No potty parity here

Police in northern India arrested a man who allegedly threw a girl into a pile of glowing embers after he caught her trespassing, an attack authorities said Wednesday may have been motivated by caste.

The 6-year-old girl is recuperating at a state-run hospital in Mathura, the north Indian city where the alleged attack occurred, said Dr. Ramesh Kumar.

She is considered a dalit _ a member of the lowest caste in India, where a system of rigid social hierarchy still lingers. The alleged attacker, Madan Singh, 22, comes from a higher caste.

Singh discovered the girl relieving herself Tuesday in a field he owned and demanded she immediately stop what she was doing and leave his property.

“When she did not respond, he simply lifted her and threw her in a heap of embers,” local police official Govind Agarwal told The Associated Press. “The cry of the girl drew the attention of the villagers. They came rushing and pulled the girl out of fire.”

Image of a Zimbabwean 10,000,000 dollar bill

http://www.portfolio.com/slideshows/2008/3/Worlds-Most-Worthless-Money?TID=advert/wired/worthless_money

 

Auditions for the NYC Subway

I didn’t know that official auditions for performing on the NYC subways existed. I don’t live there, just an occasional tourist. I know though that some of them are pretty good. Has NYC produced any minor "subway stars" like Mary Lou Lord riding on the Boston MTA?

 

Where did Charles Taylor do his banking?

Taylor ‘had billions’ in US bank . The ex-president of Liberia had holed away as much as $5 billion according to the article. Got the money from the diamond trade (with a little help from friend Pat Robertson).

Among some of the projects the democratically elected Taylor used his money for were to pay his soldiers to eat people : 

Describing himself as Mr Taylor’s former chief of operations and commander of a death squad in Liberia and Sierra Leone, Mr Marzah said the former leader ordered militias to eat the flesh of enemies in Liberia, including African and UN peacekeepers.

"He said we should eat them. Even the UN white people - he said we could use them as pork to eat," Mr Marzah said, adding that it was to "set an example for the people to be afraid".

When asked by defence lawyer Courtenay Griffith about how the militiamen would "prepare a human being" for eating, Mr Marzah described the splitting, cleaning, decapitating and cooking of the corpse with salt and pepper.

"We slit your throat, butcher you… throw away the head, take the flesh and put it in a pot… Charles Taylor knows that," he added.

Mr Marzah also described how he had killed so many men, women and children that he had lost count, and also slit open the stomachs of pregnant women on Mr Taylor’s orders.

It’s the testimony of one guy, but in the context of Liberia, it’s believable.