Indian police began a probe on Monday into reports that villagers in a tribal area of central India beat 50 women with sticks after accusing them of witchcraft, and cut off their hair.

The villagers acted on the advice of a local spiritual man who said the assault would protect them from evil spirits, in a forest in a poor district of Chhattisgarh state, 400km (250 miles) from the capital Raipur, police said.

Dozens of women are killed every year on suspicion of being witches or witch doctors in India, where superstition is widespread, especially in rural areas that lack an effective schooling system.

While there are few killings in Chhattisgarh, more than 100 women are tortured, paraded naked or harassed in the state every year, officials say.

©Oregonian

"Master" Eric J Pepin

Yesterday, as I was working on finishing up the next installment of the Comet Series of Articles, FedEx delivered a packet of mail from our corporate registered agent in the U.S. It was "Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial" filed in the State of Oregon by Eric Pepin's Higher Balance Institute, LLC. The reason? A discussion on the SOTT Forum that begins HERE.

Well, that was entertaining enough when you think about the fact that the discussion that he objects to was centered on several newspaper articles that describe his close calls with the legal system in Oregon over charges of sex abuse.

It's been nearly 25 years since the murder trial of Elizabeth Diane Downs captivated the nation -- marking Oregon as the home of one of history's most notorious child killers. Experts have for decades labeled Downs a narcissistic psychopath. She was convicted of killing her 7-year-old daughter and trying to kill her two other young children outside Springfield in a shooting that inspired a true-crime book by Ann Rule and a made-for-TV movie starring Farrah Fawcett.

Today, Downs is 53. Her most recent prison mug shot shows a woman older than her actual years, white hair and sunken features, nearly unrecognizable from the bombshell blonde who once flounced unashamed past television news cameras in handcuffs and shackles. Yet a thick packet of documents collected for her first parole hearing Tuesday shows that Downs' looks are about all that's changed in the past quarter-century.

The nation's just-retired No. 2 intelligence official Tuesday defended a controversial year-old estimate on Iran, saying he stood by its conclusion that Iran suspended a nuclear-weapons program in 2003.

As the world falls asleep under the spell of Obama's supposed change, the Zionists sneak onto his staff roster and take the opportunity to siege Gaza. With astoundingly accurate timing, India gets its own shocking 9/11 and the fingers are pointed at Pakistan.

More blood is expected to run, as we keep seeing signs of war and hearing predictions of catastrophic terrorism.

As this happens, Mother Nature takes notice of the human madness and gives the world a very cold shoulder. As above, so below: the cosmic weather responds with fireballs and other mysteries.

An American company is believed to have made an agreement in principle with the Cyprus government to exploit oil and gas in the Exclusive Economic Zone of Cyprus.

The revelation is made by Politis newspaper and comes at a time of heightened tensions off the coast of Cyprus.

An independent review has been launched into the case of a rapist who fathered seven children with his two daughters. The 56-year-old, who was sentenced to 25 life sentences, repeatedly raped his daughters, who between them went through 19 pregnancies, over a period spanning more than quarter of a century.

Judge Alan Goldsack QC ordered the Sheffield man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, to serve 25 life sentences that will run concurrently. He said the minimum term the rapist should serve in jail should be 19-and-a-half years.

Sheffield City Council's Children and Young People's Specialist Services confirmed a Serious Case Review had been launched.

Remember back in 2005 when Ariel Sharon decided to make a "historical sacrifice" by withdrawing some 9,000 illegal Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip? Remember the drama whipped up by the world's media and the tears on the faces of those who were leaving behind their ill begotten houses and farms? Remember the debates about civil and human rights - the rights of the settlers, that is because as we all know, the Palestinians have no rights. Remember as well how Sharon - the same man who years before was responsible for the massacre of the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in southern Lebanon - was applauded for his restraint and sensibility.

Well, all of that was nothing but the theatrics that came with a calculated step in a long-term war strategy and which is now reaching a climax with the siege of Gaza.

"By that, I mean, 'Get me a lead singer. He's got sort of an androgynous blonde hair, very pretty. We need a guitar player, sort of hatchet-faced, wears a hat, plays very fast, very dramatic. He must be very dramatic. Get me a pound of bass player, pound of drummer ... they're making little cardboard cutouts. They hire a producer, they hire writers ... And in the current stuff now, they don't even bother getting people to play. Don't bother with that guitar player, bass player, drummer - nonsense ... The people in those bands can't write, play, or sing."

David Crosby, describing the synthetic, manufactured nature of today's rock bands

"David was obnoxious, loud, demanding, thoughtless, full of himself - of the four of them [David Crosby, Steven Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young], the least talented."

David Geffen

First of all, before getting back into the Laurel Canyon scene, I need to say that some of you people really need to mellow out on the visits to my website. Seriously. This isn't a crack-house, for fuck's sake, so just chill out a little bit. I mean, I've grown accustomed to the fact that you feel free to drop in unannounced at all hours of the day and night, but maybe, just maybe, you could consider doing it a bit less frequently. Is that so much to ask?

Don't get me wrong here - I'm flattered by the attention. I really am. The problem though is that you have overloaded my now-overworked website, causing it to spontaneously disappear on, of all days, the morning of September 11, 2008. And to add insult to injury, the generic, no-frills page that popped up instead, proclaiming that my site was under house arrest for the crime of exceeding its bandwidth allocation, was arguably more attractive than my actual homepage.

Luckily, this problem was quickly brought to my attention by a few alert readers and I was able to liberate my site by digging deeply into my pockets to come up with the bail money that the jailers were demanding (I think they referred to it as "adding resources" to my site, but I wasn't really fooled by that. And I didn't, by the way, really dig that deeply into my pockets. But that's not the point. No, the point is that my site is - and I'm sure that there are many of you who do not know this - primitive by design. It is my belief that the 'retro website' look will soon be all the rage, and I want to be at the forefront of that movement. Everything old will someday become new again, and the 'net has been around for long enough now, given our collectively short attention span, that a return to basics - to those first tentative baby-steps some of us took in creating one of those newfangled things called 'websites' - is all but guaranteed. My site, needless to say, will become the template that will be followed by everyone who wants to run with the in-crowd. I will, of course, be regarded as something of a visionary. Unfortunately though, I will ultimately be revealed as a fraud when, a few years down the road, legions of fans suddenly realize that, long after the fad has passed, my site is still retro. Self-righteous critics will denounce me as a poser, a charlatan - they may even invoke that most demeaning of future slurs and label me a 'Palin.' But before that happens, the brief time during which I shall have basked in the limelight will have made it all worthwhile.

A top City banker is due in court today charged with murdering his wife who was found strangled at their home.

Neil Ellerbeck, 45, a senior HSBC executive based at Canary Wharf, was arrested at the detached property in Enfield.

His wife, Katherine, 46, was pronounced dead at the house after paramedics and police were called to the cul-de-sac on Friday afternoon.

The couple's children, a 13-year-old son and daughter aged 10, are not thought to have been at the £650,000 four-bedroom home at the time and are being cared for by Mrs Ellerbeck's sister who lives nearby.

The family were too distressed to talk. The couple had been married for 14 years.