Avoiding the attention of both predators and prey is a little easier for some sharks who can hide in plain sight.
By Jennifer Viegas
Tue May 25, 2010 07:00 AM ET
THE GIST
--Some sharks can make themselves invisible to both prey and predators.
--Light emitted by certain shark species creates the optical illusion.
--The shark's light may also turn on members of the opposite sex.
In open water, there is often no place to hide. Some sharks have overcome this problem by making themselves invisible to both prey and predators, according to a new study.
Light trickery permits the optical illusion, described in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology. The findings represent the first experimental tests of shark luminescence.
Lead author Julien Claes explained to Discovery News that about 50 different shark species, or more than 10 percent of all known sharks, are luminous. This means they can produce and emit light from their bodies.
Click here to view a slide show about super shark senses.
Claes and his colleagues chose to focus on one particular luminous shark, nicknamed "the phantom hunter of the fjords": the velvet belly lantern shark.
This shark's shimmer originates from light emitting organs called photophores from underneath its body, "effectively creating a glow from that region," said Claes, a researcher in the Laboratory of Marine Biology, Earth and Life Institute at the Catholic University of Louvain.
"Since many predators have upward-looking eyes, it is a common method of camouflage in the mesopelagic zone (from 656 to 3,281 feet below the surface), although it is the first time it is demonstrated in sharks," he added.
For the study, Claes and his team collected male and female velvet belly lantern sharks in Bergen, Norway. The sharks were then brought to Espeland Marine Station, where they were maintained in cold, dark water tanks, replicating conditions of their natural habitat.
The scientists next measured the luminescence intensity of each shark. Measurements were again taken after an overhead light simulation, some days later, in order to test the sharks' response to light.
Immediately after being caught, most of the sharks produced a spontaneous and long-lasting luminescence, occasionally lasting over an hour. The spectrum of this light closely matched that of the shark's usual deepwater fjord home.
The sharks were able to adjust slightly their emitted light in response to external light changes. This ability suggests that they use both their eyes and a small gland in the brain to monitor information on light shining down from above. Like most sharks, the mouth of this species is on its underside, so the camouflage system allows the shark to grab prey, such as krill and pearlfish, with invisible ease.
Similar to how lipstick makes a woman's lips stand out more, the shark's light may also turn on members of the opposite sex.
"Communication is also a function of the luminescence, since some parts of the animal appear brighter at close range, such as the pelvic part containing the sexual organs," Claes suggests.
Bernard Seret, a shark expert at the National Museum of Natural History in France, told Discovery News that he agrees with the new study. Seret hopes the research team will explore the many other possible functions of shark bioluminescence.
Rui Coelho, a shark research scientist at the Florida Museum of Natural History, also supports the new paper's conclusions.
"I believe that what most surprised and excited me about this paper was the finding that the emission of light on the ventral surface of the sharks closely resembles the environmental light," Coelho said, "allowing the sharks to efficiently camouflage themselves by counter-illumination, remaining invisible to both possible predators and potential prey."
Luckily humans are not on the prey list for the velvet belly lantern shark. Even if we were, this glowing predator would probably pose little threat.
From: http://news.discovery.com/animals/sharks-invisible-light-luminescence.html
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Rare 'alligator snapping turtle' caught in Chinese lake
Published: 1:10PM BST 24 May 2010
The man discovered the alligator snapping turtle, which is not native to the country, in Weishan Lake, in southern China's Anhui province.
The species is only native to North America and was probably someone's pet before being dumped in the lake, the local fishing department said.
The creature's alien status meant that it could have posed a danger to the local ecological system, they added.
Fisherman Sun Yongcheng said he was surprised when he netted the alligator turtle, which measures 76cm long and 30cm wide and weighs 7kg.
He said: "I suddenly noticed a black thing was hooked on the net, which scared me. It was struggling and biting the net when I pulled it up".
The spokesman for the Jining Fishing Bureau said this was the first time an alligator snapping turtle had been found in the local water system.
He said: "Somebody may have dumped their pet into the lake, which could greatly endanger the local ecology."
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7759553/Rare-alligator-snapping-turtle-caught-in-Chinese-lake.html
'Satanic' cult teens 'sacrificed' victims then ate them
Seven young members of a 'satanic' sect have gone on trial in Russia accused of four gruesome murders in which they "ritually sacrificed" their victims before cooking and eating parts of them.
Andrew Osborn in Moscow
Published: 7:21PM BST 24 May 2010
Prosecutors say the murders took place on 29 and 30 June 2008 in a remote forested area close to Yaroslavl with two victims killed per night.
The self-styled devil worshippers, which included a young teenage girl, lured three girls and a boy aged from 15 to 17 to the spot by plying them with alcohol and inviting them to sit round a bonfire.
They then killed them in a sacrificial ceremony, stabbing them 666 times each in homage to the so-called Number of the Beast.
Prosecutors say the young killers then dismembered their victims' bodies and cooked certain body parts such as the hearts and the tongues before consuming them.
They buried the rest of the remains in a giant pit which they marked with an inverted cross topped with a dead cat. Investigators say the sect was formed in 2006 and gleaned its knowledge of Satanism from the Internet, initially killing cats and dogs before graduating to homicide.
The case has shocked inhabitants of the historic city of Yaroslavl some 150 miles north-east of Moscow which is one of Russia's 'Golden Ring' tourist destinations and better known for its beautiful churches and monasteries than grisly ritual killings.
The defendants' young age - four of the accused were under eighteen at the time of the murders - and the sheer cruelty of their crimes combined with the fact that none of them came from poor families has left many locals struggling to understand their motives.
The case is being held behind closed doors but local media say all seven defendants admit their guilt. They are officially charged with murder, theft and the desecration of human remains.
They would typically be jailed for life but the fact that four of the defendants were minors at the time means they are likely to get off more lightly.
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/7760270/Satanic-cult-teens-sacrificed-victims-then-ate-them.html
Notice how nothing Satanic is mentioned...
J.A.C.
Andrew Osborn in Moscow
Published: 7:21PM BST 24 May 2010
Prosecutors say the murders took place on 29 and 30 June 2008 in a remote forested area close to Yaroslavl with two victims killed per night.
The self-styled devil worshippers, which included a young teenage girl, lured three girls and a boy aged from 15 to 17 to the spot by plying them with alcohol and inviting them to sit round a bonfire.
They then killed them in a sacrificial ceremony, stabbing them 666 times each in homage to the so-called Number of the Beast.
Prosecutors say the young killers then dismembered their victims' bodies and cooked certain body parts such as the hearts and the tongues before consuming them.
They buried the rest of the remains in a giant pit which they marked with an inverted cross topped with a dead cat. Investigators say the sect was formed in 2006 and gleaned its knowledge of Satanism from the Internet, initially killing cats and dogs before graduating to homicide.
The case has shocked inhabitants of the historic city of Yaroslavl some 150 miles north-east of Moscow which is one of Russia's 'Golden Ring' tourist destinations and better known for its beautiful churches and monasteries than grisly ritual killings.
The defendants' young age - four of the accused were under eighteen at the time of the murders - and the sheer cruelty of their crimes combined with the fact that none of them came from poor families has left many locals struggling to understand their motives.
The case is being held behind closed doors but local media say all seven defendants admit their guilt. They are officially charged with murder, theft and the desecration of human remains.
They would typically be jailed for life but the fact that four of the defendants were minors at the time means they are likely to get off more lightly.
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/7760270/Satanic-cult-teens-sacrificed-victims-then-ate-them.html
Notice how nothing Satanic is mentioned...
J.A.C.
Man guilty of wife's hammer killing
A man has been convicted of murdering his wife at their Edinburgh flat by smashing her head with a hammer.
A jury at the High Court in Perth unanimously found Yahya Babiker, 45, guilty of carrying out the attack on his wife Randa Kamblawi, 34.
The trial heard how Mrs Kamblawi's body was found in the bath of the couple's home last October.
Babiker, who claimed his wife had fallen in the bath, will be sentenced next month.
The shopfitter had gone out on the afternoon of 19 October to buy the murder weapon and was caught on CCTV spending £3.99 on a Homebase Value claw hammer.
One-way flight
He was seen trying out a crowbar for size before picking up the claw hammer and paying for it, then further CCTV images showed him returning to the flat.
The jury agreed that later that night he attacked on his wife of eight years as she lay in bed, hitting her on at least five occasions with the hammer.
Her skull was severely fractured and he dragged her body to the bathroom.
Babiker put her body into the bath and started cleaning up evidence of the attack, but the court heard he quickly gave up and decided to flee the scene.
He took the couple's two young children to the home of one of her relative's in Niddrie Mains Avenue, Edinburgh, in the early hours of 20 October and told them his wife was "tired" and unwell.
Babiker was then spotted on CCTV taking money from a cash machine before getting in a taxi to Edinburgh Airport where he tried to book a one-way flight to Paris.
However, he only had £430 in his account and was unable to pay the £565 price of an Air France flight.
Instead he paid cash for a flight to Heathrow and fled to London.
The court heard how he walked round London for several hours until he finally decided to return to Edinburgh later the same day.
Sudanese national Babiker took a bus north before handing himself in to the Royal Edinburgh psychiatric hospital and explaining that his wife's body lay in their home.
He claimed to police that he had pushed his wife in the bath as a "joke" because the water was cold and that she had slipped and fallen and struck her head twice.
But the jury accepted the Crown's contention that Babiker had shown "evil intent" by buying the claw hammer and that the CCTV footage from Homebase was "very damning".
'Monstrous act'
Lady Stacey said she could only impose a life sentence, but the recommended minimum custodial period would be decided after reports had been prepared.
Babiker will be sentenced at the High Court in Edinburgh on 29 June.
Det Insp Gary Cunningham, who led the murder investigation, said: "Yahya Babiker killed his wife in a brutal and premeditated attack, which took place without warning. He then tried to cover his tracks, but was undone by the overwhelming evidence against him."
He said he hoped the verdict would provide some solace to the family of Randa Kamblawi and that the force's thoughts were with their two young children who had been robbed of a mother by this "monstrous act".
From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/scotland/edinburgh_east_and_fife/10152796.stm
Husband Of Rape Victim Accused In Suspect's Beating
Posted: 8:21 am PDT May 24, 2010
Updated: 6:16 pm PDT May 24, 2010
ISSAQUAH, Wash. -- A man accused of rape is in a coma after he was beaten by the victim's husband and a friend, Issaquah police said.
Police said officers arrived at a home in the 400 block of Northeast Birch Street in Issaquah early Sunday morning and found a woman and three men. One of the men was unconscious and bleeding from the head.
