Tag: poisonings

Six American and Vietnamese guests found dead in Bangkok hotel were poisoned with cyanide after business feud: cops

An American Vietnamese woman is believed to have killed five people with cyanide-laced tea before poisoning herself at an upscale Bangkok hotel after a legal dispute over bad investments, Thai police revealed Wednesday.

Police suspect Chong Sherine, 56, is to blame for the grim slayings after the six bodies were discovered in a room at the five-star Grand Hyatt Erawan hotel late Tuesday, the Bangkok Post reported. 

Traces of the rapid-acting poison were uncovered during the autopsies and on drinking glasses and a teapot found inside the hotel room, cops said.

Relatives of the victims told investigators that Chong had apparently become embroiled in a legal spat with the five others after urging them to invest in various construction projects, Police Maj. Gen. Nopasilp Poonsawat said.

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Poison gas new Israeli weapon threatening lives of captives in Gaza

The Israeli army knows that bombs exploding inside tunnels can disperse toxic gases such as carbon monoxide, capable of killing Palestinian resistance fighters within them, two defense sources told the Israeli magazine Mekomit.

In a report published on 2 February, the sources said that despite this knowledge, the army aimed bombs at the entrances of tunnels in Gaza during its “Operation Guardian of the Walls” in May 2021, also known by Palestinians as the battle of “Sayf al-Quds.”

One source said that during the operation, members of Hamas military wing, the Qassam Brigades, were killed not just “because they were hit by a bomb, but also because they were in the tunnels, and the bomb emitted gas.”

A second source added that the Israeli military conducted internal tests which concluded the poison gases released from bombs in such situations are fatal.

Gadi Eisenkot, the chief of staff at the time, said that the purpose of bombing tunnel entrances to the tunnels built by Hamas in Gaza was to “turn the tunnels into a death trap” and kill hundreds of Qassam fighters who would be trapped inside.

The first source told Mekomit that the army was not using chemical or biological explosive warheads. Detonating conventional explosives inside a closed space like a tunnel was enough to spread lethal toxic gas released as byproducts. The gas can travel “a great distance in a closed area.”

Mekomit reported it is unclear whether Israel is deliberately bombing tunnels to kill Qassam fighters using poisonous gas in this way in its current war on Gaza that began on 7 October.

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Why Halloween’s ‘Poison Candy’ Myth Endures

IN THE FALL OF 1982, an unfounded fear haunted almost every house in Chicago. As area children prepared to “trick” their neighbors with their impressions of werewolves, vampires, and zombies, their parents were much more terrified of the “treats” their kids were eager to devour.

Candy was a potential murder weapon. Apples might contain carefully concealed razor blades. Twizzlers might be laced with rat or ant poison. Mayor of Chicago Jane Byrne urged extreme caution and vigilance on Halloween, adding that if she had children, she would not allow them to accept any food items.

As the fear crept across the nation, towns nowhere near Chicago began to sound the alarm. In Trenton, governor of New Jersey Thomas Kean signed a bill imposing a mandatory six-month jail sentence on anyone convicted of handing out contaminated Halloween candy. In Vineland, a southern New Jersey city, Mayor Patrick Fiorilli imposed an outright ban on trick-or-treating, noting “what an opportunity this was for some nut to do something.” Local hospitals offered to X-ray children’s Halloween candy hauls.

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Study Shows Pesticide Companies Hid Developmental Neurotoxicity Data From EU Regulators

A recently published study reveals that pesticide companies have failed to disclose data related to brain toxicity. What does this mean for toxicity data in other fields of research?

Recently, the U.S. Geological Survey acknowledged that at least 45% of the nation’s tap water is estimated to have one or more types of the chemicals known as per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, or PFAS, also known as forever chemicals. This is, unfortunately, just the latest in a string of similar admissions relating to water quality which have come to light in recent years.

As more Americans grapple with the reality that we are swimming in a soup of toxins and radiation, Europeans are becoming aware of the lack of transparency involving studies of pesticides, and potentially other toxins.

A study published in early June found that some studies of pesticides relating to developmental neurotoxicity (DNT) were submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but not to regulatory bodies within the European Union. It took between 14 and 21 years for EU regulators to become aware of these studies. Once they were aware of the data, they enacted new safety regulations in some cases and continue to evaluate necessary steps in others.

