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The post No More Foreign Interference in Haiti. The United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) and the Core Group Do Not Represent Haitian People! appeared first on Global Research.
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The post Sudan Crisis Risks Engulfing North Africa appeared first on Global Research.
On Wednesday, Salt Lake City was rocked with tragedy when a teenage girl in the Poplar Grove neighborhood was fatally shot by her brother. At around 12:04 pm, police responded to the scene in the 1600 block of West Wright Circle (505 South) to find the girl seriously injured.
Emergency responders attempted life-saving measures but were unsuccessful, and the girl was pronounced dead at the scene.
The brother had left their home before the officers arrived. Still, members of the Police Community Response Team continued their pursuit, eventually arresting him on a Utah Transit Authority bus near 1455 West and 400 South.
Though the identities of the girl and her brother have not been disclosed, it is known that he is underage. He is predicted to be taken to the Salt Lake County Juvenile Detention Center.
The gun used in the shooting has been recovered, although no details were released. A few area schools, Edison Elementary and Parkview Elementary, went under “lockout” protocol in the beginning stages of the investigation.
This event underscores the enduring turmoil that comes with gun violence and the ever-growing need for firearm safety at home and around the world. It is a cry for all of us to recognize the transient nature of life and to cherish and protect our beloved family members. Our condolences go out to the victim’s family as they go through this sorrowful time.
As recently detailed in Providence, since late November cases of alleged chemical assault using unknown poisonous gases have been endemic amongst Iranian schoolgirls, 5,000 of whom have now been hit or even hospitalized by vomiting, dizziness and fainting fits.
Interpretations range from the idea elements within the hardline Shia regime are punishing female students for their prominent role in recent anti-government protests, in which they have removed their mandated hijabs and publicly extended middle-fingers to framed portraits of the ayatollah, to the more skeptical view it is all just an outbreak of mass hysteria.
Gas Hysteria
Events strongly recall another such panic in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 1983, when 1,000 Muslim schoolgirls fell similarly ill, something attributed by many Palestinians at the time to attacks by Jews. The outbreak began at Arrabah Girls’ School when a 17-year-old pupil underwent genuine breathing difficulties. Seeking explanation, fellow students apparently mistook the hydrogen sulfide-like smell from nearby well-used toilets for Israeli nerve-gas. Soon, other pupils (and a few adults) became hospitalized, and events hit the media, causing widespread international alarm.
Unfortunately, at the time a popular regional rumor, tapping into centuries of anti-Semitic slander about supposed Jewish poisoners, had it that Israel plotted to facilitate a ‘silent genocide’ in Palestine by quietly rendering all local Muslim women infertile by devious medical means – for instance, by pumping them full of invisible gas?
Subsequent investigation by Israeli authorities concluded no poisonings had occurred, blaming mass hysteria for the panic. Yet the Arab League refused to accept this, before US, UN, Red Cross and WHO staff were dispatched to the West Bank, medically confirming initial Israeli findings. Most schoolgirls were not inventing their symptoms, just falling prey to the endemic paranoia of the period. At one point, 64 inhabitants of the Palestinian town of Jenin fell ill after a ‘Jewish’ car supposedly belched poison at them, this in fact just being normal smoke from a faulty engine.
A Playground for Evil
The common symptoms of mild poisoning and of mass hysteria can be extremely similar, making them hard to distinguish. Sometimes, however, local religious, historical and political culture can influence hysteria epidemics in such a way that their symptoms can be immediately identified by medics as being purely psychological in nature – when schoolyard trees begin spawning armies of living skeletons in rural Uganda, for instance.
In 2010, a fascinating paper entitled Demon Attack Disease appeared in the African Journal of Traumatic Stress, showing how many contemporary outbreaks of mass hysteria in Ugandan schools have occurred in areas where military violence has occurred in the nation’s recent unstable past. Consider events at the remote rural Layamo Agwata Primary School in the war-ravaged north of the country. Here, in February 2009, pupils ran amok, shouting, fighting, biting and beating each other with sticks, under hallucinatory assault from an army of demons. The headmistress, and many other attendant adults, were so afraid of being attacked by evil spirits themselves that they initially left the pupils to riot unchecked.