The woman told police she was raped by the injured man, a 31-year-old from Kirkland.
Police said he was beaten by the two other men, one of whom is the victim's husband. The injured man was taken by ambulance to Harborview Medical Center and remains in a coma, police said.
Witnesses told KIRO 7 reporter Gary Horcher that the woman was walking home from a nearby bar around 2 a.m. and was followed by the 31-year-old man.
Witnesses said the man came into the home while the woman’s husband and his friends were leaving a bar.
After the alleged sexual assault, the woman called her husband, police said.
“He was informed that his wife had been raped and he ran home to go to her aid. Meanwhile, 911 was called by other people," said defense attorney John Henry Browne.
Browne said the woman’s husband ran into the home and he saw the alleged rapist fighting with one of the husband's friends, so he joined the fight and both men beat the suspect into unconsciousness.
According to court documents, the two men did the beating with a rubber mallet and with a brick.
Browne said the woman’s husband was not beating the man in retaliation for the rape.
“Things were happening way too fast. He walked in and there was a fight going on, and he intervened in the fight to help his friend," Browne said.
The husband, a 31-year old from Renton, and the other man, a 30-year-old from Issaquah, were arrested on suspicion of assault and taken to the King County Jail.
They appeared before a judge on Monday and are expected to bail out of jail.
Browne said the alleged rape victim is going to the hospital to be treated and have evidence gathered for the rape.
“The police informed her not to go to the sexual assault center for an exam. They have just today (Monday) told her ‘Oh gee, maybe you should’ so she is going to be doing that today." Browne said.
Police have not been able to talk to the 31-year-old Kirkland man accused in the rape because he has not come out of the coma, police said.
Police said the two men arrested for beating the man both knew him.
None of the four people involved lived at the house, they were all visitors.
From: http://www.kirotv.com/news/23656557/detail.html?cxntlid=cmg_cntnt_rss
Updated: 6:16 pm PDT May 24, 2010
ISSAQUAH, Wash. -- A man accused of rape is in a coma after he was beaten by the victim's husband and a friend, Issaquah police said.
Police said officers arrived at a home in the 400 block of Northeast Birch Street in Issaquah early Sunday morning and found a woman and three men. One of the men was unconscious and bleeding from the head.
The woman told police she was raped by the injured man, a 31-year-old from Kirkland.
Police said he was beaten by the two other men, one of whom is the victim's husband. The injured man was taken by ambulance to Harborview Medical Center and remains in a coma, police said.
Witnesses told KIRO 7 reporter Gary Horcher that the woman was walking home from a nearby bar around 2 a.m. and was followed by the 31-year-old man.
Witnesses said the man came into the home while the woman’s husband and his friends were leaving a bar.
After the alleged sexual assault, the woman called her husband, police said.
“He was informed that his wife had been raped and he ran home to go to her aid. Meanwhile, 911 was called by other people," said defense attorney John Henry Browne.
Browne said the woman’s husband ran into the home and he saw the alleged rapist fighting with one of the husband's friends, so he joined the fight and both men beat the suspect into unconsciousness.
According to court documents, the two men did the beating with a rubber mallet and with a brick.
Browne said the woman’s husband was not beating the man in retaliation for the rape.
“Things were happening way too fast. He walked in and there was a fight going on, and he intervened in the fight to help his friend," Browne said.
The husband, a 31-year old from Renton, and the other man, a 30-year-old from Issaquah, were arrested on suspicion of assault and taken to the King County Jail.
They appeared before a judge on Monday and are expected to bail out of jail.
Browne said the alleged rape victim is going to the hospital to be treated and have evidence gathered for the rape.
“The police informed her not to go to the sexual assault center for an exam. They have just today (Monday) told her ‘Oh gee, maybe you should’ so she is going to be doing that today." Browne said.
Police have not been able to talk to the 31-year-old Kirkland man accused in the rape because he has not come out of the coma, police said.
Police said the two men arrested for beating the man both knew him.
None of the four people involved lived at the house, they were all visitors.
From: http://www.kirotv.com/news/23656557/detail.html?cxntlid=cmg_cntnt_rss
Man Accused Of Killing 8 Family Members Due In Court
Posted: 6:02 am EDT May 25, 2010
BRUNSWICK, Ga. -- A Brunswick man charged with beating his father and seven others to death inside their mobile home last summer is due back in court.
A hearing in Superior Court on Tuesday will mark the first time Guy Heinze Jr. has faced a judge since he was indicted on eight counts of murder last September.
Prosecutors say Heinze used a blunt weapon to kill his father along with members of an extended family they were living with in a mobile home in coastal Glynn County.
Heinze's attorney has said he didn't kill anyone. In a distraught 911 call to police, the suspect can be heard sobbing: "My whole family's dead."
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Heinze.
From: http://www.wsbtv.com/news/23666477/detail.html
BRUNSWICK, Ga. -- A Brunswick man charged with beating his father and seven others to death inside their mobile home last summer is due back in court.
A hearing in Superior Court on Tuesday will mark the first time Guy Heinze Jr. has faced a judge since he was indicted on eight counts of murder last September.
Prosecutors say Heinze used a blunt weapon to kill his father along with members of an extended family they were living with in a mobile home in coastal Glynn County.
Heinze's attorney has said he didn't kill anyone. In a distraught 911 call to police, the suspect can be heard sobbing: "My whole family's dead."
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Heinze.
From: http://www.wsbtv.com/news/23666477/detail.html
I kept dead body secret to avoid trouble, says head-in-bag accused
Published Date: 22 May 2010
By Hilary Duncanson
A MURDER accused told police he "panicked" after returning from a chip shop to find a mother of four dead in her bed, a court has heard.
Alan Cameron said 44-year-old Heather Stacey had been on a downward spiral with drink and suggested she may have died of heart failure.
Cameron said he panicked and failed to contact the authorities when he found her lifeless body in December 2007 because a warrant was out for his arrest over an alleged breach of the peace.
The accused told how he would check on the decomposing body over a number of months as it lay in Ms Stacey's Edinburgh flat, but disposed of it after finding out the council wanted to repossess her home.
He claimed the body "fell apart" as he tried to move it and denied using tools to chop it up.
Shop worker Cameron, 56, is charged with murdering Ms Stacey in her flat in Royston Mains Place between 29 November and 11 December, 2007.
He has admitted hiding her body for more than a year and then dumping the remains, but he denies murder. His trial at the High Court in Livingston heard how Cameron was interviewed under caution at Edinburgh's St Leonard's police station in January 2009, following the discovery of human remains at Hawthornvale Path in the Newhaven area.
He told officers he had found Ms Stacey dead at her flat after nipping out for 25 minutes to get food.
He said: "It was within the first two weeks of December 2007. She said she was hungry and I went to the chip shop to get her something to eat and when I came back, she was sitting in bed. I went in and I said to her, 'There's your food', and, well, she'd died."
Cameron added: "There was no life, nothing, and I panicked. I know any normal human being would've phoned the authorities right away."
The court heard that an arrest warrant was issued for Cameron in September 2007 after he failed to show up at court for an alleged breach of the peace and kicking a dog. He was arrested in relation to that warrant in July 2008.
Asked why he did not contact the emergency services about Ms Stacey in December 2007, he told officers: "I think I was still being selfish, protecting myself. I know I shouldn't have. I know I should've put her first and foremost."
The court heard he told police he left the body where it was but "panicked" again in November 2008 when the council said they wanted to take back Ms Stacey's house.
He told officers: "By this time, I knew it was getting close to being detected and I decided to take her head and, as you know, it was found in Hawthorn path.
"The rest of her body, by this time, with it lying for nearly a year, it was totally decomposed."
Cameron told how he also dumped the torso and legs around the Newhaven and Granton areas of Edinburgh and said the body "just fell apart". The trial continues.
From: http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/I-kept-dead-body-secret.6312617.jp
By Hilary Duncanson
A MURDER accused told police he "panicked" after returning from a chip shop to find a mother of four dead in her bed, a court has heard.
Alan Cameron said 44-year-old Heather Stacey had been on a downward spiral with drink and suggested she may have died of heart failure.
Cameron said he panicked and failed to contact the authorities when he found her lifeless body in December 2007 because a warrant was out for his arrest over an alleged breach of the peace.
The accused told how he would check on the decomposing body over a number of months as it lay in Ms Stacey's Edinburgh flat, but disposed of it after finding out the council wanted to repossess her home.
He claimed the body "fell apart" as he tried to move it and denied using tools to chop it up.
Shop worker Cameron, 56, is charged with murdering Ms Stacey in her flat in Royston Mains Place between 29 November and 11 December, 2007.
He has admitted hiding her body for more than a year and then dumping the remains, but he denies murder. His trial at the High Court in Livingston heard how Cameron was interviewed under caution at Edinburgh's St Leonard's police station in January 2009, following the discovery of human remains at Hawthornvale Path in the Newhaven area.
He told officers he had found Ms Stacey dead at her flat after nipping out for 25 minutes to get food.
He said: "It was within the first two weeks of December 2007. She said she was hungry and I went to the chip shop to get her something to eat and when I came back, she was sitting in bed. I went in and I said to her, 'There's your food', and, well, she'd died."
Cameron added: "There was no life, nothing, and I panicked. I know any normal human being would've phoned the authorities right away."
The court heard that an arrest warrant was issued for Cameron in September 2007 after he failed to show up at court for an alleged breach of the peace and kicking a dog. He was arrested in relation to that warrant in July 2008.
Asked why he did not contact the emergency services about Ms Stacey in December 2007, he told officers: "I think I was still being selfish, protecting myself. I know I shouldn't have. I know I should've put her first and foremost."
The court heard he told police he left the body where it was but "panicked" again in November 2008 when the council said they wanted to take back Ms Stacey's house.
He told officers: "By this time, I knew it was getting close to being detected and I decided to take her head and, as you know, it was found in Hawthorn path.
"The rest of her body, by this time, with it lying for nearly a year, it was totally decomposed."
Cameron told how he also dumped the torso and legs around the Newhaven and Granton areas of Edinburgh and said the body "just fell apart". The trial continues.
From: http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/I-kept-dead-body-secret.6312617.jp
After keeping us waiting for a century, Mark Twain will finally reveal all
By Guy Adams in Los Angeles
Sunday, 23 May 2010
Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published.
The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.
That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.
Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted the first-hand account of his life kept under wraps for so long. Some believe it was because he wanted to talk freely about issues such as religion and politics. Others argue that the time lag prevented him from having to worry about offending friends.
