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Romanian postcard by Casa Filmului Acin, no. 232.
On 18 December 2019, French actress Claudine Auger (1941) passed away. She is best known as Bond girl Domino in the James Bond film Thunderball (1965). At 17, she was Miss France 1958 and she became the first runner-up in the Miss World contest. Later she worked mostly in France and Italy.
Claudine Auger was born Claudine Oger in Paris, France in 1941. She attended St. Joan of Arc College. At the age of 16 the well-proportioned brunette earned the title of Miss France 1958 and was also the first runner-up in the 1958 Miss World contest. A year later, she married the 41-year-old writer-director Pierre Gaspard-Huit. She attended the Paris Drama Conservatory, where she performed dramatic roles. Still at school, Jean Cocteau cast her as a tall ballerina in his final film Le testament d'Orphée, ou ne me demandez pas pourquoi!/The Testament of Orpheus (1960), about an aging poet who knows he is dying. She had her first leading lady role in the satirical Swashbuckler Le Masque de fer/The Iron Mask (Henri Decoin, 1962) opposite Jean Marais as the aging musketeer D’Artagnan. She also starred opposite Pierre Étaix in his Tati-esque comedy Yoyo (Pierre Étaix, 1965). On holiday in Nassau, she met writer-producer Kevin McClory. He recommended her for an audition for Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965), the fourth 007 mission featuring Sean Connery. She auditioned for the role of Domino, the mistress of international business executive and agent of the evil SPECTRE organization Emilio Largo (Adolpho Celi). Domino was originally to be an Italian woman: Dominetta Petacchi. Auger impressed the producers so much that they re-wrote the part into a French woman, Dominique Derval. Auger later claimed that she related to her character, as she and Domino were involved with older men. Although she took lessons to perfect her English, her voice was eventually dubbed by Nikki van der Zyl. Immediate by-products of Claudine's stardom were a semi-nude Playboy spread and a guest shot on an American TV special starring Danny Thomas and Bob Hope.
Thunderball launched Claudine Auger into a successful European film career, but it did little for her otherwise in the United States. In Europe, she reunited with her James Bond director Terence Young for the British-French spy film Triple Cross (1966) with Christopher Plummer. Other trendy sixties films in which she starred were the French-Spanish-Italian thriller L'Homme de Marrakesh/That Man George! (Jacques Deray, 1966), the Italian-French-German caper comedy Operazione San Gennaro/Operation San Gennaro (Dino Risi, 1967), the Italian-French sex comedy Le Dolci Signore/Anyone Can Play (Fausto Saraceni, Luigi Zampa, 1967) opposite Ursula Andress, the French satire Jeu De Massacre/The Killing Game (Alain Jessua, 1967) and the Italian fantastic comedy L'Arcidiavolo/The devil in Love (Ettore Scola, 1968) starring Vittorio Gassman. One of her best films was Reazione a catena/Bay Of Blood (Mario Bava, 1971). This Giallo - an Italian genre of bloody horror-thrillers – is often cited as the grandfather of the modern slasher film. Robert Firsching at AllMovie: “the film's style influenced countless American slasher films of the 1970s and 1980s. Bava also includes a strangulation by telephone cord, a gory axe decapitation, a man speared to a wall, and five other murders. Antefatto was a trendsetting film, and paved the way for literally hundreds of graphically violent imitations.” Auger is the scheming daughter of a murdered Countess (played by film legend Isa Miranda). Her staged suicide forms the basis of the film's plot. With two other Bond girls, Barbara Bach and Barbara Bouchet, she appeared in another Giallo, La Tarantola dal ventre nero/Black Belly of the Tarantula (Paolo Cavara, 1972) starring Giancarlo Giannini. That year she also co-starred with Christopher Mitchum, the son of Robert Mitchum, in the Italian action film Un verano para matar/Summertime Killer (Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi, 1972).
During the following decades, Claudine Auger kept busy in both the Italian and the French cinema. A classic is the French thriller Flic Story/Cop Story (Jacques Deray, 1975) starring Alain Delon and Jean-Louis Trintignant. She again worked with Jacques Deray on his modern noir Un Papillon sur l'Epaule/A butterfly on the shoulder (Jacques Deray, 1978) starring Lino Ventura. James Travers reviews at Films de France: “In many ways, this is one of Jacques Deray’s most sophisticated and appealing films – the cobweb intrigue is masterfully woven, the detached photography evokes the sense of an unseen deadly threat throughout, and the minimalist script emphasises the feeling of isolation and helplessness of the film’s principal protagonist. It is a satisfying and compelling work, but also a profoundly disturbing one”. In Italy she appeared in the comedy of errors Viaggio con Anita/Lovers and Liars (Mario Monicelli, 1979) starring Goldie Hawn and Giancarlo Giannini, and the domestic comedy Aragosta a Colazione/Lobster for Breakfast (Giorgio Capitani, 1979). The French comedy L'Associé/The Associate (René Gainville, 1980), featuring Michel Serrault, lead in 1996 to a less successful American remake with Whoopi Goldberg. In the UK Auger made Secret Places (Zelda Barron, Judith Lang, 1984) and the British-American production The Summer House (Waris Hussein, 1993) starring Jeanne Moreau. Her last films were the erotic drama Salt on Our Skin/Desire (Andrew Birki, 1993) with Greta Scacchi, and the Spanish comedy Los hombres siempre mienten/Men Always Lie (Antonio del Real, 1995). Later she worked incidentally for TV. After her divorce from Pierre Gaspard-Huit, Claudine Auger was married to businessman Peter Brent until his death in 2008. After a long illness, Claudine Auger passed away on 18 December 2019.
Sources: Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Robert Firsching (AllMovie), James Travers (Films de France), Thomas Staedeli (Cyranos), les Gens du Cinéma, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Spanish postcard by Postal Oscar Color, Hospitalet (Barcelona), no. 608, 1966.
French actress Claudine Auger (1941) is best known as Bond girl Domino in the James Bond film Thunderball (1965). At 17, she was Miss France 1958 and she became the first runner-up in the Miss World contest. Later she worked mostly in France and Italy.
Claudine Auger was born Claudine Oger in Paris, France in 1941. She attended St. Joan of Arc College. At the age of 16 the well-proportioned brunette earned the title of Miss France Monde and was also the first runner-up in the 1958 Miss World contest. A year later, she married the 41-year-old writer-director Pierre Gaspard-Huit. She attended the Paris Drama Conservatory, where she performed dramatic roles. Still at school, Jean Cocteau cast her as a tall ballerina in his final film Le testament d'Orphée, ou ne me demandez pas pourquoi!/The Testament of Orpheus (1960), about an aging poet who knows he is dying. She had her first leading lady role in the satirical Swashbuckler Le Masque de fer/The Iron Mask (1962, Henri Decoin) opposite Jean Marais as the aging musketeer D’Artagnan. She also starred opposite Pierre Étaix in his Tati-esque comedy Yoyo (1965, Pierre Étaix). On holiday in Nassau, she met writer-producer Kevin McClory. He recommended her for an audition for Thunderball (1965, Terence Young), the fourth 007 mission featuring Sean Connery. She auditioned for the role of Domino, the mistress of international business executive and agent of the evil SPECTRE organization Emilio Largo (Adolpho Celi). Domino was originally to be an Italian woman: Dominetta Petacchi. Auger impressed the producers so much that they re-wrote the part into a French woman, Dominique Derval. Auger later claimed that she related to her character, as she and Domino were involved with older men. Although she took lessons to perfect her English, her voice was eventually dubbed by Nikki van der Zyl. Immediate by-products of Claudine's stardom were a semi-nude Playboy spread and a guest shot on an American TV special starring Danny Thomas and Bob Hope.
Thunderball launched Claudine Auger into a successful European film career, but it did little for her otherwise in the United States. In Europe, she reunited with her James Bond director Terence Young for the British-French spy film Triple Cross (1966) with Christopher Plummer. Other trendy sixties films in which she starred were the French-Spanish-Italian thriller L'Homme de Marrakesh/That Man George! (1966, Jacques Deray), the Italian-French-German caper comedy Operazione San Gennaro/Operation San Gennaro (1967, Dino Risi), the Italian-French sex comedy Le Dolci Signore/Anyone Can Play (1967, Fausto Saraceni, Luigi Zampa) opposite Ursula Andress, the French satire Jeu De Massacre/The Killing Game (1967, Alain Jessua) and the Italian fantastic comedy L'Arcidiavolo/The devil in Love (1968, Ettore Scola) starring Vittorio Gassman. One of her best films was Reazione a catena/Bay Of Blood (1971, Mario Bava). This Giallo - an Italian genre of bloody horror-thrillers Italian – is often cited as the grandfather of the modern slasher film. Robert Firsching synopsis t AllMovie: “the film's style influenced countless American slasher films of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Bava also includes a strangulation by telephone cord, a gory axe decapitation, a man speared to a wall, and five other murders. Antefatto was a trendsetting film, and paved the way for literally hundreds of graphically violent imitations.” Auger is the scheming daughter of a murdered Countess (played by film legend Isa Miranda). Her staged suicide forms the basis of the film's plot. With two other Bond girls, Barbara Bach and Barbara Bouchet, she appeared in another Giallo, La Tarantola dal ventre nero/Black Belly of the Tarantula (1972, Paolo Cavara) starring Giancarlo Giannini. Opposite Christopher Mitchum, the son of Robert Mitchum, she co-starred in the Italian action film Un verano para matar/Summertime Killer (1972, Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi).
During the following decades, Claudine Auger kept busy in both the Italian and the French cinema. A classic is the French thriller Flic Story/Cop Story (1975, Jacques Deray) starring Alain Delon and Jean-Louis Trintignant. She again worked with Deray on his modern noir Un Papillon sur l'Epaule/A butterfly on the shoulder (1978, Jacques Deray) starring Lino Ventura, James Travers reviews at Films de France: “In many ways, this is one of Jacques Deray’s most sophisticated and appealing films – the cobweb intrigue is masterfully woven, the detached photography evokes the sense of an unseen deadly threat throughout, and the minimalist script emphasises the feeling of isolation and helplessness of the film’s principal protagonist. It is a satisfying and compelling work, but also a profoundly disturbing one”. In Italy she appeared in the comedy of errors Viaggio con Anita/Lovers and Liars (1979, Mario Monicelli) starring Goldie Hawn and Giancarlo Giannini, and the domestic comedy Aragosta a Colazione/Lobster for Breakfast (1979, Giorgio Capitani). The French comedy L'Associé/The Associate (1980, René Gainville), featuring Michel Serrault, lead in 1996 to a less successful American remake with Whoopi Goldberg. In the UK Auger made Secret Places (1984, Zelda Barron, Judith Lang) and the British-American production The Summer House (1993, Waris Hussein) starring Jeanne Moreau. Her last films were the erotic drama Salt on Our Skin/Desire (1993, Andrew Birkin) with Greta Scacchi, and the Spanish comedy Los hombres siempre mienten/Men Always Lie (1995, Antonio del Real). Later she worked incidentally for TV. After her divorce from Pierre Gaspard-Huit, Claudine Auger was married to businessman Peter Brent until his death in 2008.
Sources: Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Robert Firsching (AllMovie), James Travers (Films de France), Thomas Staedeli (Cyranos), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
Rumor is that the large blood stain at the corner of Spofford Avenue and Barretto Street is from 15-year-old Destiny Sanchez, whose beaten body was found Friday morning fifty yards away, nestled in a vestibule of her aunt’s apartment on Barretto Street, covered in bleach.
The medical examiner cited strangulation as the cause of death. The neighborhood talks of surveillance tapes showing her stopping mid-flight at the bodega, bleeding.
Or maybe it’s blood from the rumored early fight knife fight between her father and her stepmother’s brother, the man who was in police custody over her killing.
Or maybe it’s the blood from a midday week-old shoot–out that took place a few yards away, when one member of a gang shot another member, “Mussolini,” over “money and girls.”