The source of the problem here was not a physically unclean toilet, but a spiritually unclean tree on the school grounds. This hell-mouth was said to be a spawning-point for devils which would descend from its branches in human form, then rot away into zombie-like living skeletons. Attacking individual children, the revenants would then order them to bite another child; once that child had been bitten, their teeth-marks would mean he or she would not be subjected to any further undead assault. However, in return for protection, that pupil then had to chomp into the flesh of another pupil and so on ad infinitum, chain-letter-style. At the height of the crisis, 47 girls and 7 boys were affected.
Eventually, the school’s headmistress gathered enough courage to attack the haunted tree, chopping it down and setting fire to it. The District Education Officer (after running away in terror) ordered the school be closed down while village elders sacrificed goats and spread blood all over the grounds to appease the spirits, whilst Christians from the Catholic relief NGO Caritas Internationalis also came to pray for the school’s deliverance from Satan. Some more skeptical pupils and their families, concerned about passing looming exams, threatened to sue over this closure.
Meanwhile, a psychiatrist from the local hospital clinically isolated the two index cases (those most socially influential pupils amongst whom the hysteria began) in the outbreak, noting they were both showing clear signs of suffering Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But from what?
Skeletons in Uganda’s Closet
The skeleton key to the whole mystery was war, which always unleashes psychological demons of some kind. In 1991, Ugandan government forces in the National Resistance Army (NRA) launched a huge offensive against the region’s notorious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels who were then using Layamo Agwata Primary School as a base for operations, having ordered the teachers and pupils to stay away or be shot. During the battle, the school buildings were utterly destroyed and many persons killed. It was not until 1997 that the institution was finally rebuilt and lessons resumed.
Unwisely, however, the classrooms were erected on the precise same site, which now featured two large unmarked mass graves full of bodies – some of which belonged to the children’s close relatives – just outside the premises. These acted as a constant reminder of the mass violence and deaths to the pupils, and acted as an ominous threat military bloodshed may return again in the future (the LRA still not being fully defeated).
Local tradition stated that, unless corpses were buried immediately after they had died, with all due ceremony, their angry spirits would roam the area looking for revenge against the living, making the children even more nervous. Accordingly, the local psychiatrist recommended memorials to the dead be built over the mass graves and an annual ceremony of remembrance be held in which prayers should be said for the peace of their souls. These measures had a calming psychological effect and no more demons – whether literal or figurative – visited the school afterwards.
Mind Over Matter?
Outside observers, not being steeped in local religious traditions of demon-lore, would instantly perceive events at Layamo Agwata Primary as being psychological in nature. Current narratives of gas-poisonings in Iranian schools, however, do not appear anything like so immediately absurd as tales of magical haunted trees. Yet some experts in the field, like New Zealand-based socio-medical historian Robert E. Bartholomew, claim to see through them nonetheless. For Bartholomew:
“Nearly all [such outbreaks] involve young schoolgirls living under repressive conditions and with no means of [social] redress. In each of these episodes, when the first girls begin to fall sick, given the tense political climate, rumors of poisoning quickly spread … while the names and the places may change, the same patterns re-emerge, yet we continue to be fooled.”
Whether today’s purported poisonings in Iran ultimately prove physically real or not, then, the symptoms of psychological and physical distress provoked amongst their apparent victims certainly are: by endlessly and brutally repressing their own people, even helpless young schoolgirls, Tehran’s theocratic dictatorship makes them fall sick en masse anyway.
Nerve-gas or none, Iran’s schoolgirls are still the victims of the ruling extremist clerics; they have poisoned not their bodies, but their minds.
The post <strong>Powers of the Air: Poison Gas, Demons and Childhood Mass Hysteria in War-Zones</strong> appeared first on Providence.
On April 12, 2021, a heated disagreement between 79-year-old Ettore Lacchei and 59-year-old William Martys became a fatal tragedy. The dispute occurred in the 40700 block of North Black Oak Avenue in Antioch, Illinois. As the argument over using a leaf blower escalated, Lacchei allegedly turned to gunfire and shot Martys in the head.