One thing's for sure: by delaying publication, the author, who was fond of his celebrity status, has ensured that he'll be gossiped about during the 21st century. A section of the memoir will detail his little-known but scandalous relationship with Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, who became his secretary after the death of his wife Olivia in 1904. Twain was so close to Lyon that she once bought him an electric vibrating sex toy. But she was abruptly sacked in 1909, after the author claimed she had "hypnotised" him into giving her power of attorney over his estate.
Their ill-fated relationship will be recounted in full in a 400-page addendum, which Twain wrote during the last year of his life. It provides a remarkable account of how the dying novelist's final months were overshadowed by personal upheavals.
"Most people think Mark Twain was a sort of genteel Victorian. Well, in this document he calls her a slut and says she tried to seduce him. It's completely at odds with the impression most people have of him," says the historian Laura Trombley, who this year published a book about Lyon called Mark Twain's Other Woman.
"There is a perception that Twain spent his final years basking in the adoration of fans. The autobiography will perhaps show that it wasn't such a happy time. He spent six months of the last year of his life writing a manuscript full of vitriol, saying things that he'd never said about anyone in print before. It really is 400 pages of bile."
Twain, who was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, had made several attempts to start work on autobiography, beginning in 1870, but only really hit his stride with the work in 1906, when he appointed a stenographer to transcribe his dictated reminiscences.
Another potential motivation for leaving the book to be posthumously published concerns Twain's legacy as a Great American. Michael Shelden, who this year published Man in White, an account of Twain's final years, says that some of his privately held views could have hurt his public image.
"He had doubts about God, and in the autobiography, he questions the imperial mission of the US in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. He's also critical of [Theodore] Roosevelt, and takes the view that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa. He said they had enough business to be getting on with at home: with lynching going on in the South, he thought they should try to convert the heathens down there."
In other sections of the autobiography, Twain makes cruel observations about his supposed friends, acquaintances and one of his landladies.
Parts of the book have already seen the light of day in other publications. Small excerpts were run by US magazines before Twain's death (since he needed the money). His estate has allowed parts of it to be adapted for publication in three previous books described as "autobiographies".
However, Robert Hirst, who is leading the team at Berkeley editing the complete text, says that more than half of it has still never appeared in print. Only academics, biographers, and members of the public prepared to travel to the university's Bancroft research library have previously been able to read it in full. "When people ask me 'did Mark Twain really mean it to take 100 years for this to come out', I say 'he was certainly a man who knew how to make people want to buy a book'," Dr Hirst said.
November's publication is authorised by his estate, which in the absence of surviving descendants (a daughter, Clara, died in 1962, and a granddaughter Nina committed suicide in 1966) funds museums and libraries that preserve his legacy.
"There are so many biographies of Twain, and many of them have used bits and pieces of the autobiography," Dr Hirst said. "But biographers pick and choose what bits to quote. By publishing Twain's book in full, we hope that people will be able to come to their own complete conclusions about what sort of a man he was."
From: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/after-keeping-us-waiting-for-a-century-mark-twain-will-finally-reveal-all-1980695.html
Monday, May 24, 2010
Vix Sunt Homines Hoc Nomine Digni, Quamque Lupi Saevae Plus Feritatis Habent
[Though men in shape, they scarce deserve the name; their savagery doth put the Wolves to shame.]
George Romero's Season of the Witch (1973)
Season of the Witch, also known as Hungry Wives, and Jack's Wife, is George A. Romero's fourth film. It was filmed in 1971, and released in 1973. It is about a housewife who becomes involved in witchcraft. The film was shot in Pittsburgh and the suburb of Forest Hills, Pennsylvania while most of it was shot in the home of the parents of Christine Forrest, a crewperson and actress whom Romero later married.
Plot
Season of the Witch follows the life of Joan Mitchell (Jan White), a 39-year-old confident and sophisticated wife of a successful businessman named Jack Mitchell (Bill Thunhurst) who live together in a large house in suburban Pittsburgh with their 19-year-old daughter Nikki (Joedda McClain) who is a student at a local community college. But unknown to her friends, Joan is unhappy and bored with her lifestyle as a housewife which includes cleaning the house, getting her car washed, picking up her husband's dry cleaning, and grocery shopping. Jack is so obsessed with his business that he often ignores Joan and leaves on long business trips every week. Joan has been seeing a therapist about recurring dreams she's been having about her husband controlling her and keeping her locked up like a dog, as well as about a miscarriage she had many years ago.
During a social party, Joan and her friends learn about a new woman in their neighborhood named Marion Hamilton (Virginia Greenwald) who practices witchcraft, they are fascinated to have an "in thing" right in their own community. Prompted by curiosity, Joan and one of her friends, Shirley (Anne Muffley), drive over to Marion's house one night for a Tarot reading where they both observe Marion's ability to deal positively with her life through her absolute faith in what she practices. Marion is also the leader of a secret woman's group which is a coven of witches in which she tells Joan a little about the group and their dealings with life in general.
Joan and Shirley drive home to Joan's house where they meet Gregg (Raymond Laine), a student teacher at Nikki's college (with whom Nikki has a very casual sexual relationship). The four spend time drinking and talking about life. Gregg clearly shows an attraction to Joan, who rebuffs his flirting with her. Joan throws Gregg out of her house when he cruelly tricks the inebriated Shirley into believing that she has smoked pot, when, in fact, she has only smoked a regular cigarette.
The next day, Nikki leaves without telling anybody where she's going, and soon afterward Jack leaves for a one week business trip, leaving Joan more alone and unhappy than ever. Joan buys a copy of the book, "To Be a Witch, A Primer", and soon practices witchcraft. She then conjures a spell to make Gregg like her, and soon the young man and older woman are engaged in an affair. Joan also has increasingly terrifying, recurring nightmares, in which she is attacked in her home by an intruder wearing a Satanic mask.
Believing that she has become a witch, Joan begins to sink more deeply into her new lifestyle, until the line between fantasy and reality blurs which leads to tragedy. The police phone Joan and tell her that they have found Nikki in Buffalo, New York and that she will be coming home in three or four days. After one last sexual encounter with Gregg, Joan tells him that Nikki is coming home soon and that she does not want to see him again.
After another terrifying nightmare involving the masked intruder, Joan accidentally shoots and kills her husband, who has unexpectedly returned home early from his business trip, after she mistakes him for the intruder.
With the last link to her past lifestyle severed, Joan joins Marion's coven of witches and becomes a full-pledged witch. Cleared of her husband's death as an accident, Joan goes back to attending social parties with her friends where she quietly introduces herself as a witch. But Joan still remains lonely when people around her still do not refer to her by her first name, but either as "Mrs. Mitchell" or simply, "Jack's wife."
Directed by George A. Romero - Produced by Alvin Croft, Nancy Romero, Gary Streiner - Written by George A. Romero - Starring Jan White, Raymond Laine, Ann Muffly - Music by Steve Gorn - Cinematography George A. Romero - Editing by George A. Romero - Distributed by Anchor Bay Entertainment (US DVD) - Release date(s) 18 April 1973 - Running time 89 min - Extended version: 104 min - Original version: 130 min - Language English - Budget $90,000 (estimated)
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season_of_the_Witch_(film)
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSTROnJzjXk
Movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZT16YDtWpc&feature=related
The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power
By all appearances, Noah Lottick of Kingston, Pa., had been a normal, happy 24-year-old who was looking for his place in the world. On the day last June when his parents drove to New York City to claim his body, they were nearly catatonic with grief. The young Russian-studies scholar had jumped from a 10th-floor window of the Milford Plaza Hotel and bounced off the hood of a stretch limousine. When the police arrived, his fingers were still clutching $171 in cash, virtually the only money he hadn't yet turned over to the Church of Scientology, the self-help "philosophy" group he had discovered just seven months earlier.
His death inspired his father Edward, a physician, to start his own investigation of the church. "We thought Scientology was something like Dale Carnegie," Lottick says. "I now believe it's a school for psychopaths. Their so-called therapies are manipulations. They take the best and brightest people and destroy them." The Lotticks want to sue the church for contributing to their son's death, but the prospect has them frightened. For nearly 40 years, the big business of Scientology has shielded itself exquisitely behind the First Amendment as well as a battery of high-priced criminal lawyers and shady private detectives.
The Church of Scientology, started by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard to "clear" people of unhappiness, portrays itself as a religion. In reality the church is a hugely profitable global racket that survives by intimidating members and critics in a Mafia-like manner. At times during the past decade, prosecutions against Scientology seemed to be curbing its menace. Eleven top Scientologists, including Hubbard's wife, were sent to prison in the early 1980s for infiltrating, burglarizing and wiretapping more than 100 private and government agencies in attempts to block their investigations. In recent years hundreds of longtime Scientology adherents — many charging that they were mentally or physically abused — have quit the church and criticized it at their own risk. Some have sued the church and won; others have settled for amounts in excess of $500,000. In various cases judges have labeled the church "schizophrenic and paranoid" and "corrupt, sinister and dangerous."
Yet the outrage and litigation have failed to squelch Scientology. The group, which boasts 700 centers in 65 countries, threatens to become more insidious and pervasive than ever. Scientology is trying to go mainstream, a strategy that has sparked a renewed law-enforcement campaign against the church. Many of the group's followers have been accused of committing financial scams, while the church is busy attracting the unwary through a wide array of front groups in such businesses as publishing, consulting, health care and even remedial education.
In Hollywood, Scientology has assembled a star-studded roster of followers by aggressively recruiting and regally pampering them at the church's "Celebrity Centers," a chain of clubhouses that offer expensive counseling and career guidance. Adherents include screen idols Tom Cruise and John Travolta, actresses Kirstie Alley, Mimi Rogers and Anne Archer, Palm Springs mayor and performer Sonny Bono, jazzman Chick Corea and even Nancy Cartwright, the voice of cartoon star Bart Simpson. Rank-and-file members, however, are dealt a less glamorous Scientology.
According to the Cult Awareness Network, whose 23 chapters monitor more than 200 "mind control" cults, no group prompts more telephone pleas for help than does Scientology. Says Cynthia Kisser, the network's Chicago-based executive director: "Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative cult the country has ever seen. No cult extracts more money from its members." Agrees Vicki Aznaran, who was one of Scientology's six key leaders until she bolted from the church in 1987: "This is a criminal organization, day in and day out. It makes Jim and Tammy [Bakker] look like kindergarten."
