Human Sacrifice to Santa Muerte In Sonora, Mexico

On April 1, 2012March 31, 2012 By A.P.In Crime, Mexico, Murder, Religion, Santa Muerte, Satanism, Sonora, Violence1 Comment

Authorities in the northern Mexican state of Sonora have arrested eight people accused of killing two boys and one woman as human sacrifices for Santa Muerte — the saint of death — officials said Friday.

The victims, two of whom were age 10, were killed and their blood was offered at an altar to the saint, according to Jose Larrinaga, spokesman for state prosecutors. The accused were asking the saint, who is generally portrayed as a skeleton dressed in a long robe and carrying a scythe, for protection, he said.

Santa Muerte is a favorite among criminals and the country’s drug traffickers. The saint, though not recognized by the Catholic Church, has taken off in popularity in recent years.

Details of the case were laid out in a statement from the Sonora State Investigative Police (PEI), which described the cult as a “Satanic sect.”

The first of the three victims was allegedly killed in 2009; the last this month. Their bodies were found in the small mining community of Nacozari de Garcia, some 155 miles (250 kilometers) north of Hermosillo, the state capital.

Many of the accused belong to the same family and one is just 15 years old, the PEI said. Authorities said they began looking into the case when one of the victim’s families reported him missing.

“Nothing like this has ever happened before in the state of Sonora. And it’s not something we’re going to allow,” said Guillermo Padres Elias, state governor.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/30/world/americas/mexico-human-sacrifice/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Marcia Usher: Drunk Florida Woman Facing Multiple Charges After She Called 911 for Help Finding a Place to Urinate

On March 31, 2012 By A.P.In 911, Addiction, Crime, Ethanol, Florida, Handgun, Methamphetamine, PoliceLeave a comment

A woman needing help finding the bathroom is now facing numerous charges.

Her first mistake: calling 911 for her restroom emergency.

The Pasco Sheriff’s Office says 32-year-old Marcia Usher placed the 911 call Wednesday night, saying she was lost in the woods and didn’t know where she should urinate.

Responding deputies found Usher not in the woods, but instead in front of her home, reportedly intoxicated and drinking a beer.

A deputy noticed a nearby open beer cooler and asked Usher if he could check inside for any weapons or drugs. According to the arrest report, Usher complied and told the deputy there was beer and a knife inside.

Instead of a knife, the deputy immediately saw a loaded handgun on top of the beer.

The deputy tried putting Usher in handcuffs, and a brief struggle ensued. She was reportedly tackled to the ground and taken into custody without further incident.

At the jail, a vial of meth residue was allegedly discovered on Usher during a strip search.

She now faces charges of carrying a concealed weapon without a permit, possession of methamphetamine, introduction/possession of contraband in a detention facility, and resisting arrest without violence.

http://www.wtsp.com/news/article/243316/8/Deputies-Drunk-woman-calls-911-to-say-she-was-lost-in-woods-did-not-know-where-to-urinate

Speech-Jammer Gun Invented in Japan

On March 30, 2012March 29, 2012 By A.P.In Asia, Communication, Engineering, Inventions, Japan, Speech, Speech-Jammer, Technology, The BrainLeave a comment

Imagine sitting around a conference table with several of your colleagues as you hold an important meeting. Now imagine your boss pulling out what looks like a radar gun for catching speeding motorists and aiming at any of you that speak to long, very nearly instantly causing whoever is speaking to start stuttering then mumbling and then to stop speaking at all. That’s the idea behind the SpeechJammer, a gun that can be fired at people to force them to stop speaking. It’s the brainchild of Koji Tsukada and Kazutaka Kurihara, science and technology researchers in Japan. They’ve published a paper describing how it works on the preprint server arXiv.

The idea is based on the fact that to speak properly, we humans need to hear what we’re saying so that we can constantly adjust how we go about it, scientists call it delayed auditory feedback. It’s partly why singers are able to sing better when they wear headphones that allow them to hear their own voice as they sing with music, or use feedback monitors when onstage. Trouble comes though when there is a slight delay between the time the words are spoken and the time they are heard. If that happens, people tend to get discombobulated and stop speaking, and that’s the whole idea behind the SpeechJammer. It’s basically just a gun that causes someone speaking to hear their own words delayed by 0.2 seconds.

To make that happen, the two attached a directional microphone and speaker to a box that also holds a laser pointer and distance sensor and of course a computer board to compute the delay time based on distance from the speaker. To make it work, the person using it points the gun at the person talking, using the laser pointer as a guide, then pulls the trigger. It works for distances up to a hundred feet.

