A Pennsylvania woman claims she joined a satanic cult at age13 and went on a murderous, 6-year rampage

At least one Satanist leader is a nonbeliever when it comes to a Pennsylvania woman's claims that she joined a satanic cult, then killed dozens of people over a six-year period.

Miranda Barbour, 19, accused of killing a man in November that she met on Craigslist, made national headlines last week when she told a local newspaper she killed at least 22 others. Barbour, in a jailhouse interview, told The Daily Item in Sunbury that she was sexually abused as a child, joined a satanic cult when she was 13 - and that the cult leader helped her pull the trigger on her first kill.

"There is a secular idea that 'the devil made me do it' that has turned into 'satanism made me do it,'" says Lucien Greaves, spokesman for The Satanic Temple, among the largest such bodies nationwide with a few hundred members. Barbour is not among them, he said.

Federal, state and local authorities say they are looking into Barbour's murderous claims. Tuesday, a Pennsylvania prosecutor said there had been "no verification" of additional slayings, and North Carolina authorities expressed skepticism.

Pakistan is going through very rough times today. But these dystopic times are no more rough than the decades which preceded the partition of the Indian subcontinent. It is often said that history, especially dystopic history, repeats itself. If we can get a handle on how the current affairs of that pre-partition era were manipulated, orchestrated, aided and abetted into existence to serve a larger geopolitical agenda, then it can help us understand some of the forces doing the same today.

The most significant character of that era is "Sir" Allama Mohammad Iqbal of Sialkot. The re-examination of our political history in the essay: Sacred Cow: Allama Iqbal - marde-momin or superman By Zahir Ebrahim unmasks many of the forces that motivated this fellow into serving imperial interests in the name of serving Muslims and Islam. These forces have not perished, but similarly fabricating and orchestrating events in Pakistan today with a new retinue of stooges and mercenaries. The modus operandi, unsurprisingly enough, isn't dissimilar either (and why change it when it works so well). Chaos conditions are fabricated with terror to create social tension which is subsequently harvested as "demands" of the people. That modus operandi of recent history already out in the open, called the "strategy of tension" in Western Europe, can be studied in the article: Operation Gladio Yesterday and Worldwide Terrorism Today - Identifying the Enemy By Zahir Ebrahim.

Caribbean slave descendants, some of whose ancestors worked for David Cameron's distant family, are calling for an apology and billions of pounds in reparations

From his bungalow on the side of a hill in western Jamaica, Willie Thompson surveys the same lush valley that one of his great-great-grandmothers was forced to harvest for sugar cane more than 180 years ago.

"I am an African descendant," he said, whippet-thin and grizzled at the age of 78. "She came here with the chains on her feet, on a slave trade ship".

Mr Thompson knows that when Parliament voted in 1833 to abolish slavery in Britain's colonies, Earl Grey's government was made to pay out compensation worth almost £2 billion in today's money.

And after an exhausting day spent scratching out a living by farming yams, he wonders what might have been if Nana Bracket and her comrades, rather than the ancestor of David Cameron who owned them, had received £4,101 of it - the equivalent of £415,000 today.

"The English made a lot of money back then. A lot of money," he said, with a sigh almost long enough to reach Dudley, West Mids, where he worked as a labourer in the 1960s before returning home. "I think it is fair for we to get a bit of compensation for what all our people been through."

A coalition of 14 Caribbean states, including Jamaica, agrees with Mr Thompson, and is now mounting the first united campaign for reparations from Britain over its role in the Atlantic slave trade.

The tale of the police dashcam video has now helped clear a Bloomfield, New Jersey man who faced a multitude of criminal charges, including eluding police and assault.

Investigative Reporter Sarah Wallace obtained the dashcam tapes, and has spoken exclusively with the 30-year old DJ who was looking at years in prison.

It was quite a turnabout, all the criminal charges against Marcus Jeter have been dismissed, and two Bloomfield police officers have been indicted for falsifying reports, and one of them, for assault.

A third pleaded guilty early on to tampering. It's all thanks to those dashcam tapes. It's the video that prosecutors say they never saw when the pursued criminal charges against 30 year-old Marcus Jeter . In the video, his hands were in the air. He was charged with eluding police, resisting arrest and assault. One officer in the video can be seen throwing repeated punches.

Sarah Wallace: "It this tape hadn't surfaced?"
Marcus: "I'd be in jail."

Julie, an immaculately made-up woman, sits down in front of a camera. She has thick, voluminous hair that frames the high cheekbones of her conspicuously crease-free face. Her elegant, arched eyebrows and extra-long eyelashes act as a counterbalance to her plump, painted lips. She looks out of frame, as if admiring herself in a mirror, before giggling and batting her eyelids.

"Oh dear," she purrs, tilting her head from side to side. "Another long day in a wig and a girdle."

She reaches up and emits a light moan as she unclips her gold earrings and gently sets them aside, one by one. She considers her image a few moments longer, then places her hands just below her ears and begins to pull her blemish-free skin off and away from her jawline. It's only now that we realize it's not human skin, but rather a mask made of soft, flesh-like silicone rubber.

