A rash of deaths and a missing reporter

– Monday 3rd February 2014
 by Pam Martens

In a span of four days last week, two current executives and one recently retired top ranking executive of major financial firms were found dead. Both media and police have been quick to label the deaths as likely suicides. Missing from the reports is the salient fact that all three of the financial firms the executives worked for are under investigation for potentially serious financial fraud.

The deaths began on Sunday, January 26. London police reported that William Broeksmit, a top executive at Deutsche Bank who had retired in 2013, had been found hanged in his home in the South Kensington section of London. The day after Broeksmit was pronounced dead, Eric Ben-Artzi, a former risk analyst turned whistleblower at Deutsche Bank, was scheduled to speak at Auburn University in Alabama on his allegations that Deutsche had hid $12 billion in losses during the financial crisis with the knowledge of senior executives. Two other whistleblowers have brought similar charges against Deutsche Bank.

Deutsche Bank is also under investigation by global regulators for potentially rigging the foreign exchange markets – an action similar to the charges it settled in 2013 over its traders’ involvement in the rigging of the interest rate benchmark, Libor.
Just two days after Broeksmit’s death, on Tuesday, January 28, a 39-year old American, Gabriel Magee, a Vice President at JPMorgan in London, plunged to his death from the roof of the 33-story European headquarters of JPMorgan in Canary Wharf. According to Magee’s LinkedIn profile, he was involved in “Technical architecture oversight for planning, development, and operation of systems for fixed income securities and interest rate derivatives.”

Magee’s parents, Bill and Nell Magee, are not buying the official story according to press reports and are planning to travel from the United States to London to get at the truth. One of their key issues, which should also trouble the police, is how an employee obtains access to the rooftop of one of the mostly highly secure buildings in London.
Nell Magee was quoted in the London Evening Standard saying her son was “a happy person who was happy with his life.” His friends are equally mystified, stating he was in a happy, long-term relationship with a girlfriend.

JPMorgan is under the same global investigation for potential involvement in rigging foreign exchange rates as is Deutsche Bank. The firm is also said to be under an investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for its involvement in potential misconduct in physical commodities markets in the U.S. and London.

One day after Magee’s death, on Wednesday, January 29, 2014, 50-year old Michael (Mike) Dueker, the Chief Economist at Russell Investments, is said to have died from a 50-foot fall from a highway ramp down an embankment in Washington state. Again, suicide is being presented by media as the likely cause. (Do people holding Ph.D.s really attempt suicide by jumping 50 feet?)

According to Dueker’s official bio, prior to joining Russell Investments, he was an assistant vice president and research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis from 1991 to 2008. His duties there included serving as an associate editor of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics. He also was editor of Monetary Trends, a monthly publication of the St. Louis Fed.

Bloomberg News quotes William Poole, former President of the St. Louis Fed from 1998 to 2008, saying “Everyone respected his professional skills and good sense.”
According to a report in the New York Times in November of last year, Russell Investments was one of a number of firms that received subpoenas from New York State regulators who are probing the potential for pay-to-play schemes involving pension funds based in New York. No allegations of wrongdoing have been made against Russell Investments in the matter.

The case of David Bird, the oil markets reporter who had worked at the Wall Street Journal for 20 years and vanished without a trace on the afternoon of January 11, has this in common with the other three tragedies: his work involves a commodities market – oil – which is under investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations <http://wallstreetonparade.com/2014/01/wall-streets-oil-and-commodities-empire-under-investigation-by-u-s-senate/>  for possible manipulation. The FBI is involved in the Bird investigation. Bird left his Long Hill, New Jersey home on that Saturday

<http://wallstreetonparade.com/2014/01/david-bird-wall-street-journal-reporter-goes-missing-after-reporting-for-three-months-on-oil-glut-in-u-s/> , telling his wife he was going for a walk. An intentional disappearance is incompatible with the fact that he left the house wearing a bright red jacket and without his life-sustaining medicine he was required to take daily as a result of a liver transplant. Despite a continuous search since his disappearance by hundreds of volunteers, local law enforcement and the FBI, Bird has not been located.

