Gay man found dead, castrated in NY hotel room...

Veteran fashion journalist and gay activist Carlos Castro, 65, was found naked with his testicles hacked off in a InterContinental Hotel room at about 7pm on Friday, ABC news reports.

It is believed Castro was castrated with a broken wine glass and had suffered from head trauma caused by a blunt object.

Castro and his model boyfriend Renato Seabra, 20, had been on vacation in New York since late December to see Broadway shows and celebrate New Year’s.

The couple had reportedly only been dating for a few months.

Luis Pires, Castro's friend of 30 years and editor of the Portuguese language newspaper Luso-Americano, told The Associated Press that there had been some tension between the two men towards the end of the holiday, saying "they were a little bit upset with each other, for jealousy reasons" but did not foresee that something bad was going to happen.

After the alleged slaying, Seabra was approached by Monica Pires, and Wanda Pires, the daughter and wife of Luis, in the lobby of the hotel that he was staying at and was asked about Carlos joining them for dinner.

Monica said Seabra "seemed in shock" and "wasn't expecting to see us.

The three talked briefly and Seabra said that Castro was "not coming out."

Seabra's strange behaviour caused Monica to alert hotel staff who later found the dead man in his hotel room.

At that point, Seabra had allegedly got into a taxi and was driven to a nearby hospital where he was treated for self-inflicted cuts to his wrists.

Seabra was deemed a person of interest and was arrested at the hospital to prevent him from fleeing the country.

Suzanna Divilly, 40, who was staying at the same hotel, told the NY Daily News that she heard the two men arguing in their room on Friday.

"There was a lot of noise, talking. You could hear them arguing in the corridor and even in our room," she said.

Seabra was a contestant last year on a Portuguese modelling reality show called "A Procura Do Sonho," or "Pursuit of a Dream".

He did not win but managed to score a modelling contract with an agency afterwards.

The NY Post has reported that Seabra was actually straight, and was only in the relationship with Castro for money.

A source was quoted in the newspaper as saying that Seabra is a womaniser who gave no indication of being gay.

Castro is known as a fashion icon in his native Portugual and has been reporting on the country's high society for years.

Acknowledgements: MSN News

http://huttriver8.blogspot.com

Happy New year to you all! Have a great year.

b
The Confucius Peace Prize - a lite version of the Nobel Peace prize...

Confucius Peace Prize - just three weeks after the idea for the honors were first publicly mentioned, isnow a reality. The Confucius Peace Prize is the Chinese snub-nosed attempt to cobble together its own peace prize - and the Confucius Peace Prize will be awarded the day before the Nobel Committee honors an imprisoned Chinese dissident in a move that has enraged Beijing.

Since Liu Xiaobo's selection, China has vilified the 54-year-old democracy advocate, called the choice an effort by the West to contain its rise, disparaged his supporters as "clowns," and launched a campaign to persuade countries not to attend Friday's ceremony in Oslo. The government is also preventing Liu - who is serving an 11-year sentence for co-authoring a bold appeal for political reforms in the Communist country - and his family members from attending.

Amid the flurry of action came a commentary published on Nov. 17 in a Communist Party-approved tabloid that suggested China create its own award - the "Confucius Peace Prize" - to counter the choice of Liu.

Read more: http://www.thirdage.com/news/confucius-peace-prize-snubs-nose-nobel-peace-prize-honors_12-8-2010?#ixzz17VnOAUUV

You are wired. Big Brother is tracking you...



Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old computer salesman and community college student, took his car in for an oil change earlier this month and his mechanic spotted an odd wire hanging from the undercarriage.

The wire was attached to a strange magnetic device that puzzled Afifi and the mechanic. They freed it from the car and posted images of it online, asking for help in identifying it.

Two days later, FBI agents arrived at Afifi's Santa Clara apartment and demanded the return of their property - a global positioning system tracking device now at the centre of a raging legal debate over privacy rights.

One federal judge wrote that the widespread use of the device was straight out of George Orwell's novel, "1984".

"By holding that this kind of surveillance doesn't impair an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy, the panel hands the government the power to track the movements of every one of us, every day of our lives," wrote Alex Kozinski, the chief judge of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, in a blistering dissent in which a three-judge panel from his court ruled that search warrants weren't necessary for GPS tracking.

But other federal and state courts have come to the opposite conclusion.

Law enforcement advocates for the devices say GPS can eliminate time-consuming stakeouts and old-fashioned "tails" with unmarked police cars. The technology had a starring role in the HBO cops-and-robbers series "The Wire" and police use it to track every type of suspect - from terrorist to thieves stealing copper from air conditioners.

That investigators don't need a warrant to use GPS tracking devices in California troubles privacy advocates, technophiles, criminal defence attorneys and others.

The federal appeals court based in Washington DC said in August that investigators must obtain a warrant for GPS in tossing out the conviction and life sentence of Antoine Jones, a nightclub owner convicted of operating a cocaine distribution ring. That court concluded that the accumulation of four-weeks worth of data collected from a GPS on Jones' Jeep amounted to a government "search" that required a search warrant.

Judge Douglas Ginsburg said watching Jones' Jeep for an entire month rather than trailing him on one trip made all the difference between surveilling a suspect on public property and a search needing court approval.

Ad Feedback "First, unlike one's movements during a single journey, the whole of one's movements over the course of a month is not actually exposed to the public because the likelihood anyone will observe all those movements is effectively nil," Ginsburg wrote. The state high courts of New York, Washington and Oregon have ruled similarly.