Or maybe it’s the blood from when the pimp “O” shot the pimp “Payroll” a few weeks ago on Spofford, at Heros’ Corner.
Or maybe it’s the blood of Snowbunny or Bernice, prostitutes who walk Spofford Avenue, who were cut by a john.
It’s not the blood from 16-year-old Keiana, who was shot in the chest two weeks ago, walking home with friends, on the Bryant Street overpass. That’s too far away, and her friends only carried her one block before her weight overcame them.
It’s not the blood from when 43-year-old Kenia Castillo-Reyes was shot in the head by an ex-lover a few months ago. She fell dead in front of her house a few blocks away on Coster Street.
Or maybe it’s the blood of none of them.
In the heart of the city, in neon, a star, and the words "Jesus The light of the world" shined over Burnside Street, the main drag. Portland, Oregon in 1980. Not too long later, the sign came down and the gospel ministry became the downtown nightclub "Starry Night", a warren of twisting back stairwells, dark wood, the sounds of Robert Cray, Emmy Lou Harris, a murder by strangulation, and stale cigarette smoke, beer, and pot. Now it's the Roseland (or it could be something else by now, hard for an old guy to keep track of how fast things change their names these days). But I'll always remember looking up and seeing the Jesus sign coming down--just a days work for a sign crew, but a shifting of major cultural geological plates it seemed at the time. To read a true account of this episode in the life of the city--"Slabtown Confidential" portlandcrime.blogspot.com/2006/05/rock-n-roll-homicide-p... -makes for great, interesting reading.
17/52
Sometimes I am my own worst enemy.
I went out to take this photograph totally on a whim, and not really sure where I was going to go with it, other than I wanted to create a very simple final image. When this happens I only ever seem to realise exactly what I want to achieve from the session just as it's getting too dark!
Thank you so much to Henry Britten for commenting on one of my photographs about my work, as it gave me a renewed sense of inspiration, sparking this photo! (Of course I suggest checking out his work if you already haven't done so, it's beautiful).
Again it is late. AY WELL. I'll catch up soon enough. So full still from my mum's birthday meal!
Vintage postcard. Photo: P.A. Reuter. Claudine Auger and Sean Connery in Thunderball (Terence Young, 1966).
On 18 December 2019, French actress Claudine Auger (1941) passed away. She is best known as Bond girl Domino in the James Bond film Thunderball (1965). At 17, she was Miss France 1958 and she became the first runner-up in the Miss World contest. Later she worked mostly in France and Italy.
Claudine Auger was born Claudine Oger in Paris, France in 1941. She attended St. Joan of Arc College. At the age of 16 the well-proportioned brunette earned the title of Miss France 1958 and was also the first runner-up in the 1958 Miss World contest. A year later, she married the 41-year-old writer-director Pierre Gaspard-Huit. She attended the Paris Drama Conservatory, where she performed dramatic roles. Still at school, Jean Cocteau cast her as a tall ballerina in his final film Le testament d'Orphée, ou ne me demandez pas pourquoi!/The Testament of Orpheus (1960), about an aging poet who knows he is dying. She had her first leading lady role in the satirical Swashbuckler Le Masque de fer/The Iron Mask (Henri Decoin, 1962) opposite Jean Marais as the aging musketeer D’Artagnan. She also starred opposite Pierre Étaix in his Tati-esque comedy Yoyo (Pierre Étaix, 1965). On holiday in Nassau, she met writer-producer Kevin McClory. He recommended her for an audition for Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965), the fourth 007 mission featuring Sean Connery. She auditioned for the role of Domino, the mistress of international business executive and agent of the evil SPECTRE organization Emilio Largo (Adolpho Celi). Domino was originally to be an Italian woman: Dominetta Petacchi. Auger impressed the producers so much that they re-wrote the part into a French woman, Dominique Derval. Auger later claimed that she related to her character, as she and Domino were involved with older men. Although she took lessons to perfect her English, her voice was eventually dubbed by Nikki van der Zyl. Immediate by-products of Claudine's stardom were a semi-nude Playboy spread and a guest shot on an American TV special starring Danny Thomas and Bob Hope.
Thunderball launched Claudine Auger into a successful European film career, but it did little for her otherwise in the United States. In Europe, she reunited with her James Bond director Terence Young for the British-French spy film Triple Cross (1966) with Christopher Plummer. Other trendy sixties films in which she starred were the French-Spanish-Italian thriller L'Homme de Marrakesh/That Man George! (Jacques Deray, 1966), the Italian-French-German caper comedy Operazione San Gennaro/Operation San Gennaro (Dino Risi, 1967), the Italian-French sex comedy Le Dolci Signore/Anyone Can Play (Fausto Saraceni, Luigi Zampa, 1967) opposite Ursula Andress, the French satire Jeu De Massacre/The Killing Game (Alain Jessua, 1967) and the Italian fantastic comedy L'Arcidiavolo/The devil in Love (Ettore Scola, 1968) starring Vittorio Gassman. One of her best films was Reazione a catena/Bay Of Blood (Mario Bava, 1971). This Giallo - an Italian genre of bloody horror-thrillers – is often cited as the grandfather of the modern slasher film. Robert Firsching at AllMovie: “the film's style influenced countless American slasher films of the 1970s and 1980s. Bava also includes a strangulation by telephone cord, a gory axe decapitation, a man speared to a wall, and five other murders. Antefatto was a trendsetting film, and paved the way for literally hundreds of graphically violent imitations.” Auger is the scheming daughter of a murdered Countess (played by film legend Isa Miranda). Her staged suicide forms the basis of the film's plot. With two other Bond girls, Barbara Bach and Barbara Bouchet, she appeared in another Giallo, La Tarantola dal ventre nero/Black Belly of the Tarantula (Paolo Cavara, 1972) starring Giancarlo Giannini. That year she also co-starred with Christopher Mitchum, the son of Robert Mitchum, in the Italian action film Un verano para matar/Summertime Killer (Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi, 1972).
During the following decades, Claudine Auger kept busy in both the Italian and the French cinema. A classic is the French thriller Flic Story/Cop Story (Jacques Deray, 1975) starring Alain Delon and Jean-Louis Trintignant. She again worked with Jacques Deray on his modern noir Un Papillon sur l'Epaule/A butterfly on the shoulder (Jacques Deray, 1978) starring Lino Ventura. James Travers reviews at Films de France: “In many ways, this is one of Jacques Deray’s most sophisticated and appealing films – the cobweb intrigue is masterfully woven, the detached photography evokes the sense of an unseen deadly threat throughout, and the minimalist script emphasises the feeling of isolation and helplessness of the film’s principal protagonist. It is a satisfying and compelling work, but also a profoundly disturbing one”. In Italy she appeared in the comedy of errors Viaggio con Anita/Lovers and Liars (Mario Monicelli, 1979) starring Goldie Hawn and Giancarlo Giannini, and the domestic comedy Aragosta a Colazione/Lobster for Breakfast (Giorgio Capitani, 1979). The French comedy L'Associé/The Associate (René Gainville, 1980), featuring Michel Serrault, lead in 1996 to a less successful American remake with Whoopi Goldberg. In the UK Auger made Secret Places (Zelda Barron, Judith Lang, 1984) and the British-American production The Summer House (Waris Hussein, 1993) starring Jeanne Moreau. Her last films were the erotic drama Salt on Our Skin/Desire (Andrew Birki, 1993) with Greta Scacchi, and the Spanish comedy Los hombres siempre mienten/Men Always Lie (Antonio del Real, 1995). Later she worked incidentally for TV. After her divorce from Pierre Gaspard-Huit, Claudine Auger was married to businessman Peter Brent until his death in 2008. After a long illness, Claudine Auger passed away on 18 December 2019.
Sources: Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Robert Firsching (AllMovie), James Travers (Films de France), Thomas Staedeli (Cyranos), les Gens du Cinéma, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
It looks like a member of the Mantodea order, but it's not a praying mantid. Body was very similar to a mantid one, and even the reaction with which it trapped a baby bee was quite mantid-like. Does anyone know what specie is it exactly?
BTW, it's eyes and face are covered in pollen.
The shot was done with a 50mm lens attached to stacked extension tubes.
Antonino Accardo 2nd from left in alley in or around Chicago. 1972
Antonino Accardo 4/20/1906 - 5/22/1992 was known as "Big Tuna" and "Joe Batters" was a small time criminal to Boss of the Chicago Outfit.
Born in Chicago on the near west side to a shoemaker. Accardo at the age of 14 was kicked out of school and started to hang out at neighborhood pool halls. After joining a neighborhood street gang he was recruited by Jack McGurn a Hitman for Al Capone.
During prohibition he killed a couple of Outfit traitors at a dinner with a baseball bat. Al Capone said "The kids a real Joe Batters" . "Big Tuna" nickname came after catching one on a fishing trip.
Accardo claims to be one of the southside hitmen in the St. Valentines Massacre in 1929. He also acclaimed to have killed Frank Yale, Brooklyn"s Gang Boss.
In 1939 he married and had 4 children with a strong marriage. He lived most of his married years in River Forest IL. But things changed, the I.R.S. was on his back so he bought a smaller home and installed a vault. Accardo wanted to keep things straight so he posed as a beer salesman for a local Chicago brewery.
In 1931 Al Capone was convicted on tax evasion. Frank Nitti took over as the Outfits Boss. In 1943 Frank Nitti was sentenced to jail time and commited suicide right before sentencing. So in 1943 Tony Accardo took over the Outfit.
Accardo decided to move some operations out west especially to Las Vegas. They took over Slot Machines, Cigarette Machines, ran narcotic smuggling and call girl services.
Accardo kept a low profile and ran operations much longer than Capone.
In 1957 Accardo was again being followed by the I.R.S. So he gave his position of Outfit Boss to Sam Giancana.
Giancana was a problem though, he lived a fancy lifestyle and dated celebs. The F.B.I. started following Sam Giancana. Giancana was found murdered in his Oak Park IL. home while cooking Italian sausage.
When vacationing in California, Accardo"s River Forest IL. home was robbed by 5 thieves. One month later all 5 thieves were found murdered by strangulation and their throats cut.
All this time, Tony Accardo only spent 1 night in jail.
He passed away in 1992 of a heart condition.
French postcard in the Collection Magie Noire by Editions Hazan, Paris, no. 6377, 1993. Photo: Claudine Auger and Sean Connery in Thunderball (Terence Young, 1966).
On 18 December 2019, French actress Claudine Auger (1941) passed away. She is best known as Bond girl Domino in the James Bond film Thunderball (1965). At 17, she was Miss France 1958 and she became the first runner-up in the Miss World contest. Later she worked mostly in France and Italy. Claudine Auger was 78.
Claudine Auger was born Claudine Oger in Paris, France in 1941. She attended St. Joan of Arc College. At the age of 16 the well-proportioned brunette earned the title of Miss France 1958 and was also the first runner-up in the 1958 Miss World contest. A year later, she married the 41-year-old writer-director Pierre Gaspard-Huit. She attended the Paris Drama Conservatory, where she performed dramatic roles. Still at school, Jean Cocteau cast her as a tall ballerina in his final film Le testament d'Orphée, ou ne me demandez pas pourquoi!/The Testament of Orpheus (1960), about an aging poet who knows he is dying. She had her first leading lady role in the satirical Swashbuckler Le Masque de fer/The Iron Mask (Henri Decoin, 1962) opposite Jean Marais as the aging musketeer D’Artagnan. She also starred opposite Pierre Étaix in his Tati-esque comedy Yoyo (Pierre Étaix, 1965). On holiday in Nassau, she met writer-producer Kevin McClory. He recommended her for an audition for Thunderball (Terence Young, 1965), the fourth 007 mission featuring Sean Connery. She auditioned for the role of Domino, the mistress of international business executive and agent of the evil SPECTRE organization Emilio Largo (Adolpho Celi). Domino was originally to be an Italian woman: Dominetta Petacchi. Auger impressed the producers so much that they re-wrote the part into a French woman, Dominique Derval. Auger later claimed that she related to her character, as she and Domino were involved with older men. Although she took lessons to perfect her English, her voice was eventually dubbed by Nikki van der Zyl. Immediate by-products of Claudine's stardom were a semi-nude Playboy spread and a guest shot on an American TV special starring Danny Thomas and Bob Hope.