When a series of tragic events involving one industry occur within an 18-day timeframe, the statistical probability of these events being random is remote. According to a number of media reports, JPMorgan is conducting an internal investigation of the death of Gabriel Magee. Given that JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Russell Investments are subjects themselves of investigations, a more serious, independent look at these deaths is called for.


Source Article:- http://wallstreetonparade.com/2014/02/a-rash-of-deaths-and-a-missing-reporter-%E2%80%93-with-ties-to-wall-street-investigations/

Who didn't want him dead?

On 5 January 2014, The New York Post reported thus:

“The millionaire Hasidic slumlord found burned and suffocated in a Nassau County dumpster, his body still smoldering from the waist down... had so many enemies that investigators say they almost don’t know where to start looking...

‘Any number of people wanted to kill this guy,’ one law-enforcement source said of Menachem ‘Max’ Stark, 39, describing the father of eight as embroiled in several ‘shady’ real-estate transactions and being up to his tuchus in debt. ‘He owed a lot of people money,’ said another source…

Stark left behind a trail of angry tenants from more than a dozen residential properties… along with an untold number of unpaid contractors and angry business associates, investigators said… ‘He was involved in shady business deals, was known to carry around a lot of money and had a sealed arrest for forcible touching’ in his past, one law-enforcement source told The Post. The alleged victim was a young teen girl, said the source, declining to give further details.

‘He’s a Hasidic Jew from Williamsburg, and we think he’s a scammer,’ another investigator said of Stark, who had defaulted on more than $30 million in real-estate loans in recent years and owed tens of thousands in penalties for building violations. ‘He f–ked over a few people,’ the source added.

Many on Stark’s enemies list took to social media Saturday, and not to mourn his passing. ‘His slanted shtreimel on his head gives his crookedness away,’ one commenter wrote on FailedMessiah.com, referring to the victim’s fur hat in a photo.
‘Sentence his kidnappers to live in one of his buildings,’ wrote another poster to the site…

On the day he was abducted, Stark had called one businessman, a Borough Park-based real-estate developer, a dozen times, said the source, and had just succeeded in convincing the man to deposit $500,000 in an account for him, the source said…
At the time of his death, Stark owed tens of thousands of dollars in penalties for 148 Department of Buildings violations on his 17 properties, public records show. ‘He owed me some money on a job I was doing for him, and he told me to go f–k myself,’ one Williamsburg contractor told The Post of his dealings with Stark, who was notorious for bouncing checks.

Numerous former Stark tenants described living with vermin, plus shabby interiors and sporadic heat and water problems. ‘I’ve had many conversations with him, and of course in many of those conversations I wanted to kill him,’ joked Greg Hanlon, who lived in a Stark-owned building in Clinton Hill.

A Stark building at 239 Banker St. in Greenpoint was so decrepit, the city issued a vacate order in 2009 — and numerous tenants were left to chase Stark down in futile efforts to retrieve the four-month deposits Stark had demanded of them, one tenant organizer said. The building went into foreclosure shortly after. ‘He pretty much ripped off the whole building,’ said the organizer, Ryan Kuonen. ‘They kept trying to serve him, and he kept hiding from them. When he’d hear ‘Are you Max Stark,’ he would take off running.’

Investigators are finding a pattern of shady dealings in which Stark would acquire properties and then ‘lose’ the properties by failing to pay his mortgage and improvement loans, sources said. The properties would then be snapped up at bargain basement prices by family members and associates, one law-enforcement source said."
Not what you'd call Mr Wonderful then. Not someone you'd want to lend your mother's last ten bob to. Max wasn't loathed by everyone, however. The Post continues:

"Rabbi David Niederman of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg told reporters Sunday that Stark ‘was a warm person when you approached him and needed something from him.

‘He was the go to-person that many people went to when they needed something special,’ Niederman said. ‘He paid for a special doctor, special education, food, or rent to stop eviction.’

Brother-in-law Abraham Buxbaum also described Stark, a married father of eight, as ‘the most loving and giving father, brother-in-law, friend, business partner, person. He is loved by everyone,’ Buxbaum said. ‘No one ever had an issue with him. It was always enjoyable to be around him.

I, personally, was in his office with his secretaries,’ Buxbaum added. ‘We went through some of his files, his accounts, his deals. Nothing, absolutely, was alarming to me. Everything, to me, looked normal’.”

