WTF. Suicide is sad enough as it is, I hate hearing about people who try to gain attention by offing themselves in a public place. Truly a selfish person; it always makes me feel more sorry for the people who had to see it, more than the poor guy who wanted to make a statement.
What a sad article. I'd be really really upset if I had witnessed something like that.
Gerald followed me out to my car, which I'd parked behind his.
'Look,' he said opening his boot to reveal a long, thick rope. 'That's what I'm going to kill myself with.'
'Grow up,' I said, rolling my eyes in disgust. 'Give me the rope.'
But he just slammed the boot shut, got in the car and roared off.Thank God he's out of my life, I thought, shaking. If only it had been that simple.
Two weeks on, on 13 September 2007, I saw Gerald again, at Neath and Port Talbot County Court for a preliminary divorce hearing. Determined to stay strong, I didn't even look at him as the judge awarded me an extra £100 a week in maintenance. Just being near Gerald made
me feel awful. By nine o'clock that evening, once I'd put the kids to bed, I crawled into bed and sobbed.What a terrible, rotten mess. I was asleep at 10.45pm, when my phone beeped with a text.Bleary-eyed, I picked it up off my bedside table. It was from Gerald.
Congratulations. XXX
'Why can't you just leave me alone?' I cried, turning the phone off in a fury.
It felt like I'd just drifted off to sleep again, when I was woken by a knock at the front door.
It was 12.45am. Not Gerald, please…But when I opened the door, there were two police officers standing there.
'It's about your husband,' the female officer said.
Great, I thought. What now? I ushered them inside.
'Your husband's been found dead in his car,' the officer told me.
Dead? Gerald?
'A-are you sure?' I spluttered.
'I'm afraid so,' she nodded.
But it wasn't until the following afternoon that I found out exactly how bad it really was.
'Gerald tied one end of a rope to a tree on Sketty Lane in Swansea,' a police officer told me. 'And the other end around his neck as he sat in his car.'
Then he'd put the top down and accelerated away.
'He was decapitated,' the officer said. 'We found his head on the back seat.'
I almost threw up.
That's when I found out there had been witnesses who'd seen Gerald's car driving down the street.
'The car was going really slowly,' one said. 'As it passed, I saw the body had no head.'
(The story is bigger in the link, and if you have time, the Real Lives stories are all horribly interesting)
A two-year corruption and international money-laundering investigation stretching from the Jersey Shore to Brooklyn to Israel and Switzerland culminated in charges against 44 people on Thursday, including three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis, the authorities said.
The case began with bank fraud charges against a member of an insular Syrian Jewish enclave centered in a seaside town. But when that man became a federal informant and posed as a crooked real estate developer offering cash bribes to obtain government approvals, it mushroomed into a political scandal that could rival any of the most explosive and sleazy episodes in New Jersey’s recent past.
It was replete with tales of the illegal sales of body parts; of furtive negotiations in diners, parking lots and boiler rooms; of nervous jokes about “patting down” a man who turned out to indeed be an informant; and, again and again, of the passing of cash — once in a box of Apple Jacks cereal stuffed with $97,000.
“For these defendants, corruption was a way of life,” Ralph J. Marra Jr., the acting United States attorney in New Jersey, said at a news conference. “They existed in an ethics-free zone.”
Mr. Marra said that average citizens “don’t have a chance” against the culture of influence peddling the investigation had unearthed.
Even veteran political observers were taken aback by the scope of the investigation. The mayors of Hoboken, Secaucus and Ridgefield were among those arrested.
“This is so massive,” said Joseph Marbach, a political scientist at Seton Hall University. “It’s going to just reinforce the stereotype of New Jersey politics and corruption.”
The arrests had immediate reverberations in the governor’s race, and a member of Gov. Jon S. Corzine’s administration was forced to resign after federal agents raided his home.