Thunderball launched Claudine Auger into a successful European film career, but it did little for her otherwise in the United States. In Europe, she reunited with her James Bond director Terence Young for the British-French spy film Triple Cross (1966) with Christopher Plummer. Other trendy sixties films in which she starred were the French-Spanish-Italian thriller L'Homme de Marrakesh/That Man George! (Jacques Deray, 1966), the Italian-French-German caper comedy Operazione San Gennaro/Operation San Gennaro (Dino Risi, 1967), the Italian-French sex comedy Le Dolci Signore/Anyone Can Play (Fausto Saraceni, Luigi Zampa, 1967) opposite Ursula Andress, the French satire Jeu De Massacre/The Killing Game (Alain Jessua, 1967) and the Italian fantastic comedy L'Arcidiavolo/The devil in Love (Ettore Scola, 1968) starring Vittorio Gassman. One of her best films was Reazione a catena/Bay Of Blood (Mario Bava, 1971). This Giallo - an Italian genre of bloody horror-thrillers – is often cited as the grandfather of the modern slasher film. Robert Firsching at AllMovie: “the film's style influenced countless American slasher films of the 1970s and 1980s. Bava also includes a strangulation by telephone cord, a gory axe decapitation, a man speared to a wall, and five other murders. Antefatto was a trendsetting film, and paved the way for literally hundreds of graphically violent imitations.” Auger is the scheming daughter of a murdered Countess (played by film legend Isa Miranda). Her staged suicide forms the basis of the film's plot. With two other Bond girls, Barbara Bach and Barbara Bouchet, she appeared in another Giallo, La Tarantola dal ventre nero/Black Belly of the Tarantula (Paolo Cavara, 1972) starring Giancarlo Giannini. That year she also co-starred with Christopher Mitchum, the son of Robert Mitchum, in the Italian action film Un verano para matar/Summertime Killer (Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi, 1972).
During the following decades, Claudine Auger kept busy in both the Italian and the French cinema. A classic is the French thriller Flic Story/Cop Story (Jacques Deray, 1975) starring Alain Delon and Jean-Louis Trintignant. She again worked with Jacques Deray on his modern noir Un Papillon sur l'Epaule/A butterfly on the shoulder (Jacques Deray, 1978) starring Lino Ventura. James Travers reviews at Films de France: “In many ways, this is one of Jacques Deray’s most sophisticated and appealing films – the cobweb intrigue is masterfully woven, the detached photography evokes the sense of an unseen deadly threat throughout, and the minimalist script emphasises the feeling of isolation and helplessness of the film’s principal protagonist. It is a satisfying and compelling work, but also a profoundly disturbing one”. In Italy she appeared in the comedy of errors Viaggio con Anita/Lovers and Liars (Mario Monicelli, 1979) starring Goldie Hawn and Giancarlo Giannini, and the domestic comedy Aragosta a Colazione/Lobster for Breakfast (Giorgio Capitani, 1979). The French comedy L'Associé/The Associate (René Gainville, 1980), featuring Michel Serrault, lead in 1996 to a less successful American remake with Whoopi Goldberg. In the UK Auger made Secret Places (Zelda Barron, Judith Lang, 1984) and the British-American production The Summer House (Waris Hussein, 1993) starring Jeanne Moreau. Her last films were the erotic drama Salt on Our Skin/Desire (Andrew Birki, 1993) with Greta Scacchi, and the Spanish comedy Los hombres siempre mienten/Men Always Lie (Antonio del Real, 1995). Later she worked incidentally for TV. After her divorce from Pierre Gaspard-Huit, Claudine Auger was married to businessman Peter Brent until his death in 2008. After a long illness, Claudine Auger passed away on 18 December 2019.
Sources: Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Robert Firsching (AllMovie), James Travers (Films de France), Thomas Staedeli (Cyranos), les Gens du Cinéma, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Sheree and I went hunting zombies last night, and wound up finding a werewolf.
It started yesterday morning.
“Want to go shoot some zombies tonight?” asked my wife cheerfully.
“Sure,” I replied. “You take the Browning and I’ll take the Beretta. But remember to aim for the head because those suckers never die unless you shoot them right in the brain. Sure: they’ll fall down. But that’s just to fool the zombie slaying newbies. As soon as you turn your back, they start to move. And by then you’ve put your gun down and are forced to defend yourself with, like, a pool noodle or a garden trowel or something.”
Sheree looked at me with tired eyes.
“I meant ‘shoot them’ with a camera,” she said.
“…ah,” I quipped cleverly in reply. “Well…I guess that’ll be alright too.”
Sheree had found an Internet site announcing that a group of people were going to make themselves up like zombies and create an undead procession through a south side bus terminal. And that is how we came to be sitting in the Dodge Magnum, staking out a bus terminal on Halloween night, as autumn darkness pooled around us.
“Wouldn’t it be a cool story if a couple of photographers went out to photograph zombies on Halloween night…and if they think the zombies are just gonna be people dressed up, but the zombies are real ACTUAL zombies…and they get their brains eaten?” I asked my wife, more or less to entertain myself as we passed the time.
“Only in your world, dear,” she said, half listening. (In her defence, Sheree may have been texting one of her 6,432 friends…and, let’s be honest: most of the things I say require only half attention anyway.)
“And how about if the husband was sitting in the car telling his wife a story about a couple of photographers waiting to photograph a zombie walk only the zombies turn out to be real and even though the husband has already talked about the idea, the wife has paid no attention to it…at all…and they have to defend themselves using only their cameras because the short-sighted wife made the husband leave his guns at home?”
“…what?” asked Sheree, looking up – face bathed in the soft glow from her Blackberry. Her eyes were all squinty, which is exactly what happens when she is trying to figure out what the hell I just said.
I cock my eyebrows enigmatically and try to sound like Boris Karloff. “Never mind.”
She sighs and, as I continue to tell myself stories about brain eating zombies, I realize my wife has dozed off. I keep my eyes peeled for the undead: brain-eating or otherwise.
Nope. No zombies. Time passes. Still no zombies, just soft regular breathing from my wife next to me. “Some zombie hunter she turned out to be,” I sniff to myself. “Good thing one of us is awake. We could wake up tomorrow with our brains all eaten.”
I continue looking hopefully out the window when a skinny kid, maybe sixteen or so, lumbers by with a couple of friends. He sees me in the car and nods. I nod back. Then, for no reason at all, he gives me the finger. He’s jabbing it sharply into the air and his face contorts into something that is not even remotely socially acceptable.
…huh?
I sit there for a moment, wondering what a middle aged guy, sitting in a car waiting patiently for zombies to show up, could possibly have done to get this kid to flip him the bird.
Briefly, very briefly, I consider stepping out of the car, breaking the offending digit off and feeding it to him. Not that I would do it, of course…probably.
To make a long story just a little less long (particularly since I seem to insist on writing all this shit on a photography site) Sheree and I didn’t actually see any zombies. (You just can’t count on brain eaters to be punctual, I guess.)
We wound up at Edmonton’s Halloween Alley – a neighbourhood that celebrates the night in style. We had a blast…it was a photographer’s dream.
One of the houses had crafted a “tunnel of terror.”
“Enter our Tunnel of Terror,” growls the distorted voice from a ghetto blaster hidden under a tarp. “You may enter…but you will only go in once…because no one ever leaves. Bwaaaahaaahaaa!!!”
This sounded like either really shrewd marketing or a lose/lose proposition for me. Besides, I've just seen plenty of people leaving...usually they're giggling or slapping each other on the back in that people have when, together, they've stared into the Abyss and survived. I decide it's just marketing, shed any trace of good decision making, and enter the Tunnel of Terror.
Sheree and I have designed Haunted Houses for clients, so I had a pretty good idea what to expect. There were creepy (and may I add ‘inexplicable’) sounds of chains being dragged and a significantly constipated mammal somewhere in the distance moaning hopelessly as they sought relief.
A wall of masks was along one dark wall – and I just KNEW one of them was going to move. Sure enough, it did – and something actually grabbed my arm…which is a mega no-no in haunted houses because the arm grabber usually gets punched out by the panicked grabee. I decided to let him live and moved around a darkened corner.
That’s where I saw the werewolf just ahead of me, waiting impatiently in the fog.
In an instant I was thinking about crap. I was transported back to the zombie-mobile. I wondered what would happen if a skinny sixteen year old kid flipped the bird to a middle aged guy sitting in a car out front of, say, a bus station.
And what if the middle aged guy was actually a REAL werewolf…and what if that werewolf, freed from every last vestige of political correctness, decided to remind that sixteen year old pile of slug snot that there IS a pecking order and respect should be shown to those who are bigger and older than himself? Would that necessarily be a BAD thing? Hmmm…
Anyway, I stepped forward and pretended that the werewolf waiting in the fog actually surprised me. (After all, these guys had put a LOT of work into their “tunnel of terror.”)
I shot a number of images of the werewolf. He was quite obliging about posing.
But I liked this one the best.
It seems to me that a werewolf ought to be something you hardly see. When you look again, it’s gone and you didn’t get a REAL good look anyway.The image should be grainy. It took me longer to Photoshop this shot than most of the stuff I do.
The close ups looked like a guy in a costume. But from a distance with added grain and blur and shake? The result is the exact kind of image I wanted to create. This one.
Others may see it in a thumbnail and sniff “This guy is wasting MY valuable flickr time! Doesn’t he know I have only twelve more comments to make before I can post MY shot in ‘Pictures-That-Really-Are-The-Best-Anywhere-On-The-Planet-And-This-Includes-Anything-You (And-Yes-I-DO-Mean-YOU) Will-EVER-Take-,-Which-Makes-It-The-Most-Exclusive-Group-In-All-Of-flickerdom-Of-Which-I-Am-A-Member-And-You-Aren’t Group (P1-A125/Sweeper Running/No Awards = Death By Slow Strangulation AND Getting Banned For LIFE Also/Demigod Invite Only)’?”
Ah well. I think, for my part, that any shot of a werewolf taken on any given Halloween night should be presented like it’s been taken in a hurry by someone genuinely afraid of getting eviscerated. And the viewer should be left thinking that it’s probably just a guy in a costume.
…or maybe not…
Happy Halloween from Larry...and me.
Female Kankakee Bullsnake (Pituophis catenifer sayi).
Bullsnakes are one of the largest native snakes in North America, dwarfed only by the eastern indigo snake, Drymarchon corais couperi (National Park Service 2015); this is dismissing the presence of the invasive Burmese pythons and green anacondas in the Florida everglades. The bullsnake can reach lengths of over seven feet, with individuals commonly ranging from fifty to seventy-two inches long (National Park Service 2015). They are also heavy bodied, with larger species capable of weighing almost ten pounds (Snake Facts). Its coloration is a yellow-tan with rectangular blotches on its dorsal side that can range in shades from brown to black to reddish, forming a slight checkered pattern; the tail has between nine to nineteen dark bands (Canadian Herpetological Society 2017). This coloration provides them perfect camouflage in their grassy habitats. The ventral side is a light cream-yellow with black checker marks (Illinois Natural History Survey 2018). The scales are strongly keeled, giving them a rough texture (Illinois Natural History Survey 2018). Its eyes are an orange or reddish color with round pupils (National Park Service 2015). The head is very distinct, being disproportionately small in comparison to the body, with black bars around the eyes and mouth, and a slightly elongated and upturned rostral scale (Kapfer 2007); this scale is not as distinct as those seen on species like the hognose snake, but it still functions to assist the snake in burrowing. Common to other snakes in the Pituophis genus, these snakes have a thin and flexible epiglottis that, when air from the trachea is forced through it, creates a loud hiss that has been described as similar to the grunt of a bull, likely giving the snake its common name (Schmidt & Davis 1941).
