Last updated 13:12 23/02/2010
A man who accidentally shot dead his girlfriend with a sawn-off shotgun last year may avoid imprisonment.
Justin Paul Goldstone, 21, admitted the manslaughter of his partner of six months, Samantha Joanne Henderson, 20, when he appeared in North Shore District Court today.
He also pleaded guilty to the unlawful possession of a cut-down shotgun and was remanded on bail by Judge David McNaughton to be sentenced in the High Court in Auckland in May.
Judge McNaughton also ordered a probation report with sentencing options, including home detention or community detention, also to be explored. The maximum sentence for manslaughter is life in prison but there is no minimum.
Ms Henderson died on December 4 last year as Goldstone posed for a series of pictures with a sawn-off shotgun which police said he had acquired for their protection.
She had asked him to pose after he got the loaded shotgun from an attic space where it had been stored.
Ms Henderson took several pictures with her digital camera, showing Goldstone with his finger resting on the trigger as he pointed the shotgun at the camera.
The shotgun discharged and the blast hit Ms Henderson in the head with shotgun pellets going through the camera.
The blast caused "massive trauma to the left side of her head,"' said police in the summary of facts.
Goldstone dropped the shotgun and went to her aid, but Ms Henderson was unresponsive.
He put her in his car and took her to a medical centre but refused to give a statement to police for three days.
He said he believed his finger was outside the trigger guard and not resting on the trigger.
Goldstone and his supporters refused to speak outside court but soon after the shooting last December relatives said it was accidental.
From: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/3363356/Partner-shot-dead-in-photoshoot
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Man beaten with high-heel on Waffle House Valentine's date
Posted: February 19, 2010 - 3:15am
By Savannah Morning News
Pooler police say violence erupted during one couple's Valentine's Day outing, as the suitor's former lover burst into the restaurant and beat the man with her high-heel shoe.
Early Sunday morning, officers were called to the Waffle House at 1012 E. U.S. 80, finding a "blood-covered floor and tables in a state of disarray," according an incident report filed by Pooler police.
A 33-year-old man had suffered cuts and scrapes on his face, marks left by the "spiked heel from a shoe," police reported.
The victim told officers that he and his girlfriend were at a booth when a pair of sisters - one of whom is the mother of his children - came in and started an argument.
He tried to ignore them, police reported, even as they began hitting him. A Waffle House manager told police the women also hurled sugar and salt containers through a window.
At some point, the assailants went to the parking lot and damaged the man's car, police reported.
They then returned inside, and the man struck at least one of the women, according to the report.
That's when the women took off in a car; a Savannah-Chatham police officer spotted the getaway vehicle and followed it to Memorial University Medical Center, Pooler police reported.
One of the women was treated for a cut above her right eye before both were taken to the Pooler police department.
The suspects - identified as Kenya White, 29, of Meldrim; and Marrisha White, 32, of Hinesville - were each charged with battery and criminal damage to private property, according to the incident report. They were taken to the Chatham County jail.
Paramedics treated the victim at the scene, police reported.
From: http://savannahnow.com/crime/2010-02-19/man-beaten-high-heel-waffle-house-valentines-date
By Savannah Morning News
Pooler police say violence erupted during one couple's Valentine's Day outing, as the suitor's former lover burst into the restaurant and beat the man with her high-heel shoe.
Early Sunday morning, officers were called to the Waffle House at 1012 E. U.S. 80, finding a "blood-covered floor and tables in a state of disarray," according an incident report filed by Pooler police.
A 33-year-old man had suffered cuts and scrapes on his face, marks left by the "spiked heel from a shoe," police reported.
The victim told officers that he and his girlfriend were at a booth when a pair of sisters - one of whom is the mother of his children - came in and started an argument.
He tried to ignore them, police reported, even as they began hitting him. A Waffle House manager told police the women also hurled sugar and salt containers through a window.
At some point, the assailants went to the parking lot and damaged the man's car, police reported.
They then returned inside, and the man struck at least one of the women, according to the report.
That's when the women took off in a car; a Savannah-Chatham police officer spotted the getaway vehicle and followed it to Memorial University Medical Center, Pooler police reported.
One of the women was treated for a cut above her right eye before both were taken to the Pooler police department.
The suspects - identified as Kenya White, 29, of Meldrim; and Marrisha White, 32, of Hinesville - were each charged with battery and criminal damage to private property, according to the incident report. They were taken to the Chatham County jail.
Paramedics treated the victim at the scene, police reported.
From: http://savannahnow.com/crime/2010-02-19/man-beaten-high-heel-waffle-house-valentines-date
Monday, February 22, 2010
The Chemist's War
The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences.
By Deborah Blum
Posted Friday, Feb. 19, 2010, at 10:00 AM ET
It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.
Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.
Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination." Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that's due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.
I learned of the federal poisoning program while researching my new book, The Poisoner's Handbook, which is set in jazz-age New York. My first reaction was that I must have gotten it wrong. "I never heard that the government poisoned people during Prohibition, did you?" I kept saying to friends, family members, colleagues.
I did, however, remember the U.S. government's controversial decision in the 1970s to spray Mexican marijuana fields with Paraquat, an herbicide. Its use was primarily intended to destroy crops, but government officials also insisted that awareness of the toxin would deter marijuana smokers. They echoed the official position of the 1920s—if some citizens ended up poisoned, well, they'd brought it upon themselves. Although Paraquat wasn't really all that toxic, the outcry forced the government to drop the plan. Still, the incident created an unsurprising lack of trust in government motives, which reveals itself in the occasional rumors circulating today that federal agencies, such as the CIA, mix poison into the illegal drug supply.
During Prohibition, however, an official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place. As the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1927: "Normally, no American government would engage in such business. … It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified." Others, however, accused lawmakers opposed to the poisoning plan of being in cahoots with criminals and argued that bootleggers and their law-breaking alcoholic customers deserved no sympathy. "Must Uncle Sam guarantee safety first for souses?" asked Nebraska's Omaha Bee.
The saga began with ratification of the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States.* High-minded crusaders and anti-alcohol organizations had helped push the amendment through in 1919, playing on fears of moral decay in a country just emerging from war. The Volstead Act, spelling out the rules for enforcement, passed shortly later, and Prohibition itself went into effect on Jan. 1, 1920.
But people continued to drink—and in large quantities. Alcoholism rates soared during the 1920s; insurance companies charted the increase at more than 300 more percent. Speakeasies promptly opened for business. By the decade's end, some 30,000 existed in New York City alone. Street gangs grew into bootlegging empires built on smuggling, stealing, and manufacturing illegal alcohol. The country's defiant response to the new laws shocked those who sincerely (and naively) believed that the amendment would usher in a new era of upright behavior.
Rigorous enforcement had managed to slow the smuggling of alcohol from Canada and other countries. But crime syndicates responded by stealing massive quantities of industrial alcohol—used in paints and solvents, fuels and medical supplies—and redistilling it to make it potable.
Well, sort of. Industrial alcohol is basically grain alcohol with some unpleasant chemicals mixed in to render it undrinkable. The U.S. government started requiring this "denaturing" process in 1906 for manufacturers who wanted to avoid the taxes levied on potable spirits. The U.S. Treasury Department, charged with overseeing alcohol enforcement, estimated that by the mid-1920s, some 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol were stolen annually to supply the country's drinkers. In response, in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge's government decided to turn to chemistry as an enforcement tool. Some 70 denaturing formulas existed by the 1920s. Most simply added poisonous methyl alcohol into the mix. Others used bitter-tasting compounds that were less lethal, designed to make the alcohol taste so awful that it became undrinkable.
To sell the stolen industrial alcohol, the liquor syndicates employed chemists to "renature" the products, returning them to a drinkable state. The bootleggers paid their chemists a lot more than the government did, and they excelled at their job. Stolen and redistilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their products far more deadly.
By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.
The results were immediate, starting with that horrific holiday body count in the closing days of 1926. Public health officials responded with shock. "The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. "[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible."
His department issued warnings to citizens, detailing the dangers in whiskey circulating in the city: "[P]ractically all the liquor that is sold in New York today is toxic," read one 1928 alert. He publicized every death by alcohol poisoning. He assigned his toxicologist, Alexander Gettler, to analyze confiscated whiskey for poisons—that long list of toxic materials I cited came in part from studies done by the New York City medical examiner's office.
Norris also condemned the federal program for its disproportionate effect on the country's poorest residents. Wealthy people, he pointed out, could afford the best whiskey available. Most of those sickened and dying were those "who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff."
And the numbers were not trivial. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor. Furious anti-Prohibition legislators pushed for a halt in the use of lethal chemistry. "Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition statutes," proclaimed Sen. James Reed of Missouri.
Officially, the special denaturing program ended only once the 18th Amendment was repealed in December 1933. But the chemist's war itself faded away before then. Slowly, government officials quit talking about it. And when Prohibition ended and good grain whiskey reappeared, it was almost as if the craziness of Prohibition—and the poisonous measures taken to enforce it—had never quite happened.
Correction, Feb. 22, 2010: The article originally and incorrectly said that the 18th Amendment banned the sale and consumption of alcohol. It banned the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol, not consumption.
From: http://www.slate.com/id/2245188/pagenum/all/
By Deborah Blum
Posted Friday, Feb. 19, 2010, at 10:00 AM ET
It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.
Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.
Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination." Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that's due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.
I learned of the federal poisoning program while researching my new book, The Poisoner's Handbook, which is set in jazz-age New York. My first reaction was that I must have gotten it wrong. "I never heard that the government poisoned people during Prohibition, did you?" I kept saying to friends, family members, colleagues.
I did, however, remember the U.S. government's controversial decision in the 1970s to spray Mexican marijuana fields with Paraquat, an herbicide. Its use was primarily intended to destroy crops, but government officials also insisted that awareness of the toxin would deter marijuana smokers. They echoed the official position of the 1920s—if some citizens ended up poisoned, well, they'd brought it upon themselves. Although Paraquat wasn't really all that toxic, the outcry forced the government to drop the plan. Still, the incident created an unsurprising lack of trust in government motives, which reveals itself in the occasional rumors circulating today that federal agencies, such as the CIA, mix poison into the illegal drug supply.
During Prohibition, however, an official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place. As the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1927: "Normally, no American government would engage in such business. … It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified." Others, however, accused lawmakers opposed to the poisoning plan of being in cahoots with criminals and argued that bootleggers and their law-breaking alcoholic customers deserved no sympathy. "Must Uncle Sam guarantee safety first for souses?" asked Nebraska's Omaha Bee.
The saga began with ratification of the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States.* High-minded crusaders and anti-alcohol organizations had helped push the amendment through in 1919, playing on fears of moral decay in a country just emerging from war. The Volstead Act, spelling out the rules for enforcement, passed shortly later, and Prohibition itself went into effect on Jan. 1, 1920.
But people continued to drink—and in large quantities. Alcoholism rates soared during the 1920s; insurance companies charted the increase at more than 300 more percent. Speakeasies promptly opened for business. By the decade's end, some 30,000 existed in New York City alone. Street gangs grew into bootlegging empires built on smuggling, stealing, and manufacturing illegal alcohol. The country's defiant response to the new laws shocked those who sincerely (and naively) believed that the amendment would usher in a new era of upright behavior.
Rigorous enforcement had managed to slow the smuggling of alcohol from Canada and other countries. But crime syndicates responded by stealing massive quantities of industrial alcohol—used in paints and solvents, fuels and medical supplies—and redistilling it to make it potable.