To explore Scientology's reach, TIME conducted more than 150 interviews and reviewed hundreds of court records and internal Scientology documents. Church officials refused to be interviewed. The investigation paints a picture of a depraved yet thriving enterprise. Most cults fail to outlast their founder, but Scientology has prospered since Hubbard's death in 1986. In a court filing, one of the cult's many entities — the Church of Spiritual Technology — listed $503 million in income just for 1987. High-level defectors say the parent organization has squirreled away an estimated $400 million in bank accounts in Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Cyprus. Scientology probably has about 50,000 active members, far fewer than the 8 million the group claims. But in one sense, that inflated figure rings true: millions of people have been affected in one way or another by Hubbard's bizarre creation.
Scientology is now run by David Miscavige, 31, a high school dropout and second-generation church member. Defectors describe him as cunning, ruthless and so paranoid about perceived enemies that he kept plastic wrap over his glass of water. His obsession is to attain credibility for Scientology in the 1990s. Among other tactics, the group:
• Retains public relations powerhouse Hill and Knowlton to help shed the church's fringe-group image
• Joined such household names as Sony and Pepsi as a main sponsor of Ted Turner's Goodwill Games
• Buys massive quantities of its own books from retail stores to propel the titles onto best-seller lists
• Runs full-page ads in such publications as Newsweek and Business Week that call Scientology a "philosophy," along with a plethora of TV ads touting the group's books
• Recruits wealthy and respectable professionals through a web of consulting groups that typically hide their ties to Scientology
The founder of this enterprise was part storyteller, part flimflam man. Born in Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard served in the Navy during World War II and soon afterward complained to the Veterans Administration about his "suicidal inclinations" and his "seriously affected" mind. Nevertheless, Hubbard was a moderately successful writer of pulp science fiction. Years later, church brochures described him falsely as an "extensively decorated" World War II hero who was crippled and blinded in action, twice pronounced dead and miraculously cured through Scientology. Hubbard's "doctorate" from "Sequoia University" was a fake mail-order degree. In a 1984 case in which the church sued a Hubbard biographical researcher, a California judge concluded that its founder was "a pathological liar."
Hubbard wrote one of Scientology's sacred texts, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, in 1950. In it he introduced a crude psychotherapeutic technique he called "auditing." He also created a simplified lie detector (called an "E-meter") that was designed to measure electrical changes in the skin while subjects discussed intimate details of their past. Hubbard argued that unhappiness sprang from mental aberrations (or "engrams") caused by early traumas. Counseling sessions with the E-meter, he claimed, could knock out the engrams, cure blindness and even improve a person's intelligence and appearance.
Hubbard kept adding steps, each more costly, for his followers to climb. In the 1960s the guru decreed that humans are made of clusters of spirits (or "thetans") who were banished to earth some 75 million years ago by a cruel galactic ruler named Xenu. Naturally, those thetans had to be audited.
An Internal Revenue Service ruling in 1967 stripped Scientology's mother church of its tax-exempt status. A federal court ruled in 1971 that Hubbard's medical claims were bogus and that E-meter auditing could no longer be called a scientific treatment. Hubbard responded by going fully religious, seeking First Amendment protection for Scientology's strange rites. His counselors started sporting clerical collars. Chapels were built, franchises became "missions," fees became "fixed donations," and Hubbard's comic-book cosmology became "sacred scriptures."
During the early 1970s, the IRS conducted its own auditing sessions and proved that Hubbard was skimming millions of dollars from the church, laundering the money through dummy corporations in Panama and stashing it in Swiss bank accounts. Moreover, church members stole IRS documents, filed false tax returns and harassed the agency's employees. By late 1985, with high-level defectors accusing Hubbard of having stolen as much as $200 million from the church, the IRS was seeking an indictment of Hubbard for tax fraud. Scientology members "worked day and night" shredding documents the IRS sought, according to defector Aznaran, who took part in the scheme. Hubbard, who had been in hiding for five years, died before the criminal case could be prosecuted.
Today the church invents costly new services with all the zeal of its founder. Scientology doctrine warns that even adherents who are "cleared" of engrams face grave spiritual dangers unless they are pushed to higher and more expensive levels. According to the church's latest price list, recruits — "raw meat," as Hubbard called them — take auditing sessions that cost as much as $1,000 an hour, or $12,500 for a 12½-hour "intensive."
Psychiatrists say these sessions can produce a drugged-like, mind-controlled euphoria that keeps customers coming back for more. To pay their fees, newcomers can earn commissions by recruiting new members, become auditors themselves (Miscavige did so at age 12), or join the church staff and receive free counseling in exchange for what their written contracts describe as a "billion years" of labor. "Make sure that lots of bodies move through the shop," implored Hubbard in one of his bulletins to officials. "Make money. Make more money. Make others produce so as to make money ... However you get them in or why, just do it."
Harriet Baker learned the hard way about Scientology's business of selling religion. When Baker, 73, lost her husband to cancer, a Scientologist turned up at her Los Angeles home peddling a $1,300 auditing package to cure her grief. Some $15,000 later, the Scientologists discovered that her house was debt free. They arranged a $45,000 mortgage, which they pressured her to tap for more auditing until Baker's children helped their mother snap out of her daze. Last June, Baker demanded a $27,000 refund for unused services, prompting two cult members to show up at her door unannounced with an E-meter to interrogate her. Baker never got the money and, financially strapped, was forced to sell her house in September.
Before Noah Lottick killed himself, he had paid more than $5,000 for church counseling. His behavior had also become strange. He once remarked to his parents that his Scientology mentors could actually read minds. When his father suffered a major heart attack, Noah insisted that it was purely psychosomatic. Five days before he jumped, Noah burst into his parents' home and demanded to know why they were spreading "false rumors" about him — a delusion that finally prompted his father to call a psychiatrist.
It was too late. "From Noah's friends at Dianetics" read the card that accompanied a bouquet of flowers at Lottick's funeral. Yet no Scientology staff members bothered to show up. A week earlier, local church officials had given Lottick's parents a red-carpet tour of their center. A cult leader told Noah's parents that their son had been at the church just hours before he disappeared — but the church denied this story as soon as the body was identified. True to form, the cult even haggled with the Lotticks over $3,000 their son had paid for services he never used, insisting that Noah had intended it as a "donation."
The church has invented hundreds of goods and services for which members are urged to give "donations." Are you having trouble "moving swiftly up the Bridge" — that is, advancing up the stepladder of enlightenment? Then you can have your case reviewed for a mere $1,250 "donation." Want to know "why a thetan hangs on to the physical universe?" Try 52 of Hubbard's tape-recorded speeches from 1952, titled "Ron's Philadelphia Doctorate Course Lectures," for $2,525. Next: nine other series of the same sort. For the collector, gold-and-leather-bound editions of 22 of Hubbard's books (and bookends) on subjects ranging from Scientology ethics to radiation can be had for just $1,900.
To gain influence and lure richer, more sophisticated followers, Scientology has lately resorted to a wide array of front groups and financial scams. Among them:
Consulting: Sterling Management Systems, formed in 1983, has been ranked in recent years by Inc. magazine as one of America's fastest-growing private companies (estimated 1988 revenues: $20 million). Sterling regularly mails a free newsletter to more than 300,000 health-care professionals, mostly dentists, promising to increase their incomes dramatically. The firm offers seminars and courses that typically cost $10,000. But Sterling's true aim is to hook customers for Scientology. "The church has a rotten product, so they package it as something else," says Peter Georgiades, a Pittsburgh attorney who represents Sterling victims. "It's a kind of bait and switch." Sterling's founder, dentist Gregory Hughes, is now under investigation by California's Board of Dental Examiners for incompetence. Nine lawsuits are pending against him for malpractice (seven others have been settled), mostly for orthodontic work on children.
Many dentists who have unwittingly been drawn into the cult are filing or threatening lawsuits as well. Dentist Robert Geary of Medina, Ohio, who entered a Sterling seminar in 1988, endured "the most extreme high-pressure sales tactics I have ever faced." Sterling officials told Geary, 45, that their firm was not linked to Scientology, he says. But Geary claims they eventually convinced him that he and his wife Dorothy had personal problems that required auditing. Over five months, the Gearys say, they spent $130,000 for services, plus $50,000 for "gold-embossed, investment-grade" books signed by Hubbard. Geary contends that Scientologists not only called his bank to increase his credit-card limit but also forged his signature on a $20,000 loan application. "It was insane," he recalls. "I couldn't even get an accounting from them of what I was paying for." At one point, the Gearys claim, Scientologists held Dorothy hostage for two weeks in a mountain cabin, after which she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.
Last October, Sterling broke some bad news to another dentist, Glover Rowe of Gadsden, Ala., and his wife Dee. Tests showed that unless they signed up for auditing, Glover's practice would fail, and Dee would someday abuse their child. The next month the Rowes flew to Glendale, Calif., where they shuttled daily from a local hotel to a Dianetics center. "We thought they were brilliant people because they seemed to know so much about us," recalls Dee. "Then we realized our hotel room must have been bugged." After bolting from the center, $23,000 poorer, the Rowes say, they were chased repeatedly by Scientologists on foot and in cars. Dentists aren't the only ones at risk. Scientology also makes pitches to chiropractors, podiatrists and veterinarians.
Public Influence: One front, the Way to Happiness Foundation, has distributed to children in thousands of the nation's public schools more than 3.5 million copies of a booklet Hubbard wrote on morality. The church calls the scheme "the largest dissemination project in Scientology history." Applied Scholastics is the name of still another front, which is attempting to install a Hubbard tutorial program in public schools, primarily those populated by minorities. The group also plans a 1,000-acre campus, where it will train educators to teach various Hubbard methods. The disingenuously named Citizens Commission on Human Rights is a Scientology group at war with psychiatry, its primary competitor. The commission typically issues reports aimed at discrediting particular psychiatrists and the field in general. The CCHR is also behind an all-out war against Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, the nation's top-selling antidepression drug. Despite scant evidence, the group's members — who call themselves "psychbusters" — claim that Prozac drives people to murder or suicide. Through mass mailings, appearances on talk shows and heavy lobbying, CCHR has hurt drug sales and helped spark dozens of lawsuits against Lilly.
Another Scientology-linked group, the Concerned Businessmen's Association of America, holds antidrug contests and awards $5,000 grants to schools as a way to recruit students and curry favor with education officials. West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller IV unwittingly commended the CBAA in 1987 on the Senate floor. Last August author Alex Haley was the keynote speaker at its annual awards banquet in Los Angeles. Says Haley: "I didn't know much about that group going in. I'm a Methodist." Ignorance about Scientology can be embarrassing: two months ago, Illinois Governor Jim Edgar, noting that Scientology's founder "has solved the aberrations of the human mind," proclaimed March 13 "L. Ron Hubbard Day." He rescinded the proclamation in late March, once he learned who Hubbard really was.