The two say they have no plans to market the device, but because the technology is so simple, it’s doubtful they could patent it anyway.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-speechjammer-gun-quash-human-utterances.html

Unemployed Austrian man cuts off foot to continue claiming jobless benefits – only to discover he is still eligible for work

On March 29, 2012 By A.P.In Amputation, Austria, Health, motivation, Stupidity, ViolenceLeave a comment

A man who almost died after cutting his own foot off so he could stay on jobless benefits has been told he might still qualify for work despite his amputation.

Long term unemployed Hans Url, 56, had just been told his hand-outs would stop if he did not accept work found for him by job centre staff.

And when his claims that he was too sick and did not like the work were challenged with the offer of a medical, he took drastic measures.

Url, of Mitterlabill, southern Austria, rigged up a mitre saw and sliced off his foot – then put it in the oven for good measure to ensure no surgeon could reattach it.

But job centre staff have delivered a blow to hapless Url’s plan by saying his new disability does not rule him out for work.

Police spokesman Franz Fasching said: ‘The planning was meticulous.

‘He waited until his wife and his adult son had left the house and he was alone.

‘He then switched it on and sliced off his left foot above the ankle – throwing it in the fire so it would not be possible to reattach it before he called emergency services.

‘He then made his way to the garage where he called emergency services and waited for them to arrive.

The police added that the man had almost died from loss of blood before the emergency services arrived and that they had recovered the foot from the oven – but that it had been too badly burned to reattach.

He was airlifted to hospital in Graz where his condition was said to be stable after emergency surgery to seal the wound.

A hospital spokesman said: ‘The foot was too badly burned to reattach. All we could do was seal the wound. He had lost a lot of blood – he almost died on the way to hospital. He was put in an artificial coma.’

The police spokesman Fasching added that they were investigating the case as an attempted suicide.

But Feldbach AMS job centre spokesman Hermann Gössinger said: ‘This is a tragic case but it will not help the man.

‘His latest excuse had been a bad back which is why he had been sent for a medical.

‘But even now losing a foot does not automatically mean he will not be able to work. He will be assessed once he is out of hospital and we will see what work we can find for him.’

Illinois Congressman Forced To Leave the House because of Wearing a Hoodie

On March 28, 2012 By A.P.In Crime, George Zimmerman, Murder, racism, Trayvon Martin, ViolenceLeave a comment

In a dramatic moment on the House floor this morning, Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) was asked to leave the chamber after taking off his suit jacket and revealing that he was wearing a hoodie during a speech in tribute to Trayvon Martin.

Rush, who donned the hood and put on sunglasses in support of Martin, the Florida teenager who was gunned down last month in a racially-tinged incident, was escorted out of the House chamber after repeated requests by the presiding officer to leave. Wearing a hood or hat while the House is in session is against House rules.

“Racial profiling has to stop Mr. Speaker,” Rush said while taking off his suit jacket, “Just because someone wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum.”

George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watch official, admitted to shooting Martin last month. Zimmerman’s representatives have asserted he acted in self-defense, but the incident has become a racial touchstone due to allegations of racial profiling associated with the shooting, and the local police’s handling of the investigation.The Congressional Black Caucus led the charge in calling for a federal investigation into the case; they were eventually joined in that demand by President Obama and a number of top Republicans.

Rush continued his speech while the presiding officer, Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS), repeatedly banged the gavel and told Rush to leave the chamber. When Rush failed to stop his speech, a representative from the Sergeant at Arms office approached Rush and walked out with the Congressman.

Martin’s parents were on Capitol Hill Tuesday to attend a briefing with Congressional Democrats to discuss hate crimes in America. The two testified briefly, thanking members of Congress for their support and calling for the arrest of Zimmerman.

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/28/10904941-congressman-escorted-from-house-after-wearing-hoodie-in-trayvon-martin-tribute

U.S. Security Will Be Put at Risk With Future Water Shortages

On March 23, 2012March 22, 2012 By A.P.In Climate Change, Dehydration, Drought, Global Warming, Government, Middle East, Survival, Terrorism, The Future, Violence, WarLeave a comment

Water shortages, polluted water and floods will increase the risk of instability in nations important to U.S. national security interests, according to a new U.S. intelligence community assessment released Thursday.

“During the next 10 years, many countries important to the United States will almost certainly experience water problems – shortages, poor water quality, or floods – that will contribute to the risk of instability and state failure and increase regional tensions,” the report from the office of the director of national intelligence states.