Well, sort of. Industrial alcohol is basically grain alcohol with some unpleasant chemicals mixed in to render it undrinkable. The U.S. government started requiring this "denaturing" process in 1906 for manufacturers who wanted to avoid the taxes levied on potable spirits. The U.S. Treasury Department, charged with overseeing alcohol enforcement, estimated that by the mid-1920s, some 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol were stolen annually to supply the country's drinkers. In response, in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge's government decided to turn to chemistry as an enforcement tool. Some 70 denaturing formulas existed by the 1920s. Most simply added poisonous methyl alcohol into the mix. Others used bitter-tasting compounds that were less lethal, designed to make the alcohol taste so awful that it became undrinkable.
To sell the stolen industrial alcohol, the liquor syndicates employed chemists to "renature" the products, returning them to a drinkable state. The bootleggers paid their chemists a lot more than the government did, and they excelled at their job. Stolen and redistilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their products far more deadly.
By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.
The results were immediate, starting with that horrific holiday body count in the closing days of 1926. Public health officials responded with shock. "The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. "[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible."
His department issued warnings to citizens, detailing the dangers in whiskey circulating in the city: "[P]ractically all the liquor that is sold in New York today is toxic," read one 1928 alert. He publicized every death by alcohol poisoning. He assigned his toxicologist, Alexander Gettler, to analyze confiscated whiskey for poisons—that long list of toxic materials I cited came in part from studies done by the New York City medical examiner's office.
Norris also condemned the federal program for its disproportionate effect on the country's poorest residents. Wealthy people, he pointed out, could afford the best whiskey available. Most of those sickened and dying were those "who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff."
And the numbers were not trivial. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor. Furious anti-Prohibition legislators pushed for a halt in the use of lethal chemistry. "Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition statutes," proclaimed Sen. James Reed of Missouri.
Officially, the special denaturing program ended only once the 18th Amendment was repealed in December 1933. But the chemist's war itself faded away before then. Slowly, government officials quit talking about it. And when Prohibition ended and good grain whiskey reappeared, it was almost as if the craziness of Prohibition—and the poisonous measures taken to enforce it—had never quite happened.
Correction, Feb. 22, 2010: The article originally and incorrectly said that the 18th Amendment banned the sale and consumption of alcohol. It banned the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol, not consumption.
From: http://www.slate.com/id/2245188/pagenum/all/
Girl, 3, killed in bulldog attack
Associated Press - February 22, 2010 6:14 AM ET
OCALA, Fla. (AP) - A 3-year-old girl who was attacked by a bulldog outside her Ocala-area home has died.
According to a Marion County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman, the girl was playing outside while her mother cleaned a dog pen Saturday. She got tangled in a dog chain when her mother went inside the home.
That's when a male dog attacked the girl, whose name wasn't immediately released.
The Ocala Star-Banner reports that four dogs were outside the home at the time of the attack, but investigators believe just 1 of the animals was involved. All the dogs were taken by county animal services officials.
From: http://www.nbc-2.com/Global/story.asp?S=12021810
OCALA, Fla. (AP) - A 3-year-old girl who was attacked by a bulldog outside her Ocala-area home has died.
According to a Marion County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman, the girl was playing outside while her mother cleaned a dog pen Saturday. She got tangled in a dog chain when her mother went inside the home.
That's when a male dog attacked the girl, whose name wasn't immediately released.
The Ocala Star-Banner reports that four dogs were outside the home at the time of the attack, but investigators believe just 1 of the animals was involved. All the dogs were taken by county animal services officials.
From: http://www.nbc-2.com/Global/story.asp?S=12021810
'Good Samaritan' robs man he helped
Posted: Feb 18, 2010 2:10 PM
Updated: Feb 18, 2010 3:55 PM
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - The Good Samaritan turned out to be bad.
Matthew Lee Scott says he ran out of gas then was robbed by a supposed good guy.
Scott tells police he accepted a ride from a stranger, who offered to take him to a gas station.
Later, Scott says the man forced him to withdraw $220 from a cash machine.
Scott tells police in Iowa the man also tried to get him to withdraw more money from a bank.
But the Des Moines Register reports the guy made a run for it after they were questioned by a teller.
Police are still looking for the suspect.
From: http://www.nbc-2.com/Global/story.asp?S=12004069
Updated: Feb 18, 2010 3:55 PM
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - The Good Samaritan turned out to be bad.
Matthew Lee Scott says he ran out of gas then was robbed by a supposed good guy.
Scott tells police he accepted a ride from a stranger, who offered to take him to a gas station.
Later, Scott says the man forced him to withdraw $220 from a cash machine.
Scott tells police in Iowa the man also tried to get him to withdraw more money from a bank.
But the Des Moines Register reports the guy made a run for it after they were questioned by a teller.
Police are still looking for the suspect.
From: http://www.nbc-2.com/Global/story.asp?S=12004069
Woman 'dismembered body, used stroller to dispose of body parts'
AAP February 19, 2010 3:05PM
A WOMAN charged with murdering an Adelaide pensioner used a child's stroller to dispose of the victim's body parts, a court has heard.
Prosecutor John Wells told the Adelaide Magistrates Court today that a blood stain was found on the stroller and it was linked to the DNA of the 83-year-old victim, Vonne McGlynn.
The prosecution alleged 34-year-old Angelika Gavare broke into Ms McGlynn's Adelaide home in December 2008 and killed her, disposing of her body parts in a nearby creek.
Ms Gavare has yet to plea to the murder charge but has asked the court to release her on bail.
Opposing the application, Mr Wells said the case against the accused was strong and included admissions she made to her own relatives.
He said items belonging to the victim were also found in Ms Gavare's home, including the pensioner's passport, house keys, personal photos and furniture.
From: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/woman-dismembered-body-used-stroller-to-dispose-of-body-parts/story-e6frf7jx-1225832247134
A WOMAN charged with murdering an Adelaide pensioner used a child's stroller to dispose of the victim's body parts, a court has heard.
Prosecutor John Wells told the Adelaide Magistrates Court today that a blood stain was found on the stroller and it was linked to the DNA of the 83-year-old victim, Vonne McGlynn.
The prosecution alleged 34-year-old Angelika Gavare broke into Ms McGlynn's Adelaide home in December 2008 and killed her, disposing of her body parts in a nearby creek.
Ms Gavare has yet to plea to the murder charge but has asked the court to release her on bail.
Opposing the application, Mr Wells said the case against the accused was strong and included admissions she made to her own relatives.
He said items belonging to the victim were also found in Ms Gavare's home, including the pensioner's passport, house keys, personal photos and furniture.
From: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/woman-dismembered-body-used-stroller-to-dispose-of-body-parts/story-e6frf7jx-1225832247134
6-year-old shoots 3-year-old brother
By STEPHEN THOMPSON | The Tampa Tribune
Published: February 20, 2010
Updated: 02/20/2010 09:44 pm
CLEARWATER - A 6-year-old boy took a gun that had been left on top of a television in a bedroom and shot his 3-year-old brother Saturday night, Clearwater police said.
The wounded child, who was identified as Gabriel Carpio, was flown to Bayfront Medical Center. He was expected to be transferred to All Children's Hospital, said Elizabeth Watts, Clearwater's public safety spokeswoman.
He was in critical but stable condition, Watts said. He was shot in the upper torso, but not the head. Authorities are hopeful he will survive.
Authorities are not releasing his brother's name or the parents' names.
At the time of the 5:06 p.m. shooting at 1781 N. Fort Harrison Ave., the boys' mother was home, but the father was not, Watts said.
She said the .32-caliber semi-automatic handgun belonged to the father.
There were no prior calls for service at the home, Watts said.
No charges were expected to be filed Sunday, she said, and the case will be referred to the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney's Office so prosecutors can decide whether to file charges.
Neighbor Theresa Rubalcava said she was cleaning out a van when she heard screaming. She looked and saw the wounded boy's mother holding her child on some steps. Rubalcava ran to help.
"She was crying and she was holding him and she was on with 911 and she was panicking," Rubalcava said. "I took her son from her and she said, 'He's been shot,'" Rubalcava said.
"She lifted up his shirt and he had a hole right here," Rubalcava said, pointing to a spot to the left of her sternum. There was no blood leaving the wound.
Rubalcava said she laid the child down and tried to keep him calm while she told a neighbor to call 911. It wasn't apparent that the dispatcher on the line with the boy's mother had made it clear help was on the way, Rubalcava said.
"Nobody was saying, 'OK, the ambulance is on the way,' " Rubalcava said. "This woman was freaking out."
The wounded boy, on the other hand, appeared to be in shock but was conscious and moving, Rubalcava said.
"When I asked him his name, he tried to tell me," she said.
From: http://www2.tbo.com/content/2010/feb/20/202144/boy-shot-while-playing-gun-clearwater-police-say/
Published: February 20, 2010
Updated: 02/20/2010 09:44 pm
CLEARWATER - A 6-year-old boy took a gun that had been left on top of a television in a bedroom and shot his 3-year-old brother Saturday night, Clearwater police said.
The wounded child, who was identified as Gabriel Carpio, was flown to Bayfront Medical Center. He was expected to be transferred to All Children's Hospital, said Elizabeth Watts, Clearwater's public safety spokeswoman.
He was in critical but stable condition, Watts said. He was shot in the upper torso, but not the head. Authorities are hopeful he will survive.
Authorities are not releasing his brother's name or the parents' names.
At the time of the 5:06 p.m. shooting at 1781 N. Fort Harrison Ave., the boys' mother was home, but the father was not, Watts said.
She said the .32-caliber semi-automatic handgun belonged to the father.
There were no prior calls for service at the home, Watts said.
No charges were expected to be filed Sunday, she said, and the case will be referred to the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney's Office so prosecutors can decide whether to file charges.
Neighbor Theresa Rubalcava said she was cleaning out a van when she heard screaming. She looked and saw the wounded boy's mother holding her child on some steps. Rubalcava ran to help.
"She was crying and she was holding him and she was on with 911 and she was panicking," Rubalcava said. "I took her son from her and she said, 'He's been shot,'" Rubalcava said.
"She lifted up his shirt and he had a hole right here," Rubalcava said, pointing to a spot to the left of her sternum. There was no blood leaving the wound.
Rubalcava said she laid the child down and tried to keep him calm while she told a neighbor to call 911. It wasn't apparent that the dispatcher on the line with the boy's mother had made it clear help was on the way, Rubalcava said.
"Nobody was saying, 'OK, the ambulance is on the way,' " Rubalcava said. "This woman was freaking out."
The wounded boy, on the other hand, appeared to be in shock but was conscious and moving, Rubalcava said.
"When I asked him his name, he tried to tell me," she said.
From: http://www2.tbo.com/content/2010/feb/20/202144/boy-shot-while-playing-gun-clearwater-police-say/
Woman Accused Of Kicking Officer In Groin
Officer Arresting Driver For DUI When Assault Occurred
POSTED: 8:16 am EST February 22, 2010
UPDATED: 8:26 am EST February 22, 2010
CHEVIOT, Ohio -- A Green Township woman was arrested after she allegedly assaulted a Cheviot officer during a traffic stop.
Police said Kayla Beiting, 21, ignored officers' orders to walk away from a DUI arrest in progress early Saturday.
When officers arrested Beiting for not following their orders, she allegedly kicked one in the groin.
Beiting kicked the officer again while she was being placed in a cruiser, police said.
Beiting is charged with felony assault and obstructing official business.