Julie is one of the most visible faces of female masking, a specific subset of cross-dressing men who wear masks, and occasionally skin-tone bodysuits, to make them look more like biological women. The videos that she uploads to YouTube have received hundreds of thousands of views, attracting both fans and detractors.

By now, most people who shop online are aware of the way in which companies try to tailor their offers based on your previous purchasing and browsing history. Being followed by strangely relevant ads everywhere is bad enough, but what if the government started using the same approach in its communications with you? That's one of the key ideas explored in an interesting new article by Zeynep Tufekci, strikingly presented on Medium, with the title "Is the Internet good or bad? Yes."

Tufekci suggests that neither of the two main metaphors regularly wheeled out for today's global surveillance -- George Orwell's "1984" and Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon -- is right:

To understand the actual -- and truly disturbing -- power of surveillance, it's better to turn to a thinker who knows about real prisons: the Italian writer, politician, and philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who was jailed by Mussolini and did most of his work while locked up. Gramsci understood that the most powerful means of control available to a modern capitalist state is not coercion or imprisonment, but the ability to shape the world of ideas.

The polarized politics of Venezuela are again in the news as demonstrations by pro- (see above) and anti-government forces are taking place, with, at this point, four deaths: a government supporter; an opposition demonstrator; a police officer; and one of uncertain provenance. But the foreign press is portraying these as evidence of bloody government repression.

Not to go over old ground, at least too much, but this manufactured crisis is a re-run. Anyone remember the massive demo/counter-demo at the Miraflores palace in 2002, the lead-up to a short-lived coup against Hugo Chávez?

The disgraceful judges of Britain's High Court - who have gone along with torture, extraordinary rendition, every single argument for mass surveillance and hiding information from the public, and even secret courts - have ruled that it was lawful for the Home Office to detain David Miranda, a journalist as information he was carrying might in some undefined way, and if communicated to them, aid "terrorists".

Despite the entire industry, both private and governmental, devoted to whipping up fear, it is plain to pretty well everyone by now that terrorism is about the most unlikely way for you to die. A car accident is many hundreds of times more likely. Even drowning in your own bath is more likely. Where is the massive industry of suppression against baths?

I had dinner inside the Ecuadorian Embassy on Sunday with Julian Assange, who I am happy to say is as fit and well as possible in circumstances of confinement. Amongst those present was Jesselyn Radack, attorney for, among others, Edward Snowden. Last week on entering the UK she was pulled over by immigration and interrogated about her clients. The supposed "immigration officer" already knew who are Jesselyn Radack's clients. He insisted aggressively on referring repeatedly to Chelsea Manning as a criminal, to which Jesselyn quietly replied that he was a political prisoner. But even were we to accept the "immigration officer's" assertion, the fact that an attorney defends those facing criminal charges is neither new nor until now considered reprehensible and illegitimate.

As various states slide towards totalitarianism, a defining factor is that their populations really don't notice. Well, I have noticed. Have you?

US congressmen Peter Roskam and Dan Lipinski have introduced a bill that would deny funding to American academic institutions that choose to boycott Israel, Al Jazeera reports.

The Protect Academic Freedom Act, introduced by Roskam and Lipinski in early February, is Congress' first effort to enforce penalties on higher learning institutions that receive government money and boycott Israel. It follows similar efforts at the state level in Maryland and New York.

"These organisations are clearly free to do what they want to do under the [US Constitution's] First Amendment," Roskam said on the House floor while introducing the bill. "But the American taxpayer doesn't have to subsidise it. The American taxpayer doesn't have to be complicit in it. And the American taxpayer doesn't have to play any part in it."

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of U.S. military veteran and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern against John Kerry, in his capacity as the Secretary of State, and against officers at George Washington University.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia three years to the date of Mr. McGovern's brutal and false arrest at GWU during a speech of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Since arrest, the PCJF has uncovered that the Department of State issued a Be On The Lookout Alert ('BOLO Alert') for Mr. McGovern which described his "considerable amount of political activism, primarily anti-war," displayed his picture and directed law enforcement that if the then-71-year-old Mr. McGovern was encountered, "USE CAUTION, stop" and question him and contact the Department of State Diplomatic Security Command Center.

Circumstances of arrest

The circumstances of McGovern's 2011 arrest were marked by stinging irony. Mr. McGovern was brutalized and arrested after peacefully and silently standing with his back to Hillary Clinton as she gave a policy speech condemning authoritarian governments who repress dissenters and internet freedom.

As Secretary Clinton was reading from her prepared remarks regarding Egypt's dictatorship saying, "Then the government pulled the plug," Mr. McGovern was forcibly and falsely arrested by GWU police officers, grabbed by the head and assaulted directly in front of her.


As Secretary Clinton continued undisturbed in her speech which was being live broadcast worldwide by the State Department and was stating, "the government ... did not want the world to watch," Mr. McGovern was removed from public view with excessive and brutal force, taken to jail, and left bleeding with bruises and contusions. Mr. McGovern's charges of disorderly conduct, for standing silently with his back turned, were ultimately dropped.