The Obama administration last month asked the DC federal appeals court to change its ruling, calling the decision "vague and unworkable" and arguing that investigators will lose access to a tool they now use "with great frequency".

After the DC appeals court decision, the 9th Circuit refused to revisit its opposite ruling.

The panel had concluded that agents could have gathered the same information by following Juan Pineda-Moreno, who was convicted of marijuana distribution after a GPS device alerted agents he was leaving a suspected "grow site".

"The only information the agents obtained from the tracking devices was a log of the locations where Pineda-Moreno's car traveled, information the agents could have obtained by following the car," Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain wrote for the three-judge panel.

Two other federal appeals court have ruled similarly.

In his dissent, Chief Judge Kozinski noted that GPS technology is far different from tailing a suspect on a public road, which requires the active participation of investigators.

"The devices create a permanent electronic record that can be compared, contrasted and coordinated to deduce all manner of private information about individuals," Kozinksi wrote.

Legal scholars predict the US Supreme Court will ultimately resolve the issue since so many courts disagree.

George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr said the issue boils down to public vs. private. As long as the GPS devices are attached to vehicles on public roads, Kerr believes the US Supreme Court will decide no warrant is needed. To decide otherwise, he said, would ignore a long line of previous 4th Amendment decisions allowing for warrantless searches as long as they're conducted on public property.

"The historic line is that public surveillance is not covered by the 4th Amendment," Kerr said.

All of which makes Afifi's lawyer pessimistic that he has much of a chance to file a successful lawsuit challenging the FBI's actions. Afifi is represented by Zahra Billoo of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country's largest Islamic civil rights group.

Afifi declined comment after spending last week fielding myriad media inquiries after wired.com posted the story of his routine oil change and it went viral on the internet.

Still, Billoo hopes the discovered GPS tracking device will help publicise in dramatic fashion the issue of racial profiling the lawyer says Arab-Americans routinely encounter.

She said Afifi was targeted because of his extensive ties to the Middle East, which include supporting two brothers who live in Egypt and making frequent overseas trips. His father was a well-known Islamic-American community leader who died last year in Egypt.

"Yasir hasn't done anything to warrant that kind of surveillance," Billoo said. "This was a blatant example of profiling."

http://kiwiriverman.blogspot.com THE KIWI RIVERMAN POST

Acknowledgements: Stuff NZ

Related articles
•Oil change reignites debate over GPS trackers (msnbc.msn.com)
•Oil change reignites debate over GPS trackers (sfgate.com)
•GPS tracker in car inflames privacy debate (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
•FBI Gets Caught Tracking Man's Car, Wants Its GPS Device Back [Espionage] (gizmodo.com)

Ghosts for sale on TradeMe...

A New Zealand woman has sold two captured ghosts for $5000 on online shopping website TradeMe.

A Christchurch bidder called cdrive won the auction last night, outbidding two other contenders, according to media reports.

The seller, Avie Woodbury, has said the two spirits turned up after an experiment with a ouija board.

She claims one ghost is an old man, Les Graham, who lived in her house during the 1920s — the other is a powerful and disruptive little girl.

Since the house was exorcised in July last year the ghosts have been preserved in holy water which Ms Woodbury claims "dulls the spirits' energy".

The sale gained worldwide attention with British tabloid The Sun likening the auction to the movie Ghostbusters.

Money from the sale will go to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals once the cost of the exorcism has been taken out.

Acknowledgements: MSN Money

http://communitybloggersevolve.blog.co.uk

(Check out my group blog: http://anzacbloggersunite.blog.co.uk)


One of life's little ironies...


One of life's little ironies. New Zealand: Population about 4.25 million. A first world country for sure. A rich country? Comparatively perhaps. New Zealand has given aid of about NZ$14 million to other countries in the Pacific and beyond who have been the victims of earthquakes and tsunamis in recent years.

Now the Canterbury region and Christchurch City in the South Island have been rocked by an earthquake of 7.1 in magnitude on the Richter Scale, on a par with Haiti EQ many months ago which killed many tens of thousands and made a million or more homeless. Good timing (4.35am) a superior building code and help from the big man above, has so far prevented deaths by injury througfh the EQ; though there is still one severely injured middle aged man in IC in Christchurch Hospital, and eight fatal heart attacks most likely caused by the quake. Christchurch has also been hit by up to a thousand aftershocks day and night ever since. New Zealand's taxpayers bill to reconstruct Christchurch and environs will be about NZ$4 billion

Many people are still homeless and many more will need repaired or rebuilt homes. In some suburbs it will be impossible to do either because of the state of the ground. But the biggest problem in Christchurch right now is the damaged sewerage system which could take until 2012 to rectify. I think Christchurch should be offered some overseas help in this area. Kiwis are proud people who regularly help others, but are reluctant to ask for help themselves. It is obvious that it is beyond their means to reconstruct their broken sewerage system quickly. They don't deserve to have to rely on chemical toilets for the next eighteen months.

Now one of the good guys could do with a bit of a hand!

http://huttsblogesphere.blogspot.com

Ghana Slave Dungeon...

Built by European traders in the 17th century, Ghana's Cape Coast Castle was the point of departure for the countless numbers of Africans who were sent to the New World as free labor for the colonies. Join Explore founder Charles Annenberg Weingarten on a virtual tour of the slave dungeon, and witness the horrific conditions the captives were forced to endure while waiting to be sent across the Atlantic.

http://explore.org/videos/player/africa-ghana-dungeons