From: http://www.wlwt.com/news/22630567/detail.html
POSTED: 8:16 am EST February 22, 2010
UPDATED: 8:26 am EST February 22, 2010
CHEVIOT, Ohio -- A Green Township woman was arrested after she allegedly assaulted a Cheviot officer during a traffic stop.
Police said Kayla Beiting, 21, ignored officers' orders to walk away from a DUI arrest in progress early Saturday.
When officers arrested Beiting for not following their orders, she allegedly kicked one in the groin.
Beiting kicked the officer again while she was being placed in a cruiser, police said.
Beiting is charged with felony assault and obstructing official business.
From: http://www.wlwt.com/news/22630567/detail.html
Salt Lake City teen dies after accidentally shooting himself
Jared Preusz and Aaron Vaughn, Web Content Producers FOX 13 News
2:25 PM MST, February 19, 2010
SALT LAKE CITY - A 16-year-old boy died Thursday night in Salt Lake City after accidentally shooting himself. Salt Lake City Police said a group of friends were playing cards on 1235 Emery Street when the teen came into the home with a revolver. Police said the teen emptied most of the shells from the gun and believing the gun was unloaded, pulled the trigger and shot himself in the head. Paramedics arrived on the scene and rushed the boy to the hospital. He was alive when emergency crews arrived, but later died at the hospital.
"It happened so fast. We were shocked that it was happening right there," said Sione Tuiono, a cousin of the teen.
The family members in the duplex where the teen lived said he brought a gun, a revolver, in from outside.
"I was downstairs in my room getting ready for work when I heard the shot go off and I came upstairs and I just saw one of my other nephews hold a towel to his head trying to stop the bleeding," said Sione Kini Kini, the victim's uncle.
Police are still investigating the incident.
From: http://www.fox13now.com/news/kstu-boy-shot-dies-playing-russian-roulette,0,560478.story
2:25 PM MST, February 19, 2010
SALT LAKE CITY - A 16-year-old boy died Thursday night in Salt Lake City after accidentally shooting himself. Salt Lake City Police said a group of friends were playing cards on 1235 Emery Street when the teen came into the home with a revolver. Police said the teen emptied most of the shells from the gun and believing the gun was unloaded, pulled the trigger and shot himself in the head. Paramedics arrived on the scene and rushed the boy to the hospital. He was alive when emergency crews arrived, but later died at the hospital.
"It happened so fast. We were shocked that it was happening right there," said Sione Tuiono, a cousin of the teen.
The family members in the duplex where the teen lived said he brought a gun, a revolver, in from outside.
"I was downstairs in my room getting ready for work when I heard the shot go off and I came upstairs and I just saw one of my other nephews hold a towel to his head trying to stop the bleeding," said Sione Kini Kini, the victim's uncle.
Police are still investigating the incident.
From: http://www.fox13now.com/news/kstu-boy-shot-dies-playing-russian-roulette,0,560478.story
Ted Bundy's VW goes on display at D.C. crime museum, but should it?
By Philip KennicottFriday, February 19, 2010
Even under a thin, black shroud, the lines of a vintage '68 Volkswagen Beetle were unmistakable.
And when the cloth came off, at a bizarre unveiling ceremony Thursday at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment, it took work to be surprised by what was underneath it: an unprepossessing tan Beetle, with a sunroof, looking a little worse for wear with touches of rust, fading paint and a few missing pieces of metal trim.
The tires looked as if they still had a few thousand good miles in them. Inside the cab, the interior had that quintessential old Bug smell -- like burning latex -- as if the rubber flooring was always smoking a little from the heat underneath.
But this wasn't any Beetle. This was Ted Bundy's Beetle, the car into which he lured his victims and in which he killed many of them during a terrifying serial killing spree in the 1970s.
"This was kind of like a death wagon," said Wyndell C. Watkins Sr., a retired D.C. police deputy chief, who was on hand to help introduce the latest iconic celebrity murder object joining Washington's museum collections.
The car has been stored in a private collection owned by New York-based Arthur Nash, who owns many of the most grisly objects on display in the museum's main exhibition. Also from the Nash collection: clown and serial killer John Wayne Gacy's painter's box, on display in a room dealing with the unseemly "murderabilia" trade.
Bundy's VW replaces the 1933 Essex-Terraplane car used as a getaway vehicle by John Dillinger. With Dillinger's car shipped off to the Southwest terminal of Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, where it will help present the capital region's best face to visitors, the crime museum needed a marquee object to grace its front lobby.
Of all of the notorious cars in the world -- the white Ford Bronco that O.J. Simpson rode in, the D.C. snipers' shabby Chevy Caprice retrofitted with gun placements -- Bundy's Bug may be the most notorious because it was so intimately connected to its owner's crimes. Bundy killed in this car is the frisson you're supposed to feel when looking at something that was not just a tool, but a container for death.
Compared with the D.C. snipers' car, on display at the Newseum, Bundy's VW has the edge of authenticity. The snipers' car is a mock-up, used at trial, not the actual vehicle from which John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo hunted their victims.
The Bundy car, with a brittle and faded 1976 Utah vehicle inspection sticker (No. 264924) still stuck to its dirty and cracked windshield, was not just the site of murder, but part of the strange, all-American charm and innocence that helped Bundy coerce women to get fatally close to him. It was advertising for a man who made himself an avatar of a free and unfettered age.
But it doesn't belong in a museum. Which is why Thursday's unveiling included some weirdly incongruous preaching from museum officials and others gathered to mark its unnecessary display before a bored and jaded public.
"We want to use it as a safety precaution," said Janine Vaccarello, chief operating officer of the privately owned museum (its partners include John Walsh, host of TV's "America's Most Wanted"). The museum, which opened in May 2008, announced the unveiling with a news release headlined: "Ted Bundy VW Beetle Serves as New Teaching Tool."
"We don't recommend hitchhiking to anyone," echoed Watkins, who summed up the car's didactic power this way: "This car represents a warning sign that you have to be careful."
The warnings and putative lessons seem oddly insubstantial compared with the lurid fascination of the car, as if the moral of the Titanic saga is "dress warm and always wear a life preserver." But these lessons are absolutely essential to the display of Bundy's car, because without them, it is almost indistinguishable from the murderabilia racket.
Curiously, if you pay the $12 to $20 it costs to get into the main exhibition space of the museum, you'll find a relatively well-presented panel documenting the murderabilia trade, the buying and selling of objects directly connected to infamous crimes. Objects associated with Bundy have always been hot in the trade, including a hubcap from Bundy's VW that was reportedly offered for sale for a starting bid of $3,500 in 2007.
The museum does a fair job of explaining the "passionate debate" about this strange economy of artifacts that enrages families of murder victims even as it thrives on the Internet. Is it an ugly, final exploitation of the victims and families? Or a long-standing, morally neutral trade in objects that have always exerted a dark fascination?
But no matter what you think of the murderabilia trade -- it has probably done less harm than trade in complex derivatives -- it's very difficult to distinguish making a profit selling murderabilia from making a profit displaying murderabilia. The museum has leased Bundy's car from Nash, and although one can see it for free in the lobby of the museum, it is a lure to sell tickets, and it is hardly the only object in the museum that qualifies as murderabilia.
Except, of course, that by being on display in a museum, murderabilia objects are magically transformed from suspect status into museum pieces with the power to teach.
That's a sleight of hand, and almost as risible as an attempt to claim that pornography changes status if you use it to teach basic anatomy (thigh bone connected to the hip bone). But the commercial museum business needs new products to keep visitors moving through the doors. The supposed academic or didactic value of many pieces on display is an obvious fiction. And when your kids are sick of looking at old Cézannes for free at the National Gallery of Art, of course it's tempting to silence their complaints and continue their "education" with a pilgrimage to the Bundy car.
So the car has rolled into town -- it attracted crowds on Seventh Street as it was being loaded into the museum's front gallery -- only to cause more mayhem. This time, it's mayhem in the museum world. Or it should be. Because only the professional museum community has the status and gravity to call out tawdry attempts to pass off displays such as this as educational.
A sharp and public rebuke from serious museum professionals would be salutary: It would help the public make clearer distinctions between serious museums and the rapidly evolving world of commercial museum-entertainment attractions. It would force a serious dialogue about the educational value of displaying objects purely for their iconic status, a form of intellectual laziness that afflicts the Smithsonian as much as the crime museum.
And it might help real museums make a better case for their survival in a world in which every aspect of their identity, with the exception of real educational value, has been hijacked by hucksters.
From: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/18/AR2010021803532.html?hpid=sec-artsliving
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Jack Parsons
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJohn Whiteside Parsons (born Marvel Whiteside Parsons on October 2, 1914 – died June 17, 1952) was an American rocket propulsion researcher at the California Institute of Technology and one of the principal founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet Corp. An enthusiastic occultist, he was one of the first Americans to take a keen interest in the writings of English author and occult teacher Aleister Crowley, and he became a leading member of his organisation, Ordo Templi Orientis.
Youth
Parsons was the only child of a rich but dysfunctional family. When he was a teenager his father walked out on his wife and son.
In the biography Sex and Rockets, the author speculated that Parsons developed an Oedipal complex.
Parsons landed a job with the Hercules Powder Company while a senior in high school. The following year he entered Pasadena Junior College and spent two years at the University of Southern California though he never graduated.
Parsons and the Space Age
In 1936, he joined the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (GALCIT) working for Frank Malina and Theodore von Kármán in Pasadena. While his formal education was limited, Parsons demonstrated tremendous scientific aptitude and genius, particularly in chemistry. His rocket research was some of the earliest in the United States, and his pioneering work in the development of solid fuel and the invention of JATO units for aircraft was of great importance to the start of humanity's space age. The noted engineer Theodore von Kármán, Parsons's friend and benefactor, declared that the work of Parsons and his peers helped usher in the age of space travel. Parsons co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, commonly referred to as JPL. According to von Kármán, Parsons' work in solid fuel research "... made possible such outstanding rockets as the Polaris and the Minuteman.
It was in 1942, the same year Parsons was appointed as head of the Agape Lodge by Aleister Crowley, that Parsons made the crucial breakthrough in the development of rocket solid fuel. He came up with a solution that could only have come from someone having a knowledge of alchemy and magic: Greek fire. Try as they might the GALCIT people would fail again and again with their black powder. Then, by an intuitive stroke of genius, Parson switched from black powder to asphalt and potassium perchlorate. Compared with Peenemünde, America was finally in the race for jet propulsion with solid fuel for the space age. Wernher von Braun would acknowledge Parsons as the father of America's space program.
Parsons and the Occult
Parsons was also an avid student and practitioner of the occult arts, and a Thelemite. He saw no contradiction between his scientific and magical pursuits, and before each rocket test launch, Parsons would invoke the Greek god Pan.
In 1942 Parsons was chosen by Aleister Crowley to lead the Agape Lodge of the Thelemic Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) in California after Crowley expelled Wilfred Smith from the position.
Sara Northrup (aka "Sarah Elizabeth" or "Betty" Northrup), began living with Parsons after his wife, Sara's half-sister Helen Northrup, left with Wilfred Smith. Sara Northrup later married author L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology and sometime magical partner of Parsons.
Babalon Working and Marjorie Cameron
In 1946 Parsons and Hubbard participated in a ritual known as the Babalon Working which is famous in occult circles — loosely, it was an attempt to summon a living goddess and change the course of history. Paul Rydeen writes:
The purpose of Parson's operation has been underemphasized. He sought to produce a magickal child who would be a product of her environment rather than of her heredity. Crowley himself describes the Moonchild in just these terms. The Babalon Working itself was preparation for what was to come: a Thelemic messiah.
