A landlord couple have been charged in San Francisco with waging a campaign of terror against their renters in a South of Market building, including cutting out the floor supports at one apartment after the tenant went to court to keep from being evicted, authorities said Wednesday.

Software engineer Kip Macy, 33, and real estate agent Nicole Macy, 32, who have addresses in Sausalito and Incline Village, Nev., were arrested Tuesday and charged with felony stalking, felony residential burglary, conspiracy and other counts in the bizarre case of apparent landlord rage.

The charges stem from tactics the Macys allegedly used after they bought a six-unit, three-story apartment building on Clementina Street for $995,000 in 2005 and started eviction proceedings against the five tenants living there.

When one of the tenants, Scott Morrow, successfully fought eviction, the couple allegedly told workers in September 2006 to cut the beams that supported his apartment’s floor. They also shut off Morrow’s electricity, cut his phone line and had workers saw a hole in his living room floor from below.

{ San Francisco Chronicle | Continue reading }

screenshot { Michael Jackson’s Thriller | watch the video }

Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure. (…)

“But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent,” said Kinshasa’s police chief.

{ Reuetrs/Yahoo | Continue reading }

artwork { Tom Wesselmann, Bedroom Painting #20, 1969 }

{ ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ props, from The Shining, Kubrick Archive. | The annotation noted how there is still some conjecture as to whether Kubrick had every individual page typed, or they were photocopied. Some of these pages looked typed. Others didn’t. | globalNix }

In many places — the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fiords of Norway — some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago. (…)

Even in modern times, when oil spills, chemical discharges and other industrial accidents heightened awareness of man’s capacity to injure sea life, the damage was often regarded as temporary. But over time, the accumulation of environmental pressures has altered the basic chemistry of the seas. The causes are varied, but collectively they have made the ocean more hospitable to primitive organisms by putting too much food into the water.

Industrial society is overdosing the oceans with basic nutrients — the nitrogen, carbon, iron and phosphorous compounds that curl out of smokestacks and tailpipes, wash into the sea from fertilized lawns and cropland, seep out of septic tanks and gush from sewer pipes.

Modern industry and agriculture produce more fixed nitrogen — fertilizer, essentially — than all natural processes on land. Millions of tons of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide, produced by burning fossil fuels, enter the ocean every day.

These pollutants feed excessive growth of harmful algae and bacteria.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

photo { Alex Tehrani }

A kinky sex escapade ended this week with the electrocution death of a Pennsylvania woman and the arrest of her husband for manslaughter. According to cops, Toby Taylor, 37, first claimed that his wife Kirsten was shocked by her hair dryer. But he then admitted that the couple was “into weird sexual behaviors.” Taylor then explained that he hooks clips to his wife’s nipples and “plugs the cord into a electric strip” and shocks her. (…)

He told investigators that the couple had “been engaging in electric shock sex and other types of extreme bondage for about 2 years.”

{ The Smoking Gun | Continue reading }

Amid pressure from animal rights groups, horse slaughter virtually ended in the United States last year, as courts upheld state laws banning it in Texas and Illinois, home to the nation’s last three horse slaughterhouses.

But there have been unintended consequences, including more grueling travel for tens of thousands of horses now being sent to slaughter in Canada and Mexico, where, animal advocates say, they sometimes face more gruesome deaths.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Olivia Malone }

Things went horribly wrong during the filming of South Africa’s second season of Big Brother. A woman got incredibly drunk, passed out, at which point her housemate sexually abused her. And to top it off, producers apparently thought it was totally okay to air.

Ofunneka Molokwu is a 29-year-old medical assistant who decided to spend the day drinking. She black out after an extended period of vomiting. That’s when 24 year old housemate Richard Bezuidenhout decided to take advantage of the woman. As another housemate begged him to stop, Bezuidenhout “penetrated her vagina with his fingers” while Molokwu lay unconscious. He then sat down in a chair across the room and sniffed his fingers for a while. Seriously. This actually happened on television, while people watched at home.

Viewers flooded newspapers and Internet message boards with emails expressing outrage. Many of the emails contained photo clips from the program, which appeared to show housemate Richard Bezuidenhout assaulting Ofunneka Molokwu.

The pay-TV channel insists that no such attack took place, even though people watched it occur. The channel took the high road: “There is no indication that [Molokwu] was unconscious at the time,” M-Net executive Joseph Hundah said.

Riiiight. I guess that is why producers called paramedics after the attack and cut the live feed, because all was well. Oh, and go fuck yourself.

In South Africa a woman is assaulted every 40 seconds. Bezuidenhout’s actions constitute rape under South African law. Bezuidenhout decided to top the assault by being an even bigger asshole when he opened his Neanderthal mouth to explain his actions to his other housemates. “Well, this is Africa,” he said.

