Witness ban, Russia rebuke grows

NewsDay
April 2, 2017

THE Kremlin threat to ban Jehovah’s Witnesses from worshipping in Russia has received widespread condemnation across the world after the United States Helsinki Commission yesterday spoke out strongly against the development and called for respect of religious freedom in the vast ex-communist country.

AGENCIES/STAFF REPORTER

The denunciation followed Russia’s decision to criminalise religious literature, places of worship known as Kingdom Halls and criminalising the preaching work of Witnesses in over 2 300 congregations under the guise of fighting extremism.

Helsinki Commission chairman Senator Roger Wicker (MS), co-Chairman Rep Chris Smith (NJ-04), and Commissioner Rep. Richard Hudson (NC-08), in a joint statement yesterday rebuked the Russian authorities for cracking down on religious liberty.

“It is wrong to apply flawed counterterrorism laws to those who seek to practice their faith,” Wicker said.

“The Russian government is exploiting genuine threats of violent extremism to undermine what little religious freedom remains in that country. This distracts from real efforts to fight terrorism. I urge the Russian government to drop the case immediately.”

Smith added: “At stake in the upcoming court case is the legality and perhaps the survival of the Jehovah’s Witnesses – and in fact basic religious freedom – throughout the Russian Federation. If the Supreme Court of Russia declares this faith group an extremist organisation, it is an ominous sign for all believers and marks a dark, sad day for all Russians.”

The pressure was being applied as Russian authorities have approached the country’s Supreme Court to effectively ban Jehovah’s Witnesses in the country from worshipping claiming that they were members of an “extremist organisation”.

“As a staunch supporter of religious liberty, I am appalled by the Russian government treating an entire religious group as a threat to national security. Religious affiliation should never be a justification for persecution,” Hudson also said.

On March 15, the Russian Ministry of Justice filed a formal court claim to label the Administrative Centre of Jehovah’s Witnesses in
Russia an extremist group and liquidate their national headquarters and 395 local chapters, known as “local religious organisations”.

Should the Russian Supreme Court decide against the Witnesses next week some 175 000 Witnesses in Russia could face criminal prosecution for practising their faith.

Some of the publications outlawed by Russia include My Book of Bible Stories – which teaches basic truths to people willing to know more about the Truth and have denied the importation of the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, a Bible translation published by the Witnesses.

Spokesperson for the organisation John Hunguka said Witnesses in Zimbabwe last week participated in the global letter-writing campaign against the Russian authorities’ threat to ban their international brotherhood.

According to the Helsinki Final Act signed by all 57 participating states of the organisation for security and cooperation in Europe – including Russia –“participating States will recognise and respect the freedom of the individual to profess and practice, alone or in community with others, religion or belief acting in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience.”
https://www.newsday.co.zw/2017/04/02/witness-ban-russia-rebuke-grows/

Mormon leaders encourage more baptisms for the dead

BRADY McCOMBS
April 2, 2017

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Mormon leaders reminded church members Saturday about the importance of performing ceremonial baptisms on dead ancestors who didn't receive the ordinance while alive — a practice unique to the faith that came under fire in the past from Jews when they discovered Holocaust victims were being baptized.

Henry Eyring told a worldwide audience during a twice-yearly Mormon conference in Salt Lake City that God wants all his children "home again, in families and in glory." He encouraged listeners to use the religion's massive genealogical database to trace their roots.

Ceremonial baptisms occur when a member brings an ancestor's name to a temple. Mormons believe the ritual allows deceased people a way to the afterlife if they choose to accept what they see as an offering of love. The belief that families are sealed for eternity is one of the faith's core tenets.

The practice is becoming more common because young church members have embraced it, said Eyring, a member of a top governing body of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, called the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

"They have learned that this work saves not just the dead; it saves all of us," Eyring said. "There are now many people who have accepted baptism in the spirit world. ... This is the work of our generation."

But ceremonial baptisms offend members of other religions, especially Jews, who became upset years ago when they discovered attempts by Mormons to alter the religion of Holocaust victims. They included Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager forced into hiding in Amsterdam during the Holocaust and killed in a concentration camp.

In the 1990s, after negotiations with Jewish leaders, the church agreed to end the ceremonial baptism of Holocaust victims. After it was revealed that they continued, Mormon leaders in 2012 spoke out against the practice and reminded the public that a virtual firewall was put in the database to block anyone who tried to access the names of people who died in the Holocaust.

Some early Christian groups may have engaged in a similar practice, but the Mormons are the only mainstream Christian faith that currently practices baptisms for the deceased, said Mormon scholar Matthew Bowman, an associate professor of history at Henderson State University.

The "proxy baptisms" also were mentioned Saturday at the conference in a speech by Russell M. Nelson, another member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles who is next in line to assume the church presidency. Nelson said Mormons who keep their covenants to Jesus Christ are given "Godly power."

"God's plan provides for those blessings to be extended to ancestors who died without an opportunity to obtain them during their mortal lives," Nelson said.

Mark Bragg, a member of a secondary governing body, applauded the increase in baptisms for the deceased: "We are experiencing great joy and celebration on both sides of the veil."

Their speeches came during the first day of a two-day conference in which leaders implored the faith's 15.8 million members worldwide to be compassionate and devout while avoiding the many temptations of the modern world that can pull them away from their faith.

Nearly 100,000 church members are expected to attend five sessions on Saturday and Sunday. Thousands more around the world will listen to the conference or watch it on television, radio, satellite and internet broadcasts in 90 different languages.

Jeffrey Holland, a long-time member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, said in a speech about inclusivity that there's room in the faith for people of different "sexual attractions" if they love God and honor his commandments.

His remark marked the latest attempt by the faith to foster a climate of empathy for gays and lesbians while the religion still clings to fundamental doctrinal beliefs that homosexuality activity is a sin.

He said there's room in the faith for all types of people, including from different cultures; those from different family structures; and those questioning their faith. Holland also encouraged church members to embrace their uniqueness.

"When we disparage our uniqueness or try to conform to fictitious stereotypes — stereotypes driven by an insatiable consumer culture and idealized beyond any possible realization by social media — we lose the richness of tone and timbre that God intended when he created a world of diversity," Holland said.

Dale Renlund, one of the newest members Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, told church members to guard against being intolerant of others with different opinions.

"We must not be guilty of persecuting anyone inside or outside the church," Renlund said. "Church history gives ample evidence of our members being treated with hatred and bigotry. How ironically sad it would be if we were to treat others as we have been treated."

https://apnews.com/5516800c2d224e62893ea0dca4914e97/Mormon-leaders-encourage-more-baptisms-for-the-dead?utm_source=Pew+Research+Center&utm_campaign=8aa9dfd25e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_04_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3e953b9b70-8aa9dfd25e-400018169

20 Tortured and Murdered at Pakistan Muslim Sufi Shrine

MUSHTAQ YUSUFZAI, SAPHORA SMITH, REUTERS and ASSOCIATED PRESS
NBC News
April 2,  2017

LAHORE, Pakistan — Twenty people were tortured and then murdered with clubs and knives at a Pakistani Sufi shrine, police said Sunday, in what officials are calling a cult ritual.

Six women are among the dead and four other people were wounded during the attack on Sunday morning at the shrine on the edge of Sargodha, a remote town in the Punjab region, police said.

The killings were purportedly carried out by the shrine's custodian and several accomplices, senior police official Jamshed Ahmad told NBC News.

With its ancient hypnotic rituals, Sufism is a mystical form of Islam that has been practiced in Pakistan for centuries.

Ahmad said police raided the shrine and captured six people including the custodian, who has been identified as Abdul Waheed, 50.

He said police came to know about what he described as a "brutal killing" when one of the injured managed to reach a nearby hospital.

"The custodian called his faithful one by one to a room where he killed them using daggers and sticks," Ahmad said.

19 people died inside the shrine and one woman died later at hospital, Ahmad added.

Police said they were currently investigating the incident and trying to ascertain the perpetrators' motives.

Liaquat Ali Chatta, government administrator of the area, told the Associated Press the custodian was allegedly in the practice of "beating and torturing" devotees to "cleanse" them and said Waheed had confessed to the murders.

Rana Sanaullah, the law minister for the Punjab provincial government, said an initial investigation showed that Waheed had a collection of followers who would regularly visit the shrine and face torture in the name of religious cleansing.

The shrine was built about two years ago on the grave of local religious leader Ali Mohamamd Gujjar. Shamsher Joya, a local police officer, said Waheed would come to the shrine twice a week from Lahore, and his followers would submit to "beating and torturing with a red hot iron rod."

