Tag: Crime

Death In Bulgaria

Closing Thought–11Oct18

My blog, In Saner Thought, has at least one loyal daily visitor from Bulgaria….I try to keep up with the news in the countries of my loyal visitors……..

A little info for those that may not know much about this country…..a country that not many Americans know much about these days……

The Bulgars, a Central Asian Turkic tribe, merged with the local Slavic inhabitants in the late 7th century to form the first Bulgarian state. In succeeding centuries, Bulgaria struggled with the Byzantine Empire to assert its place in the Balkans, but by the end of the 14th century the country was overrun by the Ottoman Turks. Northern Bulgaria attained autonomy in 1878 and all of Bulgaria became independent from the Ottoman Empire in 1908. Having fought on the losing side in both World Wars, Bulgaria fell within the Soviet sphere of influence and became a People’s Republic in 1946. Communist domination ended in 1990, when Bulgaria held its first multiparty election since World War II and began the contentious process of moving toward political democracy and a market economy while combating inflation, unemployment, corruption, and crime. The country joined NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007.

Bulgarian television reporter Viktoria Marinova has become the third journalist to be murdered in the European Union in the last year and the fourth since the start of 2017.

The 30-year-old’s body was found dumped near the Danube River in the town of Ruse, northern Bulgaria, on Saturday. Police said she had been beaten, raped and strangled.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/10/08/bulgarias-viktoria-marinova-third-journalist-murdered-eu-last-year/1563296002/

A person has been arrested for the crime……

A suspect in the rape and killing of a Bulgarian television journalist whose work highlighted corruption in the East European country has been arrested in Germany, officials said Wednesday. Bulgaria’s prosecutor general, Sotir Tsatsarov, confirmed the arrest of Severin Krassimirov, a 21-year-old Bulgarian citizen, but gave no further details of his location, the AP reports. German authorities were not immediately available. “We are currently following a European arrest procedure. The German prosecutor has arrested the suspect, they will then assess how to proceed,” Tsatsarov said. He said evidence suggested it was “a spontaneous attack, not premeditated.”

Interior Minister Mladen Marinov said investigators had found DNA evidence on the clothes and body of Viktoria Marinova, who was raped and strangled on Saturday in the northern town of Ruse. “There is physical evidence to link to the murder,” Marinov said Wednesday. He said Krasimirov, a resident of Ruse, had a criminal record for scrap metal theft. The minister said investigators had spoken to Marinova’s family and friends and “there is no apparent link to her work.” Marinova hosted a show last month featuring two investigative journalists who were detained for their work on suspected fraud involving European Union funds—a sensitive subject in Bulgaria, where corruption is endemic

TO my followers in Bulgaria…If the any information that I am missing please let me know and I will update my readers.

Closing Thought–07May18

I spend a lot of time on the ‘net researching all sorts of stories and subjects that I write about here on IST…..and in all that time I have analyzed why the US is in bed with the thugs in Saudi Arabia……we hear almost yearly that the kingdom is becoming more inclusive and modern in its thinking….and each time I call bullsh*t where it needs to be called.

One of the punishments that the Kingdom dolls out is beheading……can be given out for a wide array of crimes…..but the first couple of months this year has a goal……

Human Rights Watch is calling on Saudi Arabia to fix its “notoriously unfair criminal justice system” after revealing that over the past four months, 48 people have been executed in the country. Half of those people were put to death over non-violent drug charges, the group says. Rights experts are also concerned that, as HRW says in a statement, Saudi Arabia’s justice system “doesn’t provide for fair trials.” Capital punishment in Saudi Arabia is carried out via beheading, the Guardian reports. The country has executed almost 600 people since 2014, and more than a third of those were drug cases. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently suggested the country may change the penalty for certain crimes other than murder to life in prison rather than execution.

A great country to align ourselves with (that is sarcasm in case you were not sure)…….this country is the birthplace of the extreme Islam that most right wingers are so worried about…..this country should be shunned until it actually comes into the 21st century.  But that will not happen as long as they have cash to throw at our politicians…..

