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Mon, 08 Nov 2021
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Blue Whale suicide curator sentenced to 3 years in prison

handcuffed man
© Michaela Begsteiger / Global Look Press
The curator of the social media 'suicide game' dubbed 'Blue Whale,' Filipp Budeykin, has been sentenced to 3 years and 4 months in prison by a court in the Russian Siberian city of Tobolsk after pleading guilty.

Budeykin,22, was detained last year with the investigation concluding in June.

He was initially suspected of 15 attempts of inciting teenagers to commit suicide across Russia but was eventually convicted on two counts.

Budeykin organized several closed so-called 'death groups' on Russia's VKontakte social media network in April and May 2016, according to investigators.

Comment: See also:


Attention

West London: Car plows into street-fighting gang

car crash
© ElectricBoudoir/YouTube
A video captures the horrifying moment a young man is almost killed when a car plows into a group of youths fighting in a west London street.

CCTV footage shows a group of young men fighting in the middle of a street with what appear to be knives and furniture.

Moments later, a silver car tears down the street, mounting the pavement in pursuit of the youths.

Fortunately for the fleeing youths, the vehicle crashes and becomes lodged between a wall and a street lamp.

The attackers then launch themselves on the car in an attempt to get at the driver. A group of at least three can be seen on the passenger's side trying to open the door.

Brick Wall

ICE director plans further crackdowns on undocumented immigrants, sending more agents to sanctuary cities

Thomas Homan ICE Director

ICE Director Thomas Homan
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Thomas Homan on Tuesday said he plans to further crack down on undocumented immigrants by sending more resources and agents to sanctuary cities.

Homan told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday that he plans to address "ludicrous" sanctuary cities.
"In the America I grew up in, cities didn't shield people who violated the law," Homan told the publication. "What I want to get is a clear understanding from everybody, from the congressmen to the politicians to law enforcement to those who enter the country illegally, that ICE is open for business."

"We're going to enforce the laws on the books without apology, we'll continue to prioritize what we do," Homan continued. "But it's not OK to violate the laws of this country anymore, you're going to be held accountable."

Frog

Florida dog owners are battling toxic toads to protect their beloved pets

Cane toad
© AP
The Cane Toad or bufo marinus
Sarah Hulke-Ehorn didn't want to become an expert on bufo toads.

The invasive critters literally jumped their way into her life nearly a year ago, when one of her Yorkies snatched up what turned out to be a deadly toad.

"She thought she was protecting us," Hulke-Ehorn said while sitting on her lanai. "She came out from under the smoker with its head in her mouth, and she's killed rats and bunnies. That's what they were bred for."

Next, the dog, a 3-year-old named Daisy Mae, started convulsing at their home in south Fort Myers.

"She started having seizures, and right as we pulled into the (veterinarian office) she died in my lap," she said. "It was violent. The noises she was making, it was horrible. We had been killing them prior to that. We knew about the toads. (But at the time) I was afraid of my own backyard because they were out there."

Display

CNN star Chris Cillizza has Q & A session on Reddit, epic disaster ensues as critics savage his ethics

CNN's Chris Cillizza
© Facebook
CNN's Chris Cillizza
Reddit commenters bashed CNN Politics editor Chris Cillizza during an "Ask Me Anything" forum on Tuesday, criticizing the reporter for his biased views and questioning his journalism ethics.

Cillizza hosted the one-hour online Reddit forum in the afternoon, welcoming users to ask him questions to answer. Most commenters immediately slammed the editor for the lack of balanced reporting in his articles and treating "politics like sport."

"Chris, have you considered the fact that your reporting style of repeated and absurd focus on completely inane subjects, like 'an analysis of the Trump-Macron handshake' not only makes us all collectively stupider, but fundamentally devalues the role politics has in shaping our lives in favor of absurd horse race coverage that focuses on inside baseball to the exclusion of real working families?" one commenter said.

Comment: Too bad no one asked Cillizza to comment on any one of these points with any amount of seriousness:
Let me say this as clearly as I can: there is no valid reason to oppose the de-escalation of tensions between two nuclear superpowers. None. If you think that Trump has done a bad thing by purportedly working toward these de-escalations, I want you off of my planet before your idiotic neocon warmongering gets us all killed, you amoral f****** psychopath. The world would literally be better off without you. No I am not joking, no I am not exaggerating my position to make a point, and yes, I mean you, personally.

Stephen Cohen, easily the foremost American authority on US-Russian relations, has been delivering the message over and over and over again with increasing urgency that the pressures arising from the debunked Russiagate conspiracy theory have placed us in a situation that is in some crucial ways more dangerous than the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought us within a hair's breadth of nuclear annihilation. The fact that Trump faces unprecedented pressure to maintain escalations with a nuclear superpower under the threat of political repercussions should he ever yield an inch combined with Cohen's description of the following situation places us in a uniquely dangerous situation:
"You know it's easy to joke about this, except that we're at maybe the most dangerous moment in US-Russian relations in my lifetime, and maybe ever. And the reason is that we're in a new cold war, by whatever name. We have three cold war fronts that are fraught with the possibility of hot war, in the Baltic region where NATO is carrying out an unprecedented military buildup on Russia's border, in Ukraine where there is a civil and proxy war between Russia and the west, and of course in Syria, where Russian aircraft and American warplanes are flying in the same territory. Anything could happen."
A 2014 report published in the journal Earth's Future found that it would only take the detonation of 100 nuclear warheads to throw 5 teragrams of black soot into the earth's stratosphere for decades, blocking out the sun and making the photosynthesis of plants impossible, starving every terrestrial organism to death that didn't die of radiation or climate chaos first. The United States and Russia currently have about 7,000 nuclear warheads apiece that we know of.

