Crime
aardvarchaeology | April 23, 2015A colleague of mine has left contract archaeology to work for the police as a civil utredare, that is, someone with a university degree who works on crime cases despite not being a policeperson. He told me a pretty neat story about Gubbligan, the Old Man's Gang.
The OMG were three professional bank robbers who never settled down. In the 00s they were in their 40s, 50s and 60s, and still they kept committing armed robberies across southern Sweden. The police were onto them and had begun to tap the gang's cell phones. This way they learned that the OMG had an arms stash out in the woods, where…
kkrisberg | June 13, 2014Childhood lead poisoning is one of those health risks that everyone has likely heard about, but many probably think it’s a problem of the past. However, a recent study reminds us that in just one state — Michigan — the effects of childhood lead poisoning cost about $330 million every year. And that’s a conservative estimate.
But estimating the cost of childhood lead poisoning wasn’t the only goal of the study, which was released earlier this week. Study author Tracy Swinburn, a research specialist at the University of Michigan Risk Science Center, wanted to know what kind of financial return…
aardvarchaeology | September 26, 2013Here are two pages out of this week's Swedish crime chronicle, showcasing the rare beauties of the small-town criminal mind. Both remind me of the movie Fargo in different ways.
The first one is awesomely stupid. Wednesday shortly after noon a young couple were driving through the outskirts of Fagersta. Two police officers recognised them and flagged them down as the driver was known to have no licence.
The couple gets out of the car and starts arguing with the police, and then the man grabs one of the officers in a stranglehold and starts banging her head against the car. The woman hits the…
pharyngula | January 13, 2013Many of you already know that Aaron Swartz, an online activist, committed suicide earlier this week. I didn't know much about him, but now I've learned two things.
One, he was a victim of depression. I've never experienced this personally — at worst I can say I've been sad and stressed at time — but let's be clear about something: depression is something altogether different. Swartz wrote about his depression, and got across a little bit about what it actually feels like. This is good communication.
Your face falls. Perhaps you cry. You feel worthless. You wonder whether it's worth going on.…
pharyngula | July 17, 2012Marino is a demented fanatical animal rights activist who runs a website called "Negotiation is Over". NIO is notorious as the site of some of the most frothingly furious denouncers of all animal research. Marino is from Florida; she was arrested and extradited to Michigan in March to be tried for words she wrote on the internet.
Whoa. That ought to give one pause — arrested for free speech, you're thinking? That does cause one's knee to jerk.
But then she was also arrested in May when she chained herself to a library door to protest being banned from the Wayne State campus in Detroit. She's…
pharyngula | September 20, 2011The state of Georgia is planning to execute a man for murder tomorrow, on the basis of a very shaky case in which most of the witnesses have recanted their testimony, and who have said the police pressured them into their initial accusations. I can't make any judgments on whether he is guilty or innocent — the case has not been made strongly enough to justify an irrevocable and terminal decision. That is why it is criminally wrong for the state to kill him for this crime.
The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles is about to commit an injustice. Write or fax them at (404) 651-8502 now.
You can…
sastyk | August 9, 2011From Counterpunch, Ehrenreich, who, along with Jonathan Kozol and the late Joe Bageant and a vanishingly few others, tells the true story of American poverty more clearly than anyone else explores how we punish the poor::
The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, leading to the arrests of several…
pharyngula | July 13, 2011I don't know whether to be pleased or dismayed at this story of an obsessed Minnesotan who turned to crime for petty revenge. Barry Ardolf got mad at his neighbors, the Kostolniks, because they reported him to the police for kissing their 4-year-old child on the mouth, which is already a bit creepy, and then he got really creepy.
The man, a Medtronic computer technician, downloaded a Wi-Fi hacking program to tear into his neighbors WEP encryption. Ardolf created a fake Myspace page as well as several fake emails for Matt Kostolnik. The hacker then posted child porn on the Myspace page and…
pharyngula | July 13, 2011If you work for the Florida Museum of Natural History, someone doesn't like you. For years, someone has been vandalizing the vehicles of workers at the museum.
It started small. Darwin Fish emblems would be ripped off cars a few times a year. Undeterred, the victims would simply replace them. Then bumper stickers were scraped off. Then notes containing prayers were left on cars. And now the vandal has apparently taken the next step: driving nails into tires. One researcher said she discovered a long nail had been deliberately forced into the side rim of her new tire, destroying it. Another…
pharyngula | June 9, 2011Amina is the young Syrian woman who was threatened with rape by Islamist thugs. She disappeared a few days ago.
Earlier today, at approximately 6:00 pm Damascus time, Amina was walking in the area of the Abbasid bus station, near Fares al Khouri Street. She had gone to meet a person involved with the Local Coordinating Committee and was accompanied by a friend.
