(NEWS BLACKOUT?)
Allegedly, in the same week as the devastating Haitian earthquake, the Yellowstone super volcano experienced more than 40 tremors. Clusters of aftershocks also hit Puerto Rico and similar tremors also struck Guatemala, Mexico, Eastern Europe, Japan and Indonesia according to writer Gerald Barnes.
"THE UNEXPLAINED" (FISH WITH HUMAN TEETH?)
Introduction:
Russian fishermen have been baffled by recent catches of fish with human teeth in the lakes and streams near Chelyabinsk in the Southern Urals.
Backstory:
A Russian fisherman named Valery decided to pull the net out of the water. There was several dead fish in it, but one of them, which was quite large in size, was alive. The shape of its body and head was very unusual. The man tried to get the fish out of the net, but was horrified to see that the fish had a row of white strong teeth in its mouth. The teeth of the fish bore a striking resemblance to those of a human being.
The man left his catch on the lakeside and hurried to return home. He came back the next day – the fish was dead. He decided to bring the fish home and show it to friends.
The fisherman placed the weird fish under a thick layer of salt to dry the creature out.
“I hope it will attract scientists’ attention before it finally decomposes,” he said.
However, when specialists saw pictures of the fish, they could only shrug their shoulders.
A similar fish with human-like teeth was caught not so long ago in Texas. The catch weighed 6.5 kilos.
Russian ichthyologists believe that the caught fish does not represent a mutation. Such a mutation would take hundreds of years. However, they have no other explanation for this strange phenomenon.
VANISHED WITHOUT A TRACE FILES:
A newly commissioned Australian navy ship has vanished without a trace in the second most infamous stretch of ocean in the world.
The Outback, a Canberra-class amphibious craft, disappeared while on a training mission in the Bass Strait Triangle, a treacherous passageway between the island of Tasmania and the mainland off Australia's south coast.
The Outback was on Day 5 of a two-week trial voyage when the accident occurred on December 27. The weather was clear that day and the waters of the strait were calm.
Suddenly, communication with the Outback ceased and the vessel vanished without apparent cause.
The Bass Strait Triangle has been notorious since a ship, the Eliza, disappeared while on a rescue mission there in 1797. Since then, so many boats and airplanes have vanished in the area that scientists now compare it to the more famous Bermuda Triangle.
The Bass Strait Triangle had been quiet since October 21, when a Cessna 182 L light airplane piloted by Frederick Valentich disappeared. In his last voice transmission, Valentich told air traffic controllers he was being buzzed by a UFO. Neither he nor his aircraft were ever seen again.
When the Outback vanished, the ship had 2,000 crew members on board, plus supplies and amphibious landing craft.
TRUE STORY: "TEXAS SLAVE RANCH-1984"
On April 6, 1984, more than 30 federal, state and local lawmen raided a 3,500-acre) ranch near the Texas Hill Country town of Mountain Home. The officers were responding to reports that workers on the ranch were kidnapped from Interstate 10, forced to work and that at least one hundred workers had died and were fed through a wood chipper on the premises.
Among the items seized in the search were human bone fragments and audiotapes of torture sessions in which a cattle prod can be heard as it is used to shock the victim.
The ranchers were arrested and charged with aggravated kidnapping and the case became widely known as “The Texas Slave Ranch.”
The 1986 trial lasted three months, made national news, featured the celebrated Texas defense attorney Richard “Racehorse” Haynes and resulted in the conviction of ranchers Walter Wesley Ellebracht, 55, Walter Ellebracht Jr., 33, and ranch foreman Carlton Robert Caldwell, 21, on charges of conspiracy to commit aggravated kidnapping but acquitted of murder in the death of Anthony Bates, an Alabama man who worked on the ranch in 1984.
There was little physical evidence linking anyone in the death of Bates because a body was never found on the ranch and though multiple possible murder weapons were present it was impossible to determine what might have been used to slay Bates without a body. Though Bates has, to this date, never been seen or heard from since the day he was seen being accosted by the defendants.
