somethin deep down in my soul

Trick or Treat

On the night of October 31st, Quentin L. Patrick, 22, who has multiple drug convictions, emptied an AK-47 into his front door, walls and windows when he heard a knock at his door. The boy, T. J. Darrisaw, 12, was killed in the rain of bullets. The family had attended a Halloween celebration in Sumter, 45 miles east of Columbia, and then stopped at Mr. Patrick’s house because the porch light was on.

Bmore Rockin

You Gotta Keep the Devil Way Down in the Hole

Happy Birthday to my Midwest Homey from the best in the WEST!

Feels like death

"Every man needs a wife, a horse and a gun." - Guatemalan campaign slogan

Mexican and Guatemalan drug traffickers arguing about a horse race in a rural border town began a series of gunbattles in which 17 people died, police said Dec. 1.

National police spokesman Donald Gonzalez said the traffickers were drinking in the town of Santa Ana Huista on Sunday afternoon when an argument broke out over bets on a horse race, leading to a pursuit in which the gunmen shot at each other with automatic weapons from trucks racing down roads near a remote part of the Mexican border.

Gonzalez said police even found grenade-launchers at the scene of the final shootout, along with hundreds of bullet cartridges and a truck with license plates from the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

Guatemala is a key transit point for South American cocaine being smuggled into Mexico and the United States.

my young man went off to sea

Pirates - Hobyo Beach, Somalia

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2008/nov/18/piracy-somalia-gallery?picture=339805476

songs in the key of life

President Hugo Chavez, who has been known to belt out Venezuelan folk songs during his frequent television appearances, has recorded an album. On a new compilation of revolutionary songs released by his United Socialist Party, timed to coincide with the last weeks of a campaign to elect governors and mayors, he sings an ode to a 19th-century rebel leader. The album, called “Battle Music,” also features a rap track that samples a Chávez speech.

waiting

i am an open book

Just tryin' to find my way home

Of the 250,000 refugees fleeing the violence in Congo, more than 60% are children. Every day they risk contracting malaria and respiratory infections – the two biggest child killers in the country

Two-year-old Elia lies on a hospital bed in Rutshuru with a gunshot wound to his arm. Elia, who does not know what happened to his parents, has not spoken since arriving at the hospital

Rahati Mugishu, 6, smiles as he plays with his younger brother, moments after he was reunified with his family in the Kibati refugee camp.

An aid workers' van is surrounded as they hand out emergency biscuits to children in Kibati

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2008/nov/12/congo-children?picture=339635992

The candyman can cause he mixes it with love and makes the world taste good - Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Research shows that neck arteries of obese children were similar to those of a 45-year-old

You Caught Me Smilin (Again)

I'll be around

Someday we'll all be free - Donny Hathaway

Construction on the President's House began in 1792 in Washington, D.C., on land ceded by two slave states-Virginia and Maryland. African slaves provided the bulk of labor that built the White House, the United States Capitol, and other early government buildings. Slaves worked in the White House until 1850.

Jesus's Son

Gil Scott Heron once sung that it was winter in America. Spring has finally come!

What We Did Today

Change

disenchanted with you

you're doing it again. and i hate when you do.

She was daddy's little girl

An Islamist rebel administration in Somalia had a 13-year-old girl stoned to death for adultery after the child's father reported that three men had raped her.

Amnesty International said the al-Shabab militia, which controls the southern port city of Kismayo, arranged for a group of 50 men to stone Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow in front of a crowd of about 1,000 spectators. A lorryload of stones was brought to the stadium for the killing.

Amnesty said that Duhulow struggled with her captors and had to be forcibly carried into the stadium.

"At one point during the stoning, Amnesty International has been told by numerous eyewitnesses that nurses were instructed to check whether Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was still alive when buried in the ground. They removed her from the ground, declared that she was, and she was replaced in the hole where she had been buried for the stoning to continue," the human rights group said.

"Inside the stadium, militia members opened fire when some of the witnesses to the killing attempted to save her life, and shot dead a boy who was a bystander."