Health Care: HealthMed, a chain of clinics run by Scientologists, promotes a grueling and excessive system of saunas, exercise and vitamins designed by Hubbard to purify the body. Experts denounce the regime as quackery and potentially harmful, yet HealthMed solicits unions and public agencies for contracts. The chain is plugged heavily in a new book, Diet for a Poisoned Planet, by journalist David Steinman, who concludes that scores of common foods (among them: peanuts, bluefish, peaches and cottage cheese) are dangerous.
Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop labeled the book "trash," and the Food and Drug Administration issued a paper in October that claims Steinman distorts his facts. "HealthMed is a gateway to Scientology, and Steinman's book is a sorting mechanism," says physician William Jarvis, who is head of the National Council Against Health Fraud. Steinman, who describes Hubbard favorably as a "researcher," denies any ties to the church and contends, "HealthMed has no affiliation that I know of with Scientology."
Drug Treatment: Hubbard's purification treatments are the mainstay of Narconon, a Scientology-run chain of 33 alcohol and drug rehabilitation centers — some in prisons under the name "Criminon" — in 12 countries. Narconon, a classic vehicle for drawing addicts into the cult, now plans to open what it calls the world's largest treatment center, a 1,400-bed facility on an Indian reservation near Newkirk, Okla. (pop. 2,400). At a 1989 ceremony in Newkirk, the Association for Better Living and Education presented Narconon a check for $200,000 and a study praising its work. The association turned out to be part of Scientology itself. Today the town is battling to keep out the cult, which has fought back through such tactics as sending private detectives to snoop on the mayor and the local newspaper publisher.
Financial Scams: Three Florida Scientologists, including Ronald Bernstein, a big contributor to the church's international "war chest," pleaded guilty in March to using their rare-coin dealership as a money laundry. Other notorious activities by Scientologists include making the shady Vancouver stock exchange even shadier and plotting to plant operatives in the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Export-Import Bank of the U.S. The alleged purpose of this scheme: to gain inside information on which countries are going to be denied credit so that Scientology-linked traders can make illicit profits by taking "short" positions in those countries' currencies.
In the stock market the practice of "shorting" involves borrowing shares of publicly traded companies in the hope that the price will go down before the stocks must be bought on the market and returned to the lender. The Feshbach brothers of Palo Alto, Calif. — Kurt, Joseph and Matthew — have become the leading short sellers in the U.S., with more than $500 million under management. The Feshbachs command a staff of about 60 employees and claim to have earned better returns than the Dow Jones industrial average for most of the 1980s. And, they say, they owe it all to the teachings of Scientology, whose "war chest" has received more than $1 million from the family.
The Feshbachs also embrace the church's tactics; the brothers are the terrors of the stock exchanges. In congressional hearings in 1989, the heads of several companies claimed that Feshbach operatives have spread false information to government agencies and posed in various guises — such as a Securities and Exchange Commission official — in an effort to discredit their companies and drive the stocks down. Michael Russell, who ran a chain of business journals, testified that a Feshbach employee called his bankers and interfered with his loans. Sometimes the Feshbachs send private detectives to dig up dirt on firms, which is then shared with business reporters, brokers and fund managers.
The Feshbachs, who wear jackets bearing the slogan "stock busters," insist they run a clean shop. But as part of a current probe into possible insider stock trading, federal officials are reportedly investigating whether the Feshbachs received confidential information from FDA employees. The brothers seem aligned with Scientology's war on psychiatry and medicine: many of their targets are health and biotechnology firms. "Legitimate short selling performs a public service by deflating hyped stocks," says Robert Flaherty, the editor of Equities magazine and a harsh critic of the brothers. "But the Feshbachs have damaged scores of good start-ups."
Occasionally a Scientologist's business antics land him in jail. Last August a former devotee named Steven Fishman began serving a five-year prison term in Florida. His crime: stealing blank stock-confirmation slips from his employer, a major brokerage house, to use as proof that he owned stock entitling him to join dozens of successful class-action lawsuits. Fishman made roughly $1 million this way from 1983 to 1988 and spent as much as 30% of the loot on Scientology books and tapes.
Scientology denies any tie to the Fishman scam, a claim strongly disputed by both Fishman and his longtime psychiatrist, Uwe Geertz, a prominent Florida hypnotist. Both men claim that when arrested, Fishman was ordered by the church to kill Geertz and then do an "EOC," or end of cycle, which is church jargon for suicide.
Book Publishing: Scientology mischiefmaking has even moved to the book industry. Since 1985 at least a dozen Hubbard books, printed by a church company, have made best-seller lists. They range from a 5,000-page sci-fi decology (Black Genesis, The Enemy Within, An Alien Affair) to the 40-year-old Dianetics. In 1988 the trade publication Publishers Weekly awarded the dead author a plaque commemorating the appearance of Dianetics on its best-seller list for 100 consecutive weeks.
Critics pan most of Hubbard's books as unreadable, while defectors claim that church insiders are sometimes the real authors. Even so, Scientology has sent out armies of its followers to buy the group's books at such major chains as B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks to sustain the illusion of a best-selling author. A former Dalton's manager says that some books arrived in his store with the chain's price stickers already on them, suggesting that copies are being recycled. Scientology claims that sales of Hubbard books now top 90 million worldwide. The scheme, set up to gain converts and credibility, is coupled with a radio and TV advertising campaign virtually unparalleled in the book industry.
Scientology devotes vast resources to squelching its critics. Since 1986 Hubbard and his church have been the subject of four unfriendly books, all released by small yet courageous publishers. In each case, the writers have been badgered and heavily sued. One of Hubbard's policies was that all perceived enemies are "fair game" and subject to being "tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed." Those who criticize the church — journalists, doctors, lawyers and even judges — often find themselves engulfed in litigation, stalked by private eyes, framed for fictional crimes, beaten up or threatened with death. Psychologist Margaret Singer, 69, an outspoken Scientology critic and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, now travels regularly under an assumed name to avoid harassment.
After the Los Angeles Times published a negative series on the church last summer, Scientologists spent an estimated $1 million to plaster the reporters' names on hundreds of billboards and bus placards across the city. Above their names were quotations taken out of context to portray the church in a positive light.
The church's most fearsome advocates are its lawyers. Hubbard warned his followers in writing to "beware of attorneys who tell you not to sue . . . the purpose of the suit is to harass and discourage rather than to win." Result: Scientology has brought hundreds of suits against its perceived enemies and today pays an estimated $20 million annually to more than 100 lawyers.
One legal goal of Scientology is to bankrupt the opposition or bury it under paper. The church has 71 active lawsuits against the IRS alone. One of them, Miscavige vs. IRS, has required the U.S. to produce an index of 52,000 pages of documents. Boston attorney Michael Flynn, who helped Scientology victims from 1979 to 1987, personally endured 14 frivolous lawsuits, all of them dismissed. Another lawyer, Joseph Yanny, believes the church "has so subverted justice and the judicial system that it should be barred from seeking equity in any court." He should know: Yanny represented the cult until 1987, when, he says, he was asked to help church officials steal medical records to blackmail an opposing attorney (who was allegedly beaten up instead). Since Yanny quit representing the church, he has been the target of death threats, burglaries, lawsuits and other harassment.
Scientology's critics contend that the U.S. needs to crack down on the church in a major, organized way. "I want to know, Where is our government?" demands Toby Plevin, a Los Angeles attorney who handles victims. "It shouldn't be left to private litigators, because God knows most of us are afraid to get involved." But law-enforcement agents are also wary. "Every investigator is very cautious, walking on eggshells when it comes to the church," says a Florida police detective who has tracked the cult since 1988. "It will take a federal effort with lots of money and manpower."
So far the agency giving Scientology the most grief is the IRS, whose officials have implied that Hubbard's successors may be looting the church's coffers. Since 1988, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the revocation of the cult's tax-exempt status, a massive IRS probe of church centers across the country has been under way. An IRS agent, Marcus Owens, has estimated that thousands of IRS employees have been involved. Another agent, in an internal IRS memorandum, spoke hopefully of the "ultimate disintegration" of the church. A small but helpful beacon shone last June when a federal appeals court ruled that two cassette tapes featuring conversations between church officials and their lawyers are evidence of a plan to commit "future frauds" against the IRS.
The IRS and FBI have been debriefing Scientology defectors for the past three years, in part to gain evidence for a major racketeering case that appears to have stalled last summer. Federal agents complain that the Justice Department is unwilling to spend the money needed to endure a drawn-out war with Scientology or to fend off the cult's notorious jihads against individual agents. "In my opinion the church has one of the most effective intelligence operations in the U.S., rivaling even that of the FBI," says Ted Gunderson, a former head of the FBI's Los Angeles office.
Foreign governments have been moving even more vigorously against the organization. In Canada the church and nine of its members will be tried in June on charges of stealing government documents (many of them retrieved in an enormous police raid of the church's Toronto headquarters). Scientology proposed to give $1 million to the needy if the case was dropped, but Canada spurned the offer. Since 1986 authorities in France, Spain and Italy have raided more than 50 Scientology centers. Pending charges against more than 100 of its overseas church members include fraud, extortion, capital flight, coercion, illegally practicing medicine and taking advantage of mentally incapacitated people. In Germany last month, leading politicians accused the cult of trying to infiltrate a major party as well as launching an immense recruitment drive in the east.
Sometimes even the church's biggest zealots can use a little protection. Screen star Travolta, 37, has long served as an unofficial Scientology spokesman, even though he told a magazine in 1983 that he was opposed to the church's management. High-level defectors claim that Travolta has long feared that if he defected, details of his sexual life would be made public. "He felt pretty intimidated about this getting out and told me so," recalls William Franks, the church's former chairman of the board. "There were no outright threats made, but it was implicit. If you leave, they immediately start digging up everything." Franks was driven out in 1981 after attempting to reform the church.
The church's former head of security, Richard Aznaran, recalls Scientology ringleader Miscavige repeatedly joking to staffers about Travolta's allegedly promiscuous homosexual behavior. At this point any threat to expose Travolta seems superfluous: last May a male porn star collected $100,000 from a tabloid for an account of his alleged two-year liaison with the celebrity. Travolta refuses to comment, and in December his lawyer dismissed questions about the subject as "bizarre." Two weeks later, Travolta announced that he was getting married to actress Kelly Preston, a fellow Scientologist.