Pervaiz Haider, a doctor in a Sargodha hospital, said most of the dead were hit on the back of the neck."There are bruises and wounds inflicted by a club and dagger on the bodies of victims," he told Reuters.

Zulfiqar Hameed, Regional Police Officer for Sargodha, said that during his interrogation, Waheed had told police he believed his victims were out to kill him.

"Waheed told police that he killed the people because they had tried to kill him by poisoning him in the past, and again they were there to kill him," Hameed told Reuters.

Reuters could not immediately find contact details for Waheed or any lawyer representing him.

In recent months, Sufi shrines have been targeted by extremist Sunni militants who consider them heretics, including a suicide bombing by Islamic State that killed more than 80 worshipers at a shrine in Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine in southern Sindh province.

Last November, an explosion ripped through another Sufi shrine, the Shah Noorani in southwestern Pakistan, killing at least 52 people. Islamic State also claimed responsibility for that attack.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/20-tortured-murdered-pakistan-muslim-sufi-shrine-n741711

White nationalists are now recruiting at college campuses

Identity Evropa

Flyers similar to this one from white nationalist group Identity Evropa have been appearing with greater frequency on college campuses.

Dugan Arnett
Boston Globe
MARCH 31, 2017

Zack Peterson arrived at his car on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus one evening last month to find a flier for the white nationalist group Identity Evropa tucked beneath a windshield wiper. His response: disappointment.

But the junior marketing major, who removed a half-dozen fliers from nearby cars and reported them to a campus residence adviser, said he wasn’t terribly surprised. Such things happen these days, he said.

Indeed, in the wake of a 2016 presidential election that drew mainstream attention to a set of previously fringe ideologies, white nationalist and supremacist groups have become an increasingly visible presence on college campuses, using fliers, posters, and e-mails in an effort to recruit new blood.

Since last September, more than 120 cases of white supremacist fliers, posters, or stickers have been reported on American college campuses, according to a recent study from the Anti-Defamation League. And here in Massachusetts, a worldwide hub of higher education, the practice has become particularly prevalent.

“These white supremacist groups feel that now is the time to strike,” says Oren Segal, director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism. “They feel like their messages have been mainstreamed; they feel like there’s an opening for them now in a way that they haven’t really felt before.”

Between last September and March 24, there were seven reported cases of white nationalist propaganda popping up on college campuses in Massachusetts, the ADL reports, the fourth-largest total of any state in the nation. Only Texas (18), California (13), and Florida (9) reported more.

True, the number of incidents nationwide might be relatively small — according to the ADL, there have been 121 instances of white nationalist campus “fliering” since the current school year began last fall. And there remain plenty of questions, too, about the true size and scope of the efforts.

But the sheer volume of college campuses that have been hit with fliers, says Ryan Lenz, a spokesman for the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, “points to a very concerted effort on the part of the radical right to view college campuses as a recruiting ground.”

At the University of Massachusetts Boston, for instance, fliers for Identity Evropa — an organization founded last year by Californian and Iraq war veteran Nathan Damigo — were found posted across campus, the school said earlier this month. At the same time, the university’s chief diversity officer reported rising campus concern.

After seven posters were discovered on the Emerson College campus in December promoting American Vanguard — another white nationalist group with 12 chapters, according to the SPLC — school president Lee Pelton issued a letter to students and faculty denouncing the message.

He was compelled to do the same March 18, after an estimated 500-plus members of the Emerson community received an e-mail from the White Genocide Project, a white supremacist organization.

“We have been targeted before by white nationalist and supremacist groups and I expect that we will be targeted again,” wrote Pelton, adding that the group had also targeted Harvard, Princeton, and West Virginia University. “However, there is no indication that a single person or persons has been targeted with threats of physical violence or harm.”

For the groups in question, the decision to focus on college campuses is simple.

They are, after all, occupied by thousands of young and potentially impressionable minds — and attempting to mine them for would-be supporters to a cause, controversial or not, is a strategy that has proven effective through the decades.

“What corporation doesn’t go to colleges to recruit?” says Damigo of Identity Evropa, which mails out packages of fliers, promo cards, and stickers to its members — who may or may not be college students — at their request. “These are the people who will go on to manage the institutions of our country, and we want them in our networks.”

What’s more, it’s an opportune time to recruit, says Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, another white nationalist group openly focusing efforts on college campuses.

“There’s a rising sense of frustration and outright anger with this characterization of all whites as privileged, oppressive, and essentially evil,” says the Yale-educated Taylor. “So I think there is a greater willingness among young whites to strike back at this oppressive orthodoxy.”

This isn’t the first time American universities have been linked to certain brands of extreme ideologies,right and left.Lately, though, those links on the extreme right seem to be intensifying.

The now disgraced Milo Yiannopoulos, who has written glowingly about the alt-right movement and was handed a permanent Twitter ban after making harassing comments about the actress Leslie Jones, recently embarked upon a controversial college campus speaking tour. Matthew Heimbach has made waves, meanwhile, for his Traditionalist Youth Network, which the ADL describes as “a small white supremacist group that attempts white supremacist activities on college campuses.”

And in perhaps the most overt display to date, Richard Spencer, a notorious shepherd of the alt-right movement, gave a speech on the campus at Texas A&M University in December, reportedly telling a group of hundreds that “America belongs to white men.”

For colleges and universities, the vast majority of which hold themselves as bastions of free speech, navigating the recent uptick in white nationalist propaganda has been something of a tricky endeavor.

Many of the fliers, for instance, don’t contain overtly offensive language — one Identity Evropa poster simply features a photo of a classical statue and the phrase “Protect Your Heritage” — raising questions about First Amendment freedoms.

“Part of the college experience is freedom of expression, and it’s critical to be respectful of diverse ideas,” says Carole McFall, a spokeswoman for Emerson College. “But it’s got to be — it should be — safe for students. And they shouldn’t feel intimidated.”

Further complicating matters is the fact that, though it might be against campus policy to hang or distribute literature in unapproved locations, the circulation of some fliers — such as those invoking racist themes using only coded language — likely doesn’t rise to the level of criminal activity.

“It’s a bit complex,” says Ed Blaguszewski, a spokesman for UMass Amherst, who says the school has been focused on denouncing the fliers’ message while also being careful not to generate additional attention for the groups behind them. “While these fliers may be offensive, unless they are tied to what may be a criminal act, it’s really not a matter of a hate crime.”

Whether the recruiting efforts will have any long-term effect, meanwhile, is unlikely to be known for some time.

“The jury is [still] out,” says Lawrence Rosenthal, chair and lead researcher of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who adds that one way to track any growth of the movement would be to monitor the memberships of certain right-leaning campus groups, as well as the appearance of any right-wing protests or sit-ins.

But already there have been indications that the message is garnering increased attention.

Asked this week whether his group’s recruiting outreach had proven effective, Damigo chuckled.

At this time a year ago, he said, the organization had about a dozen members. Today, it boasts some 350. What’s more, plans to boost the group’s physical presence on college campuses in the coming months are already ramping up.

“We’ve discovered that there are many people who already have read our website, who already generally agree with us, but haven’t taken that next step to get involved or meet with other people,” he said.

“We’re already in the process of purchasing tables and banner stands and brochures,” he added. “So that next semester, we can start getting on campuses and [putting] more of a face to this.”

Dugan Arnett can be reached at dugan.arnett@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @duganarnett.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/2017/03/31/for-white-nationalists-college-campuses-are-new-recruiting-ground/MmxrcFXPY2ZHWycgvqCOAP/story.html

In downtown Clearwater, Scientology's bid for an expanded role is a matter of scripture

Tracey McManus
Tampa Bay Times
March 31, 2017

Scientology's long-standing zeal for expansion and penchant for secrecy have manifested in several ways: the scale of its plans for Cleveland Street, its private meetings with elected officials and its hushed effort to snap up millions of dollars worth of property after promising the city it wouldn't.

It's an assertive approach that comes up time and again in teachings by founder L. Ron Hubbard and other writings. When it comes to handling governments and widening its influence, the church's strategy is a matter of scripture.

In a 1961 series of letters on church policy called "Keeping Scientology Working," Hubbard writes about skirting government approvals.

"Do they think a society in this shape will approve Scientology into power? Hell no! And to hell with this society. We're making a new one. So let's skip the approval button from a lot of (non-Scientologists) and settle down to work to make new people and better people."

Scientology spokesman Ben Shaw said in a statement that other religions like Christianity and Judaism also seek to make people spiritually better, and he objected to a non-Scientologist wanting to interpret the passage.

The context of Keeping Scientology Working, Shaw said, "is something you could not be expected to understand, and your inference as to its meaning is both inaccurate and inappropriate."