This species is highly wide ranging, appearing from southern Canada to Northern Mexico and from California east into Indiana (Canadian Herpetological Society 2017). Instances of interbreeding in areas where multiple subspecies of P. catenifer interact on the boundaries of their ranges lead to some taxonomic confusion (National Park Service 2015). They can have extensive territory ranges, with a single snake capable of utilizing over a square mile of space for its daily activities (Carpenter Nature Center 2016), and they can travel even more than that distance to reach their summer habitat from their winter hibernacula (Canadian Herpetological Society 2017). As a native of the American Great Plains, the bull snake prefers habitats such as grasslands, sandhills, shrublands, prairies, and old agricultural fields (National Park Service 2015); in Illinois, they are extensive throughout the sand prairies in the central and northwestern counties (Illinois Natural History Survey 2018). They can spend up to sixty percent of their time in burrows underground, typically using old gopher burrows as a site to hunt and hide from predators (Carpenter Nature Center 2016). In order to avoid harsh winter conditions that occur throughout much of their range, bull snakes hibernate below the frost line in their underground burrows, typically in groups. It is interesting to note that these aggregations often are not just of conspecifics; bull snakes have been known to share hibernacula with racers, milksnakes, garter snakes, and even rattlesnakes (National Park Service 2015). Additionally, each species enters and leaves the hibernacula at different times – the bullsnake will leave in the spring after garter snakes but before rattlesnakes (Graham 1997).
Bullsnakes commonly consume small mammals, particularly rodents, as well as the occasional bird and their eggs, and even newborns are capable of capturing and consuming small mice (Graham 1997). They will also consume frogs when available, but this makes up a very small portion of their diet (Wheaton Park District 2018). These large snakes are constrictors, subduing their prey via strangulation before consuming it whole (Graham 1997). As a diurnal species, they hunt for prey during the day, typically in the morning and late afternoon in order to avoid direct sunlight of midday but still benefit from the warmth of the environment, and when the temperatures in peak summer get too hot, they will occasionally switch to being active at night for several weeks (Graham 1997). During the day they will also alternatively bask or seek cooler shelter, a cycle that aids in digestion and energy conservation before and after hunting (Graham 1997). Mammals like skunks or birds of prey like raptors commonly predate on the young, but once they reach their full length, they have few predators and remain relatively undisturbed (Graham 1997).
Bullsnakes begin to mate once they emerge from their hibernacula in March through May, with males emerging earlier than females (Graham 1997). Males reach sexual maturity earlier in life, at one to two years old, but females mature later at three to five years (Canadian Herpetological Society 2017). The female will excavate burrows and lay a clutch of eggs in late summer, between June and August (National Park Service 2015). A single clutch typically has between three to twenty-four eggs, usually over two inches long and creamy white with the stereotypical parchment shell common to all snakes (Graham 1997). What is interesting is that, much like their hibernacula, nesting sites also tend to be communal, so a particularly large clutch of eggs in a burrow is likely to be from more than one female (Illinois Natural History Survey 2018). The young are left unattended and hatch in August or September, an average of around eighty days, and are around twelve inches long (Illinois Natural History Survey 2018). They will disperse quickly from the nest because they need to find their own meals; as previously mentioned, even these relatively small young are capable of constricting small rodents (Graham 1997). In the wild, these snakes can live to be around twelve years old, and in captivity this more than doubles to around thirty years of age (Carpenter Nature Center 2016). This old age is possibly due to their adult size, as other animals do not easily consume them.
Studio photo by Nick Dobbs 12-07-2025
“How do you know, when you think blue — when you say blue — that you are talking about the same blue as anyone else?
You cannot get a grip on blue.
Blue is the sky, the sea, a god’s eye, a devil’s tail, a birth, a strangulation, a virgin’s cloak, a monkey’s ass. It’s a butterfly, a bird, a spicy joke, the saddest song, the brightest day.
Blue is sly, slick, it slides into the room sideways, a slippery trickster.
This is a story about the color blue, and like blue, there’s nothing true about it. Blue is beauty, not truth. ‘True blue’ is a ruse, a rhyme; it’s there, then it’s not. Blue is a deeply sneaky color.”
― Christopher Moore, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d'Art
Photography by Cajsa Lilliehook
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I had the idea of this photograph for a long time now, and wanted to make it so badly, it's actually a self portrait, so that's why It looked so bad on the original photograph.
I just took the pic again through a diamond to give it a more strange and mysterious atmosphere
I have a new video out right now! watch it here :: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrDBxJSIH8g
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A California sea lion with an entanglement injury. This sea lion was one of the fortunate ones, rescued, with the strangulation element removed. Even after removal, the sea lion bears the significant scar from that injury.
Fishing gear entanglements are, by far, the most frequent wildlife injuries I see. Sometimes the animals can be rescued, but too often they can't, or they suffer away from view. For as much harm as stray fishing gear does, I wish fishing were prohibited in areas where the wildlife hazards are particularly acute … like areas where animals are known to haul out and nest.
[Photographed at the Coast Guard pier in Monterey]
Detective Book Magazine / Magazin-Reihe
> Franklin H. Martin / King Of The Racket
> Ted Tinsley / Murder in Manhattan
> A. Merrit / Creep Show
Cover: George Gross (?)
Fiction House / USA 1938
Reprint / Comicc-Club NK 2010
ex libris MTP
Black Mask / Magazin-Reihe
> Robert Reeves / Murder A.W.O.L
cover: Rafael M. de Soto
Popular Publications / USA 1945
Reprint / Comic-Club NK 2010
ex libris MTP
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mask_(magazine)
Ah! Post WW2 planners utopia! As early as 1942/43 British planners were looking ahead to post-war reconstruction - both to deal with the devastation of Britain's urban fabric by enemy bombing as well as the social and economic 'evils' of much of the unchecked Victorian urban and industrial expansion. Hitherto much of the methodology behind contemporary urban expansion and new housing was to manage the rapid suburban development that, in many cities had lead to edge of town development of 'suburbia' - interestingly loved by those who lived and aspired to such 'semis' and hated by planners and architects as drab fungal growths on the urban fringe ('subtopia'). The other great priority was slum clearance and in-city redvelopment of existing urban areas. Most British regions produced massive development plans and these were to form the foundation of many elements of post-war construction - most notably in the landmark Town & Country Planning Act of 1947 in which the new Labour Government enshrined the production of planning and plans themselves, introduced the 'green belt' concept to protect the boundaries of existing and pushed for the construction of quite a British solution - "New Towns". In the 1940s and '50s numerous New Towns were 'designated' including a ring of such towns around London that had been suggested in the 1944 Greater London Plan. This magnificent volume, sister to the 1943 County of London Plan, was largely authored by one of the doyen of UK planning, Patrick Abercrombie. It put forward plans that helped formulate various of the London 'new towns' - one site considered was the large Essex village of Chipping Ongar, better known as Ongar. Eventually Ongar was de-selcted in c1947 largely because of the cost of the ambitious transport plans involving the London - Ongar branch railway line - the scheme would have seen extension of the line into a loop running through to Brentwood and electrification. This foundered, due to potential costs in post-war austerity - had it happened the history of the branch (that ended up being reluctantly electrified as part of London Transport's Central line and eventually abandoned in 1994) would have been very, very different. Anyhow - the Plan contains some illustrations of the 'new world' proposed - by the illustrator Peter Shepheard, they are in that marvellous style that seems so utopian to us now but must have been so asperational and vital to a British population that had suffered years of war, depression and who often lived in crowded, drab slums. Here we see the proposed neighbourhood planned around the lands surrounding the UK's oldest timber church at the hamlet of Greensted to the west of Ongar. The church is seen on the right - the perspective is slightly south of west so this is looking towards Toot Hill. Much was made of the mixture of types of housing and the preservation of landscape forms and features - fingers of rural greenery containing the carefully planned settlement - the basis of the relaxed, carefree lifestyle New Towns would offer. In contrast to suburban development each 'neighbourhood' had a full range of shopping, educational and social centres, serving the local population and supportingt he town as a whole.
If Ongar didn't get off the drawing board a neighbouring Essex village of Harlow did and was to see precisely the sorts of changes that Ongar had illustrated. Harlow, designated in 1947, saw many of these proposals implemented and, in time, was seen to be the most successful of the 'New Towns'. Places such as Harlow are easily sneered at I fear but one has to admire the energy and passion put into the intention to 'better' peoples lives, whatever you think of the planning and concepts. Interesting that now, in 2014, a new generation of New Towns is proposed to help manage the UK's housing shortage - based on the premise that the 1947 Act, now seen by some as being at the roots of the 'strangulation' of urban development, has been radically overturned we may turn back to one of the very concepts that engendered such centralised planning!
fortunately i was saved from strangulation by this predator's intolerance of plastic cameras.
holga 120n
ilford delta 3200
xtol stock, 7 minutes 30 seconds, 20 ℃
30 sec continuous agitation initially, 3 inversions / min
“How do you know, when you think blue — when you say blue — that you are talking about the same blue as anyone else?
You cannot get a grip on blue.
Blue is the sky, the sea, a god’s eye, a devil’s tail, a birth, a strangulation, a virgin’s cloak, a monkey’s ass. It’s a butterfly, a bird, a spicy joke, the saddest song, the brightest day.
Blue is sly, slick, it slides into the room sideways, a slippery trickster.
This is a story about the color blue, and like blue, there’s nothing true about it. Blue is beauty, not truth. ‘True blue’ is a ruse, a rhyme; it’s there, then it’s not. Blue is a deeply sneaky color.”
― Christopher Moore, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d'Art
Photography by Cajsa Lilliehook
Store info at Blogging Second Life
****SHOPPING LIST******
Clothing: Emery Monti Denim Skirt Old Blue for Maitreya Body Lara @C88
NYU - Bare Shoulder Knit, Fatpack (Size3)
Shoes: fri. - Portia.Heels (Sky) - Maitreya @C88
Jewelry: Zaara : Sarika feather earrings (default/lelutka) L *azure* @C88
Skin: Glam Affair America
Hair: *ARGRACE* Mia - Cinnamon tinted
Poses: Adorkable
Appliers:.LeLutka.Rosamund hairbase HUD.Set 01
Glam Affair ( Lelutka Heads ) Clara Applier [ America ]
Virtual Insanity [V/I] Slink Hands Fingernails Applier - PEACOCK #1
Eyes: PXL] REFLEX Eyes (B) ~ GreyGold
Mesh Attachments: .LeLutka.Mesh Head-STELLA v1.3
Maitreya Mesh Body - Feet V3.4
Maitreya Mesh Body - Lara V3.4
Slink Avatar Enhancement Hands V2.1 - L - Elegant1
HUDS: Lelutka Stella Head, AnyPose Expression HUD
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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For rock throwing in general, see Rock throwing. For the method of metalworking, see Stoning (metalworking). For other uses, see Stoning (disambiguation).
"Lapidation" redirects here. For the album by Anthony Coleman, see Lapidation (album).
Saint Stephen, first martyr of Christianity, painted in 1506 by Marx Reichlich (1460–1520)
(Pinakothek of Munich)
Virasundara is stoned to death on the order of Rajasinha II of Kandy (Sri Lanka, c. 1672)
Stoning, or lapidation, is a method of capital punishment where a group throws stones at a person until the subject dies from blunt trauma. It has been attested as a form of punishment for grave misdeeds since ancient times. Its adoption in some legal systems has caused controversy in recent decades.
The Torah and Talmud prescribe stoning as punishment for a number of offenses. Over the centuries, Rabbinic Judaism developed a number of procedural constraints which made these laws practically unenforceable. Although stoning is not mentioned in the Quran, classical Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) imposed stoning as a hadd (sharia-prescribed) punishment for certain forms of zina (illicit sexual intercourse) on the basis of hadith (sayings and actions attributed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad). It also developed a number of procedural requirements which made zina virtually impossible to prove in practice.