The authorities laid out two separate schemes, one involving money laundering that led to rabbis and members of the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn and in the Jersey Shore town of Deal, where many of them have summer homes. The other dealt with political corruption and bribery and involved public officials mostly in Jersey City and Hoboken, where the pace of development has been particularly intense in recent years.
Linking the two schemes was the federal informant who was not named in court papers but whom people involved with the investigation identified as Solomon Dwek, a failed real estate developer and philanthropist who was arrested in May 2006 on charges of passing a bad $25 million check at a bank in Monmouth County, N.J.
Early on, Mr. Dwek helped investigators penetrate an extensive network of money laundering that involved rabbis in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where the Syrian Jewish community is based, and in Deal and Elberon, towns on the Jersey Shore.
Mr. Dwek, a well-known member of the Syrian Jewish community whose parents founded the Deal Yeshiva, never concealed that he was facing bank fraud charges, instead telling targets, who included three rabbis in Brooklyn and two in New Jersey, that he was bankrupt and trying to conceal his assets, according to people involved in the case. The targets, in turn, accepted bank checks Mr. Dwek made out to charities that they oversaw, deducted a fee, and returned the rest to him in cash.
Much of the cash they provided him came from Israel, and some of that in turn came from a Swiss banker, prosecutors said. All told, some $3 million was laundered for Mr. Dwek since June 2007, prosecutors said.
The case shifted to focus on public corruption, prosecutors say, after one of the men accused of money laundering, Moshe Altman of Monsey, N.Y., a Hudson County developer, introduced Mr. Zwek to a politically connected building inspector in Jersey City, who then steered him to another city official, Maher Khalil.
Mr. Khalil, who is accused of accepting $30,000 in bribes from Mr. Dwek, made a series of referrals to what he called “players,” helping Mr. Dwek to branch out to a web of public officials, mayoral and council candidates, and their confidants.
Mr. Dwek — now operating under an assumed identity, according to people involved in the case — honed an approach: introduced to a local influence-peddler, he would say he was looking to build high-rises or other projects in their city or county.
He would offer $5,000 in cash for an upcoming campaign, or as a straight-up bribe, with the promise of more to come, and with earnest pleas that his official requests be “taken care of.” And he would pull the money out of the trunk of his car.
He also came up with a lingo: corrupt payments were “invitations,” approvals for development projects were “opportunities.” The communities where his pitch appears to have worked included Jersey City, Hoboken, Bayonne, Ridgefield and parts of Ocean County.
Among the public officials arrested were Mayor Peter J. Cammarano III of Hoboken, who was a City Council member before he took office as mayor on July 1, and Mayor Dennis Elwell of Secaucus, both Democrats; Assemblyman L. Harvey Smith of Jersey City, also a Democrat; and Assemblyman Daniel M. Van Pelt, a Republican from Ocean County.
Like some of the others arrested, Mr. Smith, a former teacher, ran for office on an anticorruption platform, telling The New York Times: “I don’t take cash. I don’t let people give me things.” He is charged with taking $15,000 in bribes.
Mr. Van Pelt, who sits on an assembly committee that oversees the Department of Environmental Protection, was accused of accepting money to help the informant obtain environmental permits. In a meeting in Atlantic City in February, prosecutors charged, Mr. Van Pelt assured Mr. Dwek that the environmental agency “worked for” him, then took $10,000 in cash and told the informant to call him “any time.”
The bulk of the corruption charges arose in Hudson County. The president of the City Council in Jersey City, Mariano Vega Jr., and the city’s deputy mayor, Leona Beldini, were also arrested. Mr. Vega took three $10,000 payments before and after the municipal elections in May, prosecutors said. Anthony R. Suarez, the mayor of Ridgefield, in Bergen County, was charged with accepting $10,000 in bribes.
The court papers suggest the ease, and the relatively modest payments, with which local officials seemed willing to be part of the scheme.