But the meaning of that and similar passages is just what it sounds like, said Mike Rinder, who spent 25 years as a senior Scientology executive before defecting in 2007. Once the church's international spokesman, Rinder said Scientology leader David Miscavige's retail plan for downtown is an embodiment and fulfillment of its preachings "to take over governments."

"Really it's not specifically Clearwater," he said. "Scientology believes that they are going to take over the world. This means bringing everybody into compliance with the goals and objectives of Scientology."

With the church's international spiritual headquarters located downtown at the 300,000 square foot Flag Building, Rinder said insulating that footprint is a priority for church leaders.

If Miscavige succeeds and recruits retail to the struggling downtown, Rinder said he will instruct local and visiting Scientologists to frequent the shops. That, he said, would create a "perimeter of safety" around the Flag headquarters and the Fort Harrison Hotel, so parishioners can take courses and buy church counseling sessions and not have to cross paths with outsiders.

"It's to create a buffer," Rinder said. "It's an attempt to protect what makes the income."

In private meetings March 14, Miscavige described to City Council members his strategy to recruit retailers to empty storefronts downtown and bankroll a facade overhaul for buildings along Cleveland Street.

The plan includes building an entertainment complex along Myrtle Avenue with actor and noted Scientologist Tom Cruise. The redevelopment, Miscavige suggested, hinges on the church's ability to buy a 1.4 acre lot adjacent to its 13-story Oak Cove religious retreat owned by the Clearwater Marine Aquarium.

In addition to the $260 million in property Scientology owns under its name in Clearwater, the church also bought $26 million in downtown real estate over the past two months through shell companies after Community Redevelopment Agency Director Seth Taylor said he was assured in October the church's plan did not involve buying more property.

Mayor George Cretekos said Miscavige told him the church had to quietly acquire property for its retail strategy so sellers would not inflate prices.

But one of those properties the church bought through a shell company in February has no retail purpose at all. The landmark Atrium tower on Cleveland Street leases office space to more than 30 local businesses and is anchored by SunTrust Bank.

Aaron Smith-Levin, 36, who oversaw courses and counseling as a member of the church's Sea Org workforce before leaving in 2013, said controlling sectors of society to push Scientology dogma is explicit policy.

"Once a (business) is known as being antagonistic to Scientology, Scientologists are told not to go there," Smith-Levin said. "The SunTrust building is where a lot of local companies have taken up office. Any one of those who becomes known as being anti-Scientology … are not going to have a lease renewed."

The strategy for bringing businesses and governments into compliance with Scientology is outlined in a policy called "The Special Zone Plan."

Written by Hubbard in 1960, it gives the example of a Scientologist housewife who takes over a women's club as secretary and "straightens up the club affairs" by pushing Scientology into areas like marriage advice — and taking fees for it.

The founder encourages members to get jobs like secretarial staff or bodyguards with access to department heads so they can influence the environment. He describes a police officer selling Scientology by "handling the familial problems of the commissioner as his driver or making the rookies gasp at how fast he could train them." Soon, Hubbard writes, the officer will have "altered the whole character, ability and effectiveness of the police force" and, in time, change "the whole approach to law enforcement in that area."

"The cue in all this is don't seek the cooperation of groups," Hubbard writes. "Don't ask for permission. Just enter them and start functioning to make the group win through effectiveness and sanity."

Shaw said the Special Zone Plan is "simply an idea of how to help every area of society to do better in life." He said passages from the Bible also could be misinterpreted to infer ulterior motives of Christians working near government.

When Scientology arrived in Clearwater in 1975, it purchased the Fort Harrison Hotel for its headquarters under a false name with $2.3 million cash. It took a year for the church to identify itself. In the meantime, Scientologists ran a smear campaign against then-Mayor Gabe Cazares and other officials, journalists and citizens who questioned the church.

The operation was outlined in various documents, including "Project Normandy," which described church operations to investigate everyone in the Clearwater area — from the sheriff to the city attorney — to determine whom Scientology officials needed "to penetrate and handle in order to establish area control."

Shaw said the church office responsible for the Normandy plot was disbanded long ago for unethical behavior.

Karen Pressley, a former Sea Org staffer who left the church in 1998, said investment in real estate and retail is a strategy to make it appear Scientology has influence in the corporate world at a time when membership is reportedly declining.

She said Miscavige was demonstrating that influence by meeting with City Council members privately and using a policy called "safe pointing" to make area leaders feel comfortable with Scientology. That, in turn, makes it easier to persuade them to align with his objectives.

"Without a safe point established," Hubbard writes, "it is a waste of time to rush into dealings with a government or to promise them anything. It is too easy to step on hostile toes and to arouse suspicion of you or make you difficult to account for."

Pressley, a fashion designer, worked directly under Miscavige when she was brought to Clearwater in 1995 from her post as commanding officer of the church's Celebrity Center in Los Angeles. Her job was to design new uniforms for the Sea Org.

She said if Miscavige recruits retail to the downtown core, and the general public doesn't feel it's a welcome place for non-Scientologists, it will still be billed a success within the church.

"My job used to be making Scientology look good in terms of the staff," she said. "It's the same concept with making Scientology look good with buildings. Even if people don't come into the buildings, it's enough for Scientology to show that they bought the property and they are going to hold control of the real estate. Scientology is all about public perception."

In a 1996 article, the church's Source magazine discussed goals for moving Scientology to the forefront of society and advanced the notion of making "Clearwater known as the first Scientology city in the world."

"At Flag," the article states, "we are deadly serious about making these goals happen."

Shaw said the church is attempting to finalize its retail plan for downtown so it can become public. If those plans come to fruition and are released, he said they will be for the benefit of everybody.

"A beautiful, thriving downtown is something we desire as much as anybody in Clearwater," he said.

Contact Tracey McManus at tmcmanus@tampabay.com or (727) 445-4151. Follow @TroMcManus.



http://www.tampabay.com/news/scientology/in-downtown-clearwater-scientologys-bid-for-an-expanded-role-is-a-matter/2318663

Psychic faces witchcraft charge after extorting $100K to exorcise 'evil spirit': police

Adam Miller

Global News

March 30, 2017

A 37-year-old Indian man has been charged with pretending to practice witchcraft after police say a Brampton man was defrauded of more than $100,000 in a fake exorcism for an ill relative who was told they were the “victim of an evil spirit.”

Toronto police said an astrologer and psychic known as “Master Raghav,” who was living in Toronto but visiting from India, handed out his business cards at a mall in the west-end area of Rexdale in February and March.

Police said a 44-year-old Brampton man received one of the psychic’s cards advertising a wide variety of services and set up an appointment and was informed a “sick family member had been the victim of an evil spirit.”

“So actually it’s a lure,” Const. Jenifferjit Sidhu said. “He sets up an appointment and meets this man just for $20. That’s what the initial psychic reading is, is $20.”

Police said the man was convinced to withdraw $101,000 from the bank and provide it to the psychic in an attempt to”remove” the evil spirit and heal his relative.

Murali Muthyalu was arrested Wednesday and charged with extortion, fraud over $5,000 and pretending to practice witchcraft.

The Criminal Code defines the charge as anyone who “pretends to exercise or use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration.”

It also covers anyone who attempts to “tell fortunes” or pretends to have knowledge of “an occult or crafty science” to discover where something lost or stolen may be found.

Sidhu said the exorcism was not successful and the alleged victim then reported the incident to police.

“If it’s your family member you’ll do anything for them,” she said. “She is still sick, that’s safe to say. She was sick prior to and she’s still sick.”

Police are asking anyone who has had dealings with Muthyalu or his alias of Master Raghav to contact police at 416-808-5500 or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 416-222-TIPS (8477).
http://globalnews.ca/news/3345530/psychic-charged-with-witchcraft-after-extorting-100k-to-exorcise-evil-spirit-police/

Majority: [Danish PM] Løkke must demand the extradition of Amdi on Mexico trip

A majority of Danish politicians believe Denmark should demand that Tvind’s founder be extradited when the country’s Prime Minister visits Mexico in the coming days.

By Jesper Kongstad

April 2, 2017

Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen should demand that the fugitive Tvind leader, Mogens Amdi Petersen, be extradited for trial in Denmark when Rasmussen begins a several-day visit to Mexico on Sunday.

Such is the view of a majority in Denmark’s parliament. The Danish People's Party, the Social Democrats and Socialist People's Party all believe that the visit is an excellent opportunity to increase pressure on Mexico to get the requested extradition. The parties want the Prime Minister to raise the issue at a meeting with the President of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto.

“It’s a good opportunity, now that the Prime Minister is on a visit, to raise the issue with the Mexican authorities. It’s offensive to the sense of justice that Amdi can hide over there,” says Peter Skaarup of the Danish People's Party.

The Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, has previously revealed that Petersen, after fleeing Denmark in 2006, has taken up residence at Tvind's international headquarters and training center, TG Pacifico, on Mexico’s Baja coast. And last year, another Danish news outlet, DR3, published the first photos of Petersen in over 10 years, taken at the Mexican compound.

Tax fraud and embezzlement

Social Democratic Party spokesman, Trine Bramsen, also believes that Denmark should use the visit to demand Petersen’s extradition, because “one shouldn’t be able to commit massive financial crimes and then just disappear when one is wanted.” Petersen fled Denmark after he and four other Tvind leaders, on August 31, 2006 at the district court in Ringkøbing, were acquitted of tax evasion of 47 million Danish kroner and embezzlement of 57 million Danish kroner in connection with Tvind projects in countries such as Malaysia and Brazil. [together equaling about US$20 million]

The prosecution, after a few days of reflection, appealed to Denmark’s High Court. But by then Petersen and the other defendants had disappeared from the country.

Socialist People's Party's spokesman, Lisbeth Bech Poulsen, sees no legitimate reason why Mexico shouldn’t turn Petersen over to Denmark, which has a fair judicial system.

“The Prime Minister should during the visit urge that Petersen be extradited. [The Mexican authorities] know where he lives,” she says.

For more than two years the Danish police have asked the Mexican government to arrest Petersen and extradite him to Denmark. But the Public Prosecutor for Serious Economic and International Crime says that Mexican authorities have so far refused the request, on the grounds that Mexican law prohibits such an extradition if a person has been acquitted in a first instance, as was the case with Petersen and the other defendants at the District Court in Ringkøbing.

Red-Green Alliance spokesman, Rune Lund, also believes that Petersen and the other fugitives should come home for trial in Denmark, but he will leave it up to the government to assess whether the visit should be used to push for extradition. The same feeling comes from Liberal Party spokesman, Preben Bang Henriksen.

Years of struggle

“But it should be no secret that I think that Amdi should be extradited,” says Bang Henriksen.

It hasn’t been possible to get a comment from Lars Løkke Rasmussen, but in an email to Jyllands-Posten the Prime Minister's Office stated it is expected that the case will be mentioned to President Peña Nieto:

“The Danish authorities have for years been trying to get Mogens Amdi Petersen and the others in the Tvind case extradited for prosecution in Denmark. There is an ongoing dialogue with the Mexican authorities accordingly, and the Prime Minister is expected to mention the matter to the president, just as he did when they last met in April 2016,” the agency said, referring to last year's Mexican state visit to Denmark.

The Prime Minister visits Mexico from April 2 to April 4, and he will meet with representatives from Lego, Maersk and other Danish companies in the country.

Ultra-Orthodox attack woman at anti-draft demo

Protesters filmed kicking and cursing a passerby at large demonstration in Jerusalem

TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF
March 29, 2017

A video of the incident shows the woman walking through the crowd of ultra-Orthodox men and boys, who yell at her to “Get out of here” and “We won,” while also repeatedly calling her a “shiksa,” a pejorative Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman that derives from the Hebrew for “vermin.”

After being kicked by a young boy, the woman can be seen turning around to grab him but drops her cellphone. As she reaches down to pick it up, additional protesters kick at her and her phone.

Border Police officers nearby then swoop in and pull her out of the scrum.

The protest was the largest yet in a series of recent demonstrations by ultra-Orthodox protesters over the arrest of members of the community for failing to show up to the Israel Defense Forces draft offices.

Community leaders called for the mass gathering. They set up a stage for rabbis to speak and closed a main street in the ultra-Orthodox Geula neighborhood, near Jerusalem’s central bus station.

Police said that although the protest was unauthorized and illegal, they decided to contain the event and monitor it rather than risking violence by trying to break it up.

The event marked a change in tone following weeks of often violent — albeit much smaller — protests by young men, which included blocking traffic, burning garbage and throwing rocks and objects at police. Tuesday’s protest was much larger and largely peaceful.

The event was organized by the supporters of Rabbi Shmuel Auerbach, the leader of the Lithuanian ultra-Orthodox community in Jerusalem, who have been protesting the draft for the past few weeks. Unusually the Orthodox Council of Jerusalem — an anti-Zionist extreme faction opposed to any cooperation with the state — joined the protest. Rabbis from both groups spoke from the podium, preaching against the IDF.

The ultra-Orthodox protesters, dressed in their traditional black garb, held signs such as “The State of Israel persecutes Jews” and “The draft edicts — a holocaust for the Torah world.”

Ultra-Orthodox Jews represent about 10 percent of the Israeli population and live in compliance with a strict interpretation of Jewish laws.

Some of them view military service as a source of temptation to young adults to leave the closed world of prayer and religious study.

The ultra-Orthodox are exempt if studying in yeshiva religious schools. However, the issue is controversial with secular Israelis, and attempts have been made to do away with the exemption.

Regardless, they must register at the recruitment office, but some — inspired by rabbis hostile to any cooperation with the Israeli authorities — refuse to even go to the office and are considered deserters.

AFP contributed to this report.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/ultra-orthodox-attack-woman-at-anti-draft-demo/

How a folk saint of death took off among transgender women in Mexico

RELIGION NEWS SERVICE
March 31, 2017
By Stephen Woodman

GUADALAJARA, Mexico (RNS) Betzy Ballesteros, a 26-year-old transgender sex worker, keeps a shrine to Santa Muerte, the skeleton folk saint, in her home.

Surrounding the statue are candles, candy and the grainy photos of several friends who were murdered and abandoned — people such as the transgender woman whose mutilated body was stuffed into a suitcase and dumped by the roadside on March 11. (A 43-year-old suspect has been detained, but authorities have still not released details of the victim’s name or occupation.)

Violence against transgender women is common in Mexico, mostly because employment discrimination forces many to turn to sex work for money.

The skeleton saint — with her female form and association with death — is particularly appealing to transgender sex workers, who face the persistent threat of violent clients and transphobic hatred.

Unlike official church figures such as Our Lady of Guadalupe whose images are ethereal, Santa Muerte appeals to those with practical problems and passions living on the country’s margins. Devotees ask her for protection, even when sex work is their only occupation.

“The majority of us believe in Santa Muerte,” said Ballesteros. “She’s a God to us. I ask her to shield me from danger and provide work and clients.”

The cult of Santa Muerte is an example of religious syncretism, with roots in European Catholicism and Aztec beliefs.

Condemned as satanic by the Catholic Church and frequently portrayed as a narco-cult in the media, worship of Santa Muerte is nevertheless a fast-growing new religious movement in the Americas, according to Andrew Chesnut, professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of “Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint.”

“Mexican Catholics and evangelicals tend to view transgenderism as a lifestyle choice,” said Chesnut. “But the fact that Santa Muerte is outside the orbit of both evangelical and Catholic Christianity makes her much more appealing. It’s much easier for followers to feel that she’s not going to be judgmental.”

In contrast, many transgender women feel rejected by mainstream churches.

“I went with some transgender friends to Mass one time,” said Ballesteros. “The priest stopped his sermon and told us to leave the house of God. After that, I decided I wouldn’t ever go back.”

The Rev. Hugo Valdemar Romero, a spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Mexico City, said the church does not abandon or excommunicate transgender people. But he does believe they suffer from pathology.

“Of course it is not acceptable for someone to violate their own biology,” he said. “Nature is very clear. There are men and there are women.”

As for Santa Muerte, Romero considers it a heretical cult.

“True religion looks for the devotee to fulfill the will of God, not the other way around. If they opt for another church or belief that justifies what they’re doing, they are looking for a god made to their own measure.”

Despite the church’s condemnation, many Santa Muerte devotees describe themselves as Catholic.

The civil rights organization Transgender Europe has documented 247 killings of transgender people in Mexico between January 2008 and April 2016, the second-highest number in the world, after Brazil.

The life expectancy of transgender women in Latin America is 35, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

“Transgender people are more likely to become involved in substance and alcohol abuse and they are less likely to have strong networks of family and others on whom they can count,” said Cymene Howe, an anthropologist who has studied the importance of Santa Muerte among transgender sex workers who migrate between Guadalajara and San Francisco.

Except as victims, transgender women are virtually invisible to the rest of Mexican society. Even the brutal murder on March 11 was relegated to the back pages of local newspapers.

Transgender activist Ari Vera Morales was expelled from a teaching training college.

“The school said I was creating a negative image,” she said. “The problem with being a transgender women in Mexico is that your identity, your existence is criminalized.”

Yet Santa Muerte plays a vital role in helping to unify a community that lacks a voice and visibility.