Shortly after Hubbard's death the church retained Trout & Ries, a respected, Connecticut-based firm of marketing consultants, to help boost its public image. "We were brutally honest," says Jack Trout. "We advised them to clean up their act, stop with the controversy and even to stop being a church. They didn't want to hear that." Instead, Scientology hired one of the country's largest p.r. outfits, Hill and Knowlton, whose executives refuse to discuss the lucrative relationship. "Hill and Knowlton must feel that these guys are not totally off the wall," says Trout. "Unless it's just for the money."
One of Scientology's main strategies is to keep advancing the tired argument that the church is being "persecuted" by antireligionists. It is supported in that position by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Council of Churches. But in the end, money is what Scientology is all about. As long as the organization's opponents and victims are successfully squelched, Scientology's managers and lawyers will keep pocketing millions of dollars by helping it achieve its ends.
From: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,972865,00.html
Italian villages terrorised by rampaging bear but law protects animal
A brown bear has gone on the rampage in the Italian Dolomites, killing donkeys, chickens and sheep and prompting shepherds and farmers to call for it to be killed.
Published: 5:58PM BST 21 May 2010
The male bear, which has been nicknamed Dino, is suspected of killing six donkeys and several sheep in the last 10 days, with some of the animals left disembowelled.
It has also raided chicken coops and scooped honey out of bee hives.
Anxious locals in the mountains around the town of Asiago fear that it is only a matter of time before the bear attacks a hiker or shepherd.
But brown bears are protected under Italian law, and more than 15,000 Italians have signed up to a Facebook page demanding that the beast be left unharmed, despite the havoc it is wreaking among livestock.
To complicate matters, it has become increasingly difficult to establish Dino's location because he has shed a radio tracking collar that was fitted around his neck. The bear can cover up to 30 miles in a day.
"I'm worried for the safety of cows up in the pastures, but we also have an obligation to protect the bear and avoid any sort of violent end," said Attilio Schneck, the president of the local province of Vicenza.
Dino was one of several bears born in Slovenia and brought to Italy in an attempt to re-establish the species in the Dolomites, once part of their natural range.
Bears are bouncing back in Italy, after decades of hunting, poaching and persecution by farmers caused their numbers to plummet.
While brown bears now roam the north of Italy, the rare Marsican sub-species is thriving in the central Appenine range, with around 50 bears estimated to be living in a national park in the Abruzzo region.
Italy was outraged in 2006 when one of "their" bears, a male called Bruno, wandered across the Alps into Bavaria and was shot dead by German hunters.
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/7750045/Italian-villages-terrorised-by-rampaging-bear-but-law-protects-animal.html
Published: 5:58PM BST 21 May 2010
The male bear, which has been nicknamed Dino, is suspected of killing six donkeys and several sheep in the last 10 days, with some of the animals left disembowelled.
It has also raided chicken coops and scooped honey out of bee hives.
Anxious locals in the mountains around the town of Asiago fear that it is only a matter of time before the bear attacks a hiker or shepherd.
But brown bears are protected under Italian law, and more than 15,000 Italians have signed up to a Facebook page demanding that the beast be left unharmed, despite the havoc it is wreaking among livestock.
To complicate matters, it has become increasingly difficult to establish Dino's location because he has shed a radio tracking collar that was fitted around his neck. The bear can cover up to 30 miles in a day.
"I'm worried for the safety of cows up in the pastures, but we also have an obligation to protect the bear and avoid any sort of violent end," said Attilio Schneck, the president of the local province of Vicenza.
Dino was one of several bears born in Slovenia and brought to Italy in an attempt to re-establish the species in the Dolomites, once part of their natural range.
Bears are bouncing back in Italy, after decades of hunting, poaching and persecution by farmers caused their numbers to plummet.
While brown bears now roam the north of Italy, the rare Marsican sub-species is thriving in the central Appenine range, with around 50 bears estimated to be living in a national park in the Abruzzo region.
Italy was outraged in 2006 when one of "their" bears, a male called Bruno, wandered across the Alps into Bavaria and was shot dead by German hunters.
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/7750045/Italian-villages-terrorised-by-rampaging-bear-but-law-protects-animal.html
Anti-Islam movement reaches Poland
Eastern Europe has had fewer tensions over Muslim immigration than western Europe, but that could change.
By Jan Cienski - GlobalPost
Published: May 23, 2010 09:14 ET
WARSAW, Poland — European anxiety over the presence of Muslims in traditionally Christian societies has arrived in Poland, where the capital has been blanketed in anti-Islamic posters and several hundred protesters recently showed up to denounce the construction of a mosque.
Demonstrators waved signs proclaiming “Stop Islamization,” galvanized by posters put up around Warsaw showing a woman clad in a black chador, with menacing minarets that looked like missiles peering out behind her. Counter-demonstrators, separated by a line of police, denounced them as “fascists” and “racists.”
What makes the demonstration surprising is that unlike western European countries where there are millions of Muslims, Poland, a country of 38 million, has only about 30,000 Muslims.
But at a time when Switzerland has voted to ban the construction of new mosques, when France and Belgium are considering restrictions on women covering their faces in public, and Italy’s nationalist Northern League wants to keep mosques at least a kilometer away from any churches, Islam as a political issue has arrived in Poland.
“We wanted to start a public debate,” Piotr Slusarczyk, one of the demonstrators' leaders, told the Rzeczpospolita daily. “We are warning against radical Islam in Europe.”
Samir Ismail, a Kuwaiti Palestinian doctor who has lived more than 20 years in Poland and is the leader of the newly formed Muslim League, said that for the capital's 10,000 Muslims, the mosque would simply be a place to pray. He pointed out that the community has been careful not to offend, opting for a 16-yard high minaret instead of the 25-yard one approved by the building permit.
“We don’t want to create misunderstandings,” he told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper. “We are aware that we have a problem with being accepted.”
The friction around Poland’s still tiny Muslim minority is a sign of the country’s growing normalization and integration into the European Union. Immigrants were almost unknown in communist times, but as Poland becomes wealthier, it is starting to attract outsiders, from Ukrainians working on construction or as domestic help, to Muslim Chechens escaping Russian repression in their homeland.
In one sense, Poland’s growing diversity is a return to the past. Before World War II, Poland was a multinational stew, with ethnic Poles making up only about two-thirds of the population. The country had large numbers of Ukrainians, Jews and Germans, as well as a small Muslim minority — Tatars descended from the hordes of Genghis Khan who had terrorized Europe in the Middle Ages.
Several thousand Tatars had settled in Poland and Lithuania in the 14th century, and, despite losing their language, never lost their religion.
World War II left Poland a very different country. The Jews had been mostly murdered by the Germans, and most of the survivors left after the war. Germans were expelled, and by shifting Poland’s borders hundreds of miles to the west, there were no large Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities. After 1945, Poland was almost completely monoethnic — one of the only minorities left were the Tatars, who have two villages in northeastern Poland, each with a small mosque.
New Muslim migrants, like Samir Ismail, have very little in common with the Tatars, who have been well integrated into Polish life for centuries — they even had their own cavalry unit before the war. Ismail and other Muslims formed their own organization in 2003, designed to advocate for the interests of new immigrants, including the need to build themselves a place to worship.
From that time they have been trying to build a mosque in Warsaw with the help of Saudi sponsors. As the project has neared completion, it has begun to arouse the ire of some Polish nationalists, who fear that their country could soon have the same issues with Muslim minorities as countries in western Europe.
“We have the example of other countries where the idea of freedom of religion is abused,” said Slusarczyk.
But Poland’s laws do not allow for any religious discrimination.
“The decision permitting this investment has been taken long ago,” said Tomasz Andryszczyk, a spokesman for the Warsaw city government. “What are we supposed to do? It would be bad if this project ran into any troubles.”
From: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/poland/100520/islamophobia-europe-immigration
By Jan Cienski - GlobalPost
Published: May 23, 2010 09:14 ET
WARSAW, Poland — European anxiety over the presence of Muslims in traditionally Christian societies has arrived in Poland, where the capital has been blanketed in anti-Islamic posters and several hundred protesters recently showed up to denounce the construction of a mosque.
Demonstrators waved signs proclaiming “Stop Islamization,” galvanized by posters put up around Warsaw showing a woman clad in a black chador, with menacing minarets that looked like missiles peering out behind her. Counter-demonstrators, separated by a line of police, denounced them as “fascists” and “racists.”
What makes the demonstration surprising is that unlike western European countries where there are millions of Muslims, Poland, a country of 38 million, has only about 30,000 Muslims.
But at a time when Switzerland has voted to ban the construction of new mosques, when France and Belgium are considering restrictions on women covering their faces in public, and Italy’s nationalist Northern League wants to keep mosques at least a kilometer away from any churches, Islam as a political issue has arrived in Poland.
“We wanted to start a public debate,” Piotr Slusarczyk, one of the demonstrators' leaders, told the Rzeczpospolita daily. “We are warning against radical Islam in Europe.”
Samir Ismail, a Kuwaiti Palestinian doctor who has lived more than 20 years in Poland and is the leader of the newly formed Muslim League, said that for the capital's 10,000 Muslims, the mosque would simply be a place to pray. He pointed out that the community has been careful not to offend, opting for a 16-yard high minaret instead of the 25-yard one approved by the building permit.
“We don’t want to create misunderstandings,” he told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper. “We are aware that we have a problem with being accepted.”
The friction around Poland’s still tiny Muslim minority is a sign of the country’s growing normalization and integration into the European Union. Immigrants were almost unknown in communist times, but as Poland becomes wealthier, it is starting to attract outsiders, from Ukrainians working on construction or as domestic help, to Muslim Chechens escaping Russian repression in their homeland.
In one sense, Poland’s growing diversity is a return to the past. Before World War II, Poland was a multinational stew, with ethnic Poles making up only about two-thirds of the population. The country had large numbers of Ukrainians, Jews and Germans, as well as a small Muslim minority — Tatars descended from the hordes of Genghis Khan who had terrorized Europe in the Middle Ages.
Several thousand Tatars had settled in Poland and Lithuania in the 14th century, and, despite losing their language, never lost their religion.
World War II left Poland a very different country. The Jews had been mostly murdered by the Germans, and most of the survivors left after the war. Germans were expelled, and by shifting Poland’s borders hundreds of miles to the west, there were no large Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities. After 1945, Poland was almost completely monoethnic — one of the only minorities left were the Tatars, who have two villages in northeastern Poland, each with a small mosque.
New Muslim migrants, like Samir Ismail, have very little in common with the Tatars, who have been well integrated into Polish life for centuries — they even had their own cavalry unit before the war. Ismail and other Muslims formed their own organization in 2003, designed to advocate for the interests of new immigrants, including the need to build themselves a place to worship.