In Hoboken, prosecutors charge in their complaint, Mr. Cammarano, then a councilman running for mayor, eagerly agreed in a meeting at the Malibu Diner this year to help Mr. Dwek with his projects in exchange for cash. Prosecutors said that when Mr. Dwek asked for assurances that his requests would be expedited by the Hoboken City Council, Mr. Cammarano replied, “I promise you,” adding, “You’re going to be, you’re going to be treated like a friend.”
Mr. Dwek responded that he would give a middleman $5,000 in cash for Mr. Cammarano and another $5,000 after his election as mayor.
“O.K.,” Mr. Cammarano replied, according to the complaint. “Beautiful.”
And Mr. Cammarano expressed confidence that he would be elected no matter what, according to the complaint. “Right now, the Italians, the Hispanics, the seniors are locked down,” he is quoted as saying. “Nothing can change that now.”
“I could be, uh, indicted,” he continued, “and I’m still going to win 85 to 95 percent of those populations.”
It is not clear from the federal documents whether Mr. Dwek indeed owned any properties or whether any of the developments he proposed were ever built.
In the money laundering scheme, the rabbis arrested included Saul J. Kassin, 87, a leader of the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn and New Jersey; Mordchai Fish and Lavel Schwartz, both rabbis in Brooklyn; and Eliahu Ben Haim and Edmund Nahum, who lead congregations in Deal.
Rabbi Nahum, prosecutors said, told Mr. Dwek that he should spread his money through a number of rabbis. “The more it’s spread the better,” Rabbi Nahum said, according to the complaint.
Another man in Brooklyn, Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, was accused of enticing vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 and then selling the organ for $160,000. Mr. Dwek pretended to be soliciting a kidney on behalf of someone and Mr. Rosenbaum said that he had been in business of buying organs for years, according to the complaint.
Weysan Dun, the special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Newark office, emphasized that the case was motivated by neither religion nor politics. That is an important point since New Jersey governor’s race pits a former United States attorney, Christopher J. Christie, a Republican, under whom the investigation began, against the Democratic incumbent, Mr. Corzine, whose administration was caught up in the arrests Thursday.
Agents raided the home of Joseph V. Doria Jr., commissioner of the state’s Department of Community Affairs. Mr. Doria, who is also the former mayor of Bayonne, resigned hours later at Governor Corzine’s request, officials said.
“Any corruption is unacceptable — anywhere, anytime, by anybody,” the governor said in a statement. “The scale of corruption we’re seeing as this unfolds is simply outrageous and cannot be tolerated.” He also called for the resignations of Mr. Smith and Mr. Van Pelt.
Mr. Christie called it a “really tragic day,” and said that he had worked “extraordinarily hard” to combat corruption in his seven years as a prosecutor, but that, “unfortunately, today is another example that there is much work still to be done.”
Outside Hoboken’s City Hall on Thursday, where a sign still had Mr. Cammarano’s predecessor’s name on it, residents chatted about the news. Some said they had come to expect as much from their politicians.
Others retained the capacity for shock. Carlos Ochoa, 63, a city street sweeper, said he had volunteered for the new mayor’s campaign. “I’m very disappointed,” he said. “I had a lot of expectations of him.”
Real gang members, that fucked up enough for you guys?
INDIANAPOLIS — Police say an 18-month-old girl was shot in the head when a man opened fire at a wedding reception in Indiana after scuffling with other guests.
Lawrence police detective Gary Woodruff said the child, Yuridia Sosa, was in critical condition at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis after surgery Sunday. Her mother, Mariela Rodriguez, and another woman were shot in the legs, but were expected to recover.
At least two shots were fired around 10 p.m. Saturday after three brothers fought with other wedding guests at a reception hall in Lawrence, a community within Indianapolis.
Officers arrested 21-year-old Francisco Ponce on a preliminary charge of attempted murder. His two brothers face lesser charges.
It's unclear whether the three men knew the bride and groom.