“When I was 14 my mum kicked me out and I went to live in the house of a friend,” Ballesteros said. “She had a big altar. I learned what a cult was, what death was, what everything was for.”

(Stephen Woodman is a correspondent based in Guadalajara)

http://religionnews.com/2017/03/31/how-a-folk-saint-of-death-took-off-among-transgender-women-in-mexico/?utm_source=Pew+Research+Center&utm_campaign=a30ff532a9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_31&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3e953b9b70-a30ff532a9-400018169

'This could be your child:' STU professor helps families with children lost to jihadist movement

Yahoo News
CBC

March 28, 2017

Young Canadians continue to join extremist movements and it needs compassion and community to help them and their families, says Alexandra Bain, the new director of Hayat Canada, an outreach program for people with children involved in violent extremist groups.

Bain, who teaches religious studies at St. Thomas University, says she also once lost someone to an extremist group. The youth are lured into what she describes as a cult and despite all the best efforts from their families and the police, children continue to leave, she says.

She now hopes to engage more volunteers to help and work with the families. Many of them are often horrified at what their child is doing and feel alone in coping with the situation, she said.

"Watching it grow over the years and watching young people be affected by these ideas and by these social attractions from other young people who are like-minded, it does seem to be like a virus," she says. "You can't tell who's going to be hit next."

"This could be my child, this could be your child."

First-hand experience

Bain worked with Hayat Canada for a number of months before the organization's founder, Christianne Boudreau, asked her to take over as director.

Boudreau's son died while fighting with ISIS in Syria in 2014. In a previous interview with CBC, she says she grew tired of waiting for Canada to take action on de-radicalization so she ventured out on her own.

She is now involved with at least 50 families in 11 countries — 20 of the families in Canada — as well as with extractions and interventions in Syria. She says she chose Bain to take over the Canadian chapter of Hayat because she's compassionate, challenges the system, and puts the families first.

Bain says she knows what it's like to be in their shoes. The 26-year-old man she lost to a jihadist movement was like family, she says.

"The impact it had on our family, not just on myself but on my children, who were watching, I at that point decided that I wanted to do something to make sure that families don't have to face this alone," says Bain.

Saving children

But Hayat is not just a contact for families in crisis, connecting them with community resources, volunteers and counselling services.

It also tries to prevent other children from following in the footsteps of a friend, sibling or cousin.

Bain recently noticed an small increase in people joining extremist groups. In the earlier years, they would not tell anyone about their plans until they arrived in Turkey or Syria. But now people are leaving "and nobody knows they are gone, and nobody hears from them again."

The families feel helpless, and shy away from contacting the police, as incarcerations and medical examinations often make matters worse, she says. Instead of seeking official support, they now contact groups like Hayat. But if Bain or any volunteer feels there is a definitive threat against an individual or a place, they contact the police.

"We are there to help people and everyone knows we are there to help," she says.

Disengagement

Bain says radical extremists can lure the youth because they often feel disenfranchised with their life, struggle with drugs, or have problems with their parents, and provide them with "very easy answers to life's questions." Then they introduce them to a like-minded group that becomes their new family.

"In fact, more important than their family, and they are taught to abandon their family because their family does not have the same ideology," she says.

Hayat encourages families to stay in touch with their children even after they leave because sometimes they do come back. She says radicalization is not as much of a problem as is disengaging them from their extremist views and support of violence.

"The very best advocates for this are the families themselves," she says. "So the first thing the families need is support."

She added that there are organizations that help people leave extremist groups and set up a new life in another country, she said. Those who return to Canada and are not deemed criminals by the state often suffer from post-traumatic stress, and require counselling to be "re-engaged in a new life," she says.



https://ca.news.yahoo.com/could-child-stu-professor-helps-224500316.html

China's Organ Transplant Problem

Alarming questions over the scale – and sources – of organ transplants need to be answered.

Matthew Robertson and Jacob Lavee
The Diplomat
March 29, 2017

International concern over China’s system of human organ transplantation has been expressed for decades. Over the last several years, the Chinese authorities report working hard to build a voluntary organ transplant system. Last month a top transplant official, speaking at an international organ trafficking summit at the Vatican, reiterated the claim that since January 1, 2015, China has eliminated the use of prisoner organs, and now only uses organs from donors who die in the intensive-care units of hospitals.

This would be a welcome development, if it could be trusted. Unfortunately, contradictory data, misleading claims, and intense secrecy indicate that it cannot. Moreover, the history of organ transplantation in China raises disturbing questions about past, and possibly ongoing, abuses. With abuses, of course, comes the imperative of cover-up.

Untrustworthy Figures

The first problem is that China’s official figures on the number of transplants performed cannot be trusted. At the Vatican summit last month, Dr. Huang Jiefu, the director of China’s Organ Donation and Transplantation Committee, said that from 2011 to 2014, a total of 2,342 citizens had donated their livers after death.

Yet less than a week later, in an interview with The Paper, a state-owned digital news outlet, he said something different: “From 2011-2014, there were 1,910 cases of [deceased] citizen liver donation.”

These numbers, which differ by 18 percent, cannot both be true. All transplants since September 1, 2013, are supposed to have been registered in a mandated, centralized database, known as the China Organ Transplant Response System (COTRS). Yet, in our research, we have identified ten instances of such contradictory data points, offered either by Huang or other official sources. Such inconsistent accounts of donor data indicate that these official claims simply cannot be taken at face value.

Problematic Transplant Volume

Given that figures cited by top transplant officials cannot be trusted, investigators have resorted to a variety of other methods to estimate how many transplants are being performed.

One can, for instance, look at publicly available reports about the number of beds in the transplant wards of hospitals, then compare them to the reported utilization rate of those beds. These two data points, coupled with the average length of stay for a liver or kidney transplant recipient, can be used to calculate the rough transplant volume at certain hospitals.

Tianjin First Central Hospital’s transplant center, for instance — built in late 2006 — was planned to have 500 beds (but may have had up to 700). According to 2008 filings in an official construction database, the bed utilization rate for kidney and liver transplants was 90 percent in 2008; according to Tianjin official media, the entire hospital’s bed utilization was 131 percent in 2013 (meaning either that excess patients were put up in nearby hotels, or perhaps that more beds were wedged in). With an average hospital stay of one to two months for transplant recipients, that would add up to thousands of transplants per year at just this one facility.

Communist Party media reports provide another indication of transplant volume. Comparing two official publications indicates that Tianjin First Central Hospital performed around 1,000 liver transplants a year from 2011 to 2015. Other official sources, like the 2011 liver registry, state that the hospital performs either one quarter or 12 percent of the total liver transplant activity in China. This translates to between 4,000 and about 10,000 liver transplants per year nationwide, several times the officially reported figures for that organ, which itself comprises only part of the country’s total transplant volume.

It is very difficult to know the actual number of transplants in China, but such data indicates they appear to be troublingly large relative to the claimed volume and source of organs.

The Transplant Boom

Before the year 2000, China hardly had an organ transplantation industry to speak of. From the 1980s to the end of 2000, there was a reported cumulative total of 34,832 kidney transplants. Just four years later, the figure had increased by at least 27,141, according to medical textbooks.

According to the respected business magazine Caijing, from 1993 to 2007 China’s number of liver transplants increased by 400 times — from six to over 14,000 cumulatively.

But even these figures are lowballs. They come from China’s official registries and reports, and so are only a portion of the total. The kidney transplant figures come from 106 hospitals, whereas the liver registry was formed by 25 hospitals in February 2005.

Yet in reality there were over 1,000 hospitals doing transplants in China by the year 2006, official sources say. (That figure was supposed to have been cut down to 164 in 2007.)

China’s own officials speak openly about the transplant boom. “The year 2000 was a watershed for the organ transplant industry in China,” reported Southern Weekend, citing He Xiaoshun, a top transplant official. “The number of liver transplants in 2000 reached 10 times that of 1999; in 2005, the number tripled further.”

China’s first legislation on organ transplantation came into effect in 2007. The only major regulation before that was the 1984 provision allowing the use of prisoner organs.

But despite the effort at greater regulation, what happened after 2007 is arguably more troubling

Nonstop Growth

On January 1, 2007, the Supreme People’s Court took control of death penalty reviews, triggering a sharp drop in judicial executions, cutting the annual figure down from as high as 10,000 to a few thousand. This is credible given that, as Caixin explains, “leaders from the relevant departments even worried that the public wouldn’t be able to accept the fact that there was such a precipitous decline in death penalty numbers.” Duihua, a U.S.-based human rights NGO, shows a steadily decreasing death row trend, to as low as 2,400 executions in 2013.