Stoning appears to have been the standard method of capital punishment in ancient Israel. Its use is attested in the early Christian era, but Jewish courts generally avoided stoning sentences in later times. Only a few isolated instances of legal stoning are recorded in pre-modern history of the Islamic world. Criminal laws of most modern Muslim-majority countries have been derived from Western models. In recent decades several states have inserted stoning and other hudud (pl. of hadd) punishments into their penal codes under the influence of Islamist movements. These laws hold particular importance for religious conservatives due to their scriptural origin, though in practice they have played a largely symbolic role and tended to fall into disuse.
In recent times, stoning has been a legal or customary punishment in the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Qatar, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, northern Nigeria, Afghanistan, Brunei, and tribal parts of Pakistan, including northwest Kurram Valley and the northwest Khwezai-Baezai region.[1][2][3][4] In some of these countries, including Afghanistan and Iraq, where stoning is not legal, it has been carried out extrajudicially by militants, tribal leaders, and others.[2] In some other countries, including Nigeria and Pakistan, although stoning is a legal form of punishment, it has never been legally carried out. Stoning is condemned by human rights organizations and stoning sentences have sparked international controversies. Punishing adultery with stoning has varying levels of public support in the Muslim world, ranging from 86% of Muslims in Pakistan to 6% of Muslims in Albania and Bosnia.
Contents
1Religious scripture and law
1.1Judaism
1.2Islam
2History
3Contemporary legal status and use
3.1Afghanistan
3.2Brunei
3.3Indonesia
3.4Iran
3.5Iraq
3.6Nigeria
3.7Pakistan
3.8Saudi Arabia
3.9Sudan
3.10Somalia
3.11United Arab Emirates
3.12ISIL
4Views
4.1Support
4.2Opposition
5Human rights
5.1Women's rights
5.2LGBT rights
5.3Right to private life
6Examples
6.1Ancient
6.2Modern
6.3Averted
7Biblical
7.1Averted
8In literature
9In film and television
10See also
11References
12External links
Jesus and the woman taken in adultery by Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld, 1860, where Jesus said that the man who was without sin should throw the first stone.
Religious scripture and law[edit]
Judaism[edit]
The Sabbath-breaker Stoned. Artistic impression of episode narrated in Numbers 15. James Tissot c.1900
Further information: Capital and corporal punishment in Judaism
Torah[edit]
The Jewish Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) serves as a common religious reference for Judaism. Stoning is the method of execution mentioned most frequently in the Torah. (Murder is not mentioned as an offense punishable by stoning, but it seems that a member of the victim's family was allowed to kill the murderer; see avenger of blood.) The crimes punishable by stoning were the following:
Touching Mount Sinai while God was giving Moses the Ten Commandments, Exodus 19:13
An ox that gores someone to death should be stoned, Exodus 21:28
Breaking Sabbath, Numbers 15:32–36
Giving one's "offspring" "to Molech" Leviticus 20:2-5
Having a "familiar spirit" (or being a necromancer) or being a "wizard", Leviticus 20:27
Enticing others to polytheism, Deuteronomy 13:7–11
Cursing God, Leviticus 24:10–16
Engaging in idolatry, Deuteronomy 17:2–7; or seducing others to do so, Deuteronomy 13:7–12
"Rebellion" against parents Deuteronomy 21:18-21.
Getting married as though a virgin, when not a virgin, Deuteronomy 22:13–21
Sexual intercourse between a man and a woman engaged to another man in a town, since she did not cry out, Deuteronomy 22:23-24; both parties should be stoned to death.
Forced sexual intercourse between a man and a woman engaged to another man in a field, where no one could hear her cries and save her, Deuteronomy 22:25-27; the man should be stoned.
Describing the stoning of those who entice others to apostates from Judaism, the Torah states:
If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which [is] as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; [Namely], of the gods of the people which [are] round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the [one] end of the earth even unto the [other] end of the earth; Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.
— Deuteronomy 13:6–10[5]
A case noted in the Bible, not falling into any of the above categories, was that of Achan, stoned to death together with his sheep, other livestock and his children for having pillaged valuables from Jericho during Joshua's Conquest of Canaan.
Mishna[edit]
The Talmud describes four methods of execution: stoning, pouring molten lead down the throat of the condemned person, beheading, and strangulation (see Capital and corporal punishment in Judaism). The Mishna gives the following list of persons who should be stoned.[6][7]
"To the following sinners stoning applies – אלו הן הנסקלין
one who has had relations with his mother – הבא על האם
with his father's wife – ועל אשת האב
with his daughter-in-law – ועל הכלה
a human male with a human male – ועל הזכור
or with cattle – ועל הבהמה
and the same is the case with a woman who uncovers herself before cattle – והאשה המביאה את הבהמה
with a blasphemer – והמגדף
an idolater – והעובד עבודת כוכבים
he who sacrifices one of his children to Molech – והנותן מזרעו למולך
one that occupies himself with familiar spirits – ובעל אוב
a wizard – וידעוני
one who violates Sabbath – והמחלל את השבת
one who curses his father or mother – והמקלל אביו ואמו
one who has assaulted a betrothed damsel – והבא על נערה המאורסה
a seducer who has seduced men to worship idols – והמסית
and the one who misleads a whole town – והמדיח
a witch (male or female) – והמכשף
a stubborn and rebellious son – ובן סורר ומורה"
As God alone was deemed to be the only arbiter in the use of capital punishment, not fallible people, the Sanhedrin made stoning a hypothetical upper limit on the severity of punishment.[8]
The Punishment of Korah and the Stoning of Moses and Aaron (1480–1482), by Sandro Botticelli, Sistine Chapel, Rome.
Prior to early Christianity, particularly in the Mishnah, doubts were growing in Jewish society about the effectiveness of capital punishment in general (and stoning in particular) in acting as a useful deterrent. Subsequently, its use was dissuaded by the central legislators. The Mishnah states:
A Sanhedrin that puts a man to death once in seven years is called destructive. Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah says that this extends to a Sanhedrin that puts a man to death even once in seventy years. Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon say: Had we been in the Sanhedrin none would ever have been put to death. Rabban Simeon ben Gamaliel says: they would have multiplied shedders of blood in Israel.[9][10][11]
In the following centuries the leading Jewish sages imposed so many restrictions on the implementation of capital punishment as to make it de facto illegal. The restrictions were to prevent execution of the innocent, and included many conditions for a testimony to be admissible that were difficult to fulfill.
Philosopher Moses Maimonides wrote, "It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death."[12] He was concerned that the law guard its public perception, to preserve its majesty and retain the people's respect. He saw errors of commission as much more threatening to the integrity of law than errors of omission.[13]
Mode of Judgment[edit]
In rabbinic law, capital punishment may only be inflicted by the verdict of a regularly constituted court of twenty-three qualified members. There must be the most trustworthy and convincing testimony of at least two qualified eyewitnesses to the crime, who must also depose that the culprit had been forewarned of the criminality and the consequences of his project.[7] The culprit must be a person of legal age and of sound mind, and the crime must be proved to have been committed of the culprit's free will and without the aid of others.
On the day the verdict is pronounced, the convict is led forth to execution. The Torah law (Leviticus 19:18) prescribes, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself"; and the Rabbis maintain that this love must be extended beyond the limits of social intercourse in life, and applied even to the convicted criminal who, "though a sinner, is still thy brother" (Mak. 3:15; Sanh. 44a): "The spirit of love must be manifested by according him a decent death" (Sanh. 45a, 52a). Torah law provides (Deut. 24:16), "The parents shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the parents; every man shall be put to death for his own sins", and rabbinic jurisprudence follows this principle both to the letter and in spirit. A sentence is not attended by confiscation of the convict's goods; the person's possessions descend to their legal heirs.
The Talmud limits the use of the death penalty to Jewish criminals who:
(A) while about to do the crime were warned not to commit the crime while in the presence of two witnesses (and only individuals who meet a strict list of standards are considered acceptable witnesses); and
(B) having been warned, committed the crime in front of the same two witnesses.[14]
In theory, the Talmudic method of how stoning is to be carried out differs from mob stoning. According to the Jewish oral law, after the Jewish criminal has been determined as guilty before the Great Sanhedrin, the two valid witnesses and the sentenced criminal go to the edge of a two-story building. From there the two witnesses are to push the criminal off the roof of a two-story building. The two-story height is chosen as this height is estimated by the Talmud to effect a quick and painless demise but is not so high that the body will become dismembered.[15] After the criminal has fallen, the two witnesses are to drop a large boulder onto the criminal – requiring both of the witnesses to lift the boulder together. If the criminal did not die from the fall or from the crushing of the large boulder, then any people in the surrounding area are to quickly cause him to die by stoning with whatever rocks they can find.
Islam[edit]
Main articles: Rajm and Zina
The Stoning of an Adulteress, illustration to a manuscript of 1001 Nights by Abu'l Hasan Ghaffari or his atelier. Tehran, 1853-1857.
Stoning of the Devil, 2006 Hajj
Islamic sharia law is based on the Quran and the hadith as primary sources.
Quran[edit]
The Qur'an does not mention the act of stoning (Rajm) for any crime.
Contrary to popular belief, the punishment for Adultery (Zina) in the Quran is not stoning to death but flogging with a 100 lashes (if the accuser can provide 4 witnesses to the act). If the accuser cannot produce 4 witnesses, he himself will be punished by flogging with 80 lashes.
The woman and the man guilty of fornication/adultery,- flog each of them with a hundred stripes: Let not compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by Allah, if ye believe in Allah and the Last Day: and let a party of the Believers witness their punishment.
— Qur'an 24:2 [16]
And those who accuse chaste women then do not bring four witnesses, flog them, (giving) eighty stripes, and do not admit any evidence from them ever; and these it is that are the transgressors. Except those who repent after this and act aright, for surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.
— Qur'an 24:4-5 [17]
Hadith[edit]
This section may stray from the topic of the article. Please help improve this section or discuss this issue on the talk page. (December 2018)
Hadith refers to orally transmitted reports of statements or actions attributed to Muhammad. It was forbidden to record any Hadith on paper by Muhammad himself[citation needed], the first 4 righteous Caliphs after the death of Muhammed and the later Caliphs. They believed the Quran was clear, fully detailed, complete, perfect and sufficient. There were fears that people would confuse hadith with the Qur'an, influence would seep in from other creeds, fear for fabrications by heretics, for personal or political gain. The first Hadith (that have survived) were recorded 200 years after the prophet's death. There were tens of thousands Muhaddiths who had each memorised at least 400,000 narrations along with the chain of narrators for each narration. Out of the hundreds of thousands of Hadith only a very, very small percentage were declared authentic (Sahih) by Hadith Scholars. Hadith Scholars used a number of methods of evaluation to determine the veracity of the recorded oral reports. This is achieved by analyzing the text of the report, the scale of the report's transmission, the routes through which the report was transmitted, the individual narrators involved in its transmission and cross-referincing the reports.
Muslims vary in degrees of acceptance of the Hadith. To many Sunnite and Shiite Muslims (different collections of) the hadith are almost on par with the Quran itself. To others the Quran is the word of Allah but the Hadith are the words and deeds of a human (the prophet Muhammed) transmitted down by the 200 years old fallible memory of men. Useful but not completely reliable. Some Muslims give little to no credence to the Hadith. Then there are also the different sets of Hadith accepted by different branches of Islam (Temporary Marriage or Female Genital Mutilation) who consider each other's Hadith fake.