Parsons ended the ritual by declaring it successful. Almost immediately he met Marjorie Cameron right in his own home, and regarded her as the Scarlet Woman, the fulfillment of the ritual.
Parsons, Hubbard, and Cameron then began the next stage of the Babalon Working, with Cameron acting as Parsons' magical sexual partner with whom he could sire a Moonchild. The creation of this Moonchild had been previously covered in fictional form in Crowley's novel Moonchild. A physical child was not conceived, but this did not affect the results of the ritual to that point. Parsons and Cameron soon married.
In January 1946, Parsons, Sarah Northrup, and Hubbard started a boat dealing company named Allied Enterprises. Parsons put in the sum of approximately $21,000, and Hubbard put in $1,200. Hubbard eventually abandoned Parsons and their business plans, leaving for a port in Florida with the boat and with Sarah. Parsons retreated to his hotel room and summoned a typhoon in retribution (viz., with an evocation of Bartzabel — the so-called intelligence supposedly presiding over the planet Mars). A Florida court later dissolved the poorly-contracted business, ordered repayment of debts to Parsons, and awarded ownership of the boat to Hubbard.
The Hubbard/Allied Enterprises relationship lasted until 1947, when Hubbard again defrauded Parsons of a sum of money and ran off again with Sara Northrup.
Parsons resigned his leadership of the O.T.O. in 1946.
Death
Fritz Zwicky, a member of the original Aerojet team, did not like Parsons, and called him a "dangerous man." This pronouncement proved prophetic.
On 17 June 1952 Parsons was killed in an explosion of fulminate of mercury at his home laboratory. Though gravely injured, he survived the immediate explosion, but he died of his wounds a few hours later. Distraught, Parsons' mother killed herself just hours after he died.
Unsubstantiated rumors of suicide, murder or magical ritual gone wrong have circulated. However Parsons stored many volatile chemicals and compounds in his laboratory and had been working to finish a contract for a special effects firm.
Honors
The crater Parsons on the far side of the Moon is named after him.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons
UFOs: more top secret files released
Published: 7:05AM GMT 18 Feb 2010
The Ministry of Defence have released more of its intriguing files on UFO sightings, including a flying Toblerone and an object hovering over former Conservative leader Michael Howard's house.
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/weirdnewsvideo/7261609/UFOs-more-top-secret-files-released.html
The Ministry of Defence have released more of its intriguing files on UFO sightings, including a flying Toblerone and an object hovering over former Conservative leader Michael Howard's house.
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/weirdnewsvideo/7261609/UFOs-more-top-secret-files-released.html
Shocking x-ray image as man survives brutal hammer attack
An x-ray image shows the horrific skull injuries suffered by a father-of-three after he was set upon by a gang of 30 thugs. Published: 7:30AM GMT 18 Feb 2010
David Barry's face is held together by metal plates and nuts and bolts after he and his brother Thomas were attacked outside a pub by hammer-wielding youths.
The brothers both had emergency surgery to rebuild their faces after the vicious assault in Bethnal Green, East London, on New Year's Eve last year.
Remarkably David, 41, who suffered the worst injuries including a snapped palate, shattered eye socket, smashed cheekbone and six breaks to his jaw, now shows no outward signs of the ordeal.
The surgeon treating him said his injuries to his face were the worst he had ever seen on someone who had survived an attack.
David, a communications engineer from Ilford, East London, said: "It was one of the most frightening experience of my life seeing hammers raining down on me.
"I was out cold after the first few blows but witnesses told me they continued to hit me when I was unconscious and helpless.
"My face was in pieces when I came round and when I got to hospital doctors said it was a miracle my brother and I had survived."
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7259102/Shocking-x-ray-image-as-man-survives-brutal-hammer-attack.html
Pictured: 'face of Jesus Christ' in family log fire
The funny (if the term ever applied) thing about this is, is that everybody has a pre conceived image of what Jesus is supposed to look like; but nobody really knows if he ever existed or what he looks like! And even so... who the fuck cares! It still doesn't mean anything; nothing's going to change, you're still the same schmuck with the same old boring life cause your imagination doesn't go further than seeing a mythological figure in a log fire!
How sad...
J.A.C.
A man, Rob Millist, has told of his shock after spotting an incredible image of Jesus Christ on a flaming log in a fire place.
By Andrew Hough
Published: 7:30AM GMT 18 Feb 2010
Eyes, a nose, and a moustache can clearly be seen on the well-defined four-and-half inch high face which was formed by the patterns of ash on one of the burning logs.
It remained glowing and visible within the flames for 20 minutes from when it was first spotted before it disintegrated into ash in the open hearth fire.
The 29 year-old spotted the image at his partner's mother's home in Old Hatfield, Herts., last week.
The freelance video editor had been cooking in the kitchen, before going into the living room to check on the fire when Jesus appeared to him.
He immediately pointed out Christ's face to his partner's mother, Judith Bailey, 56, a buyer for a lingerie company, who was fanning the flames at the time.
Mr Millist, who was brought up as a Catholic and a Spiritualist but does not call himself a believer, grabbed his iPhone to record the incredible moment.
''It was phenomenal. I came in from the kitchen and there the face was. It was crazy," he said.
''I had one of those moments where everything goes surreal and I just shouted to Judith to get over here.
''She was as shocked as I was. It was like a parallel universe had opened up right there in the living room."
He added: "'I would like to believe it was the face of Jesus, but it could be an incredible coincidence.
''I do believe in miracles, but I'm undecided as to whether this was one - I'm on the fence.''
As they studied the face, neighbour Patrick Rodgers, 51, a freelance paramedic, popped round and was dragged over to the fire to see the face.
''It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to what I was looking at, but it's totally clear," he said.
''It's only ash around the log, but it's absolutely formed that classic iconic image.''
The classic image of a bearded, long haired Jesus dates from the third century and is believed to have Roman origins.
''Everyone I've shown the image to since, their jaw just drops open," he said.
''I'm just so glad I took the pictures so that I have some evidence.
''I know because I'm a video editor people will say I have tinkered with the pictures, but trust me, they're totally genuine.''
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7256691/Pictured-face-of-Jesus-Christ-in-family-log-fire.html
Alleged MySpace Predator Arrested in OC
Updated: Saturday, 20 Feb 2010, 9:47 PM PSTPublished : Saturday, 20 Feb 2010, 9:47 PM PST
Text Story by:
City News
Posted by: Scott Coppersmith / myFOXla.com
Anaheim - A 33-year-old Anaheim man accused of having sex with a 12-year-old Santa Ana girl he met on MySpace was behind bars today, a police sergeant said.
Matthew Martinez Casteneda allegedly arranged to meet the girl Wednesday at the South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa after communicating with her on the MySpace social networking Web site.
They took a bus to Anaheim, where they visited two parks, said Anaheim police Sgt. Rick Martinez.
Casteneda then allegedly took the victim to Zaby's Motor Lodge at Harbor Boulevard and Katella Avenue and had sexual relations with her before leaving, Martinez said.
About 30 minutes later, the girl left the room and flagged down a uniformed Anaheim police civilian traffic controller, saying she wanted a ride home. The girl did not mention having sex, Martinez said.
It was later discovered that the girl was reported missing in Santa Ana, and she told a Santa Ana police officer she had sex with the suspect.
At about midnight Friday, Anaheim police found Casteneda at a warehouse in the 2000 block of Placentia Avenue in Costa Mesa, Martinez said.
He was arrested and booked at the Anaheim Detention Facility on suspicion of lewd and lascivious behavior with a child under the age of 14.
"Through the assistance of the staff at Zaby's Motor Lodge, we discovered that Casteneda has frequented that motel on numerous occasions," Martinez said. "We believe this subject has victimized other minors."
From: http://www.myfoxla.com/dpp/news/local/alleged-myspace-predator-arrested-20100220
Bear Slaps Man In Face, Man Pays Fine
Updated: Friday, 19 Feb 2010, 6:16 AM PSTPublished : Friday, 19 Feb 2010, 6:15 AM PST
(MYFOX NATIONAL) - A man from Seminole County Fla. who fed a wild bear and was slapped in the face by the animal was given a fine by the county according to The Orlando Sentinel .
Forty-nine-year-old Ernest Stamm went to court Tuesday and pleaded no contest to the charges of feeding wildlife. Stamm claims he had left food out for local cats in his neighborhood and will not admit to intending to feed bears or breaking any law.
The judge fined Stamm $200 and six months of probation. Stamm also will make a $250 contribution to a wildlife fund according to the newspaper .
Stamm claims last December that after hearing scratching outside, he opened his front door and was greeted by a bear eating the food Stamm intended for the cats. He told authorities that he then felt something swipe him across the face.
When authorities arrived after Stamm made the emergency call, they found a black bear in the yard. Stamm had multiple cuts on his face and was taken to the hospital to be treated.
Defense Attorney David Oliver said, “I don't think anyone had any evidence, any eyewitness accounts of Mr. Stamm actually feeding bears, but he's clearly learned it's dangerous to have bears in that type of proximity that have lost their fear of humans,” reports WBBH-TV .
The Sentinel reports that Florida Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Joy Hill told investigators that neighbors witnessed Stamm interacting with bears in the area.
“Pet food, pizza boxes, garbage cans, baby diapers, even grills. If you're going to grill outside and you live in bear country, you have to clean those if you live in bear country,” Hill said.
Hill explained that it’s a misdemeanor to feed wildlife whether it’s intentional or unintentional. It brings danger to the surrounding area because the animals lose their fear of humans.
Officials of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission ended up capturing the bear and euthanizing it which upset many of Stamm’s neighbors.
The black bear was a female who had two cubs that were old enough to fend for themselves according to the Commission.
From: http://www.myfoxla.com/dpps/news/dpgoh-bear-slaps-ernest-stamm-in-face-man-pays-fine-fc-20100219_6157259
Saturday, February 20, 2010
The Nazi Graveyard of Brazil
Nazi graveyard left behind by a Third Reich expedition to the amazon On a small island on a tributary of the River Jary in Brazil stands a nine-foot high wooden cross with what seems a very odd decoration: a swastika.
Even stranger is that on the cross it reads 'Joseph Greiner died here on 2.1.1936 " which was three years before WWII officially started in 1939 (a year before the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, sometimes considered the start of the war) and over a decade before Nazi's began making their way to Brazil, in hopes of hiding out in the South American country. So, what was a Nazi doing in Brazil halfway around the world in 1936? As the cross states it was "a death from fever in the service of German Research Work."
Known as the "Guayana Project, it was a mission of exploration and a testament to just how grand the Nazi's imagined their empire would be. As the report brought back to the Third Reich explained 'The two largest scantly populated, but rich in resources, areas on earth are in Siberia and South America. 'They alone offer spacious immigration and settlement possibilities for the Nordic peoples...
For the more advanced white race it offers outstanding possibilities for exploitation.'
In 1935, under the cover of collecting biological specimens, Schulz Kampfhenkel (the expedition leader), Joseph Greiner, and another Nazi soldier, as well as many hired locals - described in a letter back to the Third Reich as not being able to be 'measured in civilized terms as we known them in Germany' - explored the region bordering French Guyana and sent back details about how the Nazi's might infiltrate and begin colonizing the country for themselves. It was suggested that the countries already existing Germans, roughly a million at the time, might become the start of what would be the the great South American Third Reich Empire.
