EDMONTON -With a name like "Psychiatry: Industry of Death," visitors to the travelling exhibition in Edmonton likely understand they are not about to get a particularly measured perspective of the mental health profession. What they might not be prepared for is a fright show of the alleged "criminal practices" and "brutalities" of psychiatry, the cause, apparently, of history's vilest atrocities. By National PostAugust 9, 2007 EDMONTON -With a name like "Psychiatry: Industry of Death," visitors to the travelling exhibition in Edmonton ...

Senior politicians from Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition have rejected calls for a ban on the Scientology cult. A legal bid to outlaw it would fail because authorities haven't had time to build a proper case against the organization, they say. Politicians from Germany's two ruling parties have rejected calls for Scientology to be banned in Germany. A bid to outlaw Scientology may fail because Germany's domestic intelligence service is unlikely to have gathered enough evidence against it to back court action ...

A Queens legislator — who insists a controversial detoxification program he's promoting in lower Manhattan isn't a front for Scientology — attended a celebrity-studded Los Angeles gala sponsored by the Church of Scientology. City Councilman Hiram Monserrate said he paid his own way Saturday to the glitzy Hollywood event celebrating the 38th anniversary of the Church of Scientology Celebrity Center. Monserrate said the trip had no connection to his work on behalf of the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project on ...

HAMBURG, Germany, Aug. 8 (UPI) — The interior minister of Hamburg, Germany, sees Scientology as a threat to his state's security. Scientology