Yet the organ transplant industry continued to expand. For example:

• In 2007, Tianjin First Central Hospital’s new transplant building, with 17-stories and 500 beds, paid for by the local government, went into full operation (documented above);
• In 2007, a $2.8 million (20 million RMB) national policy loan was extended to North China Pharmaceutical for the industrialization of a series of immunosuppressants (used almost exclusively by transplant recipients) in Hebei Province;
• In 2008, Zheng Shusen, an architect of China’s transplant system, increased the eligible liver transplant recipient population by 52 percent, by expanding the acceptable maximum size of liver carcinomas;
• From 2010 to 2012, the Beijing 309 military hospital expanded its transplant center’s bed capacity from 316 to 393. The same hospital said its transplant center was its most profitable revenue generator, growing from 30 million yuan ($4.5 million) income in 2006 to 230 million in 2010 ($34 million), a jump of eight times.

There are numerous other examples like these. China’s entire transplant industry, in fact, appears to have developed quite separately from the trajectory of available death row prisoners.

The next question has become one of the most politically sensitive and contentious: If the transplanted organs aren’t coming from executed criminals, where are they coming from?

Troubling Sources

It is only since 2015 that China claims to have been using volunteer donors as its organ source, and officials acknowledge that the system is still in its infancy. Previously, beginning in late 2005, officials had claimed that organs came from executed prisoners (this was vociferously denied before 2005, when it was suddenly acknowledged).

Given that death row executions can hardly explain the growth trajectories of China’s transplant industry, researchers have suggested darker alternatives.

Several have suggested, for instance, that among the real sources are prisoners of conscience. This includes Uyghur Muslims, Tibetans, and potentially house church Christians, but overwhelmingly practitioners of Falun Gong, a traditional Chinese spiritual practice that has been persecuted since 1999. It is likely, of course, that other dispossessed and marginalized Chinese citizens have also been victimized.

Freedom House, in a report on freedom of religion in China published last month, said that a review of available information had “found credible evidence suggesting that beginning in the early 2000s, Falun Gong detainees were killed for their organs on a large scale.” It added that: “the large-scale disappearance of young Uyghur men, accounts of routine blood-testing of Uyghur political prisoners, and reports of mysterious deaths of Tibetans and Uyghurs in custody should raise alarm that these populations may also be victims of involuntary organ harvesting.” The U.S. Congress and the European Parliament have expressed condemnation.

The trajectories certainly match up: mass incarceration of Falun Gong in July 1999 preceded the transplant boom by just six months. And this organ source would explain the continued growth of transplants even as death row dried up. There is also a large amount of evidence — including dozens of cases collected by journalist Ethan Gutmann in his book — of detailed blood tests and organ examinations of Falun Gong detainees in China.

A full accounting of the evidence base would take hundreds of pages. But some of the most disquieting material is to be found right in official Chinese literature.

Zheng Shusen, for instance, one of China’s most prominent transplant surgeons, is also the chairman of the Anti-Cult Association of Zhejiang Province. Such associations were established by the Party in the year 2000 specifically to vilify Falun Gong and oversee the forced ideological conversion of detained practitioners.

Why is a leading Chinese liver surgeon and transplant official also heavily involved in the anti-Falun Gong campaign? In 2009, Zheng wrote in the preface to an anti-Falun Gong book: “‘Falun Gong’ and similar evil religions are like viruses corroding the organism of humanity, warping the souls of believers, destroying social order, disrupting economic development, and have become a public nuisance to mankind and a cancer on society.”

Language like this is disturbing under any circumstances. Coming from a prolific liver surgeon, in the context of the current accusations, it is highly alarming. (Zheng also attained recent notoriety for lying about the source of organs in a paper in Liver International, leading to a retraction.)

Huang Jiefu, China’s top transplant spokesman, is also on record in 2001 making similar remarks: “Opposing Falun Gong is a grave political struggle. We must not be softhearted when dealing with a little group of hardcore reactionaries.”

The rapid and unexplained growth of China’s transplant system in 2000, the robust trajectory of transplant activity post-2007 despite declining judicial executions, the blood tests and organ examinations of Falun Gong practitioners in custody, the disappearance of young Uyghur men and accounts of blood-testing of Uyghur political prisoners, and the involvement of transplant officials in the anti-Falun Gong campaign, have never been explained by the Chinese government. Instead, such evidence is simply dismissed as “ridiculous.”

Given that Huang Jiefu is now supplying apparently falsified data in international medical fora, while transplants with unexplained sources in China continue, answers to these questions are a matter of urgency.

Unannounced visits to hospitals by international medical inspectors, and the disclosure of historical and current hospital-level transplant data, would be a place to start.

Matthew Robertson is an independent researcher and translator based in New York City.

Dr. Jacob Lavee is the immediate past president of the Israel Transplantation Society, the founder and director of the heart transplantation unit at the Sheba Medical Center, Israel’s largest hospital, and a professor of surgery at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University. The authors are currently preparing a monograph about the reforms to China’s organ transplantation system since 2010.

http://thediplomat.com/2017/03/chinas-organ-transplant-problem/

Fired Satanist Says He Faced Retaliation

LOWELL NEUMANN NICKEY
Courthouse News Service
March 29, 2017

PHILADELPHIA (CN) – An avowed Satanist who lost his job with a Pennsylvania school district claims in a federal complaint that he faced retaliation.

Kevin Richard says he had been working for Coatesville schools for six months as a secretary when he learned in July 2016 that he was being reassigned to the role of registration specialist.

The new gig did not last long. Come Aug. 23, Richard allegedly lodged a religious objection because he had been asked to “reschedule a scheduled parent interview for the purpose of prioritizing another individual on the basis of nepotism.”

Richard says nepotism is a no-no in Satanism, which teaches him “to treat all individuals equally.”

Coatesville schools fired Richard the same day he complained, telling him that the woman he had been replacing as reistration specialist was no longer taking medical leave.

Calling this a clear pretext, Richard says “this was not the woman, Julia, whose last scheduled day was in the end of August, and whom Richard was told he was replacing.”

Richard seeks punitive damages for religious discrimination and retaliation.

He is represented by Larry Weisberg of the Harrisburg firm McCarthy Weisberg Cummings. Neither he nor the Coatesville Area School District’s legal department returned a call requesting comment.

Writings by Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan, indicate that the religion may not be a stickler on nepotism.

“Stratification – The point on which all the others ultimately rest,” he wrote in Pentagonal Revisionism. “There can be no more myth of ‘equality’ for all – it only translates to ‘mediocrity’ and supports the weak at the expense of the strong.”

Peter Gilmore, the church’s administrator, wrote in The Satanic Scriptures that “the idealistic fools may scream that it is not fair, but then, we Satanists know that justice is relative and only lasts as long as one has the power to maintain it, either personally or through an alliance with those who do.”



https://www.courthousenews.com/fired-satanist-says-faced-retaliation/

Brazil probes fraud by alleged cult using proof US officials dismissed

Matt Smith
Reveal
March 28, 2017

A reputed Danish cult with connections to charities that have received millions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid is now the target of a Brazilian money laundering investigation.

Brazilian prosecutors are building their case in part on Danish evidence that long has been available to U.S. officials – evidence that indicates that the network of organizations is overseen by Interpol fugitives.

A judge in Brazil ruled Jan. 23 that prosecutors could pursue money laundering charges against three members of the Teachers Group who prosecutors allege had key roles in associated businesses and a charity there.

Danish prosecutors consider the Teachers Group, known there as Tvind, a criminal organization that operates a global charity network as a scheme to steal anti-poverty funds.

“Our intelligence and financial units have tracked it, and yes, the money – at least the money that came to Brazil – can be tracked to Tvind, the Teachers Group,” Brazilian prosecutor André Batista Neves said in an interview with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. “This group is qualified as an organized criminal group.”

U.S. foreign aid officials have been aware of those allegations for more than a decade but have dismissed them, allocating more than $160 million to organizations that the FBI as well as the Danes have linked to global fraud. Yet in document after document, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Agency for International Development continued to portray Teachers Group-linked charities as U.S. government partners in fighting African starvation, illiteracy and disease.

U.S. foreign aid officials have declined to comment on whether they have taken any measures to limit funding since Reveal published and aired its investigation of the Teachers Group last year. In recent months, the British government, UNICEF and UNESCO have cut or suspended funding to one of these interlinked organizations.

Reveal reported that Mogens Amdi Petersen, the founder and leader of the Teachers Group, years ago fled fraud charges in Denmark connected with allegations that he was behind fake charities in at least 43 countries. Since 2013, Petersen and four Teachers Group associates have been listed by Interpol as among the world’s most wanted fugitives.