SAN ANTONIO — Police say they found a 3 1/2-week-old infant stabbed and decapitated in a Texas home, and his mother screaming that she killed her son after the devil told her to do it.
San Antonio police said 33-year-old Otty Sanchez was taken to a local hospital with self-inflicted stab wounds to her chest and stomach. Police spokesman Joe Rios said Otty will be charged with capital murder.
Two other children found unharmed at the home were taken by social service workers. Rios said a kitchen knife and two swords were recovered from the home.
Rios said police were called around 5 a.m. Sunday and found Otty on the couch "screaming that she killed her baby," whom police identified as Scott Wesley Buchholtz-Sanchez. Rios said she told police that she was hearing voices.
Man, this is why mental disorders are so uncomfortable to talk about and have such stigma. That story about the mother killing her child is so fucked up. How horrifying for the kids that survived. Watching their mother literally having a psychotic break-down and becoming grotesquely violent. I’m sure it wasn’t the first time they experienced their mother acting erratically. And then having the problem culminate into a bizarre murder and self-mutilation. I feel such sympathy towards those involved in this situation.
We've reported on the Missouri family who discovered that a photograph they'd posted online as a holiday greeting card was being used as an advertisement in the Czech Republic. More recently, a Massachusetts woman experienced a similar shock when a good samaritan alerted her to a personal photo that had been plucked from the Web, and was also being used for someone else's monetary gain.
According to WCVB TV5, though, the circumstances surrounding Jenni Brennan's violation of privacy were much more frightening than an advertising ploy. Some time ago, Brennan received an e-mail from a stranger stating that a Craigslist scammer had been using an image of her son Jake as part of an adoption scheme. The message included a link to the Craigslist ad, so Jenni sent an e-mail to the account associated with the posting. She discovered that for a mere $300, she could begin procedures for the adoption of her own son, who, according to the listing, was born in Canada and living in an orphanage in Cameroon.
Brennan alerted the FBI and the Massachusetts Attorney General's office to the photo, which had been lifted from a family blog. In response to the incident, Yahoo! has disabled the e-mail account of the fiend associated with the ad. Brennan has also taken measures to protect the privacy of the family blog, which (along with adding watermarks) is good protocol for anyone who wishes to post personal pictures on a Web site. [From: TheBostonChannel and CNN]
LOS ANGELES (AFP) – After six years together, the relationship between a pair of gay male penguins at San Francisco zoo is apparently over, with Harry leaving Pepper for another penguin -- Linda.
The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that the relationship between Harry and Pepper, who lived side-by-side, protecting eggs abandoned by other penguins, came to a shocking end when Harry moved into a neighboring nest with recently-widowed Linda.
The development has sparked a variety of reactions in the blogosphere, where Linda has been called a "home wrecker" who "lives for her own happiness, no matter who gets hurt."
Harrison Edell, a curator of birds at the zoo, had a more pragmatic explanation, noting that Linda's recently-deceased partner was a leader of sorts among the small zoo penguin community, commanding not one but two nests.
"For penguins, real estate means a lot," Edell told the Los Angeles Times, so "as far as penguins go, she was a pretty attractive prospect."
With Pepper rejoining the ranks of the single, Christian website OneNewsNow.com took the split as a sign that "nature prefers heterosexual relationships."
Others were more sympathetic to the bereft Pepper.
John, writing on "The Frigging Loon" blog, said he was "heartbroken" about the split and that he hopes Pepper "finds another male penguin that is ten times hotter than Harry!"
So-called “Internet addiction” among Chinese youths has led to a proliferation of clinics around the country that claim to be able to treat the recently defined disorder.
On Monday, police in the south China city of Nanning said that a 16-year-old boy died in at a boot camp for Internet addicts after being beaten by supervisors, according to the Global Times, in what would be the first reported case of a death at a treatment facility for Internet addiction.
The three adults who beat the teenager have been detained by police, his father told the Global Times, and the boy’s family is also planning a protest at local government offices to demand a full investigation and immediate closure of the treatment facility.
