Barbarous species

Barbarous species

by digby

A local leader in Tanzania has been attacked and beheaded by a gang of men, who then cooked some of his body parts, police say.

The attack took place on Friday night in the southern Katavi region of the east African nation, local police chief Dhahiri Kidavashari said, naming the dead man as 31-year-old Richard Madirisha.

Police said there had been local reports accusing Mr Madirisha of adultery.

"Five people stormed Madirisha's room wielding machetes, beheaded him, chopped off legs, hands and genitals," Mr Kidavashari said on Sunday.

"The assailants later cooked the chopped off body parts outside the house," he added.

Also too:

Magu (Tanzania) (AFP) - It was a hyena that killed the boy, but four elderly women got the blame. Villagers slashed them with machetes then set fire to their bodies for casting spells on the wild animal.

"They cut her with machetes," said Sufia Shadrack, the daughter of one of the murdered women in her small village in Tanzania's northern Mwanza district. "Then they took firewood, mattresses, an iron sheet and burned her like you would cook fish or meat."

In Tanzania, hundreds of people are killed each year accused of being witches.

Like Shadrack's mother, many victims are elderly, vulnerable or marginalised -- or own property that greedy relatives seize after accusing of witchcraft.

But while some are killed falsely accused of black magic, others are murdered by the "sorcerers" themselves: scores of people with albinism have been killed and their body parts cooked up for spells.

I don't really have any larger point in writing about this except to point out that the world is full of barbarity.

Michael Smerconish is filling in for Candy Crowley today and told White House national security advisor that his callers are hysterical right now, worried that the world has hit a "tipping point" --- that we are spinning out of control. McDonough said that this isn't really true that it only seems that way because the worlds most "nefarious actors" can disseminate their cruel acts. That is undoubtedly true. But the dissemination of these cruel acts can also serve the agendas of a number of different actors. There are always people who are eager to take advantage of the opportunities that hysteria provides.