- Lords of Chaos: The grisly film that has caused outrage
A new movie tells the appalling true story of Norway’s ‘black metal murders’.
- Children saved as Interpol exposes pedophile ring sharing child abuse images Interpol has saved 50 children and prosecuted nine sex offenders after uncovering an international pedophile ring that was sharing child abuse images on the dark web.
- Snapchat Has Become A 'Haven For Child Abuse' With Its 'Self-Destructing Messages'
Lords of Chaos: The grisly film that has caused outrage
A new movie tells the appalling true story of Norway’s ‘black metal murders’. Nicholas Barber explores the dark tale behind the film.
By Nicholas Barber 18 February 2019
By Nicholas Barber 18 February 2019
Jonas Åkerlund’s new film, Lords of Chaos, is a rock’n’roll biopic, with all the wigs and gigs that that implies. But it is also a grisly, stranger-than-fiction comedy drama about murder, suicide, self-harm, devil worship, and a spate of arson attacks that scandalised a nation. Chronicling the outrageous crimes committed by a few Norwegian black metal bands and their hangers-on in the early 1990s...
The story behind it begins not in Norway but in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England, where a heavy-metal trio called Venom recorded its second album, Black Metal, in 1982....
“Satan appeared on the album covers and was namechecked in pretty much all the songs. This was blatant pledging allegiance to the dark lord. I remember looking at the burning crucifix in the gatefold sleeve of their 1984 album, At War With Satan, and wondering if this really was a step too far.”....
Venom aside, the bands that forged black metal were Scandinavian. From Sweden, there was Bathory, whose drummer happened to be Jonas Åkerlund, the director of Lords of Chaos. From Denmark, there was Mercyful Fate. And in Norway, a younger generation of metal enthusiasts was listening and learning....
If Aarseth’s gloomy guitar playing was the archetypal sound of Norwegian black metal, it was Ohlin who developed its own brand of showmanship. He wore black-and-white ‘corpse paint’ make-up so that his face resembled a skull, and at Mayhem’s concerts, he would self-harm. But his preoccupation with death wasn’t confined to morbid theatrics. In April 1991, Aarseth returned to their house to find that Ohlin had killed himself.....
set up his own record label, Deathlike Silence Productions, and opened a record shop in Oslo named Helvete (the Norwegian for ‘Hell’). His closest associates, he decreed, would be ‘the black circle’, and they alone would be allowed into black metal’s inner sanctum, ie a damp basement room beneath the shop. A key member of the black circle was Kristian ‘Varg’ Vikernes, a teenager from Bergen who preferred to be known as Count Grishnackh. He soon built a reputation for doing the things that Aarseth only talked about. While Aarseth was still struggling to finish Mayhem’s debut album, Vikernes recorded several solo albums under the Tolkienesque name of Burzum. And while Aarseth gave interviews about spreading hate and fear, Vikernes started setting fire to Norway’s historic wooden ‘stave churches’. On 6 June 1992, Fantoft Stave Church burnt down. Vikernes called his next EP Aske (Norwegian for ‘ashes’), and put a photograph of the church’s charred shell on the sleeve. Each copy came with a free cigarette lighter. Scandinavia’s black metal fans took the hint, and dozens of other churches went up in smoke. Some had inverted crucifixes and the number 666 spray-painted onto the ruins....
As for Vikernes, he claimed that the arson was a protest against religions from the Middle East that had replaced his forefathers’ pagan Norse gods. It seems his belief system was closer to fascism than Satanism. And he wasn’t alone. In Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s documentary about Norwegian black metal, Until the Light Takes Us, it’s striking how often the interviewees resort to racist and homophobic rhetoric.
Nor was their homophobia confined to hate speech. In August 1992, another of Aarseth’s friends, Bård Eithun (or ‘Faust’), murdered Magne Andreassen, a gay man who approached him in a park in Lillehammer. Vikernes was so pleased that he boasted to journalists from the Bergens Tidende newspaper that he knew who was responsible for the arson attacks and the murder. A front-page article, We Lit The Fires, ran in January 1993.....
Britain’s leading heavy-rock magazine, Kerrang!....feature ensured that rock fans everywhere would seek out Norwegian black metal, as Ruskell remembers. “I read about them when I was about 12,” he says, “and a music scene where people burnt churches and killed people and wanted to be in league with Satan was genuinely scary. Growing up in a Church of England household, I really wanted to know what these bands sounded like.”....