The assessment focused on seven key river basins located in the Middle East, Asia and Africa that are considered strategically important to the United States: the Indus, Jordan, Mekong, Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Amu Darya and Brahmaputra basins.

The intelligence report indicates conflict between nations over water problems is unlikely in the next 10 years, but after that, water in shared basins will increasingly be used by some nations as leverage over their neighbors, the report says.

A senior U.S. intelligence official who briefed reporters on the report said, “It’s very difficult to be specific about where because it depends upon what individual states do and what actions are taken on water issues between states.”

The study also warns of the potential for water to be used as a weapon, “with more powerful upstream nations impeding or cutting off downstream flow.”

Water could also become a terrorist tool, according to the report. The U.S. official said that, “because terrorists are seeking more high visibility items to attack, in some cases we identified fragile water infrastructure that could potentially be a target for terrorism activity.” A likely target would be dams.

The official also said terrorist groups could take advantage of large movements of people displaced by water issues in vulnerable nations.

The report indicates water supplies will not keep up with the increasing demand posed by a growing world population.

Climate change will further aggravate the water problems in many areas, as will continued economic development, the report says.

“The lack of adequate water,” it says, “will be destabilizing factor in some countries because they do not have the financial resources or the technical ability to solve their internal water problems.”

Food markets are threatened by depletion of ground water in some agriculture areas of the world. Unless corrective steps are taken, food production will decline, increasing the stress on global markets, the report predicts.

The intelligence community assessed that by 2040, water shortages and pollution will harm the economic performance of important trading partners.

The study does not name specific countries, because it is based on a classified national intelligence estimate.

But the report indicates that increasing populations, industrial development and climate change in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa will make it difficult for those regions to deal with water problems.

The report does say that improved water management and investment in water-related sectors, such as agriculture, hydroelectric power and water treatment, could compensate for increased demand over next 30 years.

Since agriculture uses nearly 70% of all ground water, the report states it has the most potential to provide relief if technological changes are implemented such as large-scale drip irrigation systems.

The intelligence study suggests developing countries are likely to turn to the United States to lead the effort to resolve water problems, because of its technological capabilities.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was concerned about how global water problems could affect U.S. security interests over the next 30 years, requested the study on global water security. The National Intelligence Council prepared the assessment with contributions from 10 intelligence organizations.

At a World Water Day event at the State Department on Thursday, Clinton labeled the report “sobering,” and called on everyone to read it to “see how imperative clean water and access to water is to future peace, security, and prosperity, globally.”

The Secretary also used the occasion to announce a new effort called the U.S. Water Partnership which bring together experts in the private sector and government to find system wide solutions to water problems.

http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/22/u-s-security-at-risk-over-water/?hpt=hp_t3

Minnesota High School Boy Trying to Take Porn Star to Senior Prom

On March 22, 2012March 22, 2012 By A.P.In High School Prom, Pornography, Relationships, sexualityLeave a comment

Mike Stone plans to make his first prom a memorable one – with a Los Angeles porn star as his date.

Stone, of Oakdale, created Internet buzz this week after two women with triple-X websites agreed to go with him to the May 12 Tartan High School prom.

He isn’t sure he can raise the money for his dates’ airfare. But if even one of the women accompanies him to prom or anywhere else that evening, it will be a date to remember.

Stone, 18, doesn’t expect any trouble from his parents. “My mom was a little mad, but my dad is OK with it,” Stone said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

The school is another matter. The district has a policy requiring all non-Tartan guests to the prom to get approval in advance. That isn’t going tohappen with Stone’s guests, said Patty Phillips, superintendent of the North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale district.

In January, Stone realized that as a senior, the spring prom was his last chance – he had never been to one.

But he had no date. Then he remembered a 2004 movie called “The Girl Next Door,” in which a teenage boy and a former porn actress fall in love.

Inspired, he spent most of January and February sending Twitter messages to about 600 celebrities, including hundreds of porn actresses.

Stone didn’t woo them with soaring poetry or showers of rose petals. Typical tweets were: “hey Lyndah can u make it to my prom” and “hey nat are you booked up on may 12?”

It worked.

Last weekend, porn actress Megan Piper responded via Twitter, Stone said. She said he would need to pay for her airfare from Los Angeles.

A short time later, porn star Emy Reyes also said she would be Stone’s prom date.

Stone has launched a fundraising drive. A tweet from Stone on Sunday said, “Hey everyone please help me raise to buy Emy Reyes a plane ticket so she can come to my prom on May 12.”

Stone said he has no specific plans for the date. “I will take them to dinner, then the dance,” he said. He plans to rent a tuxedo.