The new Brazilian case involves allegations of illicit bank transfers from a Geneva-based U.S. foreign aid subcontractor called the Federation for Associations connected to the International Humana People to People Movement, or FAIHPP, to an organization called Humana People to People Brazil.

Brazilian prosecutors say both FAIHPP and Humana are part of the Teachers Group.

Over more than a decade, the USDA has allocated $133 million to a nonprofit, Planet Aid, for work in Malawi and Mozambique. Planet Aid subcontracts with FAIHPP and has paid it millions of foreign aid dollars. Planet Aid’s latest public filings show its chairman is Mikael Norling, who was also a founding director of FAIHPP. Norling has been an associate of Petersen’s for decades, according to Danish books, newspaper articles and government records.

Reveal provided questions and asked to interview representatives of Planet Aid and Humana People to People. Planet Aid declined an interview, stating, “Planet Aid has not engaged in any illegal or illicit activities.” Planet Aid sued Reveal and two of its reporters in August, alleging a conspiracy to interfere with business relationships. Reveal is contesting the lawsuit and believes it is without merit.

The Brazilian government investigation involves the country’s federal anti-money laundering agency, central bank, tax authority and public prosecutor’s office. It draws on Danish investigations involving 5 million pages of documents seized during 2001 police raids on multiple Teachers Group facilities in Denmark.

For Brazil’s anti-money laundering agency, 2010 bank transfers from FAIHPP to Brazil raised alarms.

In 2015, Brazilian prosecutors obtained international bank transfer data in pursuit of allegations of money laundering involving the Teachers Group network. Delays followed legal challenges from defendants Per Ehlert Knudsen, Lars Jensen and Paulus Gerardus van Dun – Teachers Group members who had been involved in land holding companies and the aid organization Humana People to People Brazil. Prosecutors had uncovered nearly $270,000 in suspicious transfers to Humana People to People Brazil, according to a charging document.

“We have an agency that says, ‘Look, this is the same group. We have reason to believe that this practice of money laundering has happened,’ ” Batista Neves said.

The Brazilian government alleges that between April 1 and Sept. 30, 2010, FAHIPP made a series of bank transfers prosecutors say were designed to escape detection. Prosecutors used the Portuguese term for “pulverized” to describe a series of small transfers, routed through separate banks, which it said were aimed at moving FAIHPP money to its Brazilian affiliate.

A Brazilian judge in January declined a request by attorneys for the three defendants to dismiss money laundering charges and told prosecutors that they could pursue an investigation.

In a 2011 financial statement to USAID, Planet Aid describes sending $742,424 to Humana People to People Brazil in 2008 and 2009. There is no detail on what these funds were used for beyond “Establishment and start of Child Aid Brazil.”

In its 2010 annual report, Planet Aid described sending $391,000 to Brazil for “Child Aid/community development.” The report did not specify who or what organization received the money.

Two years earlier, in a 2008 annual report submitted to USAID, Planet Aid had stated that “Ecuador, Belize and Brazil have joined a long list of countries where the Child Aid program is strengthening poor communities.”

Ecuador, Belize and Brazil also are the sites of the Teachers Group’s main private agriculture businesses, held by offshore subsidiaries of Fairbank Cooper & Lyle Ltd., a Petersen-linked holding company for the Teachers Group’s global properties, according to Danish prosecutors.

Batista Neves said his office used Danish investigative documents to help build a case involving what the case identifies as Teachers Group-related companies registered in the English Channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey and in Brazil. The documents said Brazilian timber plantation Fazenda Jatobá was owned by subsidiaries of the Jersey company Fairbank Cooper & Lyle.

“This web of companies served a single purpose: To hide the origin, nature and ownership of funds with criminal origin, which had been sent to Brazil by the transnational organization called ‘Tvind,’ ” Batista Neves’ charging document said.

FAIHPP founder and Planet Aid chairman Norling had served as an official representative in 1989 and 1990 of a Jersey-based Fairbank Cooper & Lyle subsidiary – Argyll Smith & Co. – according to separate documents obtained by Reveal. Danish prosecutors alleged that Petersen oversaw Fairbank Cooper & Lyle.

According to Knud Haargaard, who led the Danish government’s investigation, Norling during the early 2000s also had authority over projects such as the Fazenda Jatobá plantation.

“When we investigated Tvind, Mikael Norling was head of the Teachers Group’s companies and projects in Northern and Southern America. We’re talking about the ‘Jatoba’ project, Banana production in Belize, clothing collection in USA and much more,” Haargaard said in an email.

Batista Neves said his investigation produced information about bank transfers involving the same organization Haargaard probed during the 1990s and 2000s.

“This money comes to Brazil from these tax havens, and the communication that our financial intelligence unit has received says that the money flowing out of this tax haven came from the Teachers Group,” Batista Neves said.

From the documents Danish investigators seized in 2001, Brazilian prosecutors say they determined that the Teachers Group was using charities as a cover to move money around the world, $25 million of which was used to buy Fazenda Jatobá, the Brazilian charging document said.

A now-defunct web page for Fairbank Cooper & Lyle said the company controlled more than 227,000 acres of Brazilian land under the timber plantation’s holding company, Floresta Jatobá, as of March 2005.

According to the Brazilian prosecutors, Fazenda Jatobá was one of several Teachers Group operations in Brazil, including a company called Big River Melons that was valued in 2007 at about $13 million.

In 2006, Brazilian government records showed Petersen and his girlfriend, Kirsten Larsen, sought visas under the auspices of Big River Melons. Danish prosecutors previously had said in court documents that Brazil was among the countries to which Petersen considered fleeing as he was sought by Danish authorities.

Danish court records contain a Dec. 20, 2000, letter to Petersen and Larsen from associates Marlene Gunst and Ruth Olsen. Like Petersen, Larsen and Gunst were Interpol fugitives as of this month.

The letter was addressed to “KLAP,” the Teachers Group abbreviation for the names of the organization’s royal couple, Larsen and Petersen. Gunst and Olsen requested approval for a plan to place certain Petersen followers on the boards of companies holding property in Brazil. And the memo discusses the possibility of obtaining a visa for Petersen by naming him an employee of Fairbank Cooper & Lyle.

“In order to obtain a residence permit in Brazil, one must partly be on the board, and you must be able to prove any link with the parent Bahia Farming Ltd.,” the 2000 letter says. “KL (Kirsten Larsen) has this connection in order already, because she has been employed by Fairbank, Cooper & Lyle for a long time, and we could also employ AP (Amdi Petersen), if we were to use this option.”

Petersen was spotted in June 2016 by a Danish television crew at a lavish compound on Mexico’s Pacific Coast. Mexican records showed Fairbank Cooper & Lyle as an owner of that property, too, and authorities have not extradited Petersen.

Brazilian prosecutors also are investigating a series of suspicious transfers to Teachers Group-controlled Brazilian companies involving nearly $17 million in proceeds from the partial sale of Fazenda Jatobá land in 2007.

“It is very probable that this money is a continuation of the money laundering that they have done before,” Batista Neves said.

Whistleblowers repeatedly have alerted U.S. foreign aid agencies to Planet Aid’s links to the Teachers Group. But audit reports and internal government emails indicate those agencies are ill equipped to root out, or even identify, fraud.

A highly critical 2011 USAID report cited a sanitation education project by FAIHPP’s Zambia affiliate in which students were barely able to understand instructions to wash their hands after going to the bathroom. It was an example of failed oversight of U.S.-funded aid contractors all over the world, wrote the report’s author, Thomas Dichter. In addition to USDA grants, USAID has granted more than $29 million to FAIHPP affiliates in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia, Congo and Angola.

U.S. officials typically fail to ask even the most basic questions of grant recipients, and Dichter wonders if that is because “Missions are staffed with people with little experience in technical areas; and/or with little understanding of development itself,” he wrote following a two-year global investigation. “Are they not being asked because bureaucratic imperatives get in the way of such questions?”

Reveal traveled to Malawi in 2015 to visit sites of agricultural projects run by Planet Aid’s contractor there, Development Aid from People to People, or DAPP. The FBI and Danish prosecutors say DAPP also is part of the Teachers Group. Reveal found farmers on projects touted by the organization remained impoverished, struggling to feed their families.

Current and former employees of DAPP told Reveal that foreign aid grant money was routed offshore through FAIHPP via suspicious expenses for expert consulting.

