'Ratzilla' Caught in China
Chinese farmers have captured a one metre-long, 5kg rat which had been terrorising villagers, it was claimed today.
The freakish giant rodent, dubbed 'ratzilla', weighed ten times that of an average rat and had been devouring 3kg fish whole in Shaoyang, in China's Hunan Province.
In a gruesome twist, farmers who caught the huge animal tried to cut it up to eat - but broke two knives hacking at its body.
The rat had been terrorising villagers in Shaoyang before local farmers banded together to finally catch it, according to shanghaiist.com.
Workers eventually cornered 'ratzilla' and killed it with makeshift weapons, but broke two knives trying to carve its thick bones and skin.
It is claimed the huge rat had been devouring 3kg fish whole.
Rat is widely eaten in Guangdong, southern China, and is used in soups as well as being stewed or braised.
It some parts of China it is considered to be three times more nutritious than chicken.
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'Demons' Invade Namibian School
Panic befell students at St Theresia Junior Secondary School hostel at Tses after 20 pupils on Sunday afternoon suffered from epileptic type of attacks, triggering fears of demons.
A relative of one of the affected girls said that those who were attacked ran around wildly and shouting: "The girl will not write the examination. I will keep her busy until 24h00. The woman is coming."
According to the relative, the girls were withdrawn from the hostel by their parents.
The Karas education regional director, Awebahe Hoeseb, yesterday confirmed the alleged demonic attacks at the hostel.
"It's very strange that this alleged demons are aware of our examination timetable. They only surface when pupils are preparing for the exams," said Hoeseb, describing the strange behaviour of the affected pupils as "examination phobia".
"It seems it's rather a figment of the learners' imagination," Hoeseb added.
Hoeseb said the school's principal has requested local spiritual leaders to perform a cleansing ceremony at the school hostel.
"We hope they will heed the call to see that it is indeed demonic attacks and pray to rescue the affected pupils," Hoeseb further said.
Hoeseb also seized the opportunity to urge learners to prepare themselves for examinations to avoid panic attacks.
"Pupils must devote themselves to quality, quantity methods and competencies to progress to the next grade," Hoeseb advised.
Recently girls at the JA Nel and Suiderlig high schools in Keetmanshoop also collapsed.
According to Hoeseb the girls are now fine after they received counselling. - All Africa
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Nazis supplied 'Crystal Meth' to troops
“Alertness aid” read the packaging, to be taken “to maintain wakefulness.” But “only from time to time,” it warned, followed by a large exclamation point.
—The young soldier, though, needed more of the drug, much more. He was exhausted by the war, becoming “cold and apathetic, completely without interests,” as he himself observed. In letters sent home by the army postal service, he asked his family to send more. On May 20, 1940, for example, he wrote: “Perhaps you could obtain some more Pervitin for my supplies?” He found just one pill was as effective for staying alert as liters of strong coffee. And — even better — when he took the drug, all his worries seemed to disappear. For a couple of hours, he felt happy.
—This 22-year-old, who wrote numerous letters home begging for more Pervitin, was not just any soldier — he was Heinrich Böll, who would go on to become one of Germany’s leading postwar writers and win a Nobel Prize for literature in 1972. And the drug he asked for is now illegal, notoriously so. We now know it as crystal meth.
Many TV fans are familiar with the drug primarily from the hit American series “Breaking Bad,” in which a chemistry teacher with financial troubles teams up with a former student to produce meth by the pound, while drug enforcement agents chase drug rings in the oppressive New Mexico heat.
Meth use is also on the rise in real-life Germany. According to the latest official reports, the country saw more first-time users over the last year than ever before. In fact, the number of known cases skyrocketed from 1,693 to 2,556 within a single year. Use of the addictive drug has been increasing in Germany since the mid-1990s, with most of it coming into the country from the neighboring Czech Republic.
German Miracle Pill
It was in Germany, though, that the drug first became popular. When the then-Berlin-based drug maker Temmler Werke launched its methamphetamine compound onto the market in 1938, high-ranking army physiologist Otto Ranke saw in it a true miracle drug that could keep tired pilots alert and an entire army euphoric. It was the ideal war drug. In September 1939, Ranke tested the drug on university students, who were suddenly capable of impressive productivity despite being short on sleep.
From that point on, the Wehrmacht, Germany’s World War II army, distributed millions of the tablets to soldiers on the front, who soon dubbed the stimulant “Panzerschokolade” (“tank chocolate”). British newspapers reported that German soldiers were using a “miracle pill.” But for many soldiers, the miracle became a nightmare.
As enticing as the drug was, its long-term effects on the human body were just as devastating. Short rest periods weren’t enough to make up for long stretches of wakefulness, and the soldiers quickly became addicted to the stimulant. And with addiction came sweating, dizziness, depression and hallucinations. There were soldiers who died of heart failure and others who shot themselves during psychotic phases. Some doctors took a skeptical view of the drug in light of these side effects. Even Leonardo Conti, the Third Reich’s top health official, wanted to limit use of the drug, but was ultimately unsuccessful.