On the same day, The Business Insider told us this:

"The newly elected Brooklyn borough president and other New York politicians quickly condemned a controversial New York Post Sunday cover that asked about a murdered Jewish landlord, ‘Who didn't want him dead?’

Eric Adams, the new Brooklyn borough president, led a press conference Sunday afternoon to condemn the Post's ‘hateful coverage’ of the death of Menachem Stark…

Rabbi Abe Freedman tweeted that new New York City Public Advocate Letitia James was among the other politicians present at the press conference. According to the New York Observer's Colin Campbell, she suggested advertisers boycott the Post.
At the press conference, Adams called on the Post to issue an apology to Stark in Monday's edition.
‘The New York Post's decision to hang Menachem Stark in effigy on its cover, hours after shiva has begun, is a betrayal of journalistic integrity,’ he said.

Another attendee, New York City council member David Greenfield, suggested that Osama bin Laden got better coverage in the Post.”

They don't like their own 'shady' operators criticised, do they?

Oh yes, from the lofty heights of some council chamber or other, the David Cs are ever ready to pounce upon those who dare wash the dirty linen of the Orthodox in public.
And, of course, there's always some tame goy 'borough president' or equally pliable 'advocate' shiksa ready, willing and able to back up the Greenfields with a stern official denunciation from elsewhere within the corridors of power.

If there's one thing the eternal Jew doesn't like it's the whole truth, ladies and gents. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth just does not suit those who seem happy to 'f-ck... people' over as a matter of course.

Don't you think it's about time the world told the David Greenfields and their bought apologists to get lost? Don't you think it's about time we were allowed to consider Jewish misdemeanour on an equal footing with our own without having some bought jobsworth threaten boycotts and claim betrayal?

Osama Bin Laden got better coverage? Well, David, he wasn't responsible for the rats, was he? Or the bad loans and the building violations. Maybe that has something to do with it. And then, they do say that Osama wasn't entirely responsible for 9/11 either.
Maybe one or two down at The Post are catching up.

Check out The Talmud if you want to know where the Menachem Stark-type mindset comes from.

UPDATE

On 7 January 2014, Debra Nussbaum Cohen informed us further in the Israeli daily, Haaretz:

“At his funeral on bitter-cold Saturday night, attended by some 1,000 people standing on the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Stark was lauded as a pillar of his community… People in Williamsburg have been unequivocal.

The Post headline was ‘pure anti-Semitism,’ said Sarah Teitelbaum, a Satmar housewife who asked that her real name not be used. ‘He was a big ba'al tzedaka (giver of charity). Everybody only has good to say about him.’ Leaders of the Hasidic sect as well as Brooklyn politicians condemned the headline…

Subsequent accounts have detailed some of the financial and legal troubles Stark faced. With a partner he owned dozens of rental buildings with roughly 1,000 apartments in trendy Brooklyn neighborhoods including Williamsburg and Greenpoint. He had not paid tens of thousands of dollars in fines levied by the city for rental properties in severe disrepair… The real estate trade paper The Real Deal reported in 2011 that he and a business partner had been sued for $51 million for defaulting on five separate loans.

On the consumer review website Yelp, one tenant wrote that he lived in a building owned by Stark for five years and ‘the plumbing was a nightmare. The first-floor was overrun with big-ass rats. Electricity would randomly be shut off for days at a time.’ Another poster wrote, ‘Think of every terrible stereotype and characterization you can possibly imagine when the phrase ‘New York City slumlords’ enters your head’…
Sources say that in fact there is no contradiction between the role Stark played in his Satmar community of Williamsburg, and how some tenants and legal documents say he behaved outside it.”

After informing us that Satmar boys are taught that ‘non-Jews aren’t quite human,’ Cohen then quoted Samuel Katz, brought up as a Satmar but now secular, thus:
“You don’t see commonality with people who aren’t Jewish. There is a completely different taxonomy of people. There are Jews and then there are non-Jews, WHO DON’T HAVE SOULS…

Every boy is taught that the bad goyim will be killed (when the Messiah comes) and the good gentiles will have the privilege of serving us, of being our slaves. The way Stark dealt with tenants is part of that world view… It’s not taking advantage of them, that is the world order you’re taught to expect.