Amina told the friend that she would go ahead and they were separated. Amina had, apparently, identified the person she was to meet. However, while her companion was still close by, Amina was seized by three men in their early 20's.…
pharyngula | May 26, 2011As a young man, I often walked the streets of Seattle — it's a great city, and wonderful to explore. But then, I never walked the streets while brown. That experience would be completely different.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? This country is well on the way to becoming a petty tyranny, run by small-minded bullies. There is a crime caught in that video, but the culprit isn't John T. Williams, native American woodcarver — it's the abuse of power by Officer Ian Birk.
pharyngula | May 9, 2011Those are ominous words. Brian and Shannon Gore have been arrested after police, investigating evidence that Shannon Gore had been selling stolen goods, found their 5 or 6 year old daughter caged in their trailer home, gnawing on her own skin.
Then they found the body of another child buried under a shed.
Fine upstanding members of the Christian community, they are.
I don't consider every Christian to be a child-torturing murderer, but one thing I wish we could get across is that church attendance has nothing to do with morality or ethical behavior or goodness of any kind. So why do so many…
pharyngula | April 21, 2011The New York Times has a long profile of Andrew Wakefield. It's not at all laudatory (read the last paragraph in particular), but it does include quotes from people who regard Wakefield as a hero…and even something more.
"To our community, Andrew Wakefield is Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one," says J. B. Handley, co-founder of Generation Rescue, a group that disputes vaccine safety. "He's a symbol of how all of us feel."
Handley, of course, is a certifiable kook and an awful excuse for a human being. I am amused that he sees Wakefield as a Jesus, though; there doesn't seem…
pharyngula | April 19, 2011The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban was a clear example of the destructive power of religious intolerance — it takes a religious mind to turn the demolition of art into a virtue. Now we have another example of extremism attacking art: Catholic fundamentalists in France have destroyed Andres Serrano's Piss Christ.
On Saturday, around 1,000 Christian protesters marched through Avignon to the gallery. The protest group included a regional councillor for the extreme-right Front National, which recently scored well in the Vaucluse area in local elections. The gallery…
pharyngula | April 7, 2011Another madman has run wild, this time in Brazil, killing 11 schoolchildren and wounding another 13 before killing himself (and here's the story in Portuguese, with many photos, including a few that are grislier than you'll see in the US media). The killer left a suicide note, and a Brazilian reader sent me his translation:
First of all you should know that the impure can't touch me without
gloves, only the chaste or the the ones that lost their chastity after their
marriages and haven't been adulterous may touch me with no gloves,
i.e., no fornicator or adulterer may have direct contact with…
pharyngula | April 1, 2011This is how to handle a depressed person:
On December 23, 2010, Shuai, a 34-year-old pregnant woman who was suffering from a major depressive disorder, attempted to take her own life. Friends found her in time and persuaded her to get help. Six days later, Shuai underwent cesarean surgery and delivered a premature newborn girl who, tragically, died four days later.
On March 14, 2011, Shuai was arrested, jailed, and charged with murder and attempted feticide.
Don't get pregnant, ladies! It means that every risk you might take becomes a criminal offense! I always thought it was a joke to…
pharyngula | March 29, 2011The animal rights loons are ranting again. These people are simply terrorists, as you can see in this quote from their odious website.
Every time a vivisector's car or home — and, eventually, the abuser him/herself — blows up, flames of liberation light up the sky.
They're quite proud of taking the unconscionably violent position. And now, just to show how low they can sink, they have announced a new target: our students.
Debuting The Soft-Bellied Target and New Resistance Tactics: Bringing the War to the Student Body
When we attack professors, we can only expect limited gains. They are…
pharyngula | January 20, 2011I have been receiving lots of triumphant mail from anti-choice people claiming vindication, that abortion is wrong, and demanding to know how I can possibly support abortion rights after hearing about the case of Dr Kermit Gosnell. Gosnell ran an abortion mill in Philadelphia, and was a hack who maimed and killed women while doing abortions on demand, for a substantial fee. He was unqualified, uncertified in obstetrics and gynecology, and his facility was unmonitored and relatively uninspected. He gave untrained, inexperienced staff critical jobs in the surgery — he allowed a 15 year old high…
pharyngula | January 18, 2011An interesting letter has been unearthed. It reveals that the Vatican was officially instructing its clergy to hide pedophilia cases from civil authorities.
Signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II's diplomat to Ireland, the letter instructs Irish bishops that their new policy of making the reporting of suspected crimes mandatory "gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature."
Storero wrote that canon law, which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the church, "must be meticulously followed." Any bishops who tried…
pharyngula | January 8, 2011An Arizona Democrat, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, has been shot and possibly killed by an assassin armed with an automatic weapon. Her offices had earlier been targeted for vandalism for her support of health care reform.
Isn't it amazing that health care reform has become such a polarizing issue, and that the people who are raging the loudest are those who would benefit the most?
I'll take a wild guess here. The scumbag who committed this crime has been caught; I'll bet he'll turn out to be a Teabagger who listens to a lot of AM talk radio.
Holy crap. This was Sarah Palin's idea of a…