Joyce Ellebracht, wife of Walter Jr., was also charged but succeeded in having her trial severed from her husband and father-in law.
Though Prosecutor Ronald Sutton sought life sentences for the three, Walter Ellebracht Sr. received probation, Walter Jr. remained free while his 15-year sentence was appealed and Caldwell served less than three years of his 14-year sentence.
(IMMORTAL CELLS)
*This fascinating, sad but true story has appeared in the news all week. Here is an interesting backstory to the actual story.
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the land-like her slave ancestors, yet her cells-taken without her knowledge became one of the most important tools in medicine.
BACKSTORY:
by: Sarah Zielinski
Medical researchers use laboratory-grown human cells to learn the intricacies of how cells work and test theories about the causes and treatment of diseases. The cell lines they need are “immortal”—they can grow indefinitely, be frozen for decades, divided into different batches and shared among scientists. In 1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black woman with cervical cancer. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research—though their donor remained a mystery for decades. In her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, journalist Rebecca Skloot tracks down the story of the source of the amazing HeLa cells, Henrietta Lacks, and documents the cell line's impact on both modern medicine and the Lacks family.
Who was Henrietta Lacks?
She was a black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia who got cervical cancer when she was 30. A doctor at Johns Hopkins took a piece of her tumor without telling her and sent it down the hall to scientists there who had been trying to grow tissues in culture for decades without success. No one knows why, but her cells never died.
Why are her cells so important?
Henrietta’s cells were the first immortal human cells ever grown in culture. They were essential to developing the polio vaccine. They went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity. Many scientific landmarks since then have used her cells, including cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization.
There has been a lot of confusion over the years about the source of HeLa cells. Why?
When the cells were taken, they were given the code name HeLa, for the first two letters in Henrietta and Lacks. Today, anonymizing samples is a very important part of doing research on cells. But that wasn’t something doctors worried about much in the 1950s, so they weren’t terribly careful about her identity. When some members of the press got close to finding Henrietta’s family, the researcher who’d grown the cells made up a pseudonym—Helen Lane—to throw the media off track. Other pseudonyms, like Helen Larsen, eventually showed up, too. Her real name didn’t really leak out into the world until the 1970s.
How did you first get interested in this story?
I first learned about Henrietta in 1988. I was 16 and a student in a community college biology class. Everybody learns about these cells in basic biology, but what was unique about my situation was that my teacher actually knew Henrietta’s real name and that she was black. But that’s all he knew. The moment I heard about her, I became obsessed: Did she have any kids? What do they think about part of their mother being alive all these years after she died? Years later, when I started being interested in writing, one of the first stories I imagined myself writing was hers. But it wasn’t until I went to grad school that I thought about trying to track down her family.
How did you win the trust of Henrietta’s family?
Part of it was that I just wouldn’t go away and was determined to tell the story. It took almost a year even to convince Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah, to talk to me. I knew she was desperate to learn about her mother. So when I started doing my own research, I’d tell her everything I found. I went down to Clover, Virginia, where Henrietta was raised, and tracked down her cousins, then called Deborah and left these stories about Henrietta on her voice mail. Because part of what I was trying to convey to her was I wasn’t hiding anything, that we could learn about her mother together. After a year, finally she said, fine, let’s do this thing.
When did her family find out about Henrietta’s cells?
Twenty-five years after Henrietta died, a scientist discovered that many cell cultures thought to be from other tissue types, including breast and prostate cells, were in fact HeLa cells. It turned out that HeLa cells could float on dust particles in the air and travel on unwashed hands and contaminate other cultures. It became an enormous controversy. In the midst of that, one group of scientists tracked down Henrietta’s relatives to take some samples with hopes that they could use the family’s DNA to make a map of Henrietta’s genes so they could tell which cell cultures were HeLa and which weren’t, to begin straightening out the contamination problem.