It informs your moral compass. Like all good people Stark was benevolent and generous to the people who he saw were like himself, but not to other people. There’s an empathy ‘blind spot’ that imbues the Haredi outlook.”

Samuel Heilman, an ‘expert on Hasidic communities’ and a professor of sociology at Queens College, was quoted thus:

“What you do to the goyim is not the same as what you do to Jews… Part of the collective mind-set… was that you need to keep a distance from them, that THEY ARE A DIFFERENT LEVEL OF HUMAN BEING.”

Do you get it yet, folks?

These people, whom politicians and nobility throughout the western world have protected and promoted for centuries, have always seen we lesser mortals as  ‘a different level of human being,’ as having no souls.

That’s how Iraq wars come to be. (The US Neoconservatives, who were agitating for a second Gulf War from the time the first one ended, were almost wholly Jewish) That’s how the banking scandals and world-wide recessions come to be. That how Israel gets to do what it does to the Palestinians. That's how a wholly unrepresentative, damp-handed nerd like Ed Miliband gets to be the leader of the Labour party. When you can’t criticise or investigate a self-serving, other-despising community, that community can, whenever it wants, take advantage of the rest.

Check out the negative influence that the Jewish Board of British Deputies, via its role in the creation and implementation of race law in this country, has had upon the happiness and welfare of the British people.

Homosexual Jews have ‘higher souls’ than Gentiles and its related links should dispel any notion that the supremacism exhibited by the Satmar community is uncommon.
Posted by Michael Graham at 09:13

http://traitor666.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/who-didnt-want-him-dead.html

Israel demands family pays for house demolition

The Israeli authorities have demanded that a Palestinian family who were evicted from their house before it was demolished now pays for removing the wreckage.

by Kuzey News Agency 

When Israeli bulldozers arrived in front of Ayman Said Kerrish's home, Israeli officers woke him up and instructed him to leave his home within five minutes. This stirred a wave of protests and anger in other parts of the world, but it has become a daily routine for Palestinians in eastern Jerusalem, which is the capital of the Palestinian State.

Kerrish and his family were left homeless and helpless in just five minutes and were not able to stop the cruel Israeli officers who were determined to tear down the house. The only things they possess now are the pajamas they were wearing as they fled their home.

“They came very early in the morning. There were 40-50 police officers and some troops from border units. Although we had not received any early warning about our house being demolished, they came here and start to destroy the house. We begged them to give us some time to take some valuable possessions,” he said, telling the incident to TRT TURK

.

After several days of demolishing, Ayman’s little girl Nura still runs away from her father’s arms to the broken house that has a special meaning in her memory. There were 6 floors in the house where Ayman Kerrish lived, with his brother and other family members in four of them. But now this crowded Palestinian family must stay in a tent given by the Red Crescent in front of their destroyed house.

This tragic story is not unique for the Kerrish family. Israel will continue to illegally destroy Palestinian houses to make way for new Jewish settlements. Facing an economic bottleneck, the Palestinian authority is unable to provide sufficient aid to victims of Israeli brutality. The Kerrish family is working to get some legal consultancy from a Norwegian NGO.

The lawlessness embraced by the Israeli authorities with their indifferent stance towards international rules worsen the situation of Palestinian victims who do not know what the future holds for them. Noting that the Israeli goal is to put pressure on Palestinians to leave their lands, Kerrish said, “We do not know what will happen to us. They claimed our house without a license and destroyed it. But we did not rent this house, we bought it. How can they throw us out of a house without compensation?”

Instead of getting compensation for the injustice implemented by the Israeli officers, the Jewish authority demanded the family pays the cost of removing the wreckage. “What kind of justice is this? The laws are just on the paper. Their intention is clear to make Palestinians leave Jerusalem,” he cried out.

http://www.worldbulletin.net/?aType=haber&ArticleID=123651

Erich Priebke's real crime: his revisionism?