So yes, I'm going to be f****** furious with anyone who feeds into those political pressures and tries to push the US president away from de-escalation and detente. These are my kids you're threatening. This is everything I've ever loved that your moronic partisan agendas are putting at risk. I don't care if you personally saw Vladimir Putin himself hacking a voting machine, there is no valid reason for you to support heightened tensions between two nuclear superpowers with innumerable moving parts where anything could go wrong in any instant. You don't get to push my species into extinction just because Rachel Maddow told you a scary bedtime story. You can f*** right off with that shit.

Every human being on earth should support Trump and Putin in de-escalating tensions between the US and Russia and want these two countries to get along. This has been the stupidest game of chicken that anyone has ever played, and it needs to end forever. If you have a problem with this, you need to get the f*** over yourself and go find some other way to masturbate your idiotic partisan loyalties. You hate Trump? Fine. You want to try and get him impeached? Fine. Do it some other way that doesn't involve risking the life of every organism on this planet.



Attention

Chinese villagers sue collector over ownership of extremely rare mummified Buddha statue

The mummy of Buddhist Master Liuquan, shown inside a Buddha statue via CT scans.
© M. Elsevier Stokmans, Drents Museum
The mummy of Buddhist Master Liuquan, shown inside a Buddha statue via CT scans.
A mummified monk inside a golden Buddha statue is at the center of an international dispute—over who owns it.

Inside the gold figure is the mummified body of Chinese Buddhist monk Qisan Zhang, who was left preserved for generations at a Chinese temple. But villagers claim that the statue was stolen and they are applying international pressure to get it returned.

They've now taken the current owner of the statue to court over it, AFR reported. A Dutch court will now hear the case.

They claim the statue—and with it, the monk, who is believed to have lived about 1,000 years ago during the Song Dynasty—were "stolen" in 1995. It was most recently displayed in the Natural History Museum in Budapest, but it is owned by a private collector, architect Oscar van Overeem.

Sheriff

Cop caught planting fake evidence on body cam, innocent man freed after spending 6 months in jail

cop body cam
It is a common theme among old episodes of COPS — suspects getting arrested over drugs, saying, "those aren't mine." Many times they are lying. However, many times they are not. As a breaking body camera video out of Baltimore appears to show, cops have no problem planting drugs to arrest innocent people.

FOX 45 has obtained body camera footage from a Baltimore police officer that shows him planting a clear baggy of drugs. The 90-second clip also catches his fellow officers standing there in approval as he hides the drugs.

After he's seen planting the fake evidence, the crooked Baltimore cop and his cronies walk out of the alley, at which point he turns on his body camera. However, this corrupt cop apparently had no idea that their new body cameras were programmed to capture the footage 30 seconds prior to activation.

"I'm going to check here," he can be heard saying, as he walks back into the alley in a show for his body camera. Remarkably enough, he knew exactly where the 'drugs' were and was able to find them within seconds.

Snakes in Suits

Records investigation of sexually abused foster children backs up victim claims of rape by Seattle mayor

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray sex abuse

An investigation has revealed that records — once thought to be destroyed — exist backing up the claims of a victim who said the Seattle Mayor raped him.
Over the past several years, multiple victims have come forward and accused Seattle Mayor Ed Murray of sexually abusing them when they were children in the 1980's. Delvonn Heckard, one of the alleged victims, filed a lawsuit against the mayor in April, setting off an investigation by the Seattle Times. What the Times found was nothing short of bombshell and vindication for his alleged victims.

As the Free Thought Project reported in April, Murray's attorney publicly denounced the allegations of sexual abuse from the victims. One of those victims was Jeff Simpson, whose case prompted the controversy in 2008.
"The previous accusers were investigated by law enforcement and the press and found to be not credible and their claims meritless," attorney Robert Sulkin told reporters in April.
However, these claims were easily made because the Oregon Department of Human Services' (DHS) foster-parent records of his abuse were said to be destroyed. The mayor himself even felt secure enough to say last month that the press not finding the supposed records of his abuse of Simpson demonstrated his innocence — a move he now likely regrets.

Comment: See also:


Pills

Washington DC doctors allowed to prescribe life-ending medications

Doctor
© Unknown
Doctors and pharmacies in the nation's capital are now allowed to prescribe life-ending medications to terminally ill patients.

The Death with Dignity Act of 2016 became law with the signature of Mayor Muriel Bowser in December of 2016. Now the Bowser administration has announced the implementation of the law in the District.

The city said the law allows terminally ill D.C. residents over the age of 18 to legally obtain a physician's prescription for medications to end their lives in a humane and peaceful manner.

For a person to elect to end his life legally in the District, the individual must work with doctors and pharmacies licensed in D.C. that are willing to prescribe and dispense the lethal medications.

Comment: See also: Brittany Maynard: Why I scheduled my death for November 1st


Megaphone

Muslim drag queen claims same-sex Muslim marriages are thriving in UK

Asifa Lahore
© Asifa Lahore / Facebook
Asifa Lahore
Same-sex Muslim marriages are "thriving" in the UK, according to the person billed as the country's first Muslim drag queen.

Asifa Lahore, 34, whose Pakistani family raised her in west London, contested the recent claim made by another gay Muslim that his was the first union between two Muslim people of the same sex in Britain.

Jahed Choudhury, 24, made headlines last week when he claimed his marriage with Sean Rogan in Walsall was the first of its kind in the UK.

But Lahore, who rose to fame after featuring in Channel 4's Muslim Drag Queens in 2015, said that while she is happy for Choudhury, who had attempted suicide because of the abuse he suffered as a gay Muslim, there have already been many marriages within Britain's Muslim LGBT community.