The clinic’s mission statement promised a tough environment but said that torture and “other methods that might damage a child’s health” were not used. Last month, the Ministry of Health ordered another Internet addiction center in northern China to stop using electroshock as a form of punishment after former patients complained online of harsh tactics.
China’s netizens have played a key role in drawing nationwide attention to recent cases of deaths in prisons and detention centers, so it should be no surprise that they are up in arms over the fate of one of their own. Many questioned the fairly new diagnosis of “Internet addiction” as a mental disorder.
“Internet addiction? It’s a term made up by some so-called ‘experts’, how come these parents believe what they’ve said?” said one commenter on the cnbeta Web site.
“[It] should be the parents’ problem. Why do they always exaggerate their kids’ hobbies, turning them into addictions or problems?” said another.
On Netease’s news forum, one netizen called for greater tolerance of Web habits: “I am sure only China has such a term: Internet addiction…. Why can’t its people accept new ideas and new things with an open mind?”
And also, wouldn't the mere fact of being interned in a place without Internet connection be enough to start "curing" the supposed addiction? I really don't see how beating people up and electroshocking is gonna help much.
I'm amused that the commentary about internet addiction is being quoted from online forums.
You can be addicted to just about anything, if it's interfering with the rest of your life. I don't think internet addiction is a separate disorder from the others. Just a different drug. /shrug
I don't think so. An addiction to the Internet is as much an addiction as an addiction to social functions or science. It's not a 'disorder' it's totally normal.
Does your addition to breathing stop you from doing other tasks? If you were to stop breathing, could you complete your schoolwork? If you NEED to engage in breathing to maintain your lifestyle, then yes you are addicted.
The article in this link sounds just like the title... some dude is officially challenging the fact that it says "In God We Trust" on American money. I won't post the whole story because many of you probably know all there is to know about the issue. What caught my eye was both the poll on MSNBC's website about the issue and the comments that accompany this article.
The poll asks, "Should In God We Trust be taken off of money?" And gives two options: Yes, it interferes with separation of church and state, and No, it has historical and patriotic value and doesn't lend the state an official religion.
The whole issue on this site just seems characterized by ignorance and stupidity. As the article says, this slogan wasn't put on money until 1955.. the same time "Under God" was put into the Pledge of Allegiance. Shouldn't that raise a red flag for most people? Have people forgotten what kind of atmosphere existed under McCarthyism? That was a time of (from what I understand) EXTREME xenophobia when Senator McCarthy raised an inquisition against "Commies". The results of this time period are many, including (since it's near to my heart) an extreme stifling of artistic freedom in comics/graphic narrative for 30 years. So why do many Americans cling to two relics from this shady time in their history as if it's intricately interwoven with their entire identity as a nation? Unless Americans are not so far away from xenophobic McCarthyism as I thought?
I don’t see why people care if “In God We Trust” is on our money or if it isn’t. It hardly matters if is printed. It’s not hurting anyone. It doesn’t stop Muslims from practicing their religion, it doesn’t force atheists to practice a religion. But I still agree with Illithid, some of the people posting in the comment section of that article care far too much about having that little phrase printed on pieces of paper. They need to understand that the government wasn’t made to be a Christian government or Muslim government; it was made to be completely separate from churches of any kind.
I care less about about money than the whole Pledge of Allegiance thing, but overall I'm only... I dunno, concerned? And here's the reason why: I feel like having God on all these things makes the big indoctrination machine add up. Many children are indoctrinated into religious/political/cultural/ethical beliefs by their parents... raised in that environment and bombarded with messages so much that they believe them without really knowing why. I understand that this isn't a malicious plot on the part of a religious government or whatever... it's a cumulative effect left over from our foundation and passed on from generation to generation. And I would personally try to remove such indoctrinating influences from children so that they can decide on their own as they discover things.