So a postdoc called Henrietta’s husband one day. But he had a third-grade education and didn’t even know what a cell was. The way he understood the phone call was: “We’ve got your wife. She’s alive in a laboratory. We’ve been doing research on her for the last 25 years. And now we have to test your kids to see if they have cancer.” Which wasn’t what the researcher said at all. The scientists didn’t know that the family didn’t understand. From that point on, though, the family got sucked into this world of research they didn’t understand, and the cells, in a sense, took over their lives.
How did they do that?
This was most true for Henrietta’s daughter. Deborah never knew her mother; she was an infant when Henrietta died. She had always wanted to know who her mother was but no one ever talked about Henrietta. So when Deborah found out that this part of her mother was still alive she became desperate to understand what that meant: Did it hurt her mother when scientists injected her cells with viruses and toxins? Had scientists cloned her mother? And could those cells help scientists tell her about her mother, like what her favorite color was and if she liked to dance.
Deborah’s brothers, though, didn’t think much about the cells until they found out there was money involved. HeLa cells were the first human biological materials ever bought and sold, which helped launch a multi-billion-dollar industry. When Deborah’s brothers found out that people were selling vials of their mother’s cells, and that the family didn’t get any of the resulting money, they got very angry. Henrietta’s family has lived in poverty most of their lives, and many of them can’t afford health insurance. One of her sons was homeless and living on the streets of Baltimore. So the family launched a campaign to get some of what they felt they were owed financially. It consumed their lives in that way.
What are the lessons from this book?
For scientists, one of the lessons is that there are human beings behind every biological sample used in the laboratory. So much of science today revolves around using human biological tissue of some kind. For scientists, cells are often just like tubes or fruit flies—they’re just inanimate tools that are always there in the lab. The people behind those samples often have their own thoughts and feelings about what should happen to their tissues, but they’re usually left out of the equation.
And for the rest of us?
The story of HeLa cells and what happened with Henrietta has often been held up as an example of a racist white scientist doing something malicious to a black woman. But that’s not accurate. The real story is much more subtle and complicated. What is very true about science is that there are human beings behind it and sometimes even with the best of intentions things go wrong.
One of the things I don’t want people to take from the story is the idea that tissue culture is bad. So much of medicine today depends on tissue culture. HIV tests, many basic drugs, all of our vaccines—we would have none of that if it wasn’t for scientists collecting cells from people and growing them. And the need for these cells is going to get greater, not less. Instead of saying we don’t want that to happen, we just need to look at how it can happen in a way that everyone is OK with.
To read more about Henrietta Lacks and this fascinating story, order the book below from Amazon.com
Billie Holiday's manager was a former fight-fixer, whoremonger, and running dog in Al Capone's pack. Allegedly, he was the one who offered her up to the FBI.
In 1948, Billie Holiday hooked up with John Levy, an "Italian-looking," yellow Lincoln Continental–driving, opium-addicted, self-described "half-Negro, half Jew" from Chicago. One of her piano players characterized Levy as a "sadistic pimp," then added, "and Billie admired pimps." Levy became her "manager," and kept her humping, kept her high, and kept her broke, since he was handling all her business and he was the one her employers paid. "If she asked him for fifty dollars," another of her piano players recalled, "he'd say, 'Don't ask for money in public,' and he'd knock her down literally, with his fist in her face, in the stomach, anywhere."
At a party hosted by Harlem Godfather Bumpy Johnson, Levy forcibly removed Holiday's diamond earrings which left her earlobes bloody. Levy went around the party trying to sell the earrings for quick cash.
Four days into 1949, federal agents broke in on the couple in their San Francisco hotel room, catching Billie in the act of trying to flush away the opium and pipe John Levy had put in her hands. Clad in white silk pajamas, Levy, an inveterate police informer, bargained, while she "sat there... sober and clear-headed...very quiet and passive." He avoided prosecution and fled California, leaving Holiday in San Francisco to finish her engagement there, and face her trouble alone.