Of course, this did not happen. Greiner died of malaria while on the expedition, and Kampfhenkel brought his report to the Reich. In the end it wasn't the malaria, or the jungle, that put a stop to the plans to expand into Brazil but bureaucracy, and a lack of interest.'Given time, the plan may be submitted again" wrote Heinrich Himmler who was in charge of approving the plans.
Today all that remains of this monomaniacal plan is the graves of the Nazi's who perished in pursuit of it, known to locals as "the Nazi Graveyard."
From: http://atlasobscura.com/places/nazi-cemetery-cachoeira-de-santo-ant-nio
British schoolgirl killed in 'freak' go-kart accident in Hong Kong
A British schoolgirl, Amy Rose Coxall, has been killed in a freak accident in Hong Kong after getting her scarf got caught in the wheels of a go-kart, strangling her to death.
By Peter Foster, in Beijing
Published: 8:04PM GMT 18 Feb 2010
The 15 year-old was enjoying a Chinese New Year holiday outing with a group of seven friends when the accident happened.
According to witnesses, Miss Coxall, a student at Hong Kong's private £750-a-month Island School in the former British colony, arrived at the track at about noon on Wednesday.
As they were racing, the cart she was driving suddenly "veered off the circuit" and came to a sudden halt.
Rescuers rushed to assist the girl who was already semi-conscious when they reached her kart.
She was evacuated to the nearby Tuen Mun Hospital but pronounced dead on arrival 45 minutes after the accident at 4.30pm.
"A witness said the kart stopped suddenly at one side of the track and the blue scarf was attached to it," said a police spokeswoman.
"An initial investigation showed the cause of death was neck strangulation."
Local television channels showed the shocked and weeping girls being comforted by parents as their friend was admitted to hospital.
The teenager was living with a friend's family in the former British colony after her parents moved from Hong Kong to Australia.
One of her parents arrived in Hong Kong late on Thursday.
On Thursday morning a team of ten police investigators were at the Diamond Coast International Kart Circuit, the city's only karting facility which has safety codes conforming to international standards.
The track's go-karts, which are open to children over the age of 11, can travel up to 90mph, but parents must sign a liability waiver before allowing their children to race.
Karting experts said it was highly unusual for a driver to be allowed to compete whilst wearing a scarf, with girls being instructed to tie up their hair before taking the wheel. Wednesday was a cold day in Hong Kong, with temperatures falling to 6C.
Hong Kong's Home Affairs Bureau announced a review of procedures, including safety rules and track design.
In 2001, a 20-year-old female university student was critically injured and left brain-damaged when her scarf got caught in the wheel of a go-kart on a course in Macau near Hong Kong.
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/hongkong/7264633/British-schoolgirl-killed-in-freak-go-kart-accident-in-Hong-Kong.html
By Peter Foster, in Beijing
Published: 8:04PM GMT 18 Feb 2010
The 15 year-old was enjoying a Chinese New Year holiday outing with a group of seven friends when the accident happened.
According to witnesses, Miss Coxall, a student at Hong Kong's private £750-a-month Island School in the former British colony, arrived at the track at about noon on Wednesday.
As they were racing, the cart she was driving suddenly "veered off the circuit" and came to a sudden halt.
Rescuers rushed to assist the girl who was already semi-conscious when they reached her kart.
She was evacuated to the nearby Tuen Mun Hospital but pronounced dead on arrival 45 minutes after the accident at 4.30pm.
"A witness said the kart stopped suddenly at one side of the track and the blue scarf was attached to it," said a police spokeswoman.
"An initial investigation showed the cause of death was neck strangulation."
Local television channels showed the shocked and weeping girls being comforted by parents as their friend was admitted to hospital.
The teenager was living with a friend's family in the former British colony after her parents moved from Hong Kong to Australia.
One of her parents arrived in Hong Kong late on Thursday.
On Thursday morning a team of ten police investigators were at the Diamond Coast International Kart Circuit, the city's only karting facility which has safety codes conforming to international standards.
The track's go-karts, which are open to children over the age of 11, can travel up to 90mph, but parents must sign a liability waiver before allowing their children to race.
Karting experts said it was highly unusual for a driver to be allowed to compete whilst wearing a scarf, with girls being instructed to tie up their hair before taking the wheel. Wednesday was a cold day in Hong Kong, with temperatures falling to 6C.
Hong Kong's Home Affairs Bureau announced a review of procedures, including safety rules and track design.
In 2001, a 20-year-old female university student was critically injured and left brain-damaged when her scarf got caught in the wheel of a go-kart on a course in Macau near Hong Kong.
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/hongkong/7264633/British-schoolgirl-killed-in-freak-go-kart-accident-in-Hong-Kong.html
Groom shot dead at wedding by uncle's stray celebratory bullet
A newly-wed groom was accidentally shot dead by his uncle as he fired his gun in the air to celebrate the marriage.
By Dean Nelson in New Delhi
Published: 1:38PM GMT 19 Feb 2010
Pankaj Kishore Karotia, 21, was just about to claim his new bride and take her from a wedding reception to her family home when his uncle drew his licensed handgun to fire a final shot in celebration. As he was loading it, it fired accidentally and hit his newly-wed nephew in the head.
The reception party was almost finished when the tragedy happened. His new bride was waiting for him in the car as he died.
The groom's father said the uncle was "eager and excited" about the wedding and wanted to fire another shot to make the end of the celebrations.
A police spokesman said "the bullet made a hole in the brain" and confirmed the uncle had been arrested for culpable homicide.
Gunfire has become an increasingly popular celebration custom at lavish Indian weddings in recent years.
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/7271134/Groom-shot-dead-at-wedding-by-uncles-stray-celebratory-bullet.html
By Dean Nelson in New Delhi
Published: 1:38PM GMT 19 Feb 2010
Pankaj Kishore Karotia, 21, was just about to claim his new bride and take her from a wedding reception to her family home when his uncle drew his licensed handgun to fire a final shot in celebration. As he was loading it, it fired accidentally and hit his newly-wed nephew in the head.
The reception party was almost finished when the tragedy happened. His new bride was waiting for him in the car as he died.
The groom's father said the uncle was "eager and excited" about the wedding and wanted to fire another shot to make the end of the celebrations.
A police spokesman said "the bullet made a hole in the brain" and confirmed the uncle had been arrested for culpable homicide.
Gunfire has become an increasingly popular celebration custom at lavish Indian weddings in recent years.
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/7271134/Groom-shot-dead-at-wedding-by-uncles-stray-celebratory-bullet.html
Woman posted 'suicide note' on facebook then jumped to her death
A British woman jumped to her death in Spain after posting her final goodbye on the social networking site Facebook.By Fiona Govan in Madrid
Published: 4:53PM GMT 10 Feb 2010
Lita Broadhurst, 48, threw herself off a fourth floor balcony on Friday morning after leaving an apparent suicide note for her teenage children on her Facebook homepage.
The expat English teacher, who lived in Garrucha near Almeria on Spain's southern coast, blamed a British associate as the source of her misery.
She jumped to her death hours before she was due to give evidence against a former associate who was appearing in a local court accused of assaulting her.
In her final message, entitled "Last Words", she gave details of the abuse she claimed to have endured at his hands and said: "I write this in the hope that (HE) will be seen for what he is and prevented from hurting any other person who falls into his hands."
She went on: "I am not easily beaten, but this time I can see no way out of the black hole: too often have I had to beg for help from those who love me. I am alone this time and no longer able to find the way out. I have no more than despair and fatigue within me now."
And she left a poignant message for her teenage son and daughter and asked for their forgiveness.
"My fabulous children are my only anchor and I deeply, profoundly regret the pain I will cause them. Please, I beg you, don't hate me for letting you down now. My love for you both will never disappear because I have no doubts that when you need it, you'll feel it still. "
The trial of her associate was postponed and he was released on bail pending further investigation into the circumstances surrounding her death.
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/7206611/Woman-posted-suicide-note-on-facebook-then-jumped-to-her-death.html
Friday, February 19, 2010
Dead Woman Comes Back to Life at Burial
Wednesday, February 17, 2010 Funeral home workers in the Colombian city of Cali got the shock of a lifetime when an apparently dead 45-year-old woman suddenly started breathing and moving as they prepared her for burial, AFP reported Wednesday.
Local media said the woman had been declared clinically dead at a medical facility Tuesday after having been hospitalized in serious condition with a neurological condition a day earlier.
"The instruments the patient was connected to gave no blood pressure or heart rate readings," said Miguel Angel Saavedra, a doctor at the clinic where the woman was treated.
Medical staff at the facility signed the women's death certificate and her body was transferred to a funeral home to be prepared for burial.
But, in a case of what physicians call "Lazarus Syndrome," the woman was not actually dead.
"When they were going to apply formaldehyde, the patient began to breathe again and make movements," Saavedra told a local news station.
The woman, whose name has not been released, was readmitted to hospital and was in a coma, doctors said.
From: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,586302,00.html
Man crashes plane into Texas tax building
Joseph Stack published rambling suicide manifesto before piloting single-seater into IRS's Austin office
Daniel Nasaw in Washington guardian.co.uk
Thursday 18 February 2010 22.43 GMT
An anti-tax protester crashed his light plane into a Texas building containing an office of the US internal revenue service today after setting fire to his house and publishing a rambling suicide manifesto on the internet.
The man, identified by authorities as Joseph Stack, aged 53 or 54, apparently launched a suicide attack on a branch office of the US tax authority after a decades-long series of economic setbacks and struggles with tax payments and accountants.
"Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer," wrote Stack, a software engineer. "I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well."
The single-engine, four-seat Piper Cherokee registered to Stack crashed into a building housing about 190 employees of the US tax authority, shaking the structure enough to knock people to the floor, and bursting into a gigantic fireball. One person who worked in the building was unaccounted for and two others were hospitalised, Austin Fire Department Division Chief Dawn Clopton said.
Eyewitnesses said that before the crash the plane seemed in control, did not appear to be looking for a place to land and was flying at high speed. A former flight instructor who witnessed the crash told the Austin American-Statesman that the plane was in a rapid dive.
"When you are going that fast, you have to push hard on those controls to keep diving," Jerry Cullen told the newspaper. "Planes don't want to dive, they want to fly level."
"Nothing seemed to be wrong with the plane except that it was flying very low," witness Mike Ernest told CNN. "A big fireball similar to what happened on 9/11. It's a blessing that only one person is unaccounted for because it really did seem like it could have been a lot worse."
Meanwhile, local television in Austin, the Texas capital, said Stack's house was fully engulfed in flames this morning just before the crash into the IRS building, and that Stack's wife and 12-year-old daughter had been pulled out distraught but unscathed. Law enforcement officials told the Associated Press that Stack had set the house on fire before the flight.
According to Stack's long, paranoid but coherent manifesto, in the 1980s he first grew furious at the US federal tax system and what he deemed its favourable treatment of the rich and powerful, including tax-exempt status for the "vulgar, corrupt Catholic church".
After a failed marriage, he moved to Austin from California in recent years and had trouble finding work. He then remarried, to a musician, got into tax trouble and became incensed at his accountant, whom he deemed incompetent.
Federal authorities are treating the crash as a criminal act and have taken over the investigation.
From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/18/austin-plane-suicide-manifesto
Internet note posted by man linked to plane crash
Thursday, February 18, 2010, 12:16 PM
Editor’s note: We found this note on a Web site being pointed at by social media users. A search showed the domain that the note was posted on is registered to Joe Stack of San Marcos. A man by the same name, who has addresses in both Austin and San Marcos has been linked to today’s airplane crash.
