Tag: halloween

Halloween ‘Corpses’ Hanging Outside PA Home Spark Outrage as NAACP Demands Removal Over ‘Painful Historical Significance’ — Homeowner Refuses to Back Down

A Bucks County, Pennsylvania, homeowner is refusing to remove his Halloween decorations after the local NAACP and some residents claimed the display of hanging “bodies” resembles lynching victims and carries “painful historical significance” for Black Americans.

Homeowner Mike Wade told reporters he bought the kit and never intended to offend anyone. “My house is scary. My house is always scary. It’s always set up scary. Same thing. Dead bodies laying around, skeletons. It’s Halloween,” he said.

Some neighbors agreed it was simply seasonal spookiness, while others, including resident Roshea Newkirk, questioned, “I’m just looking at it and I’m just thinking to him, like, ‘do you not see what’s wrong with this?’”

The controversy reached a Bristol Borough Council meeting, where resident Karla Scott called the scene “very inappropriate.”

Council President Ralph DiGuiseppe confirmed that a borough inspector contacted the homeowner shortly after the display went up. Officials asked him to take it down, but he declined.

The homeowner told FOX 29 the display was simply for Halloween and there was “no other agenda.”

Keep reading

FBI: Possible Halloween weekend terror attack averted, multiple suspects arrested in Michigan

A possible terrorist attack planned for Halloween weekend was thwarted by authorities, according to FBI Director Kash Patel.

Patel said Friday morning on X that multiple suspects were arrested in Michigan in connection with this plot. 

According to Patel, these suspects “were allegedly plotting a violent attack over Halloween weekend.”

What we don’t know:

It is unclear where the suspects were planning the attack. Information being spread on social media references a possible attack at Warren’s TACOM, but that is an old story about a suspect who was arrested and charged in the spring.

The FBI in Detroit said agents were present in Dearborn and Inkster early Friday, but could not confirm if this was related to the terror attack plot referenced by Patel. 

Dearborn police also confirmed that the FBI conducted an operation in the city. Police said there is no threat to the community.

Keep reading

Halloween Is a Middle Finger to Communists

Halloween, by its nature, is the one holiday that can essentially be about anything: fairy tales and storybook characters, movies and celebrities, robots and aliens, pizza and M&Ms, or, one of my new personal favorites, Mrs. Doubtfire and her hot flashes. That there are far more variables than constants on Halloween is a reminder that it is defined, above all, by freedom.

For another reminder, consider that police in China recently cracked down on costumed revelers because of the supposed threat they pose to the Communist government.

Indeed, law enforcement in Shanghai last weekend set their sights on celebrants who had the audacity to dress up, for example, as a poop emoji and as Kim Kardashian, the latter of whom can be seen on video waving goodbye to the group behind her as she was forced into a police van.

Before the parties began this month, police saturated the city. Those not in costume were reportedly left alone, while individuals were taken into custody for dressing up and were sometimes made to remove them. When law enforcement dispersed Zhongshan Park, the cops conditioned their freedom on decostuming. Private businesses were also allegedly ordered not to advertise or host Halloween events. The scrutiny was not limited to Shanghai.

In other words, this was not about crowd control.

Keep reading

Man in his 40s is arrested after ‘dressing up as Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi for Halloween and posting it on Facebook’

A man in his 40s has been arrested after allegedly dressing up as Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi for Halloween and posting it on Facebook. 

Pictures posted by David Wootton show him wearing an Arabic-style headdress, with the slogan ‘I love Ariana Grande’ on his T-shirt, and carrying a rucksack with ‘Boom’ and ‘TNT’ written on the front.

The disturbing Halloween costume which was captioned ‘bet I get kicked out of the party’ caused fury on social media. 

North Yorkshire Police confirmed the man arrested had been released on conditional police bail to allow for further enquiries to be carried out. 

Abedi killed 22 people – some of them children – as well as himself when he detonated his device in the foyer of Manchester Arena at the end of an Ariana Grande concert in May 2017. 