Well, then maybe we can get you killed by a lion.

Now, in an even more hideous turn of events, the controversy is being called “Fingergate.” Seriously.

{ Suicide Girls }

A legendary New York real-estate agent who found homes for celebrities from Sting to Steven Spielberg was bludgeoned to death in her Fifth Avenue apartment, police said yesterday.

The body of broker-to-the-stars Linda Stein was found about 11 p.m. Tuesday by her daughter Mandy, lying in a pool of blood on the living-room floor of her posh two-bedroom apartment in 965 Fifth Ave., near East 79th Street.

The Medical Examiner’s Office ruled the death a homicide, saying, “She died of blunt-impact injuries to the head and neck.”

Stein, 62, was one of the city’s powerbrokers, known for a star-studded client list that included names such as Michael Douglas, Angelina Jolie and Calvin Klein.

She rose to prominence in the 1970s as the manager of the punk-rock band The Ramones. She later broke into the real-estate business in a big way when she closed on her first sale - a home for Madonna. Stein’s ex-husband, recording mogul Seymour Stein, discovered the Material Girl, and had introduced her to Linda.

Mandy Stein, 34, was visiting from L.A. when she entered the apartment and found her mother face down on the floor, fully dressed, sources said. No murder weapon was found, and there were no signs of forced entry.

One longtime building resident said it would be nearly impossible for a stranger to get in, noting the elevators have operators and open directly into the apartments. “The security’s excellent - no one is allowed in unless they have a name, and they have to deal with the doorman,” said Seymour Holtzman.

Those being investigated include all the building employees and a construction crew that was doing work at the time, sources said.

{ NY Post | Continue reading | NY Daily News }

Investigators so far are coming up empty in their search for a suspect in the death of a famed real estate broker.

{ NY Sun | Continue reading }

update 11/09/07
A Manhattan personal assistant has told investigators that she bludgeoned her boss, the well-connected real estate agent Linda Stein, in the woman’s opulent Fifth Avenue apartment because Ms. Stein swore at her, waved a stick at her and blew marijuana smoke into her face.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

previously { Warhol’s Doctor Attacked in His Upper East Side Penthouse }

Paris Hilton intends to extend her life in a cryogenic chamber. She enthused: “It’s so cool. Almost all the cells in the body are still alive when death is pronounced. And if you’re immediately cooled, you can be perfectly preserved. My life could be extended by hundreds and thousands of years.”

Hilton has allegedly invested heavily in the Cryonics Institute, reportedly the biggest suspended animation cemetery west of the Mississippi. She’ll be joined in stasis, in the style of ancient Egyptian nobility, by her Chihuahua Tinkerbell and Yorkshire Terrier Cinderella, thereby ensuring canine companionship on her journey to eventual, triumphant resurrection.

She recently announced: “Before, my life was about having fun, going to parties - it was a fantasy. But when I had time to reflect, I felt empty inside. I want to leave a mark on the world.”

Accordingly, she’s decided to go to Rwanda on a five-day humanitarian mission. The whole thing will be filmed for a reality TV exposé, of which she said: “I love having everything documented. It shows people what everyday life is like for me, how hard I work. There are a lot of misconceptions about me.”

{ The Register | Continue reading }

actually { Trip to Rwanda Postponed | “I’m scared, yeah. I’ve heard it’s really dangerous,” Hilton told Newsweek magazine earlier this month. }

related { Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years time }

Three Philadelphia funeral directors led a scheme in which more than 1,000 cadavers were dismembered in unsanitary conditions and the parts sold to doctors who implanted them in patients, a grand jury charged on Thursday.

Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham released the grand jury’s report alleging the men made $3.8 million from the sale of body parts in Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey between February 2004 and September 2005.

Accused are Louis Garzone, his brother Gerald Garzone and James McCafferty who ran a funeral and crematory business. The three permitted Michael Mastromarino, a disgraced former dentist, and a team of so-called cutters to remove body parts such as bones, skin and tendons in an unsanitary embalming room, the report found.

Thousands of people who needed, for example, to replace broken bones or repair torn tendons may have received parts from cadavers infected by HIV, hepatitis, sepsis and other diseases, the report said. It was not immediately clear if any of the recipients fell ill.

The scheme took tissue from 1,077 bodies in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, including from 244 cadavers in Philadelphia funeral homes operated by the defendants.

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

photo { Galagalo }

MORE »

In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, “[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.” Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.

Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light. (…)

The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.

{ Steven Pinker | Edge | Continue reading }

illustration { Jasper Goodall }