"We could have indicted Levy if we had wanted to," the district attorney there reportedly told her lawyer, "but Billie Holiday is the name and we want to get some publicity." She appeared for trial, two months later, with an eye blackened by Levy, and "no trace of drugs...in her system." Holiday's lawyer contended that Levy had conspired with a federal agent in her arrest, and produced a photograph of the two men chatting amiably at a table in the local night spot where she was working at the time of the raid. "[Levy] was turning Billie over," he suggested. "[He] wanted to get rid of her. He had cleaned her out of money...."
In court, she "act[ed] dumb," Blackburn reports, and "simply said that John Levy was her man and she loved him so." She beat the case. A month and a half later, when she was back in town, working at the same place, she was arrested again on the charge for which she'd already been acquitted. "The police and other government agents were always at her shows," Blackburn says, "...heckling, threatening, raiding her dressing room, making embarrassing enquiries at her hotel and spreading rumors at the clubs where she was booked to sing."
"I came out [of jail] expecting to be allowed to go to work and to start with a clean slate," Holiday told Ebony magazine. "But the police have been particularly vindictive, hounding... and harassing me.... They have allowed me no peace...."
Source: "Street Diva," by: Arthur Kempton
IN RELATED NEWS:
Rewind: Louis McKay portrayed by Billie Dee Williams in the film "Lady Sings The Blues," is pictured above with Billie Holiday in 1951. He was a feared mob enforcer and like Levy, he was a brutal pimp. In a 1959 taped phone conversation, while discussing Holiday, he made the following comments: "If I got a whore, I get some money from her, or I don't have anything to do with the bitch," he also threatened to beat Holiday during the conversation. His only redeeming quality: He tried to get Holiday off drugs.
It's always been rumored that Don King was allegedly once affiliated with Louis McKay. Unconfirmed rumors indicate: When Louis McKay did business in Cleveland, OH., King was part of his crew at the age of 15. Allegedly, King was one of the most feared African Americans in Cleveland during this era, despite his young age.
"BLACKS IMPERSONATING WHITE RACISTS"
Veronica Clark wrote an interesting book regarding Black Nazi's in Nazi Germany. This book is eye opening and insightful.
In Related News:
Several years ago, three African-American students at the University of Mississippi have been accused of writing racist graffiti on doors outside rooms of two other black students in the Kincannon residence hall on the Oxford campus.
The students, all freshmen, wrote vulgar and obscene messages at three other locations in the dorm.
They will face a University Judicial Council hearing when classes resume in January, Ole Miss officials said Wednesday.
If they are found guilty, their punishments could be reprimands, community service, suspension or expulsion. They can appeal.
A fourth African-American student also is being investigated in connection with the incident, Ole Miss Communications Director Jeff Alford said.
Ole Miss officials refused to release names of the students, citing privacy laws.
Each freshman was charged with five violations of the student code of conduct in connection with the Nov. 6 incident, Ole Miss officials said.
Rewind: We all heard about the disgusting and racially insensitive "Compton Cookout," on the UCSD campus. The party was intended to ridicule Black History Month and was steeped in racial stereotypes. Partygoers were urged to wear gold chains, flashy clothes, gang tattoos and the invitation told the girls to dress as ghetto chicks with gold teeth.
Fast Forward: Now, it's being revealed that one of the people who helped organize the offensive cookout is a little-known "black" comic and Internet personality from Las Vegas.
LAST YEAR:
An African-American man has pleaded guilty after being accused of impersonating a white supremacist on a fictitious Facebook account.
Dyron L. Hart, 20, of Poplarville, Mississippi, pleaded guilty Wednesday before U.S. District Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt to one count of communicating threats in interstate commerce, according to a Department of Justice statement.