From that time they have been trying to build a mosque in Warsaw with the help of Saudi sponsors. As the project has neared completion, it has begun to arouse the ire of some Polish nationalists, who fear that their country could soon have the same issues with Muslim minorities as countries in western Europe.
“We have the example of other countries where the idea of freedom of religion is abused,” said Slusarczyk.
But Poland’s laws do not allow for any religious discrimination.
“The decision permitting this investment has been taken long ago,” said Tomasz Andryszczyk, a spokesman for the Warsaw city government. “What are we supposed to do? It would be bad if this project ran into any troubles.”
From: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/poland/100520/islamophobia-europe-immigration
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Julio Aparicio GORED IN THROAT During Bullfight
Huffington Post | Nicholas Graham First Posted: 05-22-10 10:58 AM | Updated: 05-22-10 07:52 PM
Julio Aparicio, one of Spain's most famous matadors, was gored in the throat today during a bullfight. The horrific injury has left him in critical condition:
The incident took place during the Festival of Saint Isidro, considered to be the most important event in the bullfighting calendar, at the Plaza de Toros las Ventas bullring, which can seat up to 24,000 people.
From: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/22/julio-aparicio-gored-in-t_n_585941.html
Julio Aparicio, one of Spain's most famous matadors, was gored in the throat today during a bullfight. The horrific injury has left him in critical condition:
"[The horn] went though the tongue and penetrated the roof of the mouth, fracturing the jawbone," one of the medics who worked on Aparicio told AFP news in Madrid.[UPDATE: After two operations, it appears leading surgeon Maximo Garcia Pedros has saved Aparicio's life. The bull, however, was quickly killed by other matadors.]
The incident took place during the Festival of Saint Isidro, considered to be the most important event in the bullfighting calendar, at the Plaza de Toros las Ventas bullring, which can seat up to 24,000 people.
From: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/22/julio-aparicio-gored-in-t_n_585941.html
Priest home an alleged 'erotic dungeon'
By Stan Lehman THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SAO PAULO, Brazil - A court has ordered the arrest of a Polish priest suspected of sexually abusing a teenager in a Rio de Janeiro suburb and turning his parish home into what the judge described as an "erotic dungeon" for sex with adolescents, authorities said Friday.
State prosecutors have accused Marcin Michael Strachanowski, 44, of handcuffing the 16-year-old former altar boy to a bed three years ago in the parish house where the priest lived and threatening to kill the youth if he spoke of the abuse.
"I already know the flowers I will place on your coffin," Strachanowski warned, according to prosecutors.
The Polish priest was suspended from his duties after the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro learned of the order for his arrest, church spokesman Adionel Carlos da Cunha said in a statement issued Friday. The judge issued the order on Thursday.
The archdiocese "expresses its regret over what happened, especially with the people involved and possible victims," he said.
Judge Alexandre Abrahao Dias expressed concern that Strachanowski might try to flee the country.
He said investigators found "erotic material sent to the victim via Internet to seduce him" and that the priest also took other youths to the parish house, "which he converted into a kind of erotic dungeon where he submitted them, often with the use of handcuffs, to orgies."
Lawyers representing the priest did not immediately return a telephone message left Friday afternoon seeking comment.
Church officials declined to provide additional information about Strachanowski, such as how long he has been in Brazil or his work history with the church. Police said Friday they had not located him.
The priest also faces a canonical legal process by an ecclesiastical tribunal, da Cunha said. The tribunal has taken what da Cunha described as "the necessary measures" regarding Strachanowski's case -- but the church spokesman did not elaborate.
Sex-abuse scandals involving the Roman Catholic Church have mushroomed around the world recently, and some of the accused priests have surfaced in Brazil, home to more Catholics than any other nation.
Late last month, prosecutors charged the Rev. Jose Afonso with abusing altar boys ranging in age from 12 to 16. Prosecutors said the alleged abuses took place in the city of Franca, in southeastern Sao Paulo state.
Also last month, 83-year-old Monsignor Luiz Marques Barbosa was detained in northeastern Brazil for allegedly abusing at least three boys after being caught on videotape having sex with a young man, a former altar boy. Barbosa is under house arrest while authorities investigate. Two other priests in the same archdiocese are also accused of abuses.
The National Conference of Brazilian Bishops recently announced it would prepare a manual with guidelines to help bishops prevent child-abuse cases.
From: http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2010/05/22/14045916.html?cid=rssnews
SAO PAULO, Brazil - A court has ordered the arrest of a Polish priest suspected of sexually abusing a teenager in a Rio de Janeiro suburb and turning his parish home into what the judge described as an "erotic dungeon" for sex with adolescents, authorities said Friday.
State prosecutors have accused Marcin Michael Strachanowski, 44, of handcuffing the 16-year-old former altar boy to a bed three years ago in the parish house where the priest lived and threatening to kill the youth if he spoke of the abuse.
"I already know the flowers I will place on your coffin," Strachanowski warned, according to prosecutors.
The Polish priest was suspended from his duties after the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro learned of the order for his arrest, church spokesman Adionel Carlos da Cunha said in a statement issued Friday. The judge issued the order on Thursday.
The archdiocese "expresses its regret over what happened, especially with the people involved and possible victims," he said.
Judge Alexandre Abrahao Dias expressed concern that Strachanowski might try to flee the country.
He said investigators found "erotic material sent to the victim via Internet to seduce him" and that the priest also took other youths to the parish house, "which he converted into a kind of erotic dungeon where he submitted them, often with the use of handcuffs, to orgies."
Lawyers representing the priest did not immediately return a telephone message left Friday afternoon seeking comment.
Church officials declined to provide additional information about Strachanowski, such as how long he has been in Brazil or his work history with the church. Police said Friday they had not located him.
The priest also faces a canonical legal process by an ecclesiastical tribunal, da Cunha said. The tribunal has taken what da Cunha described as "the necessary measures" regarding Strachanowski's case -- but the church spokesman did not elaborate.
Sex-abuse scandals involving the Roman Catholic Church have mushroomed around the world recently, and some of the accused priests have surfaced in Brazil, home to more Catholics than any other nation.
Late last month, prosecutors charged the Rev. Jose Afonso with abusing altar boys ranging in age from 12 to 16. Prosecutors said the alleged abuses took place in the city of Franca, in southeastern Sao Paulo state.
Also last month, 83-year-old Monsignor Luiz Marques Barbosa was detained in northeastern Brazil for allegedly abusing at least three boys after being caught on videotape having sex with a young man, a former altar boy. Barbosa is under house arrest while authorities investigate. Two other priests in the same archdiocese are also accused of abuses.
The National Conference of Brazilian Bishops recently announced it would prepare a manual with guidelines to help bishops prevent child-abuse cases.
From: http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2010/05/22/14045916.html?cid=rssnews
Man tells cops God told him to stroll in the nude
Updated 3:55 p.m. ET May 20, 2010
THIBODAUX, La. - A man who told police that God told him to walk the streets naked to save his soul has been arrested. Thibodaux police responded to an obscenity complaint around 2 a.m. Thursday and found Shafiq Mohamed walking nude down the street. When approached, Mohamed reportedly told officers that "America raped him" and added God told him to walk the streets naked to save his soul.
Mohamed was taken into custody and charged with obscenity. He was booked into the Lafourche Parish Detention Center where he awaited bail.
It was not immediately known whether Mohamed has an attorney.
From: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37260370/ns/us_news/
THIBODAUX, La. - A man who told police that God told him to walk the streets naked to save his soul has been arrested. Thibodaux police responded to an obscenity complaint around 2 a.m. Thursday and found Shafiq Mohamed walking nude down the street. When approached, Mohamed reportedly told officers that "America raped him" and added God told him to walk the streets naked to save his soul.
Mohamed was taken into custody and charged with obscenity. He was booked into the Lafourche Parish Detention Center where he awaited bail.
It was not immediately known whether Mohamed has an attorney.
From: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37260370/ns/us_news/
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Defense will try to thwart first-degree murder charge for Klamath murder suspect
Posted: 05/20/2010 01:30:25 AM PDT
Accused killer Jarrod Wyatt's defense attorney will take the unusual step of trying to present enough evidence at a pre-trial hearing next week to cap or throw out the murder charge prosecutors are seeking for the brutal slaying.
Wyatt is facing first-degree murder charges for killing his friend Taylor Powell, 21, at a home outside of Klamath on March 21. A Del Norte County judge will determine after the preliminary hearing whether District Attorney Mike Riese presented enough evidence of murder -- and of aggravated mayhem and torture -- to put the case before a jury.
But Wyatt's defense attorney James Fallman will present what is known as an affirmative defense, in which the defense can call its own witnesses in an effort to show that the first-degree murder charge should be reduced to a second-degree charge or be thrown out altogether. Fallman would not say whether he intends to mount an insanity defense, in which the defendant must be shown to be unable to distinguish right from wrong, or to understand the nature of his act.
Wyatt has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Riese said that he could try to exclude the evidence Fallman brings to the preliminary hearing, but may decide not to object and gain insight into Fallman's strategy, which he likely wouldn't otherwise get until 30 days before the trial.
”I want it sooner than later,” Riese said.
According to a statement of probable cause filed with Del Norte County Superior Court, deputies arrived at a Fizer Road residence in Requa during the early morning hours of March 21, after a man reported seeing Wyatt, a 26-year-old mixed martial arts cage fighter, in the living room with Powell's apparently dead body.
The man, Justin Davis, had been there earlier in the day and saw Wyatt acting strangely after drinking “some kind of mushroom tea,” according to the statement. Davis left for Crescent City, but returned later to pick up his dog. Davis arrived to find Wyatt standing in the living room naked and covered with blood, according to the statement. Wyatt told Davis, according to the statement, that he was going to cut out Powell's heart. Davis went to a nearby pay phone to call law enforcement.
A deputy arrived at the residence and reportedly saw Wyatt on the couch with Powell's body, which was covered in blood and had most of its face removed. A large incision in the chest could be seen, and other unspecified body parts had been removed. An eyeball was resting in the middle of the room, according to the statement.
Wyatt allegedly told the deputy that he'd cut Powell's heart out and thrown it into the fire.
Powell's death certificate reads that he died from having his heart removed while he was still alive, causing him to bleed to death. It also lists as significant blunt force trauma to the head and neck, and compression of the neck.
The deputy reported finding blood throughout the house, making the entire residence a crime scene. Large indentations in the sheetrock in the bathroom could be seen, the statement said, which appeared to have been made by the back of someone's head.
