Showing posts with label Mecca. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mecca. Show all posts

Sunday, September 27, 2015

Death in Mecca




The death toll from September 22's stampede during a Hajj ritual, the Stoning of the Devil, outside of Mecca, has risen to 769, Saudi Arabia's health minister announced on September 26, 2015.



Saudi officials said a total of 13,74,206 foreign pilgrims arrived for Hajj this year.


Thousands of Muslim pilgrims stone the walls, in a ritual called "Jamarat," symbolizing the stoning the devil, in Mina near the Saudi holy city of Mecca.



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Every year, millions of Muslims converge on Saudi Arabia's holy cities of Mecca and Medina for the Hajj pilgrimage, representing a major security and logistical challenge for the kingdom. On occasion, the Hajj and events surrounding it have been marred by tragedy. A look at some of the deadly incidents:
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2015: Officially, 769 people are killed and more than 800 injured in a crush of pilgrims on September 22, in Mina, on the outskirts of Mecca. 
2015: On September 11, 2015, a crane collapses in a storm and crashes onto the Grand Mosque in Mecca, killing 111 people are killed and injuring nearly 400.


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2006: More than 360 pilgrims are killed in a stampede in Mina, near Mecca, where pilgrims carry out a symbolic stoning of the devil. A day before the Hajj begins, the collapse of an eight-story building used as a hostel near the Grand Mosque kills 73.
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2004: A crush of pilgrims at Mina kills 244 people and injures hundreds on the Hajj's final day.
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2001: A stampede at Mina on the final day of the Hajj kills 35 people.
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1998: About 180 people are trampled to death in panic after several of them fall from an overpass during the stoning ritual at Mina.
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1997: At least 340 pilgrims are killed in a wind-whipped fire at a tent city in Mina. More than 1,500 are injured.
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1994: About 270 people are killed in a stampede during the Mina ritual.
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1990: A stampede kills 1,426 people at an overcrowded pedestrian tunnel leading to the holy sites in Mecca in the worst Hajj-related tragedy.


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Across the Sands to Mecca: The Song of a Shriner (1947) book cover (from the Freemasonry's Shriners) is courtesy of Adam Parfrey, coauthor of Ritual America

Monday, October 13, 2014

Ebola Scare At Logan on Ebola Discovery Anniversary


On Monday, October 13, 2015, at about 2:45 p.m, a Hazmat team boarded Emirates Flight 237 to tend to five sick passengers, all from Dubai. At least one individual was placed in a "protective suit" and removed from the plane.

The ill people had not traveled to West Africa, but recently to Mecca, before coming to the USA. The incident occurred at Boston's Logan Airport. Everyone on the East Coast usually just refers to the airport as "Logan."


The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there was no Ebola scare at Boston's Logan Airport on Monday after concerns were raised when five passengers with flu-like symptoms were removed from a flight that landed there.

"There was not an Ebola scare at Boston's Logan Airport," Shelly Diaz, a CDC spokeswoman, said.

Emergency crews in protective gear removed the passengers from Emirates flight 237 after it had arrived from Dubai on Monday.

When is an Ebola scare not an Ebola scare? Perhaps we just saw one happen at Logan?



A Special Day/A Special Name: October 13th

Why is this day unlike any other day?

As Nick DeLuca at BostInno pointed out, "According to an eerie TIME magazine article, the Ebola virus was first observed by the human eye on this day 38-years ago."

TIME began their article, "On Oct. 13, 1976, exactly 38 years ago Monday, Frederick A. Murphy, a CDC virologist and expert in photographing viruses peered into a microscope and saw what he describes today as a “dark beauty — [a] horror.”

Who?

Wikipedia says, "Reports conflict about who initially coined the name: either Karl Johnson of the American CDC team or Belgian researchers."

Richard Preston wrote in The Hot Zone (NY: Anchor Books/Random House, 1995), wrote on page 117, "Karl Johnson named it Ebola."


Peter Piot, at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp in 1976.