Students, Athletes and Medics
Pervitin remained easy to obtain even after the war, on the black market or as a prescription drug from pharmacies. Doctors didn’t hesitate to prescribe it to patients as an appetite suppressant or to improve the mood of those struggling with depression. Students, especially medical students, turned to the stimulant to help them cram through the night and finish their studies faster.
Numerous athletes found Pervitin decreased their sensitivity to pain, while simultaneously increasing performance and endurance. In 1968, boxer Joseph “Jupp” Elze, 28, failed to wake again after a knockout in the ring following some 150 blows to the head. Without methamphetamine, he would have collapsed much sooner and might not have died. Elze became Germany’s first known victim of doping. Yet the drug remained on the market.
In the 1960s, the Temmler Werke supplied the armies of both East and West Germany with the stimulant pills. Not until the 1970s did West Germany’s postwar army, the Bundeswehr, remove the drug from its medical supplies, with East Germany’s National People’s Army following in 1988. Pervitin was ultimately banned in all of Germany, but its meteoric rise as an illegally produced drug had only just begun.
Dangerous Crystals
The drug’s new career came thanks to an American cookbook. In the United States, where meth use is widespread today, illegal methamphetamine was initially more an exception than the rule. Then, starting in the late 1970s, motorcycle gangs such as the Hells Angels discovered crystal meth as a source of income and began setting up large-scale drug labs. But since they targeted mainly the California cities of San Francisco and San Diego as their market for the drug, the problem remained limited mainly to the West Coast.
Methamphetamine was no longer a powder compressed into tablets, but instead sold in crystal form, and few people knew how to produce these crystals. That changed when a mad-scientist type named Steve Preisler, alias “Uncle Fester,” a chemist in Wisconsin in the mid-1980s, published a drug “cookbook” entitled “Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture.”
In this controversial book, now in its eighth edition, Preisler presented six different recipes for preparing the drug. All called for only legal ingredients, using a simple chemical reaction to extract the drug’s principal component from cough medicine, then combining it with liquids that increased its effectiveness, such as commercially available drain cleaner, battery acid or antifreeze.
More and more illegal meth labs began to spring up, producing the drug in normal apartments, isolated cabins or hotel rooms. Meth production creates highly toxic, explosive substances, and it’s not uncommon for improvised drug labs to explode or for drug-addicted mothers to store the drug’s dangerous components in the refrigerator next to baby food and end up poisoning their children.
Like Living Corpses
There are a shocking number of these “private laboratories.” According to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), around 11,000 meth labs were discovered in the country in 2010, compared to 7,530 in 2009. Of those, 2,000 were in Iowa, an agricultural state known as part of the country’s “bread basket.”
Meth can be snorted, smoked, swallowed or injected, with addicts often consuming 1,000 times the dose once taken by Wehrmacht soldiers during World War II. The side effects are alarming. Meth weakens the immune system, which leads to eczema, hair loss and so-called “meth mouth,” in which the teeth fall out and mucus membranes rot. Meth addicts experience extreme weight loss and develop kidney, stomach and heart problems, which have a nightmarish combined effect: Before and after pictures of meth addicts show that they come to look like living corpses within an extremely short span of time.
Despite these terrible side effects, it seems the drug has lost none of the appeal to which Heinrich Böll succumbed. In 2011, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, based outside Washington, estimated that around 13 million Americans had tried meth at some point. The UN estimates around 24 million users globally. - WWII Drug: The German Granddaddy of Crystal Meth
Speed-Speed-Speedfreak: A Fast History of Amphetamine
Speed, Ecstasy, Ritalin: The Science of Amphetamines
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Bigfoot lives!? Existence backed by DNA, video, claim Sasquatch Genome Project researchers
Bigfoot is real, and there's now both DNA and video evidence to prove it, claims one group of devoted Sasquatch researchers.
The group's "never-before-seen footage" of an alleged Bigfoot creature sleeping in the woods of Kentucky has been presented this week along with various blood and hair samples said to be unlike anything seen before.
The group's startling statements are supposedly backed by 11 outside laboratories and universities, which all reviewed the findings, and which were provided with blind samples, according to the report by the Sasquatch Genome Project.
"We want people to understand that this is a serious study," Dr. Melba Ketchum, a genetics scientist, who led the project during the course of the five-year study, told CBS DFW.
Unsurprisingly, others are challenging Ketchum's credibility, including New York University whose laboratory Ketchum claims similarly tested a field sample and found it having usual human mitochondrial results. Continue reading w/ images at NY Daily News
Top Secret Sasquatch: Exposing the True Nature of Bigfoot and Its Controversial Connections to UFOs, the Fossil Record, and Human History (Forbidden Bigfoot, Part Two)
Bigfoot and Human Ancestors: Views of UFOs, Planetary Changes and Species.
Sasquatch Genesis
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