On Twitter and on several websites, many readers cheered him on as a kind of teenage folk hero.

Other postings attacked him, such as this one: “To ask a porn star (total stranger) to the prom…says to me, 1.) He thinks he’s going to get lucky; and 2.) wants to impress his friends; or 3.) he can’t get a school date.”

http://www.startribune.com/local/east/143689796.html

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Woman Finds Out She Was Married to Multiple Men Due To Identity Theft

On March 19, 2012 By A.P.In Crime, MarriageLeave a comment

Anna Vargas thought she was happily married — she just didn’t know she was “married” to four guys.

The 37-year-old Queens mom has been the victim of an identity-theft nightmare, in which a parade of mysterious creeps arranged fake marriages by using her birth certificate which she lost some 16 years ago.

Vargas had no idea what was going on — until she tried to get married in 2004 and was heartbroken to find her application for a license rejected by the City Clerk’s Office.

She was turned down after records showed she was already been “married” twice in 1996, once to a man from Mexico and once to a man from Ecuador.

“I was very shocked and distraught [being rejected] because it was three weeks before I was supposed to get married,” Vargas told The Post.

It wasn’t clear why the men got married with women using her identity, but often such ID theft involves immigration scams.

After the discovery, Vargas’ relatives suggested she call off her wedding. On the advice of the family priest and a lawyer, Vargas got a license from another jurisdiction.

The ceremony was moved to Long Island, where she and fiancé Angel Poggi said their “I do’s” and prepared to live happily ever after.

Then one of her other “husbands” turned up.

Out of the blue in 2009, the man from Ecuador slapped her with divorce papers.

“I was really astounded,” Vargas recalled. “Who is this person? It was very disturbing since I’ve never been married to anyone but my husband.”

When she refused to sign those documents and hired a lawyer, the Ecuadorean man showed up at her mother-in-law’s house.

“Luckily, my mother-in-law had a picture of our wedding day,” Vargas explained. “She said, ‘Is this the person you were married to?’ He said, ‘No.’ ”

Vargas decided to go back and clear her name with the City Clerk’s Office.

On Jan. 25, Administrative Law Judge Joan Salzman ruled that Vargas had indeed been the victim of fraud and nullified the two 1996 marriages.

The fakery wasn’t tough to root out. The bogus 1996 marriage application said Vargas’ father was born in Venezuela; he is a native of Puerto Rico.

Unfortunately, her troubles aren’t over. Vargas also discovered another fake marriage in her name, on Long Island, and is fighting to erase it.

John Wilkes Booth Bobblehead Dolls

On March 15, 2012March 14, 2012 By A.P.In Abraham Lincoln, Government, Murder, ViolenceLeave a comment

GETTYSBURG, Pa. — Bobblehead dolls of the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln have been pulled from sale at the Gettysburg National Military Park visitors’ center bookstore.

The dolls of John Wilkes Booth with a handgun were removed from shelves on Saturday, a day after a reporter for Hanover’s The Evening Sun newspaper asked about them, officials said.

“On rare occasions, there’s an item that might cause concern, and obviously the bobbleheads appeared to be doing that,” Gettysburg Foundation spokeswoman Dru Anne Neil said Tuesday.

The Booth dolls, featuring big heads attached to the bodies by springs so they bobble, were available for only about a week before the park superintendent, the foundation president and the bookstore manager decided they shouldn’t be for sale, Neil said.

She declined to state the reason for the decision, and messages left Tuesday for the park and the company that operates the bookstore weren’t immediately returned.

The Booth dolls, which are about 7 inches tall and come in boxes that look like the inside of the theater where Lincoln was killed, sell online for about $20 each. They have proved to be popular, as more than 150 of the original run of 250 have been sold, and more are being made, Kansas City, Mo.-based manufacturer BobbleHead LLC said.

“There’s a market there,” sales manager Matt Powers said. “We like to let the customer decide if it’s a good item or not.”

Confederate sympathizer Booth shot and killed Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington in April 1865, as the Civil War was ending. He fled and was tracked into Virginia, where he was killed.

Gettysburg was the site of a July 1863 Civil War battle in which the Union Army repelled a Confederate invasion of the North under Gen. Robert E. Lee. The battle is often considered the turning point of the war.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/14/john-wilkes-booth-bobblehead-dolls_n_1343697.html?ref=weird-news

Maryland Couple has 5,000 Cabbage Patch Dolls and has built a $200,000 amusement park for them

On March 13, 2012 By A.P.In Hoarding, Maryland, Obsessive Compulsive DiseaseLeave a comment

Kevin, a cheery, curled-top boy, extends an invitation to his friend by cell phone, “I’d love to have you come over and play.”