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Robert Faurisson - The Unofficial Blog

Captain Erich Priebke was in Rome in 1944 when thirty of his comrades in arms were cowardly murdered, blown up by a bomb planted in via Rasella by Communist-led partisans. Another hundred of his comrades in arms were wounded by the same bomb, a large number of them permanently blinded. He was especially disturbed on learning that an eleven-year-old Italian boy had also been killed, his body cut in two by the blast. So, just a minute: what man, what woman, in such circumstances, could keep a cool head? One may add that Priebke was among those who received the order from Berlin, transmitted by his superiors, to execute the following day, in reprisal, approximately ten men for each victim. A new horror after a first horror.

The Jewish, communist and other associations that yesterday took the initiative of organising loathsome acts of violence against the attempts to transport Priebke’s coffin to a church certainly had in mind the "crime" of which they accused him, but it may be asked whether in their eyes the real crime of the scapegoat was his revisionism (see his written interview of July 2013). At a time when, on the strictly historical and scientific level, the revisionists have won victory after victory, the panic overtaking enthusiasts of the "Holocaust" or "Shoah" religion is understandable. And the conditions required for Italy to adopt, in its turn, a special ad-hoc law against revisionism need to be created, do they not?

Source: http://robertfaurisson.blogspot.it/2013/10/erich-priebkes-real-crime-his.html

Russian Deputy of the Duma says Germany is just another US colony

Posted on 08/25/2013 by justice4germans

This is a translation of a recent video interview with Evgeny Fyodorov, Deputy of the Duma, and friend of Vladimir Putin, which one of my readers discovered and kindly translated. The video is in the original Russian language with Germans subtitles, and the English translation is added below:
  
English Translation:
Intro:

Evgeny Fyodorov, Deputy of the Duma, a friend of Vladimir Putin, and one of the most popular politicians in Russia, speaks about the American occupation of Germany, recorded on August 21st, 2013.

Q:  (statement) The Federal Republic of Germany rejects collaboration in the area of informational exchange with the US and EU states.

What do you think?  Will the FRG be punished by the USA?

A: Uhm, come on…. this is all lies. The FRG’s Intelligence Services have always been directly commanded by the US. We know that from many sources.
The German Military and Intelligence Generals laugh about the statements by Merkel!
Angela (Merkel) makes her patriotic statements, because of the federal elections coming up, because the German people expect that from her.

But the German people can demand whatever they want.  It won’t change the fact, that the German Intelligence Services and Military are only affiliates (of NATO etc) of the CIA and of the US Defense Ministry and nothing more.

This is the reason why German Intelligence and Military take shots at Merkel and her statements, since their positions and careers don’t depend on her, but rather, on the USA.

The German Generals and Intelligence chiefs are carefully selected and controlled, and their position depend on the Americans, and not on the Chancellor, nor on the German government.

Germany is just another US colony, like many other countries too.
By the way, there is a national liberation movement in Germany, like we have in Russia too.

And this German national liberation movement tries to publicly talk about these topics, such as German gold reserves stored abroad, the question of the sovereignty of the German people, and the rights of the self-contained administration of the German territory, and they are demanding the withdrawal of US occupation troops from Germany.

In contrast to Russia, Germany however,  is directly occupied by US troops, who are stationed there.

The USA has occupied Germany in 1945 and stationed their troops at many military bases, and we see today, the same military bases, and the same US troops in Germany, and so it doesn’t matter that these bases are renamed in “NATO bases” or simply as military bases.

Do you seriously think, that this has changed even the slightest bit in respect to Germany’s US occupation?

This is just ridiculous! The people who believe it are so naive!

Q  (Statement)  It is claimed, however, that Germany is a member of NATO and so,  for that reason, the US and British troops are stationed in Germany.

A: Of course they say that!  That is the task of US propaganda … to “sugar coat” the American occupation, and to display it to the Germans as a “nice” and “cozy” relationship.

But in reality, simple US occupation is behind it. And within NATO, Germany is treated as another US vassal state and is exploited.

There is a “master” in Washington, and there is the servant who was commanded by the master to become a NATO member!

And just like we see in the case of Mr. Snowden, Germany is a vassal state of the USA, and so all other statements by Merkel are a fiction … a lie!

http://justice4germans.com/2013/08/25/russian-deputy-of-the-duma-says-germany-is-just-another-us-colony/

Precise atomic clock may redefine time

Device lays the groundwork for a new second.
Philip Ball - 09 July 2013


The international definition of a second of time could be heading for a change, thanks to researchers who have demonstrated that an advanced type of ‘atomic clock’ has the degree of precision and stability needed to provide a new standard.

Under a blue laser light, a cloud of strontium atoms kept in a vacuum fluoresces at a characteristic wavelength, which could be used to redefine the second.

Jérôme Lodewyck of the Paris Observatory and his colleagues have shown that two so-called optical lattice clocks (OLCs) can remain as perfectly in step as experimental precision can establish1. They say that this test of consistency is essential if OLCs are to be used to redefine the second, which is currently defined according to a different type of atomic clock.

Christopher Oates, a specialist in atomic-clock time standards at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, says that this is “very beautiful and careful work, which gives grounds for confidence in the optical lattice clock and in optical clocks generally”.

Since 1967, the second has been defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the microwave radiation absorbed or emitted when a caesium atom jumps between two particular energy states.

The most accurate way to measure this frequency at present is in an atomic fountain, in which a laser beam propels atoms in gasous caesium upwards. Emission from the atoms is probed as they pass twice through a microwave beam – once on the way up, and once as they fall back down under gravity.

Caesium atomic-fountain clocks are used to set national time standards at NIST, at the Paris Observatory and elsewhere.
The caesium fountain clock has an accuracy of about three parts in 10 quadrillion (3 × 10−16). This means that it will keep time to within one second over 100 million years. But some newer atomic clocks can do even better. Monitoring emission from individual ionized atoms trapped by an electromagnetic field can supply an accuracy of about 10−17.

Better timing

The clocks studied by Lodewyck and his colleagues are newer still: they were first demonstrated less than a decade ago2. Although they cannot yet beat the accuracy of trapped-ion clocks, they have been shown to be comparable to caesium fountain clocks, and some researchers are convinced that they will ultimately be the best of the lot.

There are two reasons for this. First, like trapped-ion clocks, they measure the frequency of visible light, with a frequency tens of thousands of times higher than that of microwaves. Second, they measure the average emission frequency from several thousand trapped atoms rather than just one, and so the measurement statistics are better. The atoms are trapped in an optical lattice, rather like an electromagnetic egg box for holding atoms.

If OLCs are to succeed, however, researchers must show that one such clock ticks at exactly the same rate as another prepared in an identical way. This is what Lodewyck and colleagues have shown. They prepared optical lattices that each held about 10,000 atoms of the isotope strontium-87, and have shown that the two clocks stay in synchrony to within a precision of at least 1.5 × 10−16, which is as accurately as the experiment could measure.

The team has also shown that their strontium OLCs can keep pace with all three of the caesium clocks at the Paris Observatory, to an accuracy dictated only by the fundamental limit on the caesium clocks themselves.

Better atomic clocks would be a boon to basic science. For example, physicists could use such clocks to investigate whether some of nature’s fundamental constants change over time, as some theories predict.
Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2013.13363

References

1.
Le Targat, R. et al. Nature Comms. 4, 2109 (2013).
Jérôme Lodewyck of the Paris Observatory and his colleagues have shown that two so-called optical lattice clocks (OLCs) can remain as perfectly in step as experimental precision can establish1

2.
Takamoto, M., Hong, F.-L., Higashi, R. & Katori, H. Nature 435, 321–324 (2005).
The clocks studied by Lodewyck and his colleagues are newer still: they were first demonstrated less than a decade ago2…

Source:-   http://www.nature.com/news/precise-atomic-clock-may-redefine-time-1.13363#/ref-link-1    

For Belgium's Tormented Souls, Euthanasia-Made-Easy Beckons

PUTTE, Belgium—In this small village amid an array of Flemish farms, they were an unusual but seemingly happy pair, two 43-year-olds who were identical, deaf twins. Townspeople recalled seeing Marc and Eddy Verbessem around town frequently, talking animatedly in sign language together, tooling around in a small blue car, and regularly buying two copies of a popular gossip magazine.
No one expected them to decide to die on purpose.