One Thugocracy to another.

Closing Thought–28Apr17

Speaking Of Russia!

Did You Say Comintern?

No!  I said “Crimintern”….and it has nothing to do with the Communist International (COMINTERN)….

  • Over the past 20 years, the role of Russian organised crime in Europe has shifted considerably. Today, Russian criminals operate less on the street and more in the shadows: as allies, facilitators and suppliers for local European gangs and continent-wide criminal networks.
  • The Russian state is highly criminalised, and the interpenetration of the criminal ‘underworld’ and the political ‘upperworld’ has led the regime to use criminals from time to time as instruments of its rule.
  • Russian-based organised crime groups in Europe have been used for a variety of purposes, including as sources of ‘black cash’, to launch cyber attacks, to wield political influence, to traffic people and goods, and even to carry out targeted assassinations on behalf of the Kremlin.
  • European states and institutions need to consider RBOC a security as much as a criminal problem, and adopt measures to combat it, including concentrating on targeting their assets, sharing information between security and law-enforcement agencies, and accepting the need to devote political and economic capital to the challenge.

Source: Crimintern: How the Kremlin uses Russia’s criminal networks in Europe | European Council on Foreign Relations

Keep in mind that this group, the ECFR, will be a anti-Russian think tank….it will echo anything the Western powers want to use to influence others…..

Thanx for your time today on IST….I must shut down the keyboard until the morrow…..peace out, my friends……chuq

Closing Thought–17Feb17

Before I begin my closing thought….

Ohio Players front man, Junie Morrison, has died….The Dayton, Ohio, vocalist and producer responsible for founding The Ohio Players and contributing to the rise of the Parliament-Funkadelic passed away today at age 62.

May he Rest in Peace.  He will be missed!

Because you will not hear this from racist bastards that push a lie!

With the New Year came the report that migrants/refugees went batcrap crazy in Germany and sexually attack many women…some say as many as 55 migrants committed these crimes…..

And of course those tiny mind slobbering at their keyboards on the Right jumped on this report and are still using it as of today to denigrate anyone that is not white.

But the report was baseless according to the police…..

Prosecutors are investigating two people for allegedly fabricating an account of a mass sex attack by Arab migrants in Frankfurt.

Claims that a “sex rioting mob” of around 50 men assaulted a group of women over the new year were reported by German tabloid Bild earlier this month.

The report, which suggested the attackers lived at a refugee shelter in central Hasse, was widely re-circulated by right-wing news sites.

Source: Mass sexual assault in Frankfurt by refugees ‘completely made up’ | The Independent

Sad how these few bigoted a/holes will hold on the a lie just to spread their disgusting paradigm….

In closing please enjoy the Ohio Players….Fire

Today is Friday and I am tapped out…..I go and begin a restful weekend (hopefully) and you do the same…..Be well, be safe….chuq

5 Stories the Media Ignored

Sunday and cooler weather has returned……enjoyable to sit in the orchard and listen…..but enough about me……

This week the world was shaken to its core…..some celebrity was robbed at gun point and lost $10 million worth of jewelry….jewelry that she bragged about on social media….and for days we heard all about this idiot’s problems…..but just what was it that made this pack of crap more important than other news?

One of the saving graces of the ailing corporate media — for the folks setting the agenda, anyhow — is its relentless ability to hyper-focus the public’s attention on altogether meaningless events.

Take, for instance, an armed robbery that sees property stolen but no one harmed. Such an event is unfortunate, yes, but such is life. People get robbed. It certainly isn’t something that should consume the news cycle — particularly when developments of actual importance are unfolding around the world.

Here’s what they should have been talking about instead.

Source: 5 Stories the Media Ignored While Reporting the Kim Kardashian Robbery

I would add one more…..an American soldier died in Afghanistan because of an IED……and that was NOT important enough to mention…..apparently it was not “newsworthy”……..

How pathetic is that?

Spies Like Us

Another Saturday and another weekend begins…..

