Hans Ulrich Rudel Allegedly Offered Friend’s Wife and Daughter To Cannibals

‘Marquis el Diablo’: Hans Ulrich Rudel, who is known for specialising spankings, is accused of trying to procure a cannibal

A Swiss politician has been accused of advertising for cannibals to kill and eat the mother and daughter of a policeman friend going through a ‘tricky’ divorce.

Hans Ulrich Rudel, a convicted murderer, allegedly sought a ‘sadistic master or butcher who can educate us mindless creatures.’

Rudel, 53, is said to have placed the German language ad in the names of his best friend’s wife, Patricia Joachim, 27, and her 12-year-old daughter.

It added: ‘We are keen to meet gentlemen interested in slaughter and dolce who would like to roast us on a spit.’

Rudel, a founder of a local conservative party, later told police that ‘dolce’ – the Italian word for ‘sweet’ – was his term for cannibalism.

Previously, he had served a decade in jail for the ritualistic killing of a young woman in 1988 – he shot her and then impaled her body on a tree branch.

Both he and Joachim – his co-founder of a branch of the Swiss conservative party BDP in Embrachertal – were members of a sado-masochistic club.

Rudel, who worked in the town planning office, was known as ‘Marquis el Diablo’ who specialised in spanking, whippings and ‘hot wax’ torture.

Rudel, who goes on trial tomorrow, told police after his arrest in 2010 that he posted the ad in the hope that someone ‘would get the wife out of the way.’

‘I was hoping Patricia would be picked up by a butcher and never show up again,’ he said.

He added that she would ‘play along’ with the sadomasochistic game that would ultimately result in her death. Some two dozen people responded to the small ad on the Internet, one offering a ‘special dungeon’ on his farm that he could use.

Another described himself as an ‘ideal and very experienced master butcher.’ Rudel chose him for his macabre scheme and replied, enclosing photos of the would-be victims.

But the master butcher turned out to be an undercover policeman. Rudel was then arrested and charged with incitement to murder. Joachim spent several weeks inside but was freed after police said he had no idea about the murder plot.

The case has exposed once more the seedy underworld of cannibal fantasists in Europe that was first laid bare in the 2003 trial of German cannibal killer Armin Meiwes who lured a Berlin computer programmer to his home near Kassel, Germany, where he killed and ate him.

Meiwes revealed at his trial that he got dozens of replies to his advert seeking someone to eat.

‘There are a lot of cannibals out there,’ he said before being sentenced.

via Hans Ulrich Rudel Allegedly Offered Friend’s Wife and Daughter To Cannibals.

Magnetic bacteria may help build future bio-computers

Magnet-making bacteria may be building biological computers of the future, researchers have said.

A team from the UK’s University of Leeds and Japan’s Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology have used microbes that eat iron.

As they ingest the iron, the microbes create tiny magnets inside themselves, similar to those in PC hard drives.

The research may lead to the creation of much faster hard drives, the team of scientists say.

The study appears in the journal Small. As technology progresses and computer components get smaller and smaller, it becomes harder to produce electronics on a nano-scale. So researchers are now turning to nature – and getting microbes involved.

In the current study, the scientists used the bacterium Magnetospirilllum magneticum.

These naturally magnetic microorganisms usually live in aquatic environments such as ponds and lakes, below the surface where oxygen is scarce. They swim following the Earth’s magnetic field lines, aligning in the magnetic field like compass needles, in search of preferred oxygen concentrations.

When the bacteria ingest iron, proteins inside their bodies interact with it to produce tiny crystals of the mineral magnetite, the most magnetic mineral on Earth.

Having studied the way the microbes collect, shape and position these nano-magnets inside themselves, the researchers copied the method and applied it outside the bacteria, effectively “growing” magnets that could in future help to build hard drives.

“We are quickly reaching the limits of traditional electronic manufacturing as computer components get smaller,” said lead researcher Dr Sarah Staniland of the University of Leeds.

“The machines we’ve traditionally used to build them are clumsy at such small scales.

“Nature has provided us with the perfect tool to [deal with] this problem.”

Besides using microorganisms to produce magnets, the researchers also managed to create tiny electrical wires from living organisms. They created nano-scale tubes made from the membrane of cells, grown in a lab-controlled environment with the help of a protein present in human lipid molecules.

A membrane is a biological film-like “wall” that separates a cell’s interior from the outside environment. Such tubes could in future be used as microscopic bio-engineered wires, capable of transferring information – just like cells do in our bodies – inside a computer, Dr Masayoshi Tanaka from Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology told the BBC.

“These biological wires can have electrical resistance and can transfer information from one set of cells inside a bio-computer to all the other cells,” he said. Besides computers, such biological wires could even be used in future for human surgery because they are highly biocompatible, Dr Tanaka added.

“Various tiny wires have been already developed all over the world, but the biocompatibility is still problematic,” he said.