Duhulow's father told Amnesty that when they tried to report her rape to the militia, the child was accused of adultery and detained. None of the men Duhulow accused was arrested.

"This was not justice, nor was it an execution," said Amnesty's Somalia campaigner, David Copeman. "This child suffered an horrendous death at the behest of the armed opposition groups who currently control Kismayo.

"This killing is yet another human rights abuse committed by the combatants to the conflict in Somalia, and again demonstrates the importance of international action to investigate and document such abuses, through an international commission of inquiry."

For Bush, revenge is a dish best served cold. - Guardian

Next month's meeting of world leaders in Washington to discuss the future of the world's financial system will gather leaders from the world's leading and emerging economies. Only one country will be notable by its absence: Spain.

Despite prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's pleas, the United States has decided not to extend an invitation to the world's eighth largest economy and home to two of the world's top 16 banks. It is evident that Spain has enough economic credentials to attend the summit – both the EU and Gordon Brown have even argued for its inclusion, to no avail.

The reason is that Zapatero consistently overlooked the high political price he would pay for his indulgent anti-American approach to international politics. His decision t0 pull out of Iraq in 2004, a radical shift from the foreign policy of his predecessor, José María Aznar, earned him the manifest hostility of the US president. George Bush has not travelled to Spain since; nor has he invited his Spanish counterpart to visit the US. In fact, he has even refused to meet with him officially when they have crossed paths at international summits.

The Makings of You

Mr. President

The first U.S. president known to have been caught cheating on his wife was James Garfield. After finding out about the smutty letters he had written to an 18 year-old New York woman named Calhoun, his wife accused him of "lawless passion"

According to a recent biography, Kennedy was photographed in a bathtub receiving oral sex from Marilyn Monroe.

During his 1884 campaign, Grover Cleveland was mocked for having a child out of wedlock with a store clerk named Maria Halpin. The child was sent to an orphanage, his mother to an insane asylum.

Abraham Lincoln was rumored to have had a four-year homosexual relationship.

http://www.playboy.com/magazine/features/presidential-sex-poll/index.html

i like the way she moves

Club Watt in Rotterdam has a new type of dance floor that harvests the energy generated by jumps and gyrations and transforms it into electricity. With rainwater-fed toilets and low-waste bars, and heat that is harvested in part from the bands' amplifiers and other musical equipment makes this the first sustainable dance club.

in the mood for love

Maneaters

w

In the remote village of Deulbari, everyone knows someone who has been attacked by a tiger. Until now, humans and tigers have coexisted uneasily in this outpost in the Sundarbans area of West Bengal, where 274 tigers were counted in the last census in 2004. This year has been different.

Approached through vivid green paddy fields dotted with pink water lilies, Deulbari is a village of roughly constructed houses, some with corrugated iron roofs, others just straw, bleached by the sun. It sits on the Indian shores of the mangrove forests that straddle the border between India and Bangladesh. After a cyclone last winter led to rising water levels and forced tigers from the Bangladeshi side over the border into India, the number of documented tiger attacks has soared. According to villagers, there have been 15 already this year, six of them fatal. The ranks of the tiger widows are swelling, and the horrifying tales are multiplying.

Swapan Haldar, 35, was a crab fisherman, wading regularly through the water along the shores of the forests in search of grey-green crustaceans. Mindful of recent attacks, his wife Minati pleaded with him to think again when he announced one Saturday morning that he was going to the forest with two other men in search of crabs. 'He said, "Look after the children, I will be back in five or six days'," she said. 'I told him I am always worried about the dangers. I told him "Don't go". But he said he had to, because it was the only thing he could do.'

Haldar's companions returned with his body the following night. According to the reports Minati received, her husband had no inkling that the tiger was there until it pounced. It locked its jaws around his head and pulled him backwards into the forest. By the time the others found him, he was already dead. 'People are helpless, but somehow we have to live here,' she said.