In my youth I was a big fan of spy fiction….Ian Fleming’s James Bond and a pulp fiction series about a CIA spy Sam Durell…..I have always liked spy thrillers….I enjoy the series The Americans, it is about spies in the 70’s in the US……

So back about a decade ago when that Russian was poisoned in London renewed my interests in the spy game…..and there was the Russian spies found here in the US especially the extremely nice looking red head……

And then I read another story and once again the whole spy then became all too important……

Russia-watchers—or readers of spy novels—may be unsurprised to learn that the sudden death of a former Vladimir Putin aide in a Washington, DC, hotel last fall now appears a little fishy. Mikhail Lesin, the former Kremlin press minister who helped set up Russia Today and spent more than a year as chief of the powerful Gazprom-Media group, was found dead in the Dupont Circle Hotel in November. Russian media reported at the time that the 57-year-old heavy smoker and drinker had died from a heart attack, but the DC medical examiner’s office announced on Thursday that the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head, the Guardian reports.

Police haven’t said whether they suspect a crime was committed, though it’s not clear what else would explain the blunt force injuries to the Russian’s head, neck, torso, arms, and legs. Moscow says it’s seeking “clarification from Washington and relevant official data on the progress of the investigation,” reports the BBC, which notes that some US lawmakers had been calling for an investigation into Lesin and the vast fortune he amassed while working as a civil servant in Russia, including $28 million in Los Angeles real estate.

Was this an assassination?  Maybe the Russian mob is behind it……maybe he forgot who he owed his loyalties to for favors of the past…..

Any ideas?

What Causes Violent Crime?

We all have heard about the massive shootings in the last couple of months and that Chicago had 500 murders last year and daily we hear about more and more violent crime…..this is not an anti-gun post so take your Valium and read on………is there any one thing that can be targeted asa cause for some violent crime?

(Newser) – Violent crime has fallen in the US for years, but why? Experts have floated theories ranging from police techniques to the “crack epidemic” to the legalizing of abortion, but none quite fit the facts. One, however, does: lead poisoning. In Mother Jones, Kevin Drums reports that the rise and fall of leaded gasoline directly mimics the arc of violent crime in America, on a 23-year time lag. In fact, studies show the same correlation in countries around the world, six US cities, and even a New Orleans neighborhood. “When they overlay [lead concentrations] with crime maps,” says one researcher, “they realize they match up.”

The science fits, too: Many studies link lead intake with lower IQs, delayed development, and a propensity to commit crimes later in life. Of course millions of children who inhaled lead from car tailpipes between the 1940s and the 1970s didn’t become criminals, but those on the margin “were pushed over the edge from being merely slow or disruptive to becoming part of a nationwide epidemic of violent crime,” writes Drums. The clincher: Lead molecules still lurk in our soil and an estimated 16 million US houses. Cleaning them up would cost billions, but save far more in the long run, Drums writes: It “could turn out to be the cheapest, most effective crime prevention tool we have. And we could start doing it tomorrow.”

Okay, this is just a work in progress but at least there is a possible link between lead and crime……..worth the study or not?

And how do I get on the list for some of that grant money?

Burning Down The House

Nope not the song from the 80’s by the Talking Heads…..but rather that iconic photo of the Nazis throwing books onto the roaring fire in Nuremberg (I believe)……they were burning books that they thought were destroying the German society….you know those books like philosophy and such……those damn intellectuals will destroy the nation and all the good work that the leader has accomplished….

The US cannot say that such things NEVER happened here……I recall back in the 60’s when the Beatles made an off the cuff statement about their popularity and the country went nuts burning their records in protest…..and then there was that whack-a-doodle preacher in Florida that was trying to gain some notoriety by having az Qur’an burning……so we are not strangers to this type of slow mentality……

After the mass killing in Newtown we heard all kinds of answers to curbing this type of violence…..from banning guns to armed vigilanbtes patrolling our schools….and all the blame….like music, bureaucracy and those damn video games……..but this is just f*cking silly!