Hart admitted creating the fictitious account in November, pretending to be a white supremacist outraged by the election of Barack Obama as the nation's first African-American president, the statement said.
He then transmitted a death threat via Facebook to an African-American student at Nicholls State University in Louisiana, saying he wanted to kill African-Americans because of Obama's election, according to the statement.
IN RELATED NEWS:
A few years ago, a black student went out of state to attend college. The student became homesick and devised a disturbing plan to mail racist letters (threatening to inflict harm to African American students). These letters were delivered to the University. After the student was caught, she admitted that she wanted to instill fear so her parents would pull her out of the university. Her motive: To return home.
"SAVOY BALLROOM TRIVIA"
"James Bond visited the Savoy Ballroom in Live and Let Die and it is extensively described particularly the dancing and a table at which Bond and Felix Leiter (a CIA agent) sit beside the dance floor looking at the dancers."
"FIRST BLACK COUNTRY CLUB IN U.S."
The Surf Club, situated where the Belle River enters Lake St. Clair outside of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, could be considered an extension of Paradise Valley (above), in that it was the first Black country club in the Metro Detroit. Frequented by local residents and many of the celebrities who visited and performed at the Gotham, the Paradise Theater and other venues around town, the Surf Club encompassed homes, cottages, a motel, driving range, tennis, fishing, boating, picnic areas and fine dining- all for the Black elite.
"BIZARRE CREATURES DISCOVERED IN LOST WORLD OF THE RAIN FOREST"
Scientists have been astonished by the discovery of a small world of previously unknown animal species, including a transparent frog and a snake that sucks snails out of their shells.
The new world is actually something scientists call a "microhabitat, located on a single hill in Ecuador called Cerro Pata de Pajaro.
The mountain slope's odd inhabitants are a result of its unique ecology. No neighboring areas contain the same conditions.
Explorers found 30 new varieties of frogs, including one that has clear skin, leaving his innards clearly visible. Another frog species lays its eggs in trees.
Other odd creatures include a gecko tiny enough to sit comfortably on a pencil eraser. There's also a snake that has a head shaped perfectly for fitting into snail shells for an air-tight fit that creates a vacuum and draws the snail straight into its mouth.
Unfortunately, these fascinating animals, rare as they are, may be endangered.
(FLOCK OF BIRDS FALL DEAD FROM THE SKY)
Experts in the UK are baffled after a flock of over 100 dying birds fell out of the sky on Sunday night.
The birds were strewn over a 12 ft area in something akin to a horror film and no explanation has yet been found, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is currently conducting tests to try and get to the bottom of the mystery.
On Sunday night, over a quiet Somerset house, scores of swooping starlings tumbled out of the sky and fell, dead, into a single front garden. The 100 birds carpeted the garden, each with blood oozing from its beak and curled up claws.
"HOMOSEXUAL SERIAL KILLER TARGETED GAY MEN"
Randy Steven Kraft (born March 19, 1945) is a serial killer. He was convicted of 16 murders and is strongly suspected of committing at least 51 others.
In 1968, Kraft joined the U.S. Air Force.
In 1969, Kraft disclosed to his family that he was gay. He was discharged from the Air Force on "medical" grounds the same year. Forced out of the military, Kraft resumed his bartending career.
Late in 1971, police found the decomposing body of Wayne Joseph Dukette, a 30-year-old gay bartender, beside Ortega Highway. The coroner placed the date of death around September 20, 1971, but found no obvious signs of foul play. Dukette’s clothing and belongings were never found. Dukette is thought to be Kraft's first victim.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, there were dozens of grisly homicides along the freeways of California, with some victims turning up in the neighboring state of Oregon. The victims were young men and teenage boys, most of whom were savagely tortured and sexually abused. Some had been burned with a car cigarette lighter, and many had high levels of alcohol and tranquilizers in their blood systems, indicating they were rendered helpless by alcohol and drugs before they were sadistically abused and killed.