There were 29 widows gathered in the long communal hall near the dock from where the boats set out, listening to her story and nodding. Anita Nashkar, 22, sat quietly, pulling her green and yellow sari around her head, lost in her own world of nightmares, her 18-month-old daughter Priyanka asleep in her arms. Her husband Putul, 24, went out with two other men two months ago to fish for crabs. 'The last time I spoke to him he said he would be back the next week,' she said. It was all she said. Two days into the trip, a tiger struck, dragging Putul's body away into the heart of the forest, where the others dared not follow.

Panchali Mundal, 24, came forward. She was mute with shock. It was barely two weeks since her husband, Sanjay, said goodbye and headed off with other men from the village in search of crabs. She stared at her feet as the men gathered round to colour in the details: Sanjay, 30, the father of her three children, had just bent down to reach into the water when the tiger pounced. It dragged his body into the jungle. She had no idea how she would take care of the children now.

The men clustered around. It seemed as if everyone had a story to tell. Naren Sardar, 56, was fortunate it was a male tiger that received his kick between its hind legs as it tried to drag him off when he was on a fishing trip. 'I kicked him in the bichi,' Sardar said. Jungle Paranaik, 42, the village hairdresser, managed to escape by swimming under the boat that had taken him in search of crabs two months ago. Fatik Haldar, 35, was eight when his father was killed by a tiger while collecting honey in the forest. He now sports a neat set of scars from where a tiger landed on his shoulders as he went in search of prawns in July. His injuries mean that his wife Basanti, 30, is now reduced to begging.

For 30 years, Gopal Chandra Tanti was the top tiger-catcher in the mangrove forests. It was in Deulbari, a village of 4,000 people on the banks of the Matla river, that Tanti downed his last tiger earlier this year. The animal, a pregnant female nearly three metres long (8ft 6in), had crossed the river and was lurking in bushes near the edge of the village. At about 10pm she was spotted, given away by the reflection from her eyes.

The villagers grabbed torches and joined the hunt, shouting loudly and waving their burning sticks until the tiger took refuge in the branches of a palm tree. There they tormented her further, jabbing at the animal with the flames. The animal escaped, but was hunted down the next day and laid low by a dart from Tanti's rifle. The old tiger-catcher's nerves are no longer strong enough to cope with the new influx.

Ashutosh Dhali, who received gruesome injuries to his left leg during an attack, agreed. 'We love tigers,' he said. 'We can't hate them. They are unavoidable, they are part of the place. There are a lot of tigers around now, but without the tigers it would not be the same jungle.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/26/india-wildlife

Wineville Chicken Coop Murders

On a sunny afternoon in March 1928, 9-year-old Walter Collins disappeared after his mother, Christine, a telephone operator, gave him a dime to spend on admission to the theater near their Mt. Washington area home. The boy’s father, Walter J.S. Collins, who was serving time in prison for robbery, believed that former inmates out for revenge against him may have kidnapped his son, though there were no witnesses and no proof that that had occurred. Arthur Hutchins, Jr., a runaway from Illinois and originally from Iowa, claimed he was the missing Walter Collins so he could get a free trip to California. The police considered the case closed and tried to convince Walter's mother, Christine Collins, that Hutchins was her son. “What are you trying to do, make fools out of us all? Or are you trying to shirk your duty as a mother and have the state provide for your son? You are the most cruel-hearted woman I’ve ever known. You are a . . . fool!” LAPD police Captain J.J. Jones allegedly said to Collins.When she refused to believe it, she was placed in the psychiatric ward of the Los Angeles County General Hospital.

While she spent five days in the hospital, Jones extracted the truth from the faux Walter.

The boy from Illinois confessed that while stopped at an Illinois roadside cafe, he listened to a diner tell him how much he resembled the kidnapped boy from Los Angeles, whose picture had appeared in newspapers nationwide. Arthur quickly seized on an opportunity to see Hollywood, turned himself in to authorities and carried out the charade by assuming the identity of the missing boy.

Only after Hutchins admitted he was not Christine Collins' son, ten days later, was she released.

Meanwhile Gordon Stewart Northcott, in what was known as the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, was found guilty of killing 12-year-old Lewis Winslow, his brother Nelson, and an "unidentified" Mexican boy. Investigators found an axe and bones, hair and fingers from three of the victims buried in lime near the chicken house at the Northcott ranch near Wineville. The jury heard that he kidnapped, molested, tortured, killed, and beheaded these and other boys throughout 1928. Northcott was hanged. Sarah Louise "Louisa" Northcott, Northcott's mother, admitted to killing Walter Collins, but then recanted her confession. She was sentenced to life and served her sentence at Tehachapi State Prison. Gordon Stewart Northcott, while on trial for abusing and murdering four boys, heard his mother testify that she was not his mother, but his grandmother."Louisa stated that Gordon was the result of a crime of incest that her husband, Cyruss George Northcott, committed against their daughter Winifred.

The LAPD insisted that Walter had been one of the victims of Gordon Stewart Northcott. But Collins refused to believe it, especially because her son’s body was never found on the Northcotts’ chicken ranch in Wineville. Continuing her search and never giving up hope, Collins became the first woman in more than three decades to receive permission to visit a serial killer on the eve of his execution at San Quentin. In October 1930, Northcott sent her a telegram saying he had lied when he denied that Walter was among his victims. He promised to tell the truth, if she came in person to hear. But upon her arrival, he balked.

“I don’t want to see you,” he said when she confronted him. “I don’t know anything about it. I’m innocent.”

Five years after Northcott’s execution, one of the other boys he was accused of killing was found alive and well. This tiny bit of news gave Collins the hope she needed to go on searching for the rest of her life.

Just you and me locked up for days

Song: Come Live With Me Angel - Marvin Gaye

Welcome home

It was a long day. I came home and threw my jacket on the bed. My dog mounted it and began to furiously hump it for the next 20 minutes. It was a long day.

All you need`s a strong heart and a nerve of steel. Viva Las Vegas, Viva Las Vegas - Elvis Presley

On the evening of Oct. 4, 1982, Lefty Rosenthal, the talented professional gambler and gangster-when-necessary who had brought sports betting to casinos in Las Vegas and illicitly run an empire of four hotel casinos, walked out of Tony Roma’s on East Sahara Avenue with an order of takeout ribs. He had just finished dinner with some fellow handicappers, and he was bringing the food home for his two children. When he got into his car, it blew up.

Mr. Rosenthal survived the explosion — later he could not remember whether he had turned the ignition key — but the attempt on his life, for which no one was ever prosecuted, ended his career as one of the most powerful men in Las Vegas. He left the city early the next year and on Monday, at home in Miami Beach, he died. He was 79 and had lived in Florida since the late 1980s.

By most accounts he was a cheat, an egomaniac, a friend of the mob, and he most brilliant man ever to have ruled the Las Vegas casinos—before he was finally blacklisted by the Nevada gaming authorities in the 1980s.

The influence of Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal over Sin City was such that his life became the subject of a 1995 Martin Scorsese movie, Casino, in which he was played by Robert De Niro. Even after his exile to Florida, it was widely believed that Rosenthal—nicknamed ‘Lefty’ for the notorious instance when he plead the Fifth Amendment no less than 38 times, refusing even to confirm that he was left-handed—was indestructible. After all, he had survived a direct hit by a car bomb in 1982 outside Tony Roma’s steakhouse—a fluke probably attributable to the steel plate fitted to his Cadillac Eldorado to correct a balancing problem. Locals claim they can still point to the scorch marks in the restaurant’s car park on East Sahara Avenue.

