Society's Child
They were identified as Jorge Beltrao Negromonte and Elizabeth Pires da Silveira, both 51, and Bruna da Silva. Police allege they intended to kill three women per year.
Once at their home, it is thought that the women were killed and their "meat" was cooked and used as the filling in a pastry dish known as empanada, which was then sold to unwitting neighbours.
Police acted after two bodies were found in the garden of the house of the trio. Police believe they may be the bodies of Alexandra Falcao, 20 and Gisele da Silva, 30, both of whom disappeared recently.
China is often a country about which Washington's moralists get on their high horse. However, China's "authoritarian" government is actually more responsive to its people than America's "elected democratic" government. Moreover, however incomplete on paper the civil liberties of China's people, the Chinese government has not declared that it can violate with impunity whatever rights Chinese citizens have. And it is not China that is running torture prisons all over the globe.
For some time I have had in mind a realistic comparison of the two countries instead of the standard propagandistic comparison, but Ron Unz has beat me to the task (see, China's Rise, America's Fall and Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison ). Unz provides a chance for an education. Don't miss it.
Unz has done an excellent job. Moreover, he cleverly understates the case for China and overstates the case for America so as not to unduly arouse the flag-wavers. Nevertheless, the conclusion is clear: The Chinese are less threatened by their "extractive elites" than Americans are by their counterparts.

U.S. Marines patrol in front of a poppy field in a village in the Golestan district of Farah province, May 4, 2009.
While the cases represent just a slice of possible drug use by U.S. troops in Afghanistan, they provide a somber snapshot of the illicit trade in the war zone, including young Afghans peddling heroin, soldiers dying after mixing cocktails of opiates, troops stealing from medical bags and Afghan soldiers and police dealing drugs to their U.S. comrades.
In a country awash with poppy fields that provide up to 90 percent of the world's opium, the U.S. military struggles to keep an eye on its far-flung troops and monitor for substance abuse.
But U.S. Army officials say that while the presence of such readily available opium - the raw ingredient for heroin - is a concern, opiate abuse has not been a pervasive problem for troops in Afghanistan.
"We have seen sporadic cases of it, but we do not see it as a widespread problem, and we have the means to check," said Col. Tom Collins, an Army spokesman.
This morning (April 19th), a new episode unfolded in my ongoing struggle with the IRS and the Empire the agency is nestled in.
I was subpoenaed to appear in the 9th Circuit court of the US Federal Court system in Sacramento, California - my state's capitol.
For background, I have had two meetings with the IRS agent assigned to my case where I expressed to him my unwillingness, due to my principles, to participate in funding a system that commits crimes almost every second of every day. At this point, the IRS is trying to collect 105 grand that it says I owe for the tax years 2005-2006. I first became a war tax refuser in 2005.

Russian missile cruiser Varyag is shown in this 2009 photo docked at Qingdao port, China's Shandong Province.
The large-scale war game, the navies' first bilateral drill, is scheduled Sunday through Friday off the resort city of Qingdao in the Yellow Sea, Xinhua said.
Russia also sent from Vladivostok three Udaloy class destroyers and three support ships, said Russian news agency Ria Novosti.
China will use 16 ships, including destroyers, frigates and two submarines, in the drill called Maritime Cooperation-2012, Ria Novosti said.
A Chinese aircraft carrier may also participate, the International Business Times said.
Comment: One might wonder, were the signs done in English, paid for by U.S. dollars, made in China?
A "return to Asia" after 10 years of spreading
Each year, more than 10,000 live animals are shot, stabbed, mutilated, and killed in horrific military training exercises that are supposed to simulate injuries on the battlefield. But the training exercises that are taking place in these highly secret courses bear no resemblance to real battlefield conditions - and they don't help soldiers save the lives of their injured comrades.
In disturbing, never-before-seen undercover video footage leaked to PETA showing a Coast Guard training course in Virginia Beach, Virginia, instructors with a company called Tier 1 Group, which was hired by the military, are seen breaking and cutting off the limbs of live goats with tree trimmers, stabbing the animals, and pulling out their internal organs. Goats moan and kick their legs during the mutilations - signs that they had not received adequate anesthesia.
During this cruel exercise, one Tier 1 Group instructor is heard cheerfully whistling on the video as he cuts off goats' legs and a Coast Guard participant callously jokes about writing songs about mutilating the animals.
Later in the day, according to the distraught whistleblower who came to PETA, goats were shot in the face with pistols and were hacked apart with an ax while still alive.
Cruel exercises like these continue regularly across the U.S. even though most civilian facilities and many military facilities have already replaced animal laboratories with superior lifelike simulators that breathe, bleed, and even "die."
Back in 1999, he was onto flaking "harm reduction" policies before the whole political establishment, including President Barack Obama's own people, adopted the meme. Today, he's ahead of the curve again, this time on pinpointing a clear strategy for reducing violence along the U.S.-Mexico border.
"Right now, 75 percent of the cartels' activities revolve around marijuana," the Libertarian Party presidential candidate told Raw Story recently. "I think as a nation, when we legalize marijuana, we're going to take giant steps toward drug reform, which will start off with looking at drugs as a public health issue, rather then a criminal justice issue. I just think legalizing marijuana [will cause] at least a 75 percent reduction in border violence due to the drugs [trade]."
Unfortunately for reform advocates, he told Raw Story recently that the shift in presidential politics has gone in the exact opposite direction. "We started MPP when Clinton was president," Kampia explained. "Clinton was horrible. Bush was worse than Clinton... and Obama is worse than Bush."
Although the U.S. abolished debtors' prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who don't pay all manner of debts, from bills for health care services to credit card and auto loans. In parts of Illinois, debt collectors commonly use publicly funded courts, sheriff's deputies, and country jails to pressure people who owe even small amounts to pay up, according to the AP.
BP has stepped into a new row over oil spills - this time in Russia - less than 24 hours after announcing it was going to pay out $8bn in America for polluting beaches with the Deepwater Horizon blowout.
Shares in TNK-BP, the Russian joint venture, slumped 5% after a meeting chaired by Vladimir Putin heard how legal action seeking damages was being prepared over leaks from pipelines into the Ob and Yenisei rivers. Natural resources and ecology minister Yuri Trutnev, whose ministry has a track record of successfully stripping companies such as Shell of their assets over ecological misdeeds, told Putin he was planning to go to court.
"I ordered Rosprirodnadzor [the environmental regulator] to prepare a lawsuit to seek damages and offered the company to lay out a plan on overhauling their pipeline system," he said, according to the meeting transcripts published on the government website on Thursday. "Please, act in line with the law," Putin was reported to have said in response.













Comment: For those who believe the U.S. is anything but a drug kingpin with a history of trafficking drugs have a look at the following.
US military Admits to Guarding, Assisting Lucrative Opium Trade in Afghanistan
War On Drugs Is A $2.5 Trillion Racket: How Big Banks, Private Military Companies And The Prison Industry Cash In
The CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan