Poor Mojo's Newswire

Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbusiness reporter who was the first named journalist to allege that Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead . Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems, was said to have been found at his Watford home. Hertfordshire police would not confirm his identity, but the force said in a statement: "At 10.40am today [Monday 18 July] police were called to Langley Road, Watford, following the concerns for the welfare of a man who lives at an address on the street. Upon police and ambulance arrival at a property, the body of a man was found. The man was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after. "The death is currently being treated as unexplained but not thought to be suspicious. Police investigations into this incident are ongoing." Hoare, who was in his mid-forties, first made his claims in a New York Times investigation into the phone-hacking allegations at the News of the World.

Robert Martin Nowak, 51, is charged with murder and criminal sexual conduct in the killing of 26-year-old Troy Moross, whose body was found near a machine shop where Nowak was working and living part-time in 2001, the Oakland County prosecutors office spokesman said. He had been castrated. Nowak's attorney Larry Kaluzny said he will present evidence at the trial on Monday that federal authorities were investigating a group of men involved in a castration cult operating out of a house in Rochester Hills. He will try to prove that the ring of men, whom investigators say also operated a torture chamber in the basement of the Rochester Hills house, may have been involved in Moross' killing, and not his client.

So where does it all come from? According to a report by the Anti-Defamation League from 2010: The theories all share the belief that many years ago an insidious conspiracy infiltrated the U.S. government and subverted it, slowly replacing parts of the original, legitimate government (often referred to by sovereigns as the "de jure" government) with an illegitimate, tyrannical government (the "de facto" government). The report also describes the role of these "gurus," who "provide leadership and inspiration as well as new sovereign citizen ideas and tactics." They frequently hold seminars, sell DVDS and CDs, and post videos to their websites. Alfred Adask, who was was recently interviewed on 60 Minutes, has given a few seminars over the years, but says he mostly uses his website to disseminate his teachings. And his reasons for distrusting the government are different than what the ADL report describes. He explained to TPM a head-spinning theory about the FDA, the Declaration of Independence, and the war on drugs. Sovereign citizens, Adask said, believe that "the idea of individual sovereignty flows from God," which throughout the history of western civilization has been mostly manifested in the form of kings, "sovereign rulers" who believed they had a divine right to their thrones. Everyone else was a subject. When America was founded, the Declaration of Independence stated that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." "Very few people realize that that's the single most radical statement in political history," Adask said, and that the founders effectively "elevated all men to the status of sovereigns" by saying everyone gets their rights from God. But, he said, in 1906 this all changed with some nefarious language in the Food And Drug Act. It states that a drug is defined as (emphasis added) "any substance or mixture of substances intended to be used for the cure, mitigation, or prevention of disease of either man or other animals." This, Adask says, "means that the government deems man to be an animal" and "animals are not 'endowed by their Creator.'" The "government is removing us from the status of men." Adask continued that the government has manifested this idea in the war on drugs, which "is premised on the idea that the people are animals rather than men or women."