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Nepal special police investigate 'Buddha boy' guru over devotee disappearances

Buddha Boy
© AFPโ€˜Buddha Boyโ€™ Ram Bahadur Bomjan, seen here in 2008, became famous after followers said he could meditate motionless for months without water, food or sleep.
A Nepali spiritual leader believed by his followers to be a reincarnation of Buddha is under investigation over the disappearance of several devotees, police in Katmandu said Monday.

Ram Bahadur Bomjan, dubbed "Buddha Boy," became famous in 2005 after followers said he could meditate motionless for months without water, food or sleep in Nepal's jungles.

The 28-year-old guru has a devout following but has been accused of physically and sexually assaulting some of his flock.

Special police investigators have begun inquiries after the families of four of Bomjan's devotees allegedly vanished from his ashrams.

Comment: See also:


Star of David

Court rules Israeli ultra-Orthodox party must end ban on women within 21 days

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women
© Miriam Alster/Flash90Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women in Mea Shearim, Jerusalem
The High Court of Justice instructed ultra-Orthodox party Agudath Israel on Thursday to change its party regulations within 21 days to allow women to run for office, in line with an agreement reached in September on the matter.

Currently a clause in the regulations stipulates that only men may run on the platform.

Agudath Israel along with the Degel HaTorah party forms United Torah Judaism in the Knesset, and sits in the governing coalition. The two parties announced a split this week, though they called it a "procedural" move and said they may reunite before the upcoming April elections.

Comment: Sputnik adds:
The move was followed by Israeli women's groups expressing doubt that amending the clause alone would immediately remove the obstacles females face in joining the country's ultra-orthodox party.

The court ruled that the party's charter should be amended within 21 days in order to remove all women-related restrictions, saying that "there will not be any rules preventing acceptance of a woman as a party member" and that "from a legal standpoint the appeal process has been fulfilled".

Under the ruling, if the party regulations aren't amended and a woman is blocked from joining the party, she may file a petition to the High Court.

Haaretz cited an unnamed Agudat Yisrael member as saying that the party will "respect the High Court's instructions to change the party's constitution because it's a matter of semantics that has no practical meaning".

"Even the group of women who speak about a lack of women's representation in the party know that this won't change in the decades to come, and still they know that Agudat Yisrael is a party that will see to the needs of all Haredi Jews," he said.

Women's groups based in Israel claimed, for their part, that amending the clause alone would not completely remove the obstacles females face in joining the party.
In other words,Agudath Israel will amend its charter, but not follow it. Still, the tide may be turning in a broader social sense.


X

French producers say 'non' to California ban on foie gras, blame vegetarian lobbyists

foie gras
© REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
French foie gras makers have accused the U.S. Supreme Court of bowing to false claims by vegetarian lobbyists with its refusal to hear an appeal against a California ban on the delicacy produced from force-fed ducks and geese.

The U.S. court on Monday declined to hear an appeal by producers that also included a Canadian non-profit organization that represents duck and goose farmers, clearing the ban on a product that French lawmakers recognized in 2006 as part the European country's "cultural and gastronomic heritage".

France is by far the world's largest foie gras producer with a market share of about 70 percent.

Comment: Those plant-based people won't be happy until we're all eating fake meat.


Snowflake

The 'Woke' crowd and the Nuremburg trials of comedy

louis ck
The "Wokes" are coming for the jokes.

Wherever you look, the "anything goes" crowd have become the "That's not funny!" scolds. No wonder Jerry Seinfeld won't play college campuses anymore. The clean comic of the 90's, the man behind the most successful situational comedy in television history, says he can't make a joke on a campus today because today's Left can't take a joke at all.

You don't have to be a conservative to wonder at what the Wokes have wrought. Louis C.K., a usually liberal leaning comedian who has already come under #MeToo fire for his personal conduct, faced backlash again for a recent set in which he called out millennial progressive Americans for their hyper-vigilant joke policing. According to the Hollywood Reporter, C.K. called out the humorlessness of today's snowflake youth, then went after one of their sacred cows: gender.