Michael Hoffman, "a longtime student of Twilight Language," recently wrote about the naming of the "Ebola virus":

The following is taken from an October 4 (2014) interview with the Flemish virologist Prof. Peter Piot, said to be the "discoverer," in 1976, of the "Ebola" virus. He is currently the director of the London School of Tropical Medicine.
In an interview with England’s Observer newspaper, Piot states that victims of the pathogen were first infected in "Yambuku and the area around it," in what had been the old Belgian Congo. (In 1976 it was called Zaire; today it is again named Congo).
He gives the following account of how the virus was named:
Observer newspaper: You were also the one who gave the virus its name. Why Ebola?
Peter Piot: "On that day our team sat together late into the night – we had also had a couple of drinks – discussing the question. We definitely didn't want to name the new pathogen 'Yambuku virus,' because that would have stigmatized the place forever. There was a map hanging on the wall and our American team leader suggested looking for the nearest river and giving the virus its name. It was the Ebola river. So by around three or four in the morning we had found a name. But the map was small and inexact. We only learned later that the nearest river was actually a different one. But Ebola is a nice name, isn't it?"
Piot and an anonymous "American team leader" supposedly named the virus after "the nearest river," Ebola, which, as it turns out, was not the nearest river. This river-naming explanation is repeated by the Establishment media without question.

....Piot's enigmatic statement that "Ebola is a nice name" is bizarre; almost a hint pointing to a clue. [For more on what this may be about, please read here.]
The French surname Piot is derived from a personal or physical characteristic of the initial bearer, from "pion" indicating "a pedestrian, that is, one who walks on foot."

The Hot Name For 2014

On July 16, 2014, I wrote "Hot Name Game of 2014: Logan." A mass killing, which occurred on July 14th, had the "coincidental" detail that one of the victims was a researcher of mass shootings. The place name where this event happened caught my synchromystic attention, for it was Logan, Utah. The multiple murders and suicide focussed my attention on the name Logan.

The incidents of the name "Logan" being spotted in violence situations this year have been intriguing.

On Friday, January 17, 2014, two students were wounded at 3:20 pm, during a shooting inside the Delaware Valley Charter High School, Logan, Pennsylvania. An 18-year-old female student was shot in the arm. The same bullet then entered a 17-year-old Tyler Lewis's shoulder.

On Sunday, May 25, 2014, at Princeton, Illinois, five-year-old Logan Jacobs died when he was left in a hot (84°) car.

On July 9, 2014, Ronald Haskell shot and killed six members of the Morman family of Stays in Spring, Texas. Haskell had previously lived and had domestic violence situations occur between himself and his then-wife (Melannie Kaye Lyon) in Logan, Utah (a Mormon community). Haskell lived in Logan, Utah, from July 2006 to November 2013, mostly with his then-wife.

In Chicago, Illinois, a driver struck a pedestrian walking in the Logan Square neighborhood, on July 16, 2014. 

On September 25, 2014, at the Vaughan Foods processing plant in Moore, about 10 miles south of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 30-year-old Alton Alexander Nolen beheaded Colleen Hufford, 54. Nolen's criminal record notes he had two felonies related to selling pot in Logan County, Oklahoma.

Looking Into Logan


In Gaelic the meaning of the name Logan is "from the hollow." In Scottish, the meaning is sometimes translated as "Finnian's servant."

I pinpointed Logan as a "power name" in my 1983 (updated in 2007) book, Mysterious America: The Ultimate Guide to the Nation's Weirdest Wonders, Strangest Spots, and Creepiest Creatures:

"Logan" is another one of those words. Rocking logan stones are a part of ancient megalithic research. My brother [Jerry Dale] and I interviewed the Lowe family about the big birds' attempted abduction of Marlon from their front yard, in Logan County, Illinois. Another Logan County, this one in Colorado, has had an unusually high number of cattle mutilations and one 1975 mystery helicopter report. Logan County, Colorado, also has had an 1897 airship account, as has Logan, Ohio. Loganville, Wisconsin, sits but a stone's throw from the woods around Baraboo, said to be haunted by ghost elephants. A lake monster supposedly made an 1835 appearance in Logansport, Indiana. Logan Peak, near Huntsville, Alabama, the location of UFO, Bigfoot and mystery explosion reports, is a short distance north of Hobbs [="devil's"] Island. Logan, Kansas, saw some unexplained bird deaths in 1978. Logan, Utah was frequented by UFOs during the late 1940s and early 1950s. A May 1, 1954, flash of light was followed by an explosion and huge crater in Logan, Utah. In the 1980s, women were disappearing from Boston's Logan Airport and thus ending this list unended. 

No surprises that Ebola and Logan have overlapped in 2014 on this special anniversary date. What's next?