Stoning in the Sunnah mainly follows on the Jewish stoning rules of the Torah. A few hadiths refer to Muhammad ordering the stoning of a married[failed verification] Jewish man and a married[failed verification] woman committing an illegal sexual act after consulting the Torah.[18]
Narrated Ibn 'Umar: A Jew and Jewess were brought to the Prophet on a charge of committing an illegal sexual intercourse. The Prophet asked the Jews, "What do you (usually) do with them?" They said, "We blacken their faces and disgrace them." He said, "Bring here the Torah and recite it, if you are truthful." They (fetched it and) came and asked a one-eyed man to recite. He went on reciting till he reached a portion on which he put his hand. The Prophet said, "Lift up your hand!" He lifted his hand up and behold, there appeared the verse of Ar-Rajm (stoning of the adulterers to death). Then he said, "O Muhammad! They should be stoned to death but we conceal this Divine Law among ourselves." Then the Prophet ordered that the two sinners be stoned to death and, and they were stoned to death, and I saw the man protecting the woman from the stones.
— Volume 9, Book 93, Number 633: (See Hadith No. 809, Vol. 8)
Narrated by 'Abdullah bin 'Umar:The Jews came to Allah's Apostle and told him that a man and a woman from amongst them had committed illegal sexual intercourse. Allah's Apostle said to them, "What do you find in the Torah (old Testament) about the legal punishment of Ar-Rajm (stoning)?" They replied, (But) we announce their crime and lash them." Abdullah bin Salam said, "You are telling a lie; Torah contains the order of Rajm." They brought and opened the Torah and one of them solaced his hand on the Verse of Rajm and read the verses preceding and following it. Abdullah bin Salam said to him, "Lift your hand." When he lifted his hand, the Verse of Rajm was written there. They said, "Muhammad has told the truth; the Torah has the Verse of Rajm. The Prophet then gave the order that both of them should be stoned to death. ('Abdullah bin 'Umar said, "I saw the man leaning over the woman to shelter her from the stones."
— Volume 4, Book 56, Number 829:
In a few others, a Bedouin man is lashed, while a Jewish woman is stoned to death, for having sex outside marriage.[19]
Stoning is described as punishment in multiple hadiths.[20][21][22] Shia and Sunni hadith collections differ because scholars from the two traditions differ as to the reliability of the narrators and transmitters and the Imamah. Shi'a sayings related to stoning can be found in Kitab al-Kafi,[23] and Sunni sayings related to stoning can be found in the Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim.[24] Based on these hadiths, in some Muslim countries, married adulterers are sentenced to death, while consensual sex between unmarried people results in 100 lashes.
Hadiths describe stoning as punishment under sharia.[21][22][25] In others stoning is prescribed as punishment for illegal sex between man and woman,[26] illegal sex by a slave girl, as well as anyone involved in any homosexual relations.[21][27] In some sunnah, the method of stoning, by first digging a pit and partly burying the person's lower half in it, is described.[28][29]
Narrated by Abu Huraira and Zaid bin Khalid Al-Juhani: A bedouin came to Allah's Apostle and said, "O Allah's apostle! I ask you by Allah to judge My case according to Allah's Laws." His opponent, who was more learned than he, said, "Yes, judge between us according to Allah's Laws, and allow me to speak." Allah's Apostle said, "Speak." He (i .e. the bedouin or the other man) said, "My son was working as a laborer for this (man) and he committed illegal sexual intercourse with his wife. The people told me that it was obligatory that my son should be stoned to death, so in lieu of that I ransomed my son by paying one hundred sheep and a slave girl. Then I asked the religious scholars about it, and they informed me that my son must be lashed one hundred lashes, and be exiled for one year, and the wife of this (man) must be stoned to death." Allah's Apostle said, "By Him in Whose Hands my soul is, I will judge between you according to Allah's Laws. The slave-girl and the sheep are to be returned to you, your son is to receive a hundred lashes and be exiled for one year. You, Unais, go to the wife of this (man) and if she confesses her guilt, stone her to death." Unais went to that woman next morning and she confessed. Allah's Apostle ordered that she be stoned to death.
— Sahih al-Bukhari, 3:50:885 see also Sahih al-Bukhari, 3:49:860, 8:82:842, 9:89:303
Narrated by Ash-Shaibani: I asked 'Abdullah bin Abi 'Aufa about the Rajam (stoning somebody to death for committing illegal sexual intercourse). He replied, "The Prophet carried out the penalty of Rajam," I asked, "Was that before or after the revelation of Surat-an-Nur?" He replied, "I do not know."
— Sahih al-Bukhari, 8:82:824 see also Sahih al-Bukhari, 8:82:809 9:92:432
Aisha reported: Abd b. Zam'a said Messenger of Allah, he is my brother as he was born on the bed of my father from his slave-girl. Allah's Messenger looked at his resemblance and found a clear resemblance with 'Utba. (But) he said: He is yours 'Abd (b. Zam'a), for the child is to be attributed to one on whose bed it is born, and stoning for a fornicator.
— Sahih Muslim, 8:3435 see also Sahih Muslim, 17:4216, 17:4191, 17:4212
Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh)[edit]
Stoning (Arabic: رجم Rajm, sometimes spelled as Rajam) has been extensively discussed in the texts of early, medieval and modern era Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh).[30]
According to traditional jurisprudence, zina can include adultery (of married parties), fornication (of unmarried parties), prostitution, bestiality, and rape.[31] Classification of homosexual intercourse as zina differs according to legal school.[32] Although stoning for zina is not mentioned in the Quran, all schools of traditional jurisprudence agreed on the basis of hadith that it is to be punished by stoning if the offender is muhsan (adult, free, Muslim, and having been married), with some extending this punishment to certain other cases and milder punishment prescribed in other scenarios.[32][31] The offenders must have acted of their own free will.[32] According to traditional jurisprudence, zina must be proved by testimony of four eyewitnesses to the actual act of penetration, or a confession repeated four times and not retracted later.[32][31] The Maliki legal school also allows an unmarried woman's pregnancy to be used as evidence, but the punishment can be averted by a number of legal "semblances" (shubuhat), such as existence of an invalid marriage contract.[32] These requirements made zina virtually impossible to prove in practice.[31] Rape was traditionally prosecuted under different legal categories which used normal evidentiary rules.[33] Making an accusation of zina without presenting the required eyewitnesses is called qadhf (القذف), which is itself a hadd crime[34][35][36] liable to a punishment of 80 lashes and to be unacceptable as witnesses unless they repent and reform.
According to the Islamic concept of Li'an, the testimony of a man who accuses his own wife without any other witnesses may be accepted if he swears by God four times that he is telling the truth with a fifth oath to incur God's condemnation if they be lying. In this case, if his wife counter swears, no punishment will be enforced.[37][38]
One of the widely followed Islamic legal commentaries, Al-Muwatta by Malik ibn Anas, state that contested pregnancy is sufficient proof of adultery and the woman must be stoned to death.[39][40]
Hanafi
Hanafi jurists have held that the accused must be a muhsan at the time of religiously disallowed sex, to be punished by Rajm (stoning).[41] A Muhsan is an adult, free, Muslim who has previously enjoyed legitimate sexual relations in matrimony, regardless of whether the marriage still exists.[39] In other words, stoning does not apply to someone who was never married in his or her life (only lashing in public is the mandatory punishment in such cases).[41]
For evidence, Hanafi fiqh accepts the following: self-confession, or testimony of four male witnesses (female witness is not acceptable).[41] Hanafi Islamic law literature specifies two types of stoning.[41] One, when the punishment is based on bayyina, or concrete evidence (four male witnesses). In this case the person is bound, a pit dug, the bound person placed and partially buried inside the pit so that he or she may not escape, thereafter the public stoning punishment is executed.[41] A woman sentenced to stoning must be partially buried up to her chest.[42] The first stones are thrown by the witnesses and the accuser, thereafter the Muslim community present, stated Abū Ḥanīfa and other Hanafi scholars.[41] In second type of stoning, when the punishment is based on self-confession, the stoning is to be performed without digging a pit or partially burying the person. In this case, the qadi (judge) should throw the first stone before other Muslims join in. Further, if the person flees, the person is allowed to leave.[41]
Hanafi scholars specify the stone size to be used for Rajm, to be the size of one's hand. It should not be too large to cause death too quickly, nor too small to extend only pain.[41]
Hanafis have traditionally held that the witnesses should throw the first stones in case the conviction was brought about by witnesses, and the qadi must throw the first stones in case the conviction was brought about by a confession.[43]
Shafi'i
The Shafii school literature has the same Islamic law analysis as the Hanafi. However, it recommends, that the first stone be thrown by the Imam or his deputy in all cases, followed by the Muslim community witnessing the stoning punishment.[42]
Hanbali
Hanbali jurist Ibn Qudamah states, "Muslim jurists are unanimous on the fact that stoning to death is a specified punishment for the married adulterer and adulteress. The punishment is recorded in number of traditions and the practice of Muhammad stands as an authentic source supporting it. This is the view held by all Companions, Successors and other Muslim scholars with the exception of Kharijites."[44]
Hanbali Islamic law sentences all forms of consensual but religiously illegal sex as punishable with Rajm.[45]
Maliki
Maliki school of jurisprudence (fiqh) holds that stoning is the required punishment for illegal sex by a married or widowed person, as well as for any form of homosexual relations among men.[21] Malik ibn Anas, founded of Maliki fiqh, considered pregnancy in an unmarried woman as a conclusive proof of zina. He also stated that contested pregnancy is also sufficient proof of adultery and any Muslim woman who is pregnant by a man who she is not married to, at the time of getting pregnant, must be stoned to death.[39][40] Later Maliki Muslim scholars admitted the concept of "sleeping embryo", where a divorced woman could escape the stoning punishment, if she remained unmarried and became pregnant anytime within five years of her divorce, and it was assumed that she was impregnated by her previous husband but the embryo remained dormant for five years.[46]
History[edit]
Stoning is attested in the Near East since ancient times as a form of capital punishment for grave sins.[47] Stoning was "presumably" the standard form of capital punishment in ancient Israel.[48] It is attested in the Old Testament as a punishment for blasphemy, idolatry and other crimes, in which the entire community pelted the offender with stones outside a city.[49] The death of Stephen, as reported in the New Testament (Acts 7:58) was also organized in this way. Paul was stoned and left for dead in Lystra (Acts 14:19). Josephus and Eusebius report that Pharisees stoned James, brother of Jesus, after hurling him from the pinnacle of the Temple shortly before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Historians disagree as to whether Roman authorities allowed Jewish communities to apply capital punishment to those who broke religious laws, or whether these episodes represented a form of lynching.[49] During the Late Antiquity, the tendency of not applying the death penalty at all became predominant in Jewish courts.[50] Where medieval Jewish courts had the power to pass and execute death sentences, they continued to do so for particularly grave offenses, although not necessarily the ones defined by the law, and they generally refrained from use of stoning.[48]
Aside from "a few rare and isolated" instances from the pre-modern era and several recent cases, there is no historical record of stoning for zina being legally carried out in the Islamic world.[31] In the modern era, sharia-based criminal laws have been widely replaced by statutes inspired by European models.[51][52] However, the Islamic revival of the late 20th century brought along the emergence of Islamist movements calling for full implementation of sharia, including reinstatement of stoning and other hudud punishments.[51][53] A number of factors have contributed to the rise of these movements, including the failure of authoritarian secular regimes to meet the expectations of their citizens, and a desire of Muslim populations to return to more culturally authentic forms of socio-political organization in the face of a perceived cultural invasion from the West.[54][55] Supporters of sharia-based legal reforms felt that "Western law" had had its chance to bring development and justice, and hoped that a return to Islamic law would produce better results. They also hoped that introduction of harsh penalties would put an end to crime and social problems.[56]
In practice, Islamization campaigns have focused on a few highly visible issues associated with the conservative Muslim identity, particularly women's hijab and the hudud criminal punishments (whipping, stoning and amputation) prescribed for certain crimes.[54] For many Islamists, hudud punishments are at the core of the divine sharia because they are specified by the letter of scripture rather than by human interpreters. Modern Islamists have often rejected, at least in theory, the stringent procedural constraints developed by classical jurists to restrict their application.[51] Several countries, including Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, and some Nigerian states have incorporated hudud rules into their criminal justice systems, which, however, retained fundamental influences of earlier Westernizing reforms.[51][53] In practice, these changes were largely symbolic, and aside from some cases brought to trial to demonstrate that the new rules were being enforced, hudud punishments tended to fall into disuse, sometimes to be revived depending on the local political climate.[51][52] The supreme courts of Sudan and Iran have rarely approved verdicts of stoning or amputation, and the supreme courts of Pakistan and Nigeria have never done so.[52]
Unlike other countries, where stoning was introduced into state law as part of recent reforms, Saudi Arabia has never adopted a criminal code and Saudi judges still follow traditional Hanbali jurisprudence.[57] Death sentences in Saudi Arabia are pronounced almost exclusively based on the system of judicial sentencing discretion (tazir) rather than sharia-prescribed (hudud) punishments, following the classical principle that hudud penalties should be avoided if possible.[58]
Contemporary legal status and use[edit]
As of September 2010, stoning is a punishment that is included in the laws in some countries including Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Iran, Somalia, Yemen and some predominantly Muslim states in northern Nigeria as punishment for Zina ("adultery by married persons").[59][60][61]
A map showing countries where public stoning is a judicial or extrajudicial form of punishment, as of 2013.[1]
Afghanistan[edit]
See also: Murder of Farkhunda
Stoning is illegal in Afghanistan, but is sometimes carried out by tribal leaders[2][62][63][64] and Taliban insurgents extrajudicially in certain parts of the country.[63][64][65][66] Before the Taliban government, most areas of Afghanistan, aside from the capital, Kabul, were controlled by warlords or tribal leaders. The Afghan legal system depended highly on an individual community's local culture and the political or religious ideology of its leaders. Stoning also occurred in lawless areas, where vigilantes committed the act for political purposes. Once the Taliban took over, it became a form of punishment for certain serious crimes or adultery. After the fall of the Taliban government, the Karzai administration re-enforced the 1976 penal code which made no provision for the use of stoning as a punishment. In 2013, the Ministry of Justice proposed public stoning as punishment for adultery.[67] However, the government had to back down from the proposal after it was leaked and triggered international outcry.[64] While stoning is officially banned in Afghanistan, it has continued to be reported occasionally as a crime.[65][68][69][70]
Brunei[edit]
Further information: Capital punishment in Brunei
Beginning on 3 April 2019, any Muslim individuals found guilty of gay sex and adultery will be stoned to death, according to a new penal code announced by Brunei. The punishment will be "witnessed by a group of Muslims."[71] Brunei has become the first Southeast Asian country which officially adopts public stoning as a judicial form of punishment.