For Belgium's Tormented Souls, Euthanasia-Made-Easy Beckons

According to their doctor, the twins had developed a genetic disorder that was making them blind, and several years ago they began pressuring him to put them to death. Even in Belgium, with its decade-old euthanasia law, the request was striking, since the twins were relatively young and not terminally ill. But their doctor says that as their condition worsened and threatened their independence, they would hand him envelopes containing a blunt request for euthanasia—and, for good measure, a list of symptoms they said were making their lives unbearable.

The twins' ordeal wasn't publicly known at the time, but their request—and its fulfillment last December—highlights an emotional battle over expanding Belgium's euthanasia law, and is reverberating in the end-of-life debate in the U.S.

On Dec. 14, Marc and Eddy, after a long legal and medical journey, met their doctors and family in a Brussels hospital, according to their doctor. They enjoyed a final cup of coffee and lay down in adjoining beds, where a chaplain said a prayer. Then they waved to their family, pointed up as if to say "see you on the other side," received their injections, and were gone.

Belgium adopted euthanasia in 2002, a year after neighboring Holland, with the goal of helping incurably ill patients escape "unbearable physical or mental suffering." It has become widely accepted; in 2011, the last year for which numbers are available, 1,133 Belgians had euthanasia requests approved, up about five fold from the first full year after the law was passed. Euthanasia accounts for about 1% of all deaths in Belgium.

The Belgian parliament is now considering expanding euthanasia in ways that many Americans might find startling. Under one proposal, gravely ill teenagers could seek euthanasia, if their parents agreed.

Another bill would let patients with early Alzheimer's sign a declaration asking to have their life ended when a doctor concludes they're no longer interacting with the outside world, even if they seem vigorous and happy at the time. Now, patients must be lucid to request euthanasia, which is generally carried out soon after.

The twins' case, along with those proposals, is playing into the end-of-life debate in the U.S., as American opponents of assisted suicide warn that America could end up like Belgium. Critics say Marc and Eddy's case shows how aid-in-dying laws invariably expand their reach.

"It's a deep worldview if you accept that life isn't necessarily a good and death isn't necessarily a bad," said John Brehany, executive director of the U.S. Catholic Medical Association, which advocates against assisted suicide. "A lot of people in the world aren't happy, and if death is one more option we lay out for them the world will look like a very different place."

But many Europeans see euthanasia as highly compassionate, a way for individuals to control their fate and even a matter of human rights. "This law should serve as an example for countries who have not been able to agree on a suitable framework for this delicate issue," David Dufour, the twins' family doctor. He discussed the Verbessem case via email.

In the U.S., four states—Oregon, Washington and Montana and Vermont—allow assisted suicide, while several others are considering it. Assisted suicide differs from euthanasia in that the patient himself, not a doctor, administers the lethal dose. That is crucial for many Americans, and polls suggest U.S. voters are more open to assisted suicide than euthanasia, though opponents claim one can lead to the other. Still, the battle on both sides is heating up. The Vermont legislature just enacted its assisted-suicide law, while Massachusetts voters defeated a version last November.

The debate is part of an intensifying discussion, at once public and highly personal, of end-of-life issues, due partly to the aging baby boom generation and partly to technological advances that can prolong life. From cremation to living wills, Americans are grappling more directly with how to die.

One U.S. group spreads the word on how patients who want to can use plastic hoods to die.
.
One U.S. group pushing the limits is Final Exit Network, a New Jersey-based nonprofit that spreads the word on how to assemble a homemade "exit bag"—a plastic hood that fits over the head and is fed by helium, resulting in a quick death. The group even supplies "exit guides" who have witnessed about 350 suicides so far, the group estimates.

Rita Marker, executive director of the Ohio-based Patients Rights Council, which opposes assisted suicide, says Final Exit volunteers essentially invite people to kill themselves. "A lot of times vulnerable people fall for this sort of thing," she said. "It's ghoulish."

Frank Kavanaugh, a Final Exit board member, denies that. He also rejects a charge from critics that "exit guides" prevent people from removing the hoods if they have last-minute doubts. "We do not as a matter of policy hold down a person's hands to keep them from taking off the hood," Mr. Kavanaugh said. "We often hold their hand, if they wish, as a matter of compassion."

