months after hundreds of people died in two separate disasters in the Mediterranean, the footage provoked renewed criticism of Italy's creaking reception system for asylum seekers and refugees.

"Italy should be ashamed," Giusi Nicolini, mayor of Lampedusa, told Rai 2 television. "It [the reception system] has to change. This is not what we were expecting to see just two months after the shipwrecks which prompted weeping, tears, commitments and promises."

In the footage, which appeared to have been shot on a mobile phone, at least two men at the reception centre are shown standing with no clothes on, while others are undressing.
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Handcuffs

China says six arrested after deadly riot in Xinjiang

Sui-Lee Wee and Ben Blanchard
EuroNews
Tue, 17 Dec 2013 04:05 UTC
Chinese police have arrested six people they suspect of taking part in a riot near the old Silk Road city of Kashgar, in the restive far western Muslim region of Xinjiang, in which 16 people were killed, the regional government said.
Image
© Rooney Chin/Reuters
A security officer holds out a detector on a street in Urumqi, Xinjiang.
The arrests, reported by the Xinjiang government in a statement on an official news site late on Monday, came a day after Chinese police shot and killed 14 people during the riot. Two policemen were also killed.

The government statement called the incident "an organised, pre-meditated, violent terror attack".

"The gang repeatedly gathered to watch violent, terrorist videos, promoted extremist religious ideology, manufactured explosive devices and guns, conducted test explosions several times and planned to carry out violent terrorist activities," the Xinjiang government said.

China has previously called some of the violence in Xinjiang the work of Islamist militants plotting holy war.

On Monday, China's Foreign Ministry stopped short of directly blaming Islamist militants but said a "violent terror gang" attacked police with explosives.

The Xinjiang government said the "terror gang" made up of 20 members was formed in August and was led by a person they named as Hesen Ismail.
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Stop

Another cracked windshield? Russian plane to Dubai turns back due to windshield crack


RIA Novosti
Tue, 17 Dec 2013 16:39 UTC
Image
© RIA Novosti. Alexander Paniotov
Airport in Krasnoyarsk
A plane bound for Dubai from the eastern Russian city of Krasnoyarsk was forced to turn back because of a crack on its cockpit window, officials said Tuesday.

The crew noticed during the plane's initial ascent that the glass on the co-pilot's side of the front windshield was cracked, and so decided to turn around, the Western Siberian Transport Prosecutor's office said in a statement.

Comment: Another cracked windshield? We wonder if there is any connection to the following case:
Explanation for 13 cracked airplane windscreens doesn't fly!

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Attention

Boston Bombings investigation reveals murdered accused Tamerlan Tsarnaev suspected he had been mind-programmed by "majestic mind control"

Maxwell Benwell
The Independent, UK
Tue, 17 Dec 2013 16:34 UTC
Image

The Tsarnaev Bros: Made in the USA
Suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev heard voices inside his head and had an alter-ego, a report published in The Boston Globe claimed yesterday.

As part of a five-month investigation, the Globe spoke to a number of sources close to Tsarnaev. Donald Larking, 67, who attended the same Boston mosque as the suspected bomber, said Tsarnaev believed the voices were part of a "majestic mind control", which was "a way of breaking down a person and creating an alternative personality with which they must coexist."

Larking also told the Globe that Tsarnaev was "torn" between himself and an alter-ego. "You can give a signal, a phrase or a gesture, and bring out the alternate personality and make them do things," he said; "Tamerlan thought someone might have done that to him."

According to the report, the voices "came to [Tsarnaev] at unexpected times, an internal rambling that he alone could hear. Alarmed, he confided to his mother that the voice 'felt like two people inside of me.'

Comment: Shades of Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, Timothy McVeigh, James Holmes, etc, etc.

To the question of whether or not MK-Ultra type programs ended in the late 1960s, here is the answer!

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Handcuffs

Land of the free? U.S. has 25 percent of the world's prisoners

Joshua Holland
Moyer's & Company
Mon, 16 Dec 2013 08:00 UTC
Image
© shutterstock
The United States has about five percent of the world's population and houses around 25 percent of its prisoners. In large part, that's the result of the "war on drugs" and long mandatory minimum sentences, but it also reflects America's tendency to criminalize acts that other countries view as civil violations.

In 2010, The Economist highlighted a case in which four Americans were arrested for importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than in cardboard boxes. That violated a Honduran law which that country no longer enforces, but because it's still on the books there its enforced here. "The lobstermen had no idea they were breaking the law. Yet three of them got eight years apiece." When the article was published 10 years later, two of them were still behind bars.

A UN report noted that Alabama officials had arrested dozens of people who were too poor to repair septic systems that violated state health laws. In one case, authorities took steps to arrest a 27-year-old single mother living in a mobile home with her autistic child for the same "crime." Replacing the system would have cost more than her $12,000 annual income, according to the report.

As The Economist put it:
America imprisons people for technical violations of immigration laws, environmental standards and arcane business rules. So many federal rules carry criminal penalties that experts struggle to count them. Many are incomprehensible. Few are ever repealed, though the Supreme Court... pared back a law against depriving the public of "the intangible right of honest services", which prosecutors loved because they could use it against almost anyone. Still, they have plenty of other weapons. By counting each e-mail sent by a white-collar wrongdoer as a separate case of wire fraud, prosecutors can threaten him with a gargantuan sentence unless he confesses, or informs on his boss. The potential for injustice is obvious.
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