After moving to Las Vegas at the age of 39 from Chicago, because he was denied a gambling license, he ended up running the Stardust, Hacienda, Fremont and Marina casinos on behalf of Allen Glick, regarded by the FBI as a frontman for the Chicago mob. Rosenthal was known for keeping his casinos free of professional cheaters—through techniques depicted in the film. Caught cheating at a table game? You would be taken in the back and have your hand crushed with a rubber mallet. Dare to put your feet on a gaming table? You would be thrown head first out of a window, not a door. Make the mistake of insulting Rosenthal or threatening him? You would be beaten to near death, all while Rosenthal looked down at you, calmly smoking his cigarette and sipping his favorite drink, sparkling water.

Rosenthal also hosted his own weekly Stardust-sponsored TV show—The Frank Rosenthal Show—on which his first guest was Frank Sinatra. All the while, the authorities suspected Rosenthal’s casinos of engaging in ‘skimming’—where cash from a legal business is shipped off to crime syndicates before it’s ever counted. Rosenthal’s ‘enforcer’ in this activity was said to be his boyhood friend Anthony "Tony the Ant" Spilotro . Indeed, it has been noted that there was a 70 per cent spike in the Las Vegas murder rate after Spilotro’s arrival. By the late 1970s, however, Rosenthal and Spilotro had fallen out over Spilotro’s affair with Rosenthal’s estranged wife, Ginger McGee, a Vegas showgirl and known hustler.

Ginger McGee



Anthony "Tony the Ant" Spilotro"


Meanwhile, Spilotro had formed a jewel-thieving ring known as the Hole in the Wall Gang and had been blacklisted by the gaming authorities thanks to the testimony of Aladena “Jimmy The Weasel” Fratianno, which saw him indicted for skimming. Some believe that Spilotro might have conspired to kill Rosenthal with the bungled 1982 car bomb attack. Whatever the case, Spilotro ultimately became a liability for the mob and it is said that his execution was ordered in 1986 by captains in Chicago. According to popular folklore, Spilotro was beaten and then buried alive in a cornfield, along with his brother, Michael. The autopsies supported the theory.

It was Rosenthal’s association with Spilotro that ultimately drove him out of Sin City. “In retrospect, reputation and the fact that we were boyhood friends—there was no way for me to overcome it,” he admitted to Florida’s Sun-Sentinel.

As one anonymous former federal prosecutor told the Review Journal yesterday: “It’s been said you should never speak ill of the dead. There are exceptions to the rule. Frank Rosenthal is one of those exceptions. He was an awful human being.”

The Good Life

And impressive collection of albino tigers is under Mexican police control after being seized in a raid on the Mexico City mansion of alleged Colombian drug traffickers. The private zoo was also home to an ordinary white tiger, a couple of black panthers, two African lions and a chimpanzee.

The house was covered in elaborate wooden carvings in styles ranging from ancient Greek to Indian. An artificial lake in the grounds contained fiberglass sculptures of two crocodiles and a hippopotamus.

The raid, on Saturday, resulted in the arrest of 11 Colombians, two Mexicans, a Uruguayan, and a US citizen. They were in the middle of a party at the time. The chief organised crime prosecutor alleged the gang was headed by drug kingpin Teodoro Fino Restrepo, alias the Seagull.

'Dear Leader'

According to a professor at Japan's Waseda University, North Korea ’s “Dear Leader”, Kim Jong-Il, passed away in the fall of 2003 and a stand-in has been fooling the world for at least five years. Kim hasn't been since seen August, fueling speculations that he is gravely ill or dead.

Remember this?

Give me oil in my lamp

Cuba has found an estimated 20bn barrels of oil offshore. This could change the game, putting them in league with the top 20 oil producers in the world.

McCain was not tortured, PoW guard claims

Read this article. Apparently he spent most of his time in the hospital, as a result of injuries from his crash, and was in fact nursed back to life by Vietnamese doctors and nurses.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/14/uselections2008-johnmccain

Let's learn Judo with Vladimir Putin!

Putin's former judo trainer, Anatoli Rakhlin, says his pupil was a gifted student who has popularised the martial art in Russia. "It's important that our prime minister is a sportsman and not a drunk,"

So why can't we get together after the dance