"They're like royalty," he says. "They tell you what to call them. 'You should address me as they/them, because I identify as gender-neutral.' Oh, OK. You should address me as 'there' because I identify as a location. And the location is your mother's c--t It doesn't have to be that nasty, but it can be."

Bullseye

Not even Joseph Biden's family could stand to vote for Killary as president in 2016

Frank Biden
© KAZUHIRO NOGI / Staff / Getty ImagesFrank Biden
Frank Biden, younger brother of former Vice President Joe Biden, ripped Hillary Clinton in a recent interview, saying the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate blew Pennsylvania and that many in his family didn't even vote for her, opting to pull the lever for President Trump.

Biden said his brother would have won his home state of Pennsylvania and would never have insulted more conservative voters as "deplorables."

"We never would have lost Pennsylvania, and all my relatives - the Finnegan family [his mom's family] - who voted for Donald Trump because they felt slighted by Hillary and her campaign," Biden, 65, told Florida's Palm Beach Post. His brother, who is mulling his own run in 2020, is a native of Scranton.


Comment: It's safe to say a great deal of Americans felt the same way.


Biden also said his brother would not have ignored Michigan, which, like Pennsylvania, voted for Trump in 2016.

Heart - Black

Damning report finds immigration loophole led to thousands of approved child bride requests

Naila Amin
© AP Photo/Kathy Kmonicek
Thousands of requests by men to bring in child and adolescent brides to live in the United States were approved over the past decade, according to government data obtained by The Associated Press. In one case, a 49-year-old man applied for admission for a 15-year-old girl.

The approvals are legal: The Immigration and Nationality Act does not set minimum age requirements. And in weighing petitions for spouses or fiancees, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services goes by whether the marriage is legal in the home country and then whether the marriage would be legal in the state where the petitioner lives.

But the data raises questions about whether the immigration system may be enabling forced marriage and about how U.S. laws may be compounding the problem despite efforts to limit child and forced marriage. Marriage between adults and minors is not uncommon in the United States, and most states allow children to marry with some restrictions.

There were more than 5,000 cases of adults petitioning on behalf of minors and nearly 3,000 examples of minors seeking to bring in older spouses or fiances, according to the data requested by the Senate Homeland Security Committee in 2017 and compiled into a report.

Handcuffs

Just an empty gesture: Five IDF troops arrested for beating Palestinian detainees

IDF soldier
© AP Photo / Majdi Mohammed
Military police detained an Israel Defense Force platoon commander and four troops serving in his unit for reportedly beating two captured Palestinians, according to Israeli media.

The soldiers are members of the Netzah Yehuda Battalion, a unit designed for Orthodox Jews to be able to serve in the defense force and stay true to their religious convictions. The Jerusalem Post notes the battalion receives a range of recruits, from ultra-Orthodox Israelis to immigrants and would-be settlers.

The military court hearing did not uncover when the alleged beating took place, though the military said the Palestinians were detained in the Ramallah area, a Palestinian city in the West Bank just north of Jerusalem. It's not clear what charges the five are being tried for.

The court lengthened the detention of the officer until Sunday. The four soldiers will stay locked up until next Tuesday.

Shoe

Notorious anti-Kremlin shock 'artist' arrested for torching French bank will walk free due to 'suspended sentence'

Pyotr Pavlensky arson french bank
A shock artist from Russia, praised in the West as a vivid Kremlin critic, has been sentenced to three years in prison for arson in France, but will walk free. The controversial 'activist' also received a hefty fine for his stunt.

Pyotr Pavlensky garnered international attention and support for being a vocal government critic. His shock stunts, including nailing his scrotum to the Red Square pavement and several acts of creative vandalism, made him famous in the West.