Now, these two things are very minor. Eliminating them will not stop many children from being bombarded by religious/patriotic sentiment... but like I said, pieces of the whole. It's the sort of thing that gives slight impetus to alienate and vilify Americans who DON'T subscribe to these beliefs and do so proudly. Essentially, it helps to set up an image of "The American" and those who don't fit into that category are not meant to be trusted.
But again, I want to stress that this isn't some conspiracy theory.. I just think that subconsciously it contributes to such a thing.
Perhaps a better example of what I'm rambling about in the paragraph above is something that my wife was told in Sunday school as a child.... she was told that all humans have three sections... the body, the soul, and the spirit (I think). The body is something you're always fighting with against the evil nature of desire and the world and all that, the soul is the intermediary between the two and what eventually is left when you die, and at the center is your spirit, the part of you that is directly connected to God. Her teacher drew it as a smiley face. But, she also mentioned that for NON-Christians, it looked a bit different... they had the same layers but at the center was not a happy face but just emptiness... and she drew in a big black circle. Non-Christians are black and empty inside. It's that sort of labelling that leads to making people not like the basic "Christian American" and thus "bad". Does that make sense?
Comments
What a sad article. I'd be really really upset if I had witnessed something like that.
(The story is bigger in the link, and if you have time, the Real Lives stories are all horribly interesting)
Real gang members, that fucked up enough for you guys?
Texas police: Mother says devil made her kill son
I hope not...
San Francisco's gay penguin has a change of heart
You can be addicted to just about anything, if it's interfering with the rest of your life. I don't think internet addiction is a separate disorder from the others. Just a different drug. /shrug
The article in this link sounds just like the title... some dude is officially challenging the fact that it says "In God We Trust" on American money. I won't post the whole story because many of you probably know all there is to know about the issue. What caught my eye was both the poll on MSNBC's website about the issue and the comments that accompany this article.
The poll asks, "Should In God We Trust be taken off of money?" And gives two options: Yes, it interferes with separation of church and state, and No, it has historical and patriotic value and doesn't lend the state an official religion.
Read the comments here. Some of them are disturbing.
The whole issue on this site just seems characterized by ignorance and stupidity. As the article says, this slogan wasn't put on money until 1955.. the same time "Under God" was put into the Pledge of Allegiance. Shouldn't that raise a red flag for most people? Have people forgotten what kind of atmosphere existed under McCarthyism? That was a time of (from what I understand) EXTREME xenophobia when Senator McCarthy raised an inquisition against "Commies". The results of this time period are many, including (since it's near to my heart) an extreme stifling of artistic freedom in comics/graphic narrative for 30 years. So why do many Americans cling to two relics from this shady time in their history as if it's intricately interwoven with their entire identity as a nation? Unless Americans are not so far away from xenophobic McCarthyism as I thought?
Now, these two things are very minor. Eliminating them will not stop many children from being bombarded by religious/patriotic sentiment... but like I said, pieces of the whole. It's the sort of thing that gives slight impetus to alienate and vilify Americans who DON'T subscribe to these beliefs and do so proudly. Essentially, it helps to set up an image of "The American" and those who don't fit into that category are not meant to be trusted.
But again, I want to stress that this isn't some conspiracy theory.. I just think that subconsciously it contributes to such a thing.
Perhaps a better example of what I'm rambling about in the paragraph above is something that my wife was told in Sunday school as a child.... she was told that all humans have three sections... the body, the soul, and the spirit (I think). The body is something you're always fighting with against the evil nature of desire and the world and all that, the soul is the intermediary between the two and what eventually is left when you die, and at the center is your spirit, the part of you that is directly connected to God. Her teacher drew it as a smiley face. But, she also mentioned that for NON-Christians, it looked a bit different... they had the same layers but at the center was not a happy face but just emptiness... and she drew in a big black circle. Non-Christians are black and empty inside. It's that sort of labelling that leads to making people not like the basic "Christian American" and thus "bad". Does that make sense?