On 5 May, the Sultan of Brunei confirmed that the de facto moratorium (a delay or suspension of an activity or a law) on the death penalty will apply to the Sharia Penal Code and committed Brunei to ratifying the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT).
Indonesia[edit]
Further information: Capital punishment in Indonesia
On 14 September 2009, the outgoing Aceh Legislative Council passed a bylaw that called for the stoning of married adulterers.[72] However, then governor Irwandi Yusuf refused to sign the bylaw, thereby keeping it a law without legal force and, in some views, therefore still a law draft, rather than actual law.[73] In March 2013, the Aceh government removed the stoning provision from its own draft of a new criminal code.[74]
Iran[edit]
Further information: Capital punishment in Iran
The Iranian judiciary officially placed a moratorium on stoning in 2002; however, in 2007, the Iranian judiciary confirmed that a man who had been convicted of adultery 10 years earlier, was stoned to death in Qazvin province.[75] In 2008, the judiciary tried to eliminate the punishment from the books in legislation submitted to parliament for approval.[76] In 2009, two people were stoned to death in Mashhad, Razavi Khorasan Province as punishment for the crime of adultery.[77] The amended penal code, adopted in 2013, no longer contains explicit language prescribing stoning as punishment for adultery. According to legal experts, while an explicit prescription of stoning as punishment for adultery has been removed from Iran's new penal code, stoning remains a possible form of punishment, since the penal code still lists it, without specifying when it should be used, and allows punishment to be based on fiqh (traditional Islamic jurisprudence), which includes provisions for stoning.[78][79] In 2013 the spokesman for the Iranian Parliament’s Justice Commission confirmed that while the Penal Code no longer prescribes stoning, it remains a valid punishment under sharia, which is enforceable under the Penal Code.[78][80] The most known case in Iran was the stoning of Soraya Manutchehri in 1986.
Methods
In the 2008 version of the Islamic Penal Code of Iran detailed how stoning punishments are to be carried out for adultery, and even hints in some contexts that the punishment may allow for its victims to avoid death:[81]
Article 102 – An adulterous man shall be buried in a ditch up to near his waist and an adulterous woman up to near her chest and then stoned to death.
Article 103 – In case the person sentenced to stoning escapes the ditch in which they are buried, then if the adultery is proven by testimony then they will be returned for the punishment but if it is proven by their own confession then they will not be returned.[81]
Article 104 – The size of the stone used in stoning shall not be too large to kill the convict by one or two throws and at the same time shall not be too small to be called a stone.[81]
Depending upon the details of the case, the stoning may be initiated by the judge overseeing the matter or by one of the original witnesses to the adultery.[81] Certain religious procedures may also need to be followed both before and after the implementation of a stoning execution, such as wrapping the person being stoned in traditional burial dress before the procedure.[82]
The method of stoning set out in the 2008 code was similar to that in a 1999 version of Iran's penal code.[83] Iran revised its penal code in 2013. The new code does not include the above passages, but does include stoning as a hadd punishment.[79] For example, Book I, Part III, Chapter 5, Article 132 of the new Islamic Penal Code (IPC) of 2013 in the Islamic Republic of Iran states, "If a man and a woman commit zina together more than one time, if the death penalty and flogging or stoning and flogging are imposed, only the death penalty or stoning, whichever is applicable, shall be executed".[84] Book 2, Part II, Chapter 1, Article 225 of the Iran's IPC released in 2013 states, "the hadd punishment for zina of a man and a woman who meet the conditions of ihsan shall be stoning to death".[84][85]
Iraq[edit]
In 2007, Du'a Khalil Aswad, a Yazidi girl, was stoned by her fellow tribesmen in northern Iraq for dating a Muslim boy.[86]
In 2012 at least 14 youths were stoned to death in Baghdad, apparently as part of a Shi'ite militant campaign against Western-style "emo" fashion.[87]
An Iraqi man was stoned to death, in August 2014, in the northern city of Mosul after one Sunni Islamic court sentenced him to die for the crime of adultery.[88]
Nigeria[edit]
Since the sharia legal system was introduced in the predominantly Muslim north of Nigeria in 2000, more than a dozen Nigerian Muslims have been sentenced to death by stoning for sexual offences ranging from adultery to homosexuality. However, none of these sentences has actually been carried out. They have either been thrown out on appeal, commuted to prison terms or left unenforced, in part as a result of pressure from human rights groups.[89][90][91][92]
Pakistan[edit]
Further information: Capital punishment in Pakistan
As part of Zia-ul-Haq's Islamization measures, stoning to death (rajm) at a public place was introduced into law via the 1979 Hudood Ordinances as punishment for adultery (zina) and rape (zina-bil-jabr) when committed by a married person.[93] However, stoning has never been officially utilized since the law came into effect and all judicial executions occur by hanging.[94] The first conviction and sentence of stoning (of Fehmida and Allah-Bakhsh) in September 1981 was overturned under national and international pressure. A conviction for adultery of Safia Bibi, a 13-year-old blind girl who alleged that she was raped by her employer and his son, was reversed and the conviction was set aside on appeal after bitter public criticism. Another conviction for adultery and sentence of stoning (of Shahida Parveen and Muhammad Sarwar) in early 1988 sparked outrage and led to a retrial and acquittal by the Federal Sharia Court. In this case the trial court took the view that notice of divorce by Shahida's former husband, Khushi Muhammad, should have been given to the Chairman of the local council, as stipulated under Section-7(3) of the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance, 1961. This section states that any man who divorces his wife must register it with the Union Council. Otherwise, the court concluded that the divorce stood invalidated and the couple became liable to conviction under the Adultery ordinance. In 2006, the ordinances providing for stoning in the case of adultery or rape were legislatively demoted from overriding status.[95]
Extrajudicial stonings in Pakistan have been known to happen in recent times. In March 2013, Pakistani soldier Anwar Din, stationed in Parachinar, was publicly stoned to death for allegedly having a love affair with a girl from a village in the country's north western Kurram Agency.[96] On 11 July 2013, Arifa Bibi, a young mother of two, was sentenced by a tribal court in Dera Ghazi Khan District, in Punjab, to be stoned to death for possessing a cell phone. Members of her family were ordered to execute her sentence and her body was buried in the desert far away from her village.[2][97]
In February 2014, a couple in a remote area of Baluchistan province was stoned to death after being accused of an adulterous relationship.[98] On 27 May 2014, Farzana Parveen, a 25-year-old married woman who was three months pregnant, was killed by being attacked with batons and bricks by nearly 20 members of her family outside the high court of Lahore in front of "a crowd of onlookers" according to a statement by a police investigator. The assailants, who allegedly included her father and brothers, attacked Farzana and her husband Mohammad Iqbal with batons and bricks. Her father Mohammad Azeem, who was arrested for murder, reportedly called the murder an "honor killing" and said "I killed my daughter as she had insulted all of our family by marrying a man without our consent."[99] The man whose second wife Farzana had become, Iqbal, told a news agency that he had strangled his previous wife in order to marry Farzana, and police said that he had been released for killing his first wife because a "compromise" had been reached with his family.[100]
Saudi Arabia[edit]
Further information: Capital punishment in Saudi Arabia
Legal stoning sentences have been reported in Saudi Arabia.[101][102] There were four cases of execution by stoning reported between 1981 and 1992.[103]
Sudan[edit]
In May 2012, a Sudanese court convicted Intisar Sharif Abdallah of adultery and sentenced her to death; the charges were appealed and dropped two months later.[104] In July 2012, a criminal court in Khartoum, Sudan, sentenced 23-year-old Layla Ibrahim Issa Jumul to death by stoning for adultery.[105] Amnesty International reported that she was denied legal counsel during the trial and was convicted only on the basis of her confession. The organization designated her a prisoner of conscience, "held in detention solely for consensual sexual relations", and lobbied for her release.[104] In September, Article 126 of the 1991 Sudan Criminal Law, which provided for death by stoning for apostasy, was amended to provide for death by hanging.[106]
Somalia[edit]
In October 2008, a girl, Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, was buried up to her neck at a Somalian football stadium, then stoned to death in front of more than 1,000 people. The stoning occurred after she had allegedly pleaded guilty to adultery in a sharia court in Kismayo, a city that was controlled by Islamist insurgents. According to the insurgents she had stated that she wanted sharia law to apply.[107] However, other sources state that the victim had been crying, had begged for mercy and had to be forced into the hole before being buried up to her neck in the ground.[108] Amnesty International later learned that the girl was in fact 13 years old and had been arrested by al-Shabab militia after she had reported being gang-raped by three men.[109]
In December 2009, another instance of stoning was publicised after Mohamed Abukar Ibrahim was accused of adultery by the Hizbul Islam militant group.[110]
In September 2014, Somali al Shabaab militants stoned a woman to death, after she was declared guilty of adultery by an informal court.[111]
United Arab Emirates[edit]
Stoning is a legal form of judicial punishment in UAE. In 2006, an expatriate was sentenced to death by stoning for committing adultery.[112] Between 2009 and 2013, several people were sentenced to death by stoning.[113][114][115] In May 2014, an Asian housemaid was sentenced to death by stoning in Abu Dhabi.[116][117][118]
ISIL[edit]
Further information: Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
Several adultery executions by stoning committed by IS have been reported in the autumn of 2014.[119][120][121] The Islamic State's magazine, Dabiq, documented the stoning of a woman in Raqqa as a punishment for adultery.[122]
In October 2014, IS released a video appearing to show a Syrian man stone his daughter to death for alleged adultery.[121][123]
Spotted a specimen of the Jew's ear fungus as I was filling the bird feeders that hang in our copper beech tree. [Length of the lowest, frilly edge is 42mm.]