In a statement, the force said: ‘North Yorkshire Police can confirm that a man has been arrested after the force received complaints about a man wearing an offensive costume on social media, depicting murderer, Salman Abedi who killed 22 people at Manchester Arena.

‘The man, who is aged in his 40s, was arrested on 1 November on suspicion of a number of offences including using a public communication network to send offensive messages.’

Keep reading

Teenage Trick-Or-Treaters Are Too Scary For These Cities

Every year, it seems like the controversies surrounding Halloween keep getting stupider.

Last year, fears about “rainbow fentanyl” caused panic over brightly colored pills supposedly designed as candy. This year, parents online expressed horror over the “switch witch” (a clever, if cruel way to throw away your kid’s candy haul), and a New Jersey school district announced its baffling decision to cancel Halloween celebrations over concern for the minority of kids who don’t celebrate the holiday.

But there’s also another Halloween debate that has long gotten out of hand: How old is too old to go trick-or-treating? While this seems like a question for parents, some local governments have handed down their own decrees about just who gets to participate in Halloween candy collecting.

According to a recent NPR story, kids over 14 in Chesapeake, Virginia, caught trick-or-treating can be charged with a misdemeanor. Until 2019, they apparently faced six months in jail.

In nearby Norfolk, Suffolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach, kids over 12 are barred from trick-or-treating. Rayne, Louisiana, and Jacksonville, Illinois, also ban teenage trick-or-treaters. In Belleville, Illinois, they can get slapped with a $1,000 fine.

How often these laws are enforced is unclear. However, it doesn’t seem like local police departments are rigorously verifying the age of trick-or-treaters.

“Officers do not spend Halloween night ‘carding’ trick-or-treaters, nor are they actively seeking ‘over age’ participants,” one Chesapeake spokesperson told Today in 2019.

It’s not entirely clear why these cities have enacted age limits on trick-or-treating; the most common—though often vaguely phrased—reasoning seems to be an attempt to halt teenage crime.

Keep reading

Why Is Halloween Candy So Expensive? Sugar Protectionism.

There ain’t no such thing as free candy, not even on Halloween—as anyone who has stocked up in advance of Tuesday’s holiday can attest.

Candy prices have jumped over 7 percent since last year and are up over 21 percent since October 2021, according to inflation data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even in an environment where everything is getting more expensive, candy prices have climbed even faster than the overall rate of inflation for groceries and other home goods.

The main culprit is rising prices within the supply chains for America’s candy makers—and, specifically, rising sugar prices. Much of America’s supply of the sweet stuff comes from Mexico, where a dryer-than-normal summer meant a below-average sugar crop, Barron‘s reports. The New York Times spreads the blame a bit wider: Everything from high fertilizer prices (thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine) to hotter, dryer weather all around the world that affected sugar crops in Asia, Central America, and West Africa.

There is, however, one major factor that the Times ignores entirely: America’s sugar policies.

The series of subsidies and tariffs that the federal government uses to artificially inflate sugar prices in the United States cost consumers between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion every year, according to a timely Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released today. Those protectionist policies aren’t the cause of the recent spike in sugar or candy prices, of course, but prices would absolutely be lower without them.

The so-called “sugar program” administrated by the federal Department of Agriculture “creates higher sugar prices, which cost consumers more than producers benefit, at an annual cost to the economy of around $1 billion per year,” the GAO concludes. No matter what happens to cause global sugar prices to fluctuate, Americans have consistently paid higher prices over the past 20 years:

Those higher prices get baked—quite literally—into the cost of everything from Milky Ways to Sour Patch Kids. And, as the GAO also points out, this is a classic case of concentrated benefits for a special interest that results in huge, but very diffused, costs for everyone else: “Because the program guarantees relatively high prices for domestic sugar, sugar farmers benefit significantly, and sugar farms are substantially more profitable per acre than other U.S. farms.”

Keep reading