If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?” The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken. Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it. I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless… especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head. Exactly what is therapeutic about that I’m not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”. I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.
While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.
Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.
And justice? You’ve got to be kidding!
How can any rational individual explain that white elephant conundrum in the middle of our tax system and, indeed, our entire legal system? Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand. Yet, it mercilessly “holds accountable” its victims, claiming that they’re responsible for fully complying with laws not even the experts understand. The law “requires” a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that’s not “duress” than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is.
How did I get here?
My introduction to the real American nightmare starts back in the early ‘80s. Unfortunately after more than 16 years of school, somewhere along the line I picked up the absurd, pompous notion that I could read and understand plain English. Some friends introduced me to a group of people who were having ‘tax code’ readings and discussions. In particular, zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful “exemptions” that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. We carefully studied the law (with the help of some of the “best”, high-paid, experienced tax lawyers in the business), and then began to do exactly what the “big boys” were doing (except that we weren’t steeling from our congregation or lying to the government about our massive profits in the name of God). We took a great deal of care to make it all visible, following all of the rules, exactly the way the law said it was to be done.
The intent of this exercise and our efforts was to bring about a much-needed re-evaluation of the laws that allow the monsters of organized religion to make such a mockery of people who earn an honest living. However, this is where I learned that there are two “interpretations” for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us… Oh, and the monsters are the very ones making and enforcing the laws; the inquisition is still alive and well today in this country.
That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0. It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie. It also made me realize, not only how naive I had been, but also the incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, line, and sinker, the crap about their “freedom”… and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them.
Before even having to make a shaky recovery from the sting of the first lesson on what justice really means in this country (around 1984 after making my way through engineering school and still another five years of “paying my dues”), I felt I finally had to take a chance of launching my dream of becoming an independent engineer.
On the subjects of engineers and dreams of independence, I should digress somewhat to say that I’m sure that I inherited the fascination for creative problem solving from my father. I realized this at a very young age.
The significance of independence, however, came much later during my early years of college; at the age of 18 or 19 when I was living on my own as student in an apartment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My neighbor was an elderly retired woman (80+ seemed ancient to me at that age) who was the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was social security to live on.
In retrospect, the situation was laughable because here I was living on peanut butter and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to splurge) for months at a time. When I got to know this poor figure and heard her story I felt worse for her plight than for my own (I, after all, I thought I had everything to in front of me). I was genuinely appalled at one point, as we exchanged stories and commiserated with each other over our situations, when she in her grandmotherly fashion tried to convince me that I would be “healthier” eating cat food (like her) rather than trying to get all my substance from peanut butter and bread. I couldn’t quite go there, but the impression was made. I decided that I didn’t trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for my own future and myself.
Return to the early ‘80s, and here I was off to a terrifying start as a ‘wet-behind-the-ears’ contract software engineer… and two years later, thanks to the fine backroom, midnight effort by the sleazy executives of Arthur Andersen (the very same folks who later brought us Enron and other such calamities) and an equally sleazy New York Senator (Patrick Moynihan), we saw the passage of 1986 tax reform act with its section 1706.
For you who are unfamiliar, here is the core text of the IRS Section 1706, defining the treatment of workers (such as contract engineers) for tax purposes. Visit this link for a conference committee report (http://www.synergistech.com/1706.shtml#ConferenceCommitteeReport) regarding the intended interpretation of Section 1706 and the relevant parts of Section 530, as amended. For information on how these laws affect technical services workers and their clients, read our discussion here (http://www.synergistech.com/ic-taxlaw.shtml).
SEC. 1706. TREATMENT OF CERTAIN TECHNICAL PERSONNEL.
(a) IN GENERAL - Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978 is amended by adding at the end thereof the following new subsection:
(d) EXCEPTION. - This section shall not apply in the case of an individual who pursuant to an arrangement between the taxpayer and another person, provides services for such other person as an engineer, designer, drafter, computer programmer, systems analyst, or other similarly skilled worker engaged in a similar line of work.
(b) EFFECTIVE DATE. - The amendment made by this section shall apply to remuneration paid and services rendered after December 31, 1986.
Note:
· “another person” is the client in the traditional job-shop relationship.
· “taxpayer” is the recruiter, broker, agency, or job shop.
· “individual”, “employee”, or “worker” is you.
Admittedly, you need to read the treatment to understand what it is saying but it’s not very complicated. The bottom line is that they may as well have put my name right in the text of section (d). Moreover, they could only have been more blunt if they would have came out and directly declared me a criminal and non-citizen slave. Twenty years later, I still can’t believe my eyes.
During 1987, I spent close to $5000 of my ‘pocket change’, and at least 1000 hours of my time writing, printing, and mailing to any senator, congressman, governor, or slug that might listen; none did, and they universally treated me as if I was wasting their time. I spent countless hours on the L.A. freeways driving to meetings and any and all of the disorganized professional groups who were attempting to mount a campaign against this atrocity. This, only to discover that our efforts were being easily derailed by a few moles from the brokers who were just beginning to enjoy the windfall from the new declaration of their “freedom”. Oh, and don’t forget, for all of the time I was spending on this, I was loosing income that I couldn’t bill clients.
After months of struggling it had clearly gotten to be a futile exercise. The best we could get for all of our trouble is a pronouncement from an IRS mouthpiece that they weren’t going to enforce that provision (read harass engineers and scientists). This immediately proved to be a lie, and the mere existence of the regulation began to have its impact on my bottom line; this, of course, was the intended effect.
Again, rewind my retirement plans back to 0 and shift them into idle. If I had any sense, I clearly should have left abandoned engineering and never looked back.
Instead I got busy working 100-hour workweeks. Then came the L.A. depression of the early 1990s. Our leaders decided that they didn’t need the all of those extra Air Force bases they had in Southern California, so they were closed; just like that. The result was economic devastation in the region that rivaled the widely publicized Texas S&L fiasco. However, because the government caused it, no one gave a shit about all of the young families who lost their homes or street after street of boarded up houses abandoned to the wealthy loan companies who received government funds to “shore up” their windfall. Again, I lost my retirement.
Years later, after weathering a divorce and the constant struggle trying to build some momentum with my business, I find myself once again beginning to finally pick up some speed. Then came the .COM bust and the 911 nightmare. Our leaders decided that all aircraft were grounded for what seemed like an eternity; and long after that, ‘special’ facilities like San Francisco were on security alert for months. This made access to my customers prohibitively expensive. Ironically, after what they had done the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars … as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY! After these events, there went my business but not quite yet all of my retirement and savings.
By this time, I’m thinking that it might be good for a change. Bye to California, I’ll try Austin for a while. So I moved, only to find out that this is a place with a highly inflated sense of self-importance and where damn little real engineering work is done. I’ve never experienced such a hard time finding work. The rates are 1/3 of what I was earning before the crash, because pay rates here are fixed by the three or four large companies in the area who are in collusion to drive down prices and wages… and this happens because the justice department is all on the take and doesn’t give a fuck about serving anyone or anything but themselves and their rich buddies.
To survive, I was forced to cannibalize my savings and retirement, the last of which was a small IRA. This came in a year with mammoth expenses and not a single dollar of income. I filed no return that year thinking that because I didn’t have any income there was no need. The sleazy government decided that they disagreed. But they didn’t notify me in time for me to launch a legal objection so when I attempted to get a protest filed with the court I was told I was no longer entitled to due process because the time to file ran out. Bend over for another $10,000 helping of justice.
So now we come to the present. After my experience with the CPA world, following the business crash I swore that I’d never enter another accountant’s office again. But here I am with a new marriage and a boatload of undocumented income, not to mention an expensive new business asset, a piano, which I had no idea how to handle. After considerable thought I decided that it would be irresponsible NOT to get professional help; a very big mistake.
When we received the forms back I was very optimistic that they were in order. I had taken all of the years information to XXXX XXXX, and he came back with results very similar to what I was expecting. Except that he had neglected to include the contents of Sheryl’s unreported income; $12,700 worth of it. To make matters worse, XXXX knew all along this was missing and I didn’t have a clue until he pointed it out in the middle of the audit. By that time it had become brutally evident that he was representing himself and not me.
This left me stuck in the middle of this disaster trying to defend transactions that have no relationship to anything tax-related (at least the tax-related transactions were poorly documented). Things I never knew anything about and things my wife had no clue would ever matter to anyone. The end result is… well, just look around.
I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s “business-as-usual”. Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes… isn’t that a clever, tidy solution.
As government agencies go, the FAA is often justifiably referred to as a tombstone agency, though they are hardly alone. The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government. Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws.
I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.
I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along.
I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.
The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.
Joe Stack (1956-2010)
02/18/2010
From: http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/blotter/entries/2010/02/18/internet_note_posted_by_man_li.html?cxntcid=breaking_news
Daniel Nasaw in Washington guardian.co.uk
Thursday 18 February 2010 22.43 GMT
An anti-tax protester crashed his light plane into a Texas building containing an office of the US internal revenue service today after setting fire to his house and publishing a rambling suicide manifesto on the internet.
The man, identified by authorities as Joseph Stack, aged 53 or 54, apparently launched a suicide attack on a branch office of the US tax authority after a decades-long series of economic setbacks and struggles with tax payments and accountants.
"Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer," wrote Stack, a software engineer. "I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well."
The single-engine, four-seat Piper Cherokee registered to Stack crashed into a building housing about 190 employees of the US tax authority, shaking the structure enough to knock people to the floor, and bursting into a gigantic fireball. One person who worked in the building was unaccounted for and two others were hospitalised, Austin Fire Department Division Chief Dawn Clopton said.
Eyewitnesses said that before the crash the plane seemed in control, did not appear to be looking for a place to land and was flying at high speed. A former flight instructor who witnessed the crash told the Austin American-Statesman that the plane was in a rapid dive.
"When you are going that fast, you have to push hard on those controls to keep diving," Jerry Cullen told the newspaper. "Planes don't want to dive, they want to fly level."
"Nothing seemed to be wrong with the plane except that it was flying very low," witness Mike Ernest told CNN. "A big fireball similar to what happened on 9/11. It's a blessing that only one person is unaccounted for because it really did seem like it could have been a lot worse."
Meanwhile, local television in Austin, the Texas capital, said Stack's house was fully engulfed in flames this morning just before the crash into the IRS building, and that Stack's wife and 12-year-old daughter had been pulled out distraught but unscathed. Law enforcement officials told the Associated Press that Stack had set the house on fire before the flight.
According to Stack's long, paranoid but coherent manifesto, in the 1980s he first grew furious at the US federal tax system and what he deemed its favourable treatment of the rich and powerful, including tax-exempt status for the "vulgar, corrupt Catholic church".
After a failed marriage, he moved to Austin from California in recent years and had trouble finding work. He then remarried, to a musician, got into tax trouble and became incensed at his accountant, whom he deemed incompetent.
Federal authorities are treating the crash as a criminal act and have taken over the investigation.
From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/18/austin-plane-suicide-manifesto
Internet note posted by man linked to plane crash
Thursday, February 18, 2010, 12:16 PM
Editor’s note: We found this note on a Web site being pointed at by social media users. A search showed the domain that the note was posted on is registered to Joe Stack of San Marcos. A man by the same name, who has addresses in both Austin and San Marcos has been linked to today’s airplane crash.
If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?” The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken. Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it. I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless… especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head. Exactly what is therapeutic about that I’m not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”. I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.
While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.
Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.
And justice? You’ve got to be kidding!