What appeared to be wild mushrooms were in the kitchen, the deputy reported. The deputy also discovered a marijuana garden in the house when he went to search for additional victims, the statement reads.
According to the statement, Wyatt was read his Miranda rights and transported to Del Norte County jail, where Wyatt repeatedly said he'd killed his “Taylor.”
The defense strategy of mounting an affirmative defense at the preliminary hearing, say legal experts, can be risky, but it can also be a means to motivate a plea bargain. The defense must show that the majority of its evidence goes to disprove the charge, a higher bar than the prosecution must meet to show there is sufficient probable cause to support the charge.
Law professor Franklin Zimring, who directs the criminal justice research program at University of California at Berkeley Boalt Hall's Earl Warren Legal Institute, said that there doesn't seem to be much doubt over who did what in Wyatt's case.
”The question is criminal responsibility,” Zimring said.
Zimring said that showing one's client was insane at the time of a murder could be a means of showing that a trial is likely to be long and complicated, which can be a motivation to press the prosecution to plea bargain.
On the other hand, the defense presenting evidence at a preliminary hearing can reveal the strategy it intends to pursue at trial -- but months before it otherwise would have to. The defense does not have to turn over its discovery until 30 days before the start of a trial, which in Wyatt's case could be a year or more away.
Stanford Law School Criminal Justice Center Academic Director Robert Weisberg said that the value of the affirmative defense in a case like Wyatt's is not necessarily to prevent the case from going to trial, but rather to persuade the judge to cap the charge at second-degree murder. The defense may try to show that the evidence of premeditation -- a necessary element in many first-degree murder cases -- is substantially lacking, possibly due to a “lack of clarity of consciousness” from using drugs, Weisberg said.
Fallman would not say why he is seeking an affirmative defense, and said he can't comment on Wyatt's current mental state. Fallman said that he's going to exercise all viable plea options, and that he has not been approached with any reasonable plea agreements yet.
In another twist, Justin Davis -- likely a key witness -- was arrested last week at his Crescent City residence near a city administrative building on suspicion of growing marijuana, possessing marijuana for sale, possession of a dangerous weapon and a parole violation.
Both Fallman and Riese said that the arrest would make no difference to their cases.
The preliminary hearing is currently scheduled for May 26.
From: http://www.times-standard.com/localnews/ci_15123814
Jersey City Society Hill pimp is sentenced to 18 years in prison
May 19, 2010, 12:11PM
Society Hill pimp Allen E. Brown got a little testy in court this morning and was sentenced to 18 years in prison by Judge Kevin Callahan in Hudson County Superior Court in Jersey City.
Brown, aka Prince, was shocked at the length of the sentence. "18 years?" Brown blurted out in court when Callahan announced the sentence.
"This will take you to your 60th birthday until you see the light of day" said Callahan. "The facts of this case are horrendous. They are vast."
Brown, 48, who authorities say operating the ring out of a home on Lyon Avenue in the upscale development on the Hackensack River, was sentenced to 10 years for racketeering and eight years for extortion.
When Brown first walked into the courtroom he said to his lawyer, Adam Reisman, "I'm tired of your bulls---." His hair was styled exquisitely, with wavy strands curled on his forehead and a long thin ponytail hanging over his shoulders.
Even before he was sentenced Brown told the judge he didn't understand how much time he faced. His attorney told the judge Brown refused to go over the sentencing materials with him.
Callhan said he was concerned because in Brown's written statement Brown seemed to back away from some of the admissions he made when he pleaded guilty in early April. Callahan sent the defense lawyer and Brown out to discuss the matter and when they returned Brown said he stood by his plea hearing admissions.
At the plea hearing Brown, who admitted he ran a human trafficking and prostitution ring, was told he faced from 12 to 20 years in prison.
Authorities say he enslaved women and girls, some as young at 17, and forced them to turn tricks on the streets. He even turned some into drug addicts, authorities say. Authorities say the woman were forced to earn $500 on weeknights and $1,000 on weekend nights, or else they were denied entry back into the house, were denied drugs or were beaten.
Assistant Attorney General, Annmarie Taggert said Brown extorted a $600,000 inheritance from a woman who turned over the money because the woman feared for her and her niece's lives. Taggert added that one woman who refused become a prostitute was handcuffed to a bed and forced to take heroin until she became addicted.
Brown's mother, Tecora Brown, and his sister, Veronica, attended the sentencing. Tecora Brown pleaded guilty to promoting prostitution and is not expected to be given prison time. Authorities say the Lyon Avenue home belonged to Tecora Brown.
"It's all lies, " Veronica Brown said after the sentencing. She said her brother was trying to help the women who were already drug-addicted prostitutes. Brown said that her brother bought one of the women a computer and that woman now works at a hospital in South Jersey.
From: http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2010/05/jersey_city_society_hill_pimp_1.html
Couple robbed and tortured in Clapham home reveal 'ordeal of unbelievable brutality'
Published: 4:01PM BST 21 May 2010
Gavin Gordon, 31, who has a string of convictions for violence dating back to his teens, was jailed indefinitely yesterday for the "horrendous and barbaric attack".
In an emotional victim impact statement, the woman, who cannot be named, said that she suffers from constant nightmares, repeated panic attacks and has lost two stone through depression since the attack in October 2008.
"Before all this happened I was a confident, outgoing girl that enjoyed going out to clubs and had a wide circle of friends,” she said. "Sadly all this has now changed.
"I now feel that as a mother I will never be able to protect my daughter, as on that night I could not protect myself.
" I still feel totally vulnerable and will live with this for the rest of my life.”
In his victim statement, her boyfriend said he lost his job following the attack and became "extremely stressed" that his attackers could be anyone he passed in the street.
Southwark Crown Court heard that the woman was leaving her flat shortly after midnight on October 26 2008 when several men approached her and demanded money.
They covered her head and forced her back inside her flat, where they made her text her boyfriend and ask him to come over.
When he arrived, they tied his hands with his belt and tortured him, wrapping computer cable around his throat, pressing a hot iron against his forehead and thigh, and rubbing lemon juice and bleach into his injuries. He was also repeatedly kicked and punched as the robbers tried to get him to reveal the location of a haul of cash which did not exist.
The woman was repeatedly raped as she heard her boyfriend screaming in the next room.
The gang later escaped with two cars - an Audi A3 and a Golf GTI, a black Skype 3G mobile phone, a black Nokia mobile phone, £300 in cash and keys.
Gordon, whose DNA was found on a juice carton at the property, was found guilty of robbery, unlawful imprisonment, actual bodily harm and theft.
Two other men, Reon Hall and Aaron Gelly, both 20 and from Surrey, were sentenced to nine years each in June for their role in the sustained three-hour attack.
Jailing Gordon, Judge Stephen Robbins told him: "You and others subjected this man and woman to a sustained attack, an ordeal of unbelievable brutality, subjecting the male to what can only be described as torture, burning him with an iron, covering him in bleach and rubbing lemon juice into his wounds.”
"The female was orally raped by one of you in this concerted attack carried out in the mistaken belief there was money to be stolen from the premises."
Gordon's actions "can only be described as horrendous and barbaric crimes on these individuals whose lives have been ruined", the judge said.
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/7749187/Couple-robbed-and-tortured-in-Clapham-home-reveal-ordeal-of-unbelievable-brutality.html
Bizarre creature washes up in small Ontario town
By Mail Foreign Service
Last updated at 10:39 AM on 21st May 2010
Last updated at 10:39 AM on 21st May 2010
Locals in a small Canadian town have been stumped by the appearance of a bizarre creature, which was dragged from a lake.
The animal, which has a long hairy body with bald skin on its head, feet and face, has prompted wild internet speculation that it is a more evolved version of the famous 'Montauk monster'.
The creature was discovered by two nurses in the town of Kitchenuhmaykoosib in Ontario, Canada, while out on a walk with their dog.
The animal, which has a long hairy body with bald skin on its head, feet and face, has prompted wild internet speculation that it is a more evolved version of the famous 'Montauk monster'
When the dog began sniffing in the lake, the two women started investigating, before the dog pulled the dead animal out.
After taking some photographs of the odd animal, the nurses left it alone. When locals decided to go back and retrieve the body, it has disappeared.
The photographs have now been posted on a local website, with an explanation which reads: 'This creature was first discovered by Sam the Dog, a local dog.
'It was discovered first week of May in the creek section of town, hikers noticed Sam sniffing something in the water and they approached to see in what the Sam had detected and they noticed the creature in the water face down.
The creature was discovered by two nurses in the town of Kitchenuhmaykoosib in Ontario, Canada, while out on a walk with their dogWhen the dog began sniffing in the lake, the two women started investigating, before the dog pulled the dead animal out.
After taking some photographs of the odd animal, the nurses left it alone. When locals decided to go back and retrieve the body, it has disappeared.
The photographs have now been posted on a local website, with an explanation which reads: 'This creature was first discovered by Sam the Dog, a local dog.
'It was discovered first week of May in the creek section of town, hikers noticed Sam sniffing something in the water and they approached to see in what the Sam had detected and they noticed the creature in the water face down.
'The dog jumped in the lake and pulled the creature to the rocks and dragged it out for the hikers to see and these are the photos they took.
'The creature's tail is like a rat's tail and it is a foot long.'
There has been much speculation about what kind of species the animal is.
The body of the creature appears to look something like an otter, while its face - complete with long fang-like teeth, bears a striking resemblance to a boar-like animal.
Even the local police chief Donny Morris is baffled, saying: 'What it is, I don't know. I'm just as curious as everyone else.'
The pictures of the animal have caused mass speculation online, from bloggers who are all stumped as to what the creature could be.
One internet blogger wrote: 'That certainly is a face only a mother can love. It looks like some sort of otter, weasel-type thing.'
While another added: 'Some kind of mustelid - I thought otter first.
'Being in the water and bashed around has made the fur on the face and tail come off so clean like that.'
Many people have suggested the animal could be a new 'Montauk monster' - due to the similarities between these photographs and those of a different creature which washed up in Montauk, New York, in 2008.
The animal, which quickly earned the nickname the 'Montauk monster', thanks to the beach's location to a Long Island government animal testing facility, has never been officially identified - although the general consensus is that it was some kind of racoon.
However, other bloggers have speculated that the new creature discovered is a type of chupacabra, or 'goatsucker'.
The chupacabra is rumoured to inhabit parts of the U.S. , with many several hundred eyewitness accounts over the past few years.
But despite these sightings, the majority of biologists and wildlife experts believe the chupacabra is a contemporary legend.
From: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1279956/Montauk-Monster-Beast-Ontario.html
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"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."