The method of murder varied, with some strangled, some shot in the head, and others killed through a combination of torture and drugs. Quite a number of victims were in the military, hitching their way either to or from their bases. Others were teenage runaways, hitchhikers, or were picked up by the killer in gay bars.
Kraft was nearly arrested in 1975. A 19-year-old high school dropout, Keith Daven Crotwell, left Long Beach on March 29, 1975, hitchhiking for southbound rides. Over a month later, Crotwell's severed head was found near the Long Beach Marina. Long Beach was scoured for the car that took Crotwell on his last ride, and it was quickly located. The registration was traced to Randy Steven Kraft. Police questioned Kraft on May 19, 1975. Kraft admitted taking Crotwell for a ride, saying that they went "just wandering around," but claimed he left Crotwell alive at an all-night café. Detectives reportedly wanted to charge Kraft with murder, but L.A. County prosecutors refused, citing the absence of a body or known cause of death.
Kraft was pulled over by the California Highway Patrol on May 14, 1983, while driving along the San Diego Freeway in Mission Viejo. Kraft exited the car himself, dumping the contents of a beer bottle onto the pavement while doing so. Officer Michael Sterling met Kraft at the front of his patrol car and observed Kraft's jeans to be unbuttoned. Officer Sterling had Kraft walk to the front of his vehicle to perform a series of field sobriety tests, which he failed. Kraft was then arrested by Sterling for driving while intoxicated. Sgt. Michael Howard approached the car and saw a man in the passenger's seat, partially covered by a jacket and with empty beer bottles around his feet. This turned out to be the strangled body of Terry Gambrel, a 25-year-old U.S. Marine, Kraft's last victim.
Other incriminating evidence was found in the car, including alcohol, tranquilizers, and blood not from Gambrel's body. Officer Sterling and Sgt. Howard then turned Kraft over to the Orange County Sheriffs Department for further investigation. More evidence was found in the house that Kraft shared with his partner. There were clothes and other possessions belonging to young men who had turned up dead at the side of freeways over the last decade, and many photos of victims either unconscious or dead.
Kraft also kept a coded list of 61 cryptic references to his victims, including four double murders, leading to a total of 65 listed victims. At least one of the victims, Terry Gambrel, was not listed because of Kraft's arrest. Investigators maintain that Eric Church was also not listed by Kraft for unknown reasons. Since the list is in code, the possibility exists that Eric Church is listed in a way that investigators cannot recognize, which would lead to a total of 66 listed victims. However, it is largely held that Kraft was responsible for 67 murders, if not more.
Kraft was eventually charged with 16 homicides. He pleaded not guilty at his trial in 1988, but he was convicted on all counts and sentenced to death on November 29, 1989. The death sentence was upheld by the California Supreme Court on August 11, 2000. He is currently on death row at San Quentin State Prison.
Of Kraft's suspected 67 victims, 22 bodies remain unrecovered and unidentified.
Certain details surrounding some of Kraft's murders have caused many to suspect that Kraft did not always act alone.
DID KRAFT HAVE AN ACCOMPLICE?
Forensic evidence in two cases point to an accomplice — an extra set of footprints and semen that did not match Kraft's DNA. (During the trial, members of the prosecution admitted privately that they did not charge Kraft in several murders that they were sure he had committed because of these facts.
Kraft would have had difficulty moving around 200-pound corpses; dumping them from cars alone would also be difficult to do unnoticed.
The snapshots Kraft had of the dead men were processed somewhere, but no photo developer reported Kraft's morbid images to the police. (Kraft himself had no darkroom expertise or darkroom equipment.)
During the trial, the prosecution believed the inconsistencies could be explained away because Kraft had not acted alone in his initial murder spree. His roommate, Jeff Graves, occasionally helped him, according to members of the prosecution team. Graves died of AIDS before police could question him, so the question of Kraft's accomplice was never raised in court.