Vikernes’ and Aarseth’s infamy leapt to a horrifying new level in August 1993. Having convinced himself that Aarseth was planning to kill him, Vikernes drove to Aarseth’s Oslo flat in the middle of the night, and murdered him. In May 1994, he was sentenced to 21 years in prison, both for Aarseth’s murder and for multiple church burnings. He was 21. That same month, Mayhem’s debut album was finally released. It included lyrics by Ohlin, guitar-playing by Aarseth, and bass-playing by Vikernes, which made it a grotesque rarity: an album on which one contributor had killed himself, another had been murdered, and another was the murderer....
Children saved as Interpol exposes pedophile ring sharing child abuse images
By Julia Hollingsworth and Stella Ko CNN May 24, 2019
Interpol has saved 50 children and prosecuted nine sex offenders after uncovering an international pedophile ring that was sharing child abuse images on the dark web.
Police believe there are still 100 children yet to be located, Interpol said in a press release Thursday, adding that it expected to make more arrests and rescues.
Offenders have already been prosecuted in Thailand, Australia and the United States, Interpol said, and police in nearly 60 countries are involved in the investigation.
In the report, Interpol said it launched "Operation Blackwrist" in 2017 after discovering material depicting the abuse of 11 boys all under 13 on the dark web, a part of the internet that cannot be found by mainstream search engines. The images were on a subscription-based website that published new images weekly to almost 63,000 users worldwide.
In June 2017, Thailand's Department of Special Investigations (DSI) took on the case, working closely with Interpol's Liaison Bureau in Bangkok and investigators around the world including in the United States, Bulgaria, New Zealand and Australia..,..
In June 2018, the website's main administrator, Thailand-based Montri Salangam, was sentenced to 146 years in prison on charges of child rape and human trafficking. He had abused 11 boys — including his nephew — and had lured children to his home with meals, internet access and sporting events.
A nursery school teacher who was close to Tokputza was sentenced to 36 years in prison on the same charges.
In May 2019, Ruecha Tokputza, an Australia-based website administrator, received 40 years and three months in prison, the longest sentence ever imposed in the country for child sex offenses. Police found thousands of images taken in Thailand and Australia on his devices, some of which featured Tokputza as the main abuser. The youngest victim depicted was only 15 months old....
Snapchat Has Become A 'Haven For Child Abuse' With Its 'Self-Destructing Messages'
Zak Doffman May 26, 2019
Zak Doffman May 26, 2019
Not a good week for Snapchat. On Thursday, Motherboard reported that "several departments inside social media giant Snap have dedicated tools for accessing user data, and multiple employees have abused their privileged access to spy on Snapchat users." And now the Sunday Times has published an investigation into allegations that predators are "flocking" to the social media platform, which has become a "haven for child abuse."
Motherboard's article cited two former employees who claimed that "multiple Snap employees abused their access to Snapchat user data several years ago." This included the use of "internal tools that allowed Snap employees to access user data, including in some cases location information, their own saved Snaps and personal information such as phone numbers and email addresses."....
Ironically, it is this limited user data that is central to the Sunday Times investigation. The newspaper's investigation has uncovered "thousands of reported cases that have involved Snapchat since 2014," including "pedophiles using the app to elicit indecent images from children and to groom teenagers," as well as "under-18s spreading child pornography themselves." This has now resulted in U.K. police "investigating three cases of child exploitation a day linked to the app, [with] messages that self-destruct allowing groomers to avoid detection."....
A similar investigation in March focused on Instagram, with the NSPCC claiming that Facebook's photo-sharing app has become the leading platform for child grooming in the country. During an 18-month period to September last year, there were more than 5,000 recorded crimes "of sexual communication with a child," and "a 200% rise in recorded instances in the use of Instagram to target and abuse children." The charity's CEO described the figures as "overwhelming evidence that keeping children safe cannot be left to social networks. We cannot wait for the next tragedy before tech companies are made to act."
This latest investigation makes the same point and comes a little over a month after the U.K. Government published proposals for "tough new measures to ensure the U.K. is the safest place in the world to be online," claiming these to be the world's "first online safety laws." The proposals include an independent regulator with the "powers to take effective enforcement action against companies that have breached their statutory duty of care." Such enforcement will include "substantial fines" as well as, potentially, the powers "to disrupt the business activities of a non-compliant company... to impose liability on individual members of senior management... and to block non-compliant services."
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