A DNT test typically exposes pregnant female rats to a pesticide to assess their offspring for neuropathological and behavioral changes. The tests have been useful for identifying chemicals which will cause DNT in humans.

The study was first reported on by The Guardian in collaboration with European outlets Bayerischer Rundfunk/ARD, Der Spiegel in Germany, SRF in Switzerland, and Le Monde in France. It has received little attention in the American media.

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Arsenic found in body of jailed ex-Georgian president – lawyer

Nail clippings taken from jailed former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili have tested positive for arsenic, his lawyer has claimed ahead of a court hearing involving his client. The ex-leader’s supporters have maintained that he is gravely ill and has had toxic heavy metals in his body.

Shalva Khachapuridze, who represents Saakashvili, said on Monday that the results of the toxicology test of his client’s samples would be available later in the day. The presence of the poisonous element was confirmed to him in a phone call, he told journalists on Monday, according to the private television station Mtavari Arkhi.

Saakashvili sneaked into Georgia in 2021 ahead of municipal elections, despite the risk of being arrested and facing prosecution on various charges. At the time, he had already been sentenced in absentia based on some of the charges, while others were still pending. On Friday, he is set to appear before a court over the most recent alleged transgression – an illegal crossing of the national border, Khachapuridze said.

The attorney stated that his client would probably have to use a wheelchair to attend the proceedings because he can no longer walk properly.

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5 “CRAZY” CONSPIRACY THEORIES THAT ACTUALLY TURNED OUT TO BE TRUE

Deception, lying, and hiding the truth are nothing new. Whenever there was a struggle for power, influence, money, or dominance, there was a conspiracy… Countless conspiracies turnout out to be true and today we will explore some examples.

As it turns out many of them hail from the United States, the land of “the brave and the free” (just kidding…). So, let’s check out some of the theories peddled across multiple sites over the last couple of decades. 

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The mysterious death of Stanley Meyer and his water powered car

The crime scene is in Grove City, Ohio, Franklin County.

With all the ingredients of the setting in the American province that is dear to crime writers.

It’s the 21st March 1998, the first day of spring, and four men are having lunch in a restaurant.

A waiter serves one of them some cranberry juice, perhaps (but we will never know for sure) chosen for dessert. This man, immediately after the first sip, suddenly gets up as if he’s gone crazy, he holds his hands around his neck, he loses his breath, runs out into the parking lot, collapses to the ground and pronounces his last words “they poisoned me”.

Steve Robinette, the lead detective on the case, collected the testimonies of everyone in the parking lot, including the final disturbing words of a man immediately identified as Stanley Meyer, a citizen of Grove City. His brother Stephen was one of the four at the table, and he heard the words spoken at the end of his life. Robinette is not one for interminable investigations. He performed a toxicology analysis, which gave no significant results, and he also spoke to the coroner, who attributed his death to a brain aneurysm, compatible with previous episodes of hypertension. In just three months, he closed the case file, sealed it with a coloured elastic band and wrote on the cover “death by natural causes”. Formally, the case was now resolved.

In 2015 Robinette retired from the police force, and devoted himself to politics, becoming president of the city council, and in 2019 he also ran for mayor.

But we can all rest assured that in all these years he never forgot the case of Stanley Meyer, the inventor of the water-powered car who, in 1998, got up from a table at a restaurant to run into a car park, some say just to leave us a message: “they poisoned me, and it’s because of what I’m doing to revolutionize the car world”. The coroner’s report contained the following statement: “no poison known to American science has been found”. But maybe the search for Meyer’s enemies should have gone beyond American soil. We have to go back to 1975, when Meyer, who spent his life patenting technical solutions of every kind, from the banking sector to, ironically, heart monitoring, decided to explore the automotive world. In that year, the effects of the Middle East oil embargo, which had also led to a crisis in the United States, were still considerable, with a significant drop in car sales.

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Why the Feds Intentionally Poisoned Americans During Prohibition, Killing Thousands—and Why You’ve Never Heard about It

I was recently invited to speak to a student group about alcohol prohibition. During the course of my talk, I shared with them perhaps the most chilling historical account of America’s failed experiment to ban the sale of alcohol.