For most children that play date at Magic Crystal Valley in Maryland would be a dream come true: riding a miniature train, a motorized swing and even a hot-air balloon that sweeps them 30 feet in the air.

But Kevin, and his hundreds of friends from around the country, are Cabbage Patch Kids, and their “parents” are humans who are obsessed with the ugly, but cuddly dolls that hit the market by storm in 1983.

Pat and Joe Prosey own 5,000 and they consider them their own children, even though the 64-year-olds have a real-life grown daughter.

“They are kids. We don’t use the word D-O-L-L — they might hear,” said Joe, a former shipyard worker who built this special playground for other enthusiasts.

They are collectors, but say it really isn’t about the money, but an obsession with their “babies.”

The obsession all began with Pat Prosey, a former paint store technician, who had loved baby dolls as a girl. “Mother said one day I would probably collect some type of doll when I was older,” she said.

The soft dolls with the wrinkled faces were created by Xavier Roberts, a 21-year-old art student from Georgia, who adopted a German technique for sculpture with his mother’s quilting skills, according to his the Cabbage Patch Kids website.

His concept — adoptable “Little People” — was developed in 1976. Each doll was different and came with a double-barreled name and a birth certificate.

By the end of 1981, the Cabbage Patch doll had made the cover of Newsweek magazine, and he had sold nearly 3 million kids. By 1990, 65 million had been “adopted,” according to his web site.

Pat Prosey got her first Cabbage Patch Meg in 1985 for $50. “She was kind of cute and when I got her got her home, Joe thought I had lost my mind,” she said.

But soon, she found a boy, named Kevin, and today he is the spokesman for what has become their personal Cabbage Patch empire.

After Meg and Kevin, came the “preemies” and the ones with freckles. “They went from freckles to teeth to glasses and toothbrushes, and before you know it, our whole house in Baltimore was filled with Cabbage Patch Kids,” said Pat Prosey.

But when her father offered the couple a farm two hours south in Leonardstown, Md., they jumped at the chance to find room for their growing collection.

She said she thought, “Now, I could actually build a place for my kids,” and the amusement park was born.

As for Joe Prosey, he got hooked in the 1980s one day when he was at a waterskiing event and saw a miniature sample of a wet suit hanging on a shop wall. “I thought, that’ll fit a Cabbage Patch Kid.”

The following weekend, he dressed Kevin the wetsuit and took him waterskiing — even though has he got strange looks from others.

Soon, Joe Prosey was writing a column in a collectors’ newsletter using Kevin’s voice. “He was a real kid doing real stuff,” he said. “There was such response, a woman phoned us and asked, could I do it again?”

Then, as they met more Cabbage Patch parents, the Proseys sent gifts back and forth — eventually arranging play dates at their dream playground.

Now the couple displays and sells Cabbage Patch originals. Those from the 70s and 80s can sell for as much as $25,000 to $35,000 a piece.

“Xavier Robert told us, “If you want to prosper at this thing, you have to live the fantasy day in and day out,” said Joe Prosey. “The collectors will love you.”

Experts say there is a fine line between collecting and hoarding, which a serious psychological disorder.

“With hoarding, we look at three main behaviors: one, acquiring too many possessions; second, having great difficulty discarding something; and three difficulty organizing,” said Julie Pike, a clinical psychologist from the Anxiety Disorder Treatment Center in Durham, N.C. “But there is a lot of overlap.”

Pike has been featured on TLC’s reality show, “Hoarding: Buried Alive,” and spoke with ABCNews.com last year.

Collectors are usually well-organized and know exactly where each item is and what they have. They are also proud, not ashamed, of their possessions, she said.

“But if collectors get in a place where they are spending so much money that they can’t pay their mortgage, that’s a problem,” Pike said. “Or if they are spending so much time at it that they can’t go to their job or leave their house.”

Pat Prosey insists she loves her “fantasy world” and the couple has always had “a roof over our heads, food in our mouths and clothes on our back.”

“You can walk out of every day life and there is no harm done, no foul play and have a good time,” she said. “People pay $2 million for a painting — is that crazy? I love my Cabbage Patches like another person loves a Rembrandt or a shiny new car.”

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/crazy-obsession-couple-owns-5000-cabbage-patch-kids/story?id=15828541#.T1cbryM2GRC

It's Interesting

Category: Human Behavior