How can any rational individual explain that white elephant conundrum in the middle of our tax system and, indeed, our entire legal system? Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand. Yet, it mercilessly “holds accountable” its victims, claiming that they’re responsible for fully complying with laws not even the experts understand. The law “requires” a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that’s not “duress” than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is.
How did I get here?
My introduction to the real American nightmare starts back in the early ‘80s. Unfortunately after more than 16 years of school, somewhere along the line I picked up the absurd, pompous notion that I could read and understand plain English. Some friends introduced me to a group of people who were having ‘tax code’ readings and discussions. In particular, zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful “exemptions” that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. We carefully studied the law (with the help of some of the “best”, high-paid, experienced tax lawyers in the business), and then began to do exactly what the “big boys” were doing (except that we weren’t steeling from our congregation or lying to the government about our massive profits in the name of God). We took a great deal of care to make it all visible, following all of the rules, exactly the way the law said it was to be done.
The intent of this exercise and our efforts was to bring about a much-needed re-evaluation of the laws that allow the monsters of organized religion to make such a mockery of people who earn an honest living. However, this is where I learned that there are two “interpretations” for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us… Oh, and the monsters are the very ones making and enforcing the laws; the inquisition is still alive and well today in this country.
That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0. It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie. It also made me realize, not only how naive I had been, but also the incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, line, and sinker, the crap about their “freedom”… and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them.
Before even having to make a shaky recovery from the sting of the first lesson on what justice really means in this country (around 1984 after making my way through engineering school and still another five years of “paying my dues”), I felt I finally had to take a chance of launching my dream of becoming an independent engineer.
On the subjects of engineers and dreams of independence, I should digress somewhat to say that I’m sure that I inherited the fascination for creative problem solving from my father. I realized this at a very young age.
The significance of independence, however, came much later during my early years of college; at the age of 18 or 19 when I was living on my own as student in an apartment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My neighbor was an elderly retired woman (80+ seemed ancient to me at that age) who was the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was social security to live on.
In retrospect, the situation was laughable because here I was living on peanut butter and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to splurge) for months at a time. When I got to know this poor figure and heard her story I felt worse for her plight than for my own (I, after all, I thought I had everything to in front of me). I was genuinely appalled at one point, as we exchanged stories and commiserated with each other over our situations, when she in her grandmotherly fashion tried to convince me that I would be “healthier” eating cat food (like her) rather than trying to get all my substance from peanut butter and bread. I couldn’t quite go there, but the impression was made. I decided that I didn’t trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for my own future and myself.
Return to the early ‘80s, and here I was off to a terrifying start as a ‘wet-behind-the-ears’ contract software engineer… and two years later, thanks to the fine backroom, midnight effort by the sleazy executives of Arthur Andersen (the very same folks who later brought us Enron and other such calamities) and an equally sleazy New York Senator (Patrick Moynihan), we saw the passage of 1986 tax reform act with its section 1706.
For you who are unfamiliar, here is the core text of the IRS Section 1706, defining the treatment of workers (such as contract engineers) for tax purposes. Visit this link for a conference committee report (http://www.synergistech.com/1706.shtml#ConferenceCommitteeReport) regarding the intended interpretation of Section 1706 and the relevant parts of Section 530, as amended. For information on how these laws affect technical services workers and their clients, read our discussion here (http://www.synergistech.com/ic-taxlaw.shtml).
SEC. 1706. TREATMENT OF CERTAIN TECHNICAL PERSONNEL.
(a) IN GENERAL - Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978 is amended by adding at the end thereof the following new subsection:
(d) EXCEPTION. - This section shall not apply in the case of an individual who pursuant to an arrangement between the taxpayer and another person, provides services for such other person as an engineer, designer, drafter, computer programmer, systems analyst, or other similarly skilled worker engaged in a similar line of work.
(b) EFFECTIVE DATE. - The amendment made by this section shall apply to remuneration paid and services rendered after December 31, 1986.
Note:
· “another person” is the client in the traditional job-shop relationship.
· “taxpayer” is the recruiter, broker, agency, or job shop.
· “individual”, “employee”, or “worker” is you.
Admittedly, you need to read the treatment to understand what it is saying but it’s not very complicated. The bottom line is that they may as well have put my name right in the text of section (d). Moreover, they could only have been more blunt if they would have came out and directly declared me a criminal and non-citizen slave. Twenty years later, I still can’t believe my eyes.
During 1987, I spent close to $5000 of my ‘pocket change’, and at least 1000 hours of my time writing, printing, and mailing to any senator, congressman, governor, or slug that might listen; none did, and they universally treated me as if I was wasting their time. I spent countless hours on the L.A. freeways driving to meetings and any and all of the disorganized professional groups who were attempting to mount a campaign against this atrocity. This, only to discover that our efforts were being easily derailed by a few moles from the brokers who were just beginning to enjoy the windfall from the new declaration of their “freedom”. Oh, and don’t forget, for all of the time I was spending on this, I was loosing income that I couldn’t bill clients.
After months of struggling it had clearly gotten to be a futile exercise. The best we could get for all of our trouble is a pronouncement from an IRS mouthpiece that they weren’t going to enforce that provision (read harass engineers and scientists). This immediately proved to be a lie, and the mere existence of the regulation began to have its impact on my bottom line; this, of course, was the intended effect.
Again, rewind my retirement plans back to 0 and shift them into idle. If I had any sense, I clearly should have left abandoned engineering and never looked back.
Instead I got busy working 100-hour workweeks. Then came the L.A. depression of the early 1990s. Our leaders decided that they didn’t need the all of those extra Air Force bases they had in Southern California, so they were closed; just like that. The result was economic devastation in the region that rivaled the widely publicized Texas S&L fiasco. However, because the government caused it, no one gave a shit about all of the young families who lost their homes or street after street of boarded up houses abandoned to the wealthy loan companies who received government funds to “shore up” their windfall. Again, I lost my retirement.
Years later, after weathering a divorce and the constant struggle trying to build some momentum with my business, I find myself once again beginning to finally pick up some speed. Then came the .COM bust and the 911 nightmare. Our leaders decided that all aircraft were grounded for what seemed like an eternity; and long after that, ‘special’ facilities like San Francisco were on security alert for months. This made access to my customers prohibitively expensive. Ironically, after what they had done the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars … as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY! After these events, there went my business but not quite yet all of my retirement and savings.
By this time, I’m thinking that it might be good for a change. Bye to California, I’ll try Austin for a while. So I moved, only to find out that this is a place with a highly inflated sense of self-importance and where damn little real engineering work is done. I’ve never experienced such a hard time finding work. The rates are 1/3 of what I was earning before the crash, because pay rates here are fixed by the three or four large companies in the area who are in collusion to drive down prices and wages… and this happens because the justice department is all on the take and doesn’t give a fuck about serving anyone or anything but themselves and their rich buddies.
To survive, I was forced to cannibalize my savings and retirement, the last of which was a small IRA. This came in a year with mammoth expenses and not a single dollar of income. I filed no return that year thinking that because I didn’t have any income there was no need. The sleazy government decided that they disagreed. But they didn’t notify me in time for me to launch a legal objection so when I attempted to get a protest filed with the court I was told I was no longer entitled to due process because the time to file ran out. Bend over for another $10,000 helping of justice.
So now we come to the present. After my experience with the CPA world, following the business crash I swore that I’d never enter another accountant’s office again. But here I am with a new marriage and a boatload of undocumented income, not to mention an expensive new business asset, a piano, which I had no idea how to handle. After considerable thought I decided that it would be irresponsible NOT to get professional help; a very big mistake.
When we received the forms back I was very optimistic that they were in order. I had taken all of the years information to XXXX XXXX, and he came back with results very similar to what I was expecting. Except that he had neglected to include the contents of Sheryl’s unreported income; $12,700 worth of it. To make matters worse, XXXX knew all along this was missing and I didn’t have a clue until he pointed it out in the middle of the audit. By that time it had become brutally evident that he was representing himself and not me.
This left me stuck in the middle of this disaster trying to defend transactions that have no relationship to anything tax-related (at least the tax-related transactions were poorly documented). Things I never knew anything about and things my wife had no clue would ever matter to anyone. The end result is… well, just look around.
I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s “business-as-usual”. Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes… isn’t that a clever, tidy solution.
As government agencies go, the FAA is often justifiably referred to as a tombstone agency, though they are hardly alone. The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government. Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws.
I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.
I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along.
I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.
The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.
Joe Stack (1956-2010)
02/18/2010
From: http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/blotter/entries/2010/02/18/internet_note_posted_by_man_li.html?cxntcid=breaking_news
Mallorca Police searching for severed head
Wed, 17 February 12:37 2010
MALLORCA - THE confessed killer of Bolivian woman, Maria Elena Salcedo has told police that he accidentally killed her during an argument at a Palmaapartment. The alleged killer, an Ecuadorian builder, aged 43, told how he dismembered her body using his work tools and disposed of them along a wide bushy area by the roadside.
At the time of going to print, the police had recovered the torso, two legs and the left arm, as well as remains from the right, in the proximity to Urbanizacion el Paraiso, in Sa Rapita, near Es Trenc.
Three others who were said to be present in the apartment at the time of the killing were also taken in for questioning and later released with charges of failing to report the crime and possibly assisting in the cover up of the crime.
Provincial Police chief, Antoni Ceda, revealed during a press conference that the alleged killer has already warned that he won’t be able to find the head of the 53-year-old victim, as he disposed of it in a refuse container to prevent the cause of death being known.
For legal reasons, if investigators fail to locate the head the accused will only be able to be charged with manslaughter and not murder.
From: http://www.euroweeklynews.com/2010021773420/news/mallorca/body-parts-recovered-following-confession.html
MALLORCA - THE confessed killer of Bolivian woman, Maria Elena Salcedo has told police that he accidentally killed her during an argument at a Palmaapartment. The alleged killer, an Ecuadorian builder, aged 43, told how he dismembered her body using his work tools and disposed of them along a wide bushy area by the roadside.
At the time of going to print, the police had recovered the torso, two legs and the left arm, as well as remains from the right, in the proximity to Urbanizacion el Paraiso, in Sa Rapita, near Es Trenc.
Three others who were said to be present in the apartment at the time of the killing were also taken in for questioning and later released with charges of failing to report the crime and possibly assisting in the cover up of the crime.
Provincial Police chief, Antoni Ceda, revealed during a press conference that the alleged killer has already warned that he won’t be able to find the head of the 53-year-old victim, as he disposed of it in a refuse container to prevent the cause of death being known.
For legal reasons, if investigators fail to locate the head the accused will only be able to be charged with manslaughter and not murder.
From: http://www.euroweeklynews.com/2010021773420/news/mallorca/body-parts-recovered-following-confession.html
Swiss prostitutes trained to use defibrillators in brothels to prevent clients dying
Swiss prostitutes are being trained to use defibrillators to prevent clients with heart problems from dying on them, it has emerged.
Published: 6:30AM GMT 18 Feb 2010
Brothel owners in the Lugano area say electric shock treatment to restart customer's hearts is needed because so many elderly customers are using their services.
The most recent victim was a pensioner, thought to be having fun with the help of anti-impotence medication.
His death followed a series of other incidents, some fatal, in which heart attacks have claimed brothel customers in the area.
The owner of one sex club said: "Having customers die on us isn't exactly good publicity".
There are now 38 sex clubs and brothel in the Lugano area. And more are planned, according to Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, in order to accommodate the thousands of customers who pour over the boarder from Italy, where brothels are illegal. Around 80 per cent of the men who pay for sex in the area are thought to be Italian.