Pavlensky's notoriety received a boost when he was fined 481,500 rubles (โ‚ฌ6,500) by a Russian court for setting fire to the entrance of the Russian security service FSB. No prison sentence was issued though.

Apparently, that was the last straw for the notorious stuntman as he fled the 'oppressive' Russian regime and settled down in France. But French life became too idyllic (or miserable?) for Pavlensky, as he and his partner Oksana Shalygina repeated his arson stunt at the door of the Bank of France in October 2017.

French judges weren't impressed by his creative genius. On Thursday, Pavlensky and Shalygina stood trial in Paris and faced up to ten years in prison for "dangerous destruction of property."

Comment: No doubt the court's leniency is due to the 'service' provided by Pavlensky in giving some credence to the narrative of Russia as an 'intolerant and oppressive regime'. And noting the French government's hypocrisy, such generosity will not likely be shown to the hapless Gilet Jaunes who have been arrested during (or ahead of) recent protests.

See:


Heart

Teen missing for 3 months found alive after escaping captor who murdered parents and kidnapped her; suspect arrested [Update]

Jayme Closs
© Barron County, Wis., Sheriff's DepartmentJayme Closs in an undated photo provided by Barron County, Wis., Sheriff's Department
Jayme Closs, the 13-year-old Wisconsin girl who police say was kidnapped after the murder of her parents in October, was found late Thursday afternoon by a woman outside of Gordon -- 70 miles away from the girl's Barron home.

Kristin Kasinskas was just getting home from work when her dog started barking because someone was walking up her driveway, she told ABC News. It was her neighbor -- along with a girl with matted hair and shoes too big for her.

"She came to the door, she knocked, then she actually just opened the door and said, 'Call 911, this is Jayme Closs.' We recognized Jayme immediately, because obviously, we've seen her picture everywhere, everywhere," Kasinskas said.

Closs had come up to the neighbor, who has not been publicly identified, while the neighbor was walking a dog, Kasinskas said. Closs did not explain how she escaped from apparent captivity, Kasinskas added.

Comment: Authorities have also explained that the motive all along was to kidnap the teen and that he had taken steps to plan the entire act, which seems to include murdering her parents.
"Jayme was taken against her will and taken to a residence where she was held," Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald told reporters Friday. "The subject planned his actions and took many proactive steps to hide his identity."

"We also do not believe at this time that the suspect had any contact with the family. We do believe Jayme was the only target," Fitzgerald said.
UPDATE: From the AP, a Wisconsin man has been arrested:
Authorities say they have jailed a 21-year-old man on kidnapping and homicide charges in the October killing of a Wisconsin couple and abduction of their teen daughter, who was found alive.

Douglas County Sheriff Thomas Dalbec said at a news conference Friday that Jake Thomas Patterson was arrested Thursday after Jayme Closs was found near the Town of Gordon, where Patterson lives.




Folder

Dutch prosecutor states foiled terror attack could've left dozens of victims

gavel
© Wikimedia/Brian Turner
The Netherlands escaped a terrorist attack that could've resulted in "dozens of victims" with the arrest of seven suspects in Arnhem and Weert in September last year, the Public Prosecutor said in court on Thursday - the first proforma hearing in this case. Only three of the six suspects still in detention were present at the hearing, AD reports.

"The suspects said goodbye to friends. These suspects were on the way to commit an attack, with dozens of victims. The Netherlands escaped a major attack", the Prosecutor said.

According to the Prosecutor, the attack was to happen at a festival. The suspects discussed how they would get ready outside the festival, and then go in and commit an attack. "They also talked about tactics: how should they do it? And what to do if one of them is tagged by the police?" They decided not to walk too close to each other, and detonate their bomb vest if they police grab them, the Prosecutor said.

The Prosecutor stressed that there was never a real danger, because the police infiltrated this group and foiled their plans. "But how different it could have been. If the string had broken with the infiltrators, we might have had dozens of victims."

Comment: Patsies or not?