In August, after the BBC in collaboration with Reveal reported that DAPP was secretly run by the Teachers Group, Britain – which had provided about $7 million in funds to DAPP – suspended ties and launched its own inquiry. UNICEF, which had given $920,000, did the same.

https://www.revealnews.org/article/brazil-probes-fraud-by-alleged-cult-using-proof-us-officials-dismissed/

Herbert signs polygamy bill into Utah law

NATE CARLISLE

The Salt Lake Tribune
March 28, 2017

Law » Felony status continues; penalties increased for fraud convictions.

Gov. Gary Herbert on Tuesday signed a bill that keeps polygamy a felony in Utah and increases the penalties for polygamists convicted of committing frauds and abuses.

Herbert's approval of HB99 affirms the position Utah has held since statehood — that polygamy is against the law. Yet it's unclear how much of the bill will ever be used.

Polygamists and some sympathetic attorneys have said HB99 will be unconstitutional if it's applied to consenting adults who choose to live as such a family. Joe Darger, who has three wives and was the most vocal opponent of the bill, has dared prosecutors to charge him.

Darger doesn't think that will happen. After Herbert signed the bill Tuesday, Darger said the goal of HB99 appeared to be to keep polygamists silent by making their lifestyles a crime.

"This is more for persecution than it ever is intended for prosecution," the polygamist said.

The Utah attorney general's office and every county attorney who has been asked has said his or her policies are not to prosecute families like the Dargers. Assistant Attorney General Parker Douglas testified to the Legislature that prosecutors are concerned with polygamists who commit fraud and abuse.

The Sound Choices Coalition, which seeks to dissuade people from joining polygamous marriages and helps those seeking to leave them, issued a statement Tuesday night supporting the bill signing.

"Polygamy is an antisocial, unsustainable practice that hurts many, so we are pleased that the state of Utah has taken action to demonstrate that it takes the abuses of polygamy seriously," the statement said. "Polygamy has enjoyed de facto decriminalization for decades, and polygamists will continue to be in no danger of prosecution unless they commit other crimes. We trust that the attorney general's office will use this new law as it uncovers criminal activities within polygamist communities."

HB99 was a response to the lawsuit filed by the Brown family from the television show "Sister Wives." The Browns sued the state after Lehi police investigated them for bigamy.

Clark Waddoups, a federal judge in Salt Lake City, ruled for the Browns in 2013, saying Utah's bigamy statute, as applied to polygamists, is unconstitutional.

But the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Waddoups' ruling on the grounds that the Browns were never prosecuted. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

However, polygamists and people opposed to polygamy seem to think Waddoups' legal analysis, though not binding, was accurate.

HB99 attempted to address Waddoups' concerns. It added criteria for bigamy prosecution: The offender would have to live with the extra spouse and "purport" to be married. State law required only one or the other.

The new law keeps the offense a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison, but the penalty could increase to 15 years if bigamy is prosecuted in conjunction with crimes such as abuse, fraud or human smuggling. Anyone leaving a polygamous marriage and reporting abuse or protecting a child would receive amnesty.

The bill had the support of anti-polygamy organizations as well as a few former plural wives and children of polygamists who say they lived in households that were abusive and polygamy was to blame. Some lawyers who have represented people leaving polygamous homes support the bill, too.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which officially abandoned polygamy in 1890 and excommunicates members found practicing it, also issued a statement supportive of HB99.

The LDS Church and its tenets were evoked during the debate on HB99. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab, stood on the House floor and compared polygamous sects to organized crime, saying people who refer to themselves as fundamentalist Mormons are apostates.

Noel's words could be used in a lawsuit showing that the Legislature sought to target a religious minority, says Ken Driggs, a semiretired attorney in Atlanta who has studied polygamy and the law. He sent Herbert a 16-page memo urging a veto.

But, Driggs has said, any plaintiff would probably need what the Browns didn't have — a prosecutor charging him or her with bigamy.

Herbert signed the bill five days after another television show about Utah polygamists premiered. "Three Wives, One Husband," is a documentary series broadcast on British television.

One of the show's focal points, Enoch Foster, on Tuesday said he was disappointed Herbert signed the bill, but he believes the way polygamists went to the state Capitol and lobbied their legislators will keep them politically active and will one day lead to removing the criminal penalties for polygamy.

"While we clearly lost the battle," Foster said, "at the same time, there's some victories in it, I think."

ncarlisle@sltrib.com

Twitter: @natecarlisle



http://www.sltrib.com/home/5082165-155/herbert-signs-polygamy-bill-into-utah

In Russia, some scientology files have been included in the federal list of extremism-related materials

TASS

March 29, 2017


MOSCOW, March 29. /TASS/. Police are carrying out a search at a scientology center located to the northeast of Moscow, a law enforcement source told TASS on Wednesday.

"Today the law enforcement agencies have come to conduct a search in the Center for managing activity on spreading dianetics and scientology located in the town of Losino-Petrovsky, in the Moscow Region," the source said.

The investigation is underway as part of a criminal case into illegal entrepreneurship launched by the Federal Security Service in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region.

Dianetics and scientology is a religious and philosophic belief created in the United States in early 1950s by American author Lafayette Ron Hubbard. The scientific community does not recognize it as a science.

In Russia, some scientology files have been included in the federal list of extremism-related materials and their storage and dissemination is prohibited in the country.

http://tass.com/world/938203

Witnesses mount campaign against persecution

Tessa Roy
Johnston Sun Rise
March 30, 2017

Jehovah’s Witnesses may not boast as large a following as more mainstream faiths, but people of the faith are seeking to make a massive global impact. All eight million of them are encouraged to participate in a letter writing campaign to Russia in effort to “express the hope that the Russian authorities will stop the legal action being taken against the branch office and the congregations in Russia so that our brothers and sisters can continue to gather peacefully for Christian meetings without interference.” Locally, Kingdom Halls of Jehovah’s Witnesses can be found in both Warwick and Cranston.

A press release from Jehovah’s Witness site jw.org details happenings in Russia, saying, “Russia’s Ministry of Justice filed a claim with the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation to label the Administrative Center of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia as extremist and liquidate it. The claim also seeks to ban the activities of the Administrative Center.”

The release states the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the claim on April 5th and that if the claim is upheld, the Witnesses’ national headquarters near St. Petersburg will be shut down and about 400 registered Local Religious Organizations liquidated, outlawing the services of over 2,300 congregations of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia.

“Individual Jehovah’s Witnesses would become subject to criminal prosecution for merely carrying out their worship activities,” the release says. Instructions for the campaign on jw.org provide six different addresses for writers to send their letters, including President Vladimir Putin, Minister of Justice Alexander Vladimirovich Konovalov, Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Viktorovich Lavrov, Prosecutor General Yury Yakovlevich Chayka, and Chairman of the Supreme Court Viacheslav Mikhailovich Lebedev.

A report from USA Today also describes the potential extremist designation and says 175,000 total Witnesses could be affected.

Jehovah’s Witnesses aren’t often in the news but are also no strangers to controversy – whenever they are seen in any form of media, it’s often under a critical eye. They’re known for their door-to-door evangelizing, but also for their rather unconventional views that closely follow the Bible. They don’t celebrate birthdays or holidays and abstain from political activities, including voting and running for public office. The latter is due to their belief that they are part of a Kingdom of God rather than of any governments established by humans.

“We don’t have confidence that there is any human government that is capable of dealing with… all the complex issues we have as humans,” said Tyrie Jones, a media representative for Jehovah’s Witnesses. “That’s one thing we hold true to, even in Russia, and that’s one complication that’s viewed as being extremist; that we have a government that we feel is superior to any human government and that’s one set up in Heaven.”

However, Jones also notes that Witnesses aren’t out to usurp or deny the legitimacy of authorities – their views may be “extremely different,” but not “extremist,” he said.

“I think our history is crystal clear on that, that we have the utmost respect, and we’re commanded even scripturally to respect, the superior authorities in place,” Jones said.

Johnston Witness Jerry Shearer said efforts, like the letter writing campaign, Witnesses have made to protect themselves and their right to practice their religion stand to benefit many other groups as well.

“The freedom that all of us enjoy in this country right now has a lot to do with what the Jehovah’s Witnesses have done,” he said. “Even groups that theologically we wouldn’t agree with, what we have done has protected everyone’s civil rights and everyone’s freedom of expression.”

As for their current campaign, Shearer and Jones hope their letters will be successful in making an impact on the Russian officials who read them and help them to understand that their population of Jehovah’s Witnesses are good citizens.

“We don’t believe we should sit back and do nothing. We have all been praying about this for some time,” Shearer said. “We know it’s going to have an impact if all 8 million Jehovah’s Witnesses… write six letters. That’s going to have a huge impact on the postal service in Moscow. They’re going to see that they’re coming from all over the world.”



http://johnstonsunrise.net/stories/witnesses-mount-campaign-against-persecution,123134