The sex trade in the pretty, lakeside Swiss town is also being fuelled by prostitutes from South America and Eastern Europe who enter the country via Italy.
Local health experts are said to have backed the plans to stock defibrillators in sex clubs and brothels.
Defibrillators work by delivering a controlled electric shock to the heart to restore a normal heartbeat, after it has stopped.
According to the British Heart Foundation: "Modern defibrillators are becoming increasingly quick and easy for the lay person to use, which can mean the difference between life and death".
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7259636/Swiss-prostitutes-trained-to-use-defibrillators-in-brothels-to-prevent-clients-dying.html
Published: 6:30AM GMT 18 Feb 2010
Brothel owners in the Lugano area say electric shock treatment to restart customer's hearts is needed because so many elderly customers are using their services.
The most recent victim was a pensioner, thought to be having fun with the help of anti-impotence medication.
His death followed a series of other incidents, some fatal, in which heart attacks have claimed brothel customers in the area.
The owner of one sex club said: "Having customers die on us isn't exactly good publicity".
There are now 38 sex clubs and brothel in the Lugano area. And more are planned, according to Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, in order to accommodate the thousands of customers who pour over the boarder from Italy, where brothels are illegal. Around 80 per cent of the men who pay for sex in the area are thought to be Italian.
The sex trade in the pretty, lakeside Swiss town is also being fuelled by prostitutes from South America and Eastern Europe who enter the country via Italy.
Local health experts are said to have backed the plans to stock defibrillators in sex clubs and brothels.
Defibrillators work by delivering a controlled electric shock to the heart to restore a normal heartbeat, after it has stopped.
According to the British Heart Foundation: "Modern defibrillators are becoming increasingly quick and easy for the lay person to use, which can mean the difference between life and death".
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7259636/Swiss-prostitutes-trained-to-use-defibrillators-in-brothels-to-prevent-clients-dying.html
Thursday, February 18, 2010
RSPCA find dog with cable around scrotum
AAP February 17, 2010 6:20PM
THE RSPCA say the case of a dog found with a cable tie bound tightly around its testicles is one of the worst acts of cruelty it has seen.
The cable was tied so tightly that the American Staffordshire terrier's scrotum had turned septic.
"This is the first time I've seen a case like this. It sickens me to think someone could do such a thing," Inspector Travis Cooper said.
Mr Cooper said he suspected that the cable tie had been attached to the dog, which was found at Ningi near Bribie Island north of Brisbane, for up to a week.
"The cable tie had been pulled so tight that it restricted blood flow," Mr Cooper said.
"When I picked him up he was very weak and disorientated. We're not completely sure why someone would have done this.
"I can only speculate that it may have been an attempt at DIY castration."
The dog was initially found on the corner of Fauna Way and Peel Road by the Moreton Bay Regional Council.
"We believe he's been dumped. He has no identification and no microchip and is currently undergoing surgery to remove the gangrenous scrotum," Mr Travis said.
RSPCA Queensland is seeking information that may help identify the dog's owner or lead to the perpetrator.
From: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/rspca-find-dog-with-cable-around-scrotum/story-e6frf7jx-1225831516247
THE RSPCA say the case of a dog found with a cable tie bound tightly around its testicles is one of the worst acts of cruelty it has seen.
The cable was tied so tightly that the American Staffordshire terrier's scrotum had turned septic.
"This is the first time I've seen a case like this. It sickens me to think someone could do such a thing," Inspector Travis Cooper said.
Mr Cooper said he suspected that the cable tie had been attached to the dog, which was found at Ningi near Bribie Island north of Brisbane, for up to a week.
"The cable tie had been pulled so tight that it restricted blood flow," Mr Cooper said.
"When I picked him up he was very weak and disorientated. We're not completely sure why someone would have done this.
"I can only speculate that it may have been an attempt at DIY castration."
The dog was initially found on the corner of Fauna Way and Peel Road by the Moreton Bay Regional Council.
"We believe he's been dumped. He has no identification and no microchip and is currently undergoing surgery to remove the gangrenous scrotum," Mr Travis said.
RSPCA Queensland is seeking information that may help identify the dog's owner or lead to the perpetrator.
From: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/rspca-find-dog-with-cable-around-scrotum/story-e6frf7jx-1225831516247
Man shoots daughter's boyfriend in groin
Louis Cooper • lcooper@pnj.com • February 17, 2010
A 29-year-old man was treated and released from a hospital after his girlfriend's father shot him in the groin.
Randall Carter, 29, suffered birdshot wounds in the scrotum and inner thigh when he was shot by William Russell Kelly Jr., 48, at Kelly's home in the 9200 block of Ridge Drive in Navarre, according to a Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office report. The shooting occurred shortly before 1 a.m. Monday.
Kelly's daughter, 18-year-old Amanda Kelly, is Carter's girlfriend.
William Kelly was charged with aggravated battery with intent to cause bodily harm or disability. He was taken to Santa Rosa County Jail and released on $20,000 bond later Monday.
Deputies were responding to a noise complaint at Lost Bottoms Lane in Navarre at 12:51 a.m. Monday when they heard what sounded like a "large-caliber gunshot," the report said.
Carter and Amanda Kelly were running toward the deputy, screaming for help. Carter said he had been shot. Deputies saw him bleeding from the groin area.
When asked why Carter had been shot, Amanda Kelly said, "Because he hates him, dude! That's it."
When confronted by deputies, William Kelly admitted shooting Carter to protect his daughter.
"I shot him in the (groin) with birdshot because he was beating my daughter," Kelly told deputies.
Kelly had a silver-colored .45-caliber revolver, but only one of the five shots had been fired. The empty casing inside the chamber contained birdshot, the report said.
The next three chambers had birdshot. The final chamber was loaded with a lead slug.
The investigation is ongoing.
From: http://www.pnj.com/article/20100217/NEWS01/2170326
A 29-year-old man was treated and released from a hospital after his girlfriend's father shot him in the groin.
Randall Carter, 29, suffered birdshot wounds in the scrotum and inner thigh when he was shot by William Russell Kelly Jr., 48, at Kelly's home in the 9200 block of Ridge Drive in Navarre, according to a Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office report. The shooting occurred shortly before 1 a.m. Monday.
Kelly's daughter, 18-year-old Amanda Kelly, is Carter's girlfriend.
William Kelly was charged with aggravated battery with intent to cause bodily harm or disability. He was taken to Santa Rosa County Jail and released on $20,000 bond later Monday.
Deputies were responding to a noise complaint at Lost Bottoms Lane in Navarre at 12:51 a.m. Monday when they heard what sounded like a "large-caliber gunshot," the report said.
Carter and Amanda Kelly were running toward the deputy, screaming for help. Carter said he had been shot. Deputies saw him bleeding from the groin area.
When asked why Carter had been shot, Amanda Kelly said, "Because he hates him, dude! That's it."
When confronted by deputies, William Kelly admitted shooting Carter to protect his daughter.
"I shot him in the (groin) with birdshot because he was beating my daughter," Kelly told deputies.
Kelly had a silver-colored .45-caliber revolver, but only one of the five shots had been fired. The empty casing inside the chamber contained birdshot, the report said.
The next three chambers had birdshot. The final chamber was loaded with a lead slug.
The investigation is ongoing.
From: http://www.pnj.com/article/20100217/NEWS01/2170326
Woman Lies About Fire, Rape
Leslie Stricklan Facing Multiple Charges
By Carissa Lawson/WLKY
POSTED: 4:52 pm EST February 17, 2010
UPDATED: 7:31 pm EST February 17, 2010
LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Investigators said a Louisville woman set her house on fire while her son and husband were inside.
Authorities also said Leslie Stricklan claimed she was raped and assaulted days earlier.
Major Henry Ott, who heads the Metro Arson Squad, said his investigation uncovered what may have been the bizarre motive behind the alleged crimes that lead to this housewife's arrest this week.
"She claimed she had been raped by an unknown assailant," Ott said. "She provided a physical description to LMPD and they were conducting an investigation."
A day later, Stricklan filed another report.
"She was getting out the bathroom, out of her shower and someone assaulted her, hit a vase over her head and then ran," Ott said.
Then on Friday, Dec. 18, Ott was called to Stricklan's home after a fire started inside a bathroom.
Matches found at the scene led him to believe the fire was no accident.
A phone call from Stricklan's attorney confirmed his hunch, and shed light on the rape and assault claims.
"She presented herself with her attorney and admitted that she had set the fire and that the rape allegation was false, and the assault accusation was false," Ott said.
When Stricklan failed to turn herself in, a warrant was issued for her arrest. It said Stricklan admitted setting fire to her home while her son was in the basement asleep, and her husband was in another room.
"He was under the same assumption that his wife had been raped, she had been assaulted, and now someone had come set her house on fire," Ott said.
The arrest warrant also said Stricklan was "upset at the attention her husband was paying to her when she set the house on fire."
"It was to get attention from her husband is what she explained to us," Ott said.
If convicted on the arson charge, Stricklan faces a punishment of 20 to life.
Meanwhile, a detective with the sex crimes unit says two warrants have been issued for Stricklan's arrest for charges of filing two false reports.
She's in jail on a $10,000 bond for the arson charge.
From: http://www.wlky.com/news/22593246/detail.html
By Carissa Lawson/WLKY
POSTED: 4:52 pm EST February 17, 2010
UPDATED: 7:31 pm EST February 17, 2010
LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Investigators said a Louisville woman set her house on fire while her son and husband were inside.
Authorities also said Leslie Stricklan claimed she was raped and assaulted days earlier.
Major Henry Ott, who heads the Metro Arson Squad, said his investigation uncovered what may have been the bizarre motive behind the alleged crimes that lead to this housewife's arrest this week.
"She claimed she had been raped by an unknown assailant," Ott said. "She provided a physical description to LMPD and they were conducting an investigation."
A day later, Stricklan filed another report.
"She was getting out the bathroom, out of her shower and someone assaulted her, hit a vase over her head and then ran," Ott said.
Then on Friday, Dec. 18, Ott was called to Stricklan's home after a fire started inside a bathroom.
Matches found at the scene led him to believe the fire was no accident.
A phone call from Stricklan's attorney confirmed his hunch, and shed light on the rape and assault claims.
"She presented herself with her attorney and admitted that she had set the fire and that the rape allegation was false, and the assault accusation was false," Ott said.
When Stricklan failed to turn herself in, a warrant was issued for her arrest. It said Stricklan admitted setting fire to her home while her son was in the basement asleep, and her husband was in another room.
"He was under the same assumption that his wife had been raped, she had been assaulted, and now someone had come set her house on fire," Ott said.
The arrest warrant also said Stricklan was "upset at the attention her husband was paying to her when she set the house on fire."
"It was to get attention from her husband is what she explained to us," Ott said.
If convicted on the arson charge, Stricklan faces a punishment of 20 to life.
Meanwhile, a detective with the sex crimes unit says two warrants have been issued for Stricklan's arrest for charges of filing two false reports.
She's in jail on a $10,000 bond for the arson charge.
From: http://www.wlky.com/news/22593246/detail.html
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
Posts
"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."
"Being is substance and life; life manifests by movement; movement is perpetuated by equilibrium; equilibrium is therefore the law of immortality.
"The doctrine of equality!... But there exists no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice.... "Equality for equals, inequality for unequals" that would be the true voice of justice: and, what follows from it, "Never make equal what is unequal."