Of particular interest is the etymology of Jew's ear which derives from the belief that Judas Iscariot hanged himself in what became known as an elder tree.
Here's an extract from Wikipedia:-
"Folklore suggests that the ears are Judas's returned spirit, and are all that are left to remind us of his suicide. The common name of the fungus was originally Judas's ear, but this was later shortened to Judas ear and ... shortened again to Jew's ear. Common names for the fungus which refer to Judas can be traced back to at least the end of the 16th century; for instance, in the 17th century, Thomas Browne wrote of the species:
"In Jews' ears something is conceived extraordinary from the name, which is in propriety but fungus sambucinus, or an excrescence about the roots of elder, and concerneth not the nation of the Jews, but Judas Iscariot, upon a conceit he hanged on this tree; and is become a famous medicine in quinsies, sore throats, and strangulations, ever since.""
The practice of choking and strangulation techniques is a subtle art that requires more attention to detail than many other skills in Judo. Yet most texts on Judo do little to enlighten the conscientious student on the finer points of choking and strangulation. Most in fact imply that any pressure on the neck that makes the opponent give up is a good choke.
.... Serial killing in North America had to start somewhere and here, six feet under a bit of grass in St. James Cemetery in downtown Toronto, is where the first serial killer’s final victims were laid to rest - Here's the tragic story of the Pitezel sisters .... The bodies of the children were buried under the cellar floor.
In a gloomy crawlspace beneath a home at 16 St. Vincent Street near Yonge and College in Toronto, police detective Frank Geyer of Philadelphia pushed his shovel through a patch of soft soil. The stench that burst from the ground was overpowering.
With the help of Alf Cuddy, a detective from Toronto, Geyer continued down further.
“The deeper we dug, the more horrible the odor became” Geyer would later write. “When we reached the depth of three feet, we discovered what appeared to be the bone of the forearm of a human being.”
Both immediately knew what they had found. In a picturesque little two-storey Victorian cottage, the search for the elusive final victims of America’s most notorious serial killer had finally ended .... It was July 15, 1895.
The bodies of Alice and Nellie Pitezel had been placed on top of each other. 13-year-old Alice was the deepest. Her body was on its side, her hands facing west. Nellie, aged 11, was face down, her head pointed south and her dark plaited hair draped across her back.
They were the daughters of Benjamin Pitezel, a close associate of Henry Howard Holmes, or simply H. H. Holmes, swindler and confidence trickster, who is widely considered to be the United States first known serial killer.
His connection to Toronto, Ontario and by extension, the Pitezel sisters, stems from an insurance fraud scam Holmes tried to capitalize on with the girls father, Benjamin Pitezel. In late 1893, Holmes and Pitezel arranged for a $10,000 insurance policy on Pitezel’s life. Their scheme called for a corpse to be acquired and disfigured so that investigators would wrongly believe it to be Pitezel; Holmes would help identify the body and the two would split the ensuing insurance payout. Pitezel’s wife Carrie was made aware of the scam. Instead, Holmes killed Pitezel by knocking him unconscious with chloroform and setting his body on fire. Holmes collected the insurance payout on the basis of the genuine Pitezel corpse. Holmes persuaded Carrie Pitezel that the fraud had been successful and that her husband was still alive but travelling from city to city, so as not to attract suspicion. He also told her that Benjamin Pitezel was desperate to see his children. H.H. Holmes then went on to manipulate Pitezel's unsuspecting wife into allowing Alice and Nellie to be placed in his custody. Carrie Pitezel believed, along with Alice and Nellie, that Holmes would reunite them with their father.
H.H. Holmes travelled through Indiana and Michigan, eventually the devil blew in with the cool October breeze, making his way to Toronto, Ontario with Alice and Nellie. In the meantime, Fidelity Mutual Life Association, the insurance company that had initial suspicions, eventually paid out and appeared to consider the matter closed until October, 1894, when fresh evidence suggested Holmes had indeed committed insurance fraud. Initial concern centered on the insurance fraud, but in examining available evidence the police grew increasingly convinced that the body in the case was indeed that of Benjamin Pitezel. Holmes's fraud & murder spree finally ended when he was arrested in Boston on November 17, 1894, after being tracked there by the private Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Holmes was put on trial for murder, and confessed to 27 murders (in Chicago, Indianapolis and Toronto) and six attempted murders. Holmes later confessed to murdering Alice and Nellie by forcing them into a large trunk and locking them inside. He drilled a hole in the lid of the trunk and put one end of a hose through the hole, attaching the other end to a gas line to asphyxiate the girls. During his trial, Holmes testified how he had locked the girls in a trunk and left for dinner, returning “at his leisure” several hours later to kill them by forcing gas into their prison. Holmes buried their nude bodies in the cellar of his rental house at 16 St. Vincent Street in Toronto. After the grisly discovery of the murdered girls, a distraught Mrs. Pitezel, travelled to Toronto to identify her daughters. The next day great pains were taken to try to minimize the trauma of showing her the remains of her children. Brandy and smelling salts were brought in case she needed to be revived. According to Geyer, the staff at the morgue “had removed the putrid flesh from the skull of Alice; the teeth had been nicely cleaned and the bodies covered in canvas. The hair of both children had been carefully washed and laid on the canvas sheet next to Alice …. In an instant she recognized the teeth and hair as that of her daughter, Alice.” Although Geyer was prepared to wait, Carrie Pitezel agreed to provide testimony at the inquest at police headquarters later that evening. There, she recounted the entire story of her connection with Holmes and identified the bodies in the morgue as her daughters until, in the words of press reporters “she was led to the matron’s room where she became hysterical. Her screams were heard all over the building and continued at intervals until the close of the session.” The remains of Alice and Nellie, were buried in an unmarked grave in St. James Cemetery, one coffin above the other, in a space not far from the cemetery front gates. A mournful cortege comprised of two children's hearses and a closed carriage containing Mrs. Pitezel and Detectives Cuddy and Geyer. The bones of Alice and Nellie Pitezel had found their final resting place.
H.H. Holmes was convicted of the first degree murders of Benjamin, Alice, Nellie, and 8 year old Howard Pitezel, a third child strangled and murdered by Holmes in Indiana. He was hanged on May 7, 1896, in Philadelphia. It was reported that when the executioner had finished all the preliminaries of the hanging, he asked "Ready, Dr. Holmes?" to which Holmes said, "Yes, Don't bungle" The executioner did "bungle" however, because Holmes' neck did not snap immediately - he instead died slowly and painfully of strangulation over the course of about 15 minutes. .... **** Photograph shows approximate site of unmarked Pitezel sisters grave **** Section - Ep.s.
in Peter's words.
Because yesterday I got a package from Peter, with some movies we'd discussed (where I had said... "gee I really have been wanting to see that, I heard it was great"), a letter, and a beautiful scarf from Scotland :)
I love it.
(sorry, you told me not to blog about it... this doesn't count, right?)
Large plastic rabbit. Green tie still around its neck. Possibly there for emergency strangulation after the rabbit comes alive and attacks. Where is Alice when you need her?
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"If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck? ~Linda Ellerbee
The Hanging of John Heath During Christmas in 1883, five gunmen burst into a Bisbee store, killing a woman & three men during a robbery attempt. The five were captured and hanged. Because the instigator, a 32 year old Texas gunman named John Heath did not participate directly, he drew only a 20 year sentence. Bisbee residence were not happy with the lack of justice. In February 1884., a vigilante crowd from Bisbee dragged John Heath from the Tombstone jail & hanged him on a tall telegraph pole.
See photograph C.S. Fly's photo of residents proudly posing at the event.
*Photo is displayed in this case.
Dr. Goodfellow witness the hanging, examined the body, & as a member of the coroner's jury, issued the following report. "J. Heath came to his death from emphysema of the lungs-a disease common in high altitudes-which might have been caused by a strangulation, self inflicted or otherwise.
The root of this ivy tree lovingly embraces the old church wall , a gentle strangulation.
These are the fragments left by the passing of time.Nothing is forever
This is a creative commons image, which you may freely use by linking to this page. Please respect the photographer and his work.
Grape vines in my yard in Charlotte Court House, Charlotte County, Virginia.
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The Life and Death of Lennon Lacy: Strange, Still
By Michael W. Waters, Huffington Post
The animus for Time Magazine's "song of the 20th century" was a photograph of a Southern lynching. A Southern lynching would often draw an entire region of spectators together for a day of socializing. Small children were even present in the crowd, lifted high upon shoulder for an uninterrupted view of the day's fatal proceedings. It was a strange, albeit frequent Southern spectacle, one that claimed many Black lives.
Given the frequency of this horrid practice, and the abundance of lynching photographs in circulation, many that doubled as postcards, it is unclear why one particular photograph troubled, then inspired Abel Meeropol, a New York English teacher and poet. Yet, it did. Unable to free his mind of this troubling image over several days, Meeropol sought consolation through his pen. As ink dried upon its canvas, its residuum formed words that have haunted generations, words etched into our collective memory as lyric by the incomparable Billie Holiday:
"Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees."
Now seventy-six years removed its initial recording, there is still cause to sing this sorrowful song.
On August 29, 2014, another Black body was added to the crowded annals of those swung by Southern breeze. In a cruel twist of irony, the body of seventeen year-old Lennon Lacy was not found swinging upon a Southern tree, but upon a Southern swing set - a fact only beginning the strangeness surrounding his death. Authorities in Bladenboro, North Carolina, abruptly ruled Lennon's death a suicide, declaring that he was depressed, and closed the case in five days.
Still, many questions remain.
Why did authorities fail to place bags over Lennon's hands to prevent contamination and preserve DNA from a possible struggle?
Why didn't authorities take any pictures at the scene of Lennon's death?
Why were the shoes found on Lennon's feet not the same shoes that he departed from home wearing?
Why were the shoes found on Lennon's feet a size and a half smaller than his foot size?
Why were those same shoes removed from the body bag between the time his corpse was placed in the body bag and the time the body arrived at the medical examiner's office?
Strange.
Very strange.
Strange, still, is an independent examiner's conclusion that declaring Lennon's death a suicide is virtually impossible given Lennon's height, weight, and the items found at the scene.
The circumstances surrounding Lennon's death, however, begin to lose some of its strangeness when the fact that he was in an interracial relationship with a white woman in an area still ripe with racial tension, and where the Ku Klux Klan has an active presence, is brought to the fore. History has taught us time and time again that when authorities move too quickly to close a case, a cover-up is afoot. With so many questions surrounding Lennon's death, the move to close his case remains startlingly strange, and it is cause for great concern. Thankfully, the FBI is now investigating the case.
Strange, still, is how justice for so many Black lives remains so fleeting.
Strange, still, is how swiftly certain tragedies that befall Black lives are swept under the rug.
Strange, still, is the spectacle of a Southern lynching upon a swing set, a symbol of youthful euphoria now rendered the site of a Black youth's strangulation. Of Meeropol and Holiday's "Strange Fruit," the late jazz writer Leonard Feather penned that it was "the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism." The very nature of a lynching is to render the victim forever mute -- asphyxiating in suspended space -- the violent snapping of the neck. While Lennon Lacy is forever muted, we who love justice must become for him as Meeropol and Holiday: an unmuted cry.
We must continue to pen Lennon's story.
We must continue to sing Lennon's song.
We must continue to seek answers to strange circumstances.
We must continue to seek justice for another Black life, a life, strangely, still, gone too soon.
This post is part of the "28 Black Lives That Matter" series produced by The Huffington Post for Black History Month. Each day in February, this series will shine a spotlight on one African-American individual who made headlines in 2014 -- mostly in circumstances we all wished had not taken place. This series will pay tribute to these individuals and address the underlying circumstances that led to their unfortunate outcomes. To follow the conversation on Twitter, view #28BlackLives -- and to see all the posts as part of our Black History Month coverage, read here.