The Prohibition Era (1920 -1933), which began with the passage of the Volstead Act, had many problems. Virtually overnight, millions of Americans became criminals for the “crime” of having a drink. Instead of people trading money for a jug of beer or a bottle of gin, they had to make their own or turn to the black market. It resulted in a surge of organized crime and the rise of many of the most notorious gangsters in history, including Al Capone, Dutch Schultz, and Charles “Lucky” Luciano.

“In the absence of Prohibition, we wouldn’t have had the kind of syndicated criminality that occurred. Prohibition was the catalyst,” explains Howard Abadinsky, professor of criminal justice at St. John’s University and the author of the book Organized Crime.

One might think the surge of organized crime—which resulted in a corresponding surge of law enforcement to suppress it—would be the darkest consequence of Prohibition. It was not.

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One Year On… Navalny Poison Pulp Fiction – Surprisingly – Provides a Real Conclusion

There is no doubt Navalny is an asset for Western intelligence agencies assigned to subvert Russia from within with his scripted media antics.

The hallmark of a shoddy, pulp fiction story is it quickly fades from memory. It’s a bit like lots of other made-for-fast-consumption experiences: fast-food, trashy news, infotainment, drugs, or indeed propaganda stunts. It’s sold brashly with gaudy packaging but the intended substance is lacking. Hence, in a short period, the experience and memory vanish leaving a disappointing void.

The alleged poisoning of Russian blogger and political gadfly Alexei Navalny is a case in point. It was one year ago that he dramatically fell ill while on a flight from Siberia. He was rushed to hospital where the Russian doctors stabilized his condition. The medics found nothing extraneous in his body fluids and suggested he was suffering from a medical reaction. Two days later, Navalny was permitted by the Russian government to be flown on a private airplane for treatment in Germany. Within days, the Berlin authorities were claiming he had been poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent, Novichok. (After body samples had been analyzed at a Bundeswehr military laboratory!)

This was the same nerve poison that was allegedly used by Kremlin assassins against Russian traitor-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in March 2018. Remember the Western media kerfuffle over that drama, the diplomatic expulsions and sanctions? Where have all the expressions of concern about that obscure incident gone? Indeed, where are the Skripals now? The British authorities like a conjuror refuse to disclose the whereabouts of the disappeared. The silence is beyond bizarre.

As with the Skripal case, there then followed a torrent of accusations from Western governments and media claiming that Navalny had likewise been the victim of an assassination plot by the Kremlin. There were grave demands for Moscow to conduct a criminal investigation into the alleged poisoning of Navalny.

One year on, Western governments and media have stopped playing to the gallery with unsubstantiated claims about Navalny. Even the blogger himself, who is now serving three years in a Russian jail for financial corruption, has stopped talking about it. Last year, while allegedly convalescing in Germany for five months in violation of his probation terms for an earlier suspended conviction by a Russian court, Navalny made sensational claims that President Vladimir Putin had personally ordered his assassination. Western media indulged and amplified the slander. Then he returned to Russia in January, whereupon the Russian prison authorities detained him and converted his suspended sentence into jail time. Rightly so, too.

Laughably, the prisoner has been free to give interviews to prominent Western media outlets. So much for him being “persecuted in a penal colony”!

Last week, he wrote an opinion piece for the British Guardian and this week gave an interview to the New York Times. Strangely, however, he barely mentions the purported assassination plot that Putin had allegedly ordered. That shows, inadvertently, that not even Navalny has any conviction in peddling the preposterous story.

The contradiction and absurdities in the Navalny saga, as with the Skripal “prequel”, are legion. A detailed account of official communications from the Russian foreign ministry demonstrates how the German authorities have refused to follow basic standards of informational exchange with Moscow on the provenance of claims made by Navalny that have been amplified by Berlin and other Western governments. That refusal, like the British one over the Skripal affair, is a shocking dereliction of diplomatic standards and due process.

As with so many other anti-Russian tropes – from election meddling to cyber attacks – there is an absolute dearth of evidence provided to back up accusations. The accusations are recklessly repeated over and over and thereby take on the appearance of being established facts (The Big Lie technique of Josef Goebbels no less). When in fact the claims are always fiction.

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