Word: blood
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Russian winter was finally starting to bite, Gilani Shepiyev, the former deputy mayor of Grozny in Chechnya, was returning to his home in western Moscow. Shepiyev did not make it. He was found less than a foot away from the wood-paneled door to his apartment block. Blood from three gunshot wounds stained the dirty snow on the pavement; the weapon, a Baikal pistol, lay discarded next to him. Typical signs of a contract killing. Shepiyev had survived one assassination attempt in Grozny in 2006. This time he was not so lucky...
...rival of Kadyrov, was gunned down outside the British embassy in Moscow at peak hour. (On Jan. 13, Umar Israilov, a former bodyguard of Kadyrov's, was killed on the streets of Vienna, where he had obtained asylum.) "I don't know who is behind these crimes or why blood has been spilt," Kadyrov told the newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta in February...
...those people were Kadyrov's opponents." He says, "Kadyrov has made it clear on several occasions that he is not responsible, and maybe directly he isn't, but his supporters do have his interests at heart." Some of the crimes appear to be examples of the Caucasus' tradition of blood revenge, where a relative of an enemy is as much a target as the enemy himself - a tradition that may have been brought over to Moscow by the Chechen diaspora. "You have to understand that Chechnya is Chechnya - it has had so many wars in the last decade," says Malashenko...
Villages infested with vampire bats are one thing. But Nicaragua has its own folklore of blood-sucking monsters. From tales of the infamous chupacabras - the mythical alien, kangaroo, batdog that feeds on the blood of goats and chickens - to the lesser-known comelenguas, an unseen beast that feeds on the tongues of sleeping cattle, most Nicaraguan farmers can hold their own when it comes to telling vampire stories around a campfire. But, perhaps just like The X-Files, there could be an element of truth to some of the legends...
...when the chupacabras was supposedly terrorizing a rural farming community outside the colonial city of Leon, a former government vampire hunter told the local press that the real blood-sucking culprit was a giant vampire bat with a 5-ft wingspan, which he claims to have once caught in the northern mountains of Nicaragua. Bat experts and other vampire hunters insist there's no way a vampire could grow that big, but zoologist Bill Schutt says the hunter could have caught the Vampyrum spectrum, a monstrous carnivorous bat found in Nicaragua. The Vampyrum spectrum is an extremely rare predator with...