When law enforcement arrived, they found first responders and medics providing life-saving measures to Martys. He was later transported to Advocate Condell Medical Center in Libertyville but pronounced dead shortly after arriving. An autopsy conducted the following day revealed the cause of death to be a gunshot wound to the head.
Citing the evidence from a comprehensive investigation, the Lake County Sheriff’s Office determined Lacchei as the shooter and charged him with two counts of first-degree murder.
Detectives indicated that the suspect “had various perceived grievances” with his neighbor, which initiated the violent ending. On April 25, a search warrant was executed, and Lacchei was detained and transported to the Lake County Jail in Waukegan. Judge Theodore Potkonjak denied the suspect bond, and he is set to appear in court again on May 25.
Sheriff Mark Covelli disclosed that confrontations between Lacchei and his neighbors were frequently reported, and he suggested that the lack of protective gun legislation may have catalyzed the deadly incident.
Lake County State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart concurred, saying the crime “once again, [demonstrates] easy access to firearms” and that the authorities are devoted to justice for Martys and his family.
The fatal incident between Lacchei and Martys serves as a reminder of how quickly a harmless disagreement can turn into a devastating tragedy due to the presence of a gun. Yet another instance of extreme gun violence underscores the call for stricter gun control laws and mandates.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir applauds the move, having banned the “flag of incitement” as one of his first acts as minister.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
In line with a policy declared months ago by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, police removed Palestinian flags hanging in several northern districts Wednesday, including in Israeli-Arab towns, Channel 14 reported.
This included taking down flags hung along Route 65 near Wadi Ara, in parking lots, and prominently over the building of the Hadash party branch in Nazareth. These were places where the flags had been hanging for years, the report said.
Hadash is a communist, non-Zionist, Arab-Israeli party whose leader, Ayman Odeh, heads the Joint List consisting of several Arab factions in the Knesset. It formally supports the maximalist Palestinian position that Israel should withdraw from all the territories it liberated in the 1967 Six-Day War and make eastern Jerusalem the capital of a Palestinian state.
“I congratulate the police commissioner and the district commanders for their determined and professional action,” Ben-Gvir said. “Our policy is sharp and clear on this issue as well; we will not allow flags of incitement and support for terrorism on any day, and certainly not on Israeli Independence Day.”
Israel celebrated its 75th Independence Day on Wednesday.
It is not officially illegal to fly the red, green, black and white flag of the Palestinian Authority, and its forerunner, the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Based on the PLO’s use of the flag, Ben-Gvir had announced as one of his first acts as a minister in January that “all police officers of any rank are authorized in the course of police work to pull down flags of the Palestinian Authority” found in any public places, because they are to be considered “a form of supporting terror.”
The flag is also waved by Arab-Israelis in most, if not all, pro-Palestinian demonstrations, such as those by Arab students in Israeli universities when they protest Israel’s establishment on May 15, the Georgian date of independence that Israel’s foes call the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe.”
The police have long had the authority to remove any display if it “threatens public order.” Ben-Gvir believes that any show of the Palestinian flag does exactly that, and the right-wing sector agrees with him.
Matan Peleg, CEO of the Zionist Im Tirtzu movement, said in January that the ban was correct because “it should be understood that the purpose of raising the PLO flag is to rebel against the State of Israel and convey a message that there is room for a terrorist entity within the territory of the state. Today, it is already clear to everyone what the connection is between waving the flag of terror and encouraging the nationalist extremism and violence of Israeli Arabs.”
A bill banning the hoisting of an “enemy flag,” including that of the PLO, in places budgeted or supported by the state, such as universities, passed in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation under the previous government last May but has not progressed yet in the Knesset.
However, the minister may have celebrated a little too early. According to a Haaretz report, police sources said they had removed the flags from the Hadash branch because it was a “provocation” to fly them on Israeli Independence day but they would be returned once the holiday is over.
The post Police remove Palestinian ‘flags of incitement’ in country’s north appeared first on World Israel News.