Newser) – The Newtown shooting has America understandably on edge. “But are we really hoping to purge our collective soul by demolishing copies of Halo 4?” asks Liel Leibovitz at the New Republic. The town of Southington, Conn., plans to do just that on Saturday. Past cultural bête noires—from comic books to gangsta rap to television—have seen similar burnings, but video games are a unique case. They’re not consumed, they’re played. “The digital violence we witness on-screen comes from our own hands,” Leibovitz writes.

That may sound scary, but as all gamers know, the experience “has more to do with our thumbs than it does with our minds,” resembling contact sports more than watching TV. What’s more, it’s “not fundamentally different than what previous generations have done, when sticks served as swords or hands as pistols.” It’s play. Then, as ever, it helps people deal with intense experience in a safe, sublimated way. “By confiscating and burning their games, parents risk extinguishing a critical outlet—and creating the very problem they were trying to avoid,” he writes. Click for Leibovitz’s full column

I could go on and on and stir up all kinds of BS….there is an answer…you may not like it…..but there is an answer.  And this feat of stupidity is NOT IT!

Roll Tide Roll

It is once again the weekend and NO this post is NOT about the SEC or the Alabama football team……

You know that there is a black market here in the US of A, right?  Drugs, stolen cars, store equipment, babies and just about anything you can think of is sold and sold at a profit on the black market…..I thought I had heard just about everything but this just made my jaw drop……

From the msn.com website…….

It’s a crime wave made for creative reporting, or at least bad puns: Police attempt to stem rising Tide of thefts. Thieves clean up with stolen laundry detergent. Scum steal laundry soap.

In a story headlined “Grime Wave,” The Daily reports that thieves from Oregon to Maryland are stealing large quantities of Tide laundry detergent by loading it into shopping carts and pushing it out of the stores, often to waiting getaway cars.

Others say stolen Tide is sold on the black market. “They’ve done the same thing with baby formula for years,” West St. Paul, Minn., police Chief Bud Shaver told the Star Tribune. “It’s an essential. You’re going to buy it.” The Star Tribune reported recently that a Wal-Mart in West St. Paul had lost an estimated $25,000 worth of Tide over the span of 15 months.

Why Tide?

Laundry detergent is something all households need, and the price of Tide — $10 to $20 per bottle retail — translates to $5 to $10 on the black market, which makes it a stable currency, according to The Daily. Also, detergent is not perishable, and — unlike electronic items — carries no identifying information.

Police say the Procter & Gamble detergent is the most popular and most recognizable of the name-brand laundry soaps, partly because of its bright orange packaging.

“We don’t have any insight as to why the phenomenon is happening, but it is certainly unfortunate,” a Procter & Gamble spokeswoman told The Daily.

Have these people ever heard of the Dollar store?

I understand the market for drugs or a car or stereo equipment and even a baby……but laundry detergent?

Was There Room For A Lexus?

Yep, you got it….it is the weekend and I must purge the brain of all the politic jargon and happenings of the week….and as usual it has NOTHING to do with the government….

In the past I have written about all sorts of weird stuff…like the Butt Bomber in Saudi that tried to kill a crown prince with a cellphone bomb in his butt….or the crotch bomber that tried to lite is penis on fire as a fuse for a diaper bomb….or the guy in Florida that had pills, cigs, matches and a receipt shoved up his butt……..lots of good stuff!

But I found one that takes the cake!

Police in northeastern Pennsylvania say they recovered more than 50 bags of heroin, cash and loose change from a woman following a cavity search.Authorities say 27-year-old Karin Mackaliunas was detained last weekend following a crash. Scranton police say they found three bags of heroin in her jacket and after being taken to the police station she told investigators she had more hidden in her vagina.

A doctor performed a search and recovered 54 bags of heroin, 31 empty bags used to package heroin, prescription pills and $51.22.

And like I said…all that was missing was a Lexus, a Big Mac and Soda….I guess size DOES matter!

$51.22?  Does that mean it was like a vending machine?  Money in–heroine out?