“The fabricated nano-wires in this study were covered with components of cell membrane, so theoretically they are highly biocompatible.”

via BBC News – Magnetic bacteria may help build future bio-computers.

 

CIA destroyed video tapes of waterboarding

Secret CIA video tapes of the waterboarding of Osama Bin Laden’s suspected jihadist travel arranger Abu Zubaydah show him vomiting and screaming, the BBC has learned.

The tapes were destroyed by the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez. In an exclusive interview for Newsnight, Rodriguez has defended the destruction of the tapes and denied waterboarding and other interrogation techniques amount to torture.

The CIA tapes are likely to become central to the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, at Guantanamo Bay.

When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed appeared before a special military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay last Saturday, he refused to put on the headphones that would enable him to hear the translator. His civilian attorney, David Nevin, said he could not wear them because of the torture he had suffered during his interrogation.

His “torture” at the hands of his CIA interrogators at a secret “black site” to which he had been rendered, included being deprived of sleep for over a week, standing naked, wearing only a nappy, and being waterboarded 183 times.

The CIA and the US Department of Justice that authorised the secret interrogation programme in the wake of 9/11, euphemistically referred to its content as “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

Most people would probably call them “torture”, but Jose Rodriguez disputes this term.

He has written a book, “Hard Measures” in which he defends the use of such techniques, and he told me there is no doubt they were effective.

“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was probably the toughest detainee that we ever had and he was going to resist to the end of his strengths,” he told me.

Waterboarding is simulated drowning. The detainee is stripped naked and strapped onto a board in a horizontal position with feet higher than his head. Water is then dripped onto a cloth covering the nose and mouth which makes the detainee choke and temporarily stop breathing.

“It’s not a pretty sight when you are waterboarding anybody or using any of these techniques, let’s be perfectly honest,” Rodriguez admitted. Only three of the CIA’s “high value targets” were waterboarded.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged architect of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in which 17 sailors died, was waterboarded twice, and Abu Zubaydah, Osama Bin Laden’s suspected travel agent for jihadis, 83 times.

And it is the waterboarding of Zubaydah that has now become the centre of fresh controversy triggered by Newsnight’s investigation. The CIA recorded Zubaydah’s detention and interrogation – and that of other detainees – on 92 video tapes. Twelve of them covered the application of the “enhanced interrogation techniques”, including waterboarding. On one or more of them, I understand Zubaydah is shown vomiting and screaming.

John Rizzo, the CIA’s top legal counsel who oversaw the legalisation of the techniques in an exchange of memoranda with the Department of Justice, wanted to be certain that what was happening at the black site was in accordance with what had been legally agreed. He had not anticipated that waterboarding would be used as often as it was. And he sent one of his most experienced colleagues to the black site, believed to be in Thailand, to find out.

Rizzo’s colleague viewed all the 92 hours of video and concluded that the techniques were being legally applied, but he was uncomfortable about what he saw.

“He did say that portions of the tapes, particularly those of Zubaydah being waterboarded, were extraordinarily hard to watch,” Rizzo told me.

“He [Zubaydah] was reacting visibly in a very disturbing way.” So was he being sick?

“He was experiencing some physical difficulties, I’ll just leave it at that… ‘tough to watch in places’ was his term.” I asked Jose Rodriguez if he had seen the tapes. He said he had not. Was he aware that they showed Abu Zubaydah vomiting and screaming? He said he was not.

“I don’t know where you got that from”, he said. “I don’t know about screaming and vomiting but it’s not a pretty sight.”

Rodriguez knew the tapes were potentially a ticking time bomb and wanted to destroy them. He waited for three years with increasing exasperation at the apparent unwillingness of anybody on high to take responsibility for authorising their destruction. Then when news of the CIA’s secret black sites leaked, Rodriguez’s patience ran out. Believing he had the authority to do so, he ordered the 92 tapes to be minced in an industrial shredder.

“Our lawyers said it was legal,” he said. But Rizzo was not happy.

“I was stunned and angry and honestly a bit hurt. I made it clear to him, as did two CIA directors, that he did not have the authority to make a decision to destroy those tapes.”

So I asked, “He disobeyed orders?”

“He did.”

But Rodriguez is adamant that he acted legally and says his motive in ordering their destruction was to protect the identities of his CIA interrogators lest they suffer reprisals. But there was more to it than that. Three days after the tapes had been shredded, a CIA memorandum, since released under America’s Freedom of Information Act, reported comments by Jose Rodriguez:

“As Jose said, the heat from destroying [the tapes] is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes got into the public domain – he said that out of context they would make us look terrible – it would be devastating to us. All in the room agreed.”

I put this to Rodriguez and he was typically upfront about it.

“I said that, yes. If you’re waterboarding somebody and they’re naked, of course that was a concern of mine.”

Despite all the controversies around the CIA’s black sites and its interrogation programme, Jose Rodriguez stands by all that he did.

