"Corrective Rape" in South Africa (And we continue to "help" this degenerative part of the world.....)

A report by the international NGO ActionAid, backed by the South African Human Rights Commission, said the horrific crimes against lesbians were going unrecognised by the state and unpunished by the legal system.


The report called for South Africa's criminal justice system to recognise the rapes as hate crimes in an attempt to force police to take action over the rising tide of violence.


The ferocity of the attack became clear in April last year when Eudy Simelane, former star of South Africa's national female football squad, became one of the victims. Miss Simelane, and equality rights campaigner and one of the first women to live openly as a lesbian, was gang-raped and brutally beaten before being stabbed 25 times in the face, chest and legs.


But scores more women have been deliberately targeted for rape, the Guardian reports.


"Every day I am told that they are going to kill me, that they are going to rape me and after they rape me I'll become a girl," Zakhe Sowello from Soweto, told the paper. "When you are raped you have a lot of evidence on your body. But when we try and report these crimes nothing happens, and then you see the boys who raped you walking free on the street.
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Research shows 86 per cent of black lesbians from the Western Cape live in fear of sexual assault. Triangle, a gay rights organisation, said it deals with up to 10 new cases of "corrective rape" every week.


"What we're seeing is a spike in the numbers of women coming to us having been raped and who have been told throughout the attack that being a lesbian was to blame for what was happening to them," Vanessa Ludwig, the chief executive at Triangle, told the paper.


Support groups claim an increasingly macho political environment led to inaction over attacks.


A statement released by South Africa's national prosecuting authority said: "While hate crimes – especially of a sexual nature – are rife, it is not something that the South African government has prioritised as a specific project.
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Human rights and equality campaigners are hoping that the public outrage and disgust at Miss Simelane's death and the July trial of the three men accused of her rape and murder will help put an end to the spiralling violence.

VARG VIKERNES To Be Released

Varg Vikernes (a.k.a. Count Grishnackh) — the former BURZUM mastermind who is currently serving a Norwegian prison term for the August 1993 murder of MAYHEM guitarist Oystein Aarseth (a.k.a. Euronymous) and setting fire to three churches — will soon be a free man.

In September 2008, Vikernes's fourth application for parole was denied, but a couple of weeks ago he finally received the message he has been waiting for: after almost 16 years in prison, he will be released.

"I will have to report [to the parole officer] for one year — initially every two weeks, and then once a month," Vikernes told the Dagbladet newspaper.

Varg's mother, who last year wrote a letter to Dagbladet in which she argued that her son was being unfairly treated by the justice officials who repeatedly denied his parole application, is very relieved that her son will be able to join his family in Bø (a municipality in the county of Telemark, Norway), where he recently purchased a small farm.

"I am very happy that he has been so strong and that he held out," she said. "It will be good for the family that they can be together every day."

For the past couple of years, Varg has been allowed to leave the prison regularly to walk around Tromsø, Norway (where the prison is located) and visit his family: his mother, his wife, eighteen-month-old son and sixteen-year-old daughter.

"I'm ready for society — and I have been for many years," Vikernes told Dagbladet last July . "I have learned from my mistakes and become older. Now I just want to be together with my family. My mind has never been in prison; I think all the time about what I should do on the day that I am released." He added, "I have barely seen my son since he came into the world. Even though I hear his voice on the phone almost every day, it is very tough to not be present while he is growing up. I miss my family. And I look forward the day that I could work on my farm, create music, write books and be with the wife and kids around the clock — and live a normal life. I have received tremendous support from my family. It means a lot."

Last year it was reported that case workers at the Justice Ministry feared that Vikernes would be unable to adjust to life on the outside after his years in jail.

In denying his parole for the second time, the Justice Ministry emphasized that Vikernes escaped from prison in 2003 and that he has ties to neo-Nazi groups.

"I haven't been in contact with them for a long time. Police security services know this," Vikernes previously told the VG newspaper.

Photo courtesy of Burzum.org (photo by Ingun Mæhlum):

Take that, creationists....

Archaeologists have discovered a set of footprints in Kenya dating from 1.5 million years ago. The series of footprints show adults and one child walking on the banks of a river. Scientists believe that the humans were about 5 feet 9 inches in height.

“Now we know that 1.5 million years ago, Homo erectus had feet with an anatomy very similar to modern humans. It could essentially walk with the same biomechanical efficiency as you or I,” Matthew Bennett, of Bournemouth University, said in a statement.

The ancient humans walked in a similar way as we do today. The footprints are likely left by a human ancestor called the Homo erectus. Archaeologists believe that the ancestors might've been searching for food along the beach.

"It was kind of creepy excavating these things to see all of a sudden something that looks so dramatically like something that you yourself could have made 20 minutes earlier in some kind of wet sediment just next to the site,” David Braun, archaeologist from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, said in a statement.

Scientists from the site claim that it's the most important discovery for the modern day human species. Humans, also known as Homo sapiens, first appeared 200,000 years ago. However, the footprints discovered were left more than 1.5 million years ago.

While it is unknown when humans began wearing sandals to cover their feet, the ancient prints indicate that the ancestors preferred to walk barefoot. The big toe was parallel to the other four with an arch. The other toes were shorter in comparison to modern feet today.

However, the size, spacing, and depth of the footprints show that the weight of human ancestors was similar to modern human beings.

The oldest footprints ever discovered were found in Tanzania. The prints were left 3.75 million years ago.