The end-of-life debate has become global, with euthanasia defining one end of it. Luxembourg in 2008 joined Belgium and the Netherlands in allowing euthanasia. In France, a medical panel recently approved the practice, paving the way for possible legislation. Switzerland allows assisted suicide, and its Dignitas clinic outside Zurich has become a destination for those seeking death.

The subject is also entering the broader culture in the U.S. and world-wide. The BBC recently commissioned a series called "Way to Go," which it described as "a black comedy about three ordinary guys who find themselves forced by an extraordinary set of circumstances into setting up an assisted-suicide business."

When her Alzheimer's worsens, Gerda Windgasse, 72, wants to die this way, too.
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In Belgium, euthanasia's foothold is illustrated by Gerda Windgasse, 72, a bubbly retired secretary who's planning to end her life in the coming years. She has a still-mild case of Alzheimer's, and when she decides she has deteriorated enough, she intends to gather her family and receive a lethal injection.

"My life was good, but I don't want to make it two years longer if my mind is not there," Ms. Windgasse said in an interview at her modern-style home in the prosperous town of Oud-Turnhout. "When I don't recognize my husband or my kids or grandchildren, I don't want that."

When Ms. Windgasse was diagnosed in 2002, her doctor said he'd never euthanize her because of his Catholic beliefs, prompting her to seek another physician. "When I found a doctor who could help me with euthanasia, tears came down, I was so happy," she said. Knowing she can end her life before losing her dignity, she said, "makes me feel free, like I can fly."

That new doctor is Peter De Deyn, a white-bearded bear of a man who's a neuropsychiatrist at the University of Antwerp. He estimates he has euthanized about 20 patients with dementia, plus more with other conditions.

Dr. De Deyn rejects the notion, prevalent especially in the U.S., that patients can get bullied into euthanasia by doctors or family members. He said euthanasia is only performed on those who desperately want it.

"It's something they are looking forward to," Dr. De Deyn said. "That sounds paradoxical, but it is the only way to step out in a dignified manner, having control over their life and death, and they see it as a kind of party. They are surrounded by loved ones, they sing songs sometimes. It's very, very strange."

Dr. De Deyn has told Ms. Windgasse he will euthanize her when she's ready. On a recent afternoon, she and her husband Karel Broeckx opened a black binder to show the declaration she has signed saying she can be euthanized if she falls into a coma.

But Ms. Windgasse hopes to end her life while she's lucid, and her husband says he won't fight that. "There is no doubt I will accept the decision," Mr. Broeckx said. "It's out of love for her that I couldn't stand the full decline of her personality."

More complicated is the question of whether to invite their granddaughters Laura and Amber, ages 12 and 10, to the event. "I often think, 'Why not with the grandchildren?' " Mr. Broeckx said during the interview. Ms. Windgasse protested, "They're too young." Mr. Broeckx replied, "I have my doubts about that. I saw my own grandfather die…It can be a beautiful moment."

Earlier this month, Christian de Duve, a Belgian Nobel laureate in medicine, was euthanized at his home at age 95 after various health problems. Such prominent cases can spur a greater interest in euthanasia in the country, as happened after the 2008 death of Hugo Claus, a well-known Belgian writer.

Now the Belgian senate is debating whether to expand the law. One of the most controversial proposals would let severely ill, suffering minors request euthanasia, if a psychiatrist finds they have a "capacity for discernment" and if their parents agree.

The Catholic Church, among others, fiercely objects to that. "Minors are…considered legally incapable of certain acts, for example buying or selling, marrying, and so on," Msgr. Andre-Joseph Leonard, archbishop of Brussels, told reporters recently. "And here all of a sudden, they're sufficiently mature in the eyes of the law to ask someone to take their lives?"

Ms. Marker, of the Patients Rights Council, said such proposals highlight the perils of aid-in-dying provisions, including assisted suicide laws. "This presents a really good lesson for those in U.S. considering this," she said. "If it is a good medical treatment to end suffering, why deny it to a 3-year old, a 5-year-old, an 8-year-old?"

Assisted-suicide advocates say history disproves such slippery-slope arguments; Oregon, they say, has never moved to expand its law, despite allowing assisted suicide since 1997. In all, 1,050 Oregon patients have receive lethal prescriptions since 1998, a number that is rising but, on a per capita basis in the state, is far lower than that in Belgium.

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