“I was honoured to serve my country after the 9/11 attacks. I am proud of the decisions that I took including the destruction of the tapes to protect the people who worked for me. I have no regrets.”

No doubt defence lawyers at Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial will try and get access to the written records that exist of what was on the tapes and seek to question the CIA lawyer who viewed them.

But under the rules of the military tribunal that restrict any discussion of torture, they are unlikely to succeed.

Via BBC

The lie that “Waterboarding is simulated drowning” is an insult to humanity. Water-boarding is not “simulated” drowning, it is REAL suffocation torture and it is a mock execution. People die from it. Since when is stripping someone naked a part of waterboarding? That’s just an additional perverted bonus added by the diseased individual doing the torture. Contrary to popular belief, torture does not work. You don’t get the truth, you get false confessions. People say anything they think the torturer wants to hear because they believe they are being killed.

Dating back to the Spanish Inquisition, the suffocation of bound prisoners with water has been favored because, unlike most other torture techniques, it produces no marks on the body.^[27] CIA officers who have subjected themselves to the technique have lasted an average of 14 seconds before capitulating.^[6]

According to at least one former CIA official, information retrieved from the waterboarding may not be reliable because a person under such duress may admit to anything, as harsh interrogation techniques lead to false confessions. “The person believes they are being killed, and as such, it really amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal under international law,” says John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.^[6] It is “bad interrogation. I mean you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture’s bad enough,” said former CIA officer Bob Baer.^[6]

Rodriguez is above the law so nothing will happen to him. In a sane world he would be helped to discover that he does indeed have regrets. Were they raping men, woman and children in the secret torture prisons? Electrocuting them? Killing them slowly with dogs, rats and flesh eating insects? Hacking off limbs, poking out eyeballs, goring people with power drills, and then suffocating them to death? Were they making prisoners eat other prisoners brains alive? Hard measures indeed. We will never know. The 92 tapes are destroyed.

Row over cold soup leaves husband stranded in frozen forest for a month

A Russian man found himself stranded in the middle of a forest in sub-zero conditions for over a month after storming out of the house following an argument with his wife over her cooking.

Yuri Ticuic must have wished he hadn’t bothered bringing it up at all after complaining to his wife after she served him up a bowl of cold soup.

And his wife must have feared he had left her for good after he failed to return for over a month having inadvertently walked deep into the heart of a dense woodland.

The 69-year-old quickly found himself stranded in the bitter cold, unable to find a way back to his house in Altai, Russia.

‘I walked and walked but after a few hours I didn’t have any idea where I was and I couldn’t find my way back,’ Mr Ticuic explained to the local media.

‘I thought I was going to die. The temperatures were sub-zero and I was getting really weak.’

Having turned his nose up at his wife’s bowl of soup, the pensioner was forced to survive for weeks on a diet of berries and forest leaves.

He was eventually found frostbitten and close to death by farm workers who then raised the alarm.

‘One day I heard voices and saw some farm workers. I called them and they managed to get me to hospital,’ he explained.

Mr Ticuic has insisted he has learnt his lesson from the incident, saying: ‘No matter what happens, that’s the last time I criticise my wife’s cooking. Anything is better than hay grain.’

Doctors say he is lucky to be alive, but fear they may have to amputate his legs.

‘They are severely damaged from frostbite and it may not be possible to save them,’ said a hospital spokesman.

via Row over cold soup leaves husband stranded in frozen forest for a month | Metro.co.uk.

Google gets Nevada driving licence for self-drive car

Driverless cars will soon be a reality on the roads of Nevada after the state approved America’s first self-driven vehicle licence. The first to hit the highway will be a Toyota Prius modified by search firm Google, which is leading the way in driverless car technology. Its first drive included a spin down Las Vegas’s famous strip. Other car companies are also seeking self-driven car licences in Nevada.

The car uses video cameras mounted on the roof, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic. Engineers at Google have previously tested the car on the streets of California, including crossing San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge. For those tests, the car remained manned at all times by a trained driver ready to take control if the software failed. According to software engineer Sebastian Thrun, the car has covered 140,000 miles with no accidents, other than a bump at traffic lights from a car behind. Bruce Breslow, director of Nevada’s Department of Motor Vehicles, says he believes driverless vehicles are the “cars of the future”. Nevada changed its laws to allow self-driven cars in March. The long-term plan is to license members of the public to drive such cars.

Google’s car has been issued with a red licence plate to make it recognisable. The plate features an infinity sign next to the number 001.

Other states, including California, are planning similar changes. “The vast majority of vehicle accidents are due to human error,” said California state Senator Alex Padilla, when he introduced the legislation.

“Through the use of computers, sensors and other systems, an autonomous vehicle is capable of analysing the driving environment more quickly and operating the vehicle more safely.”

via BBC News – Google gets Nevada driving licence for self-drive car.

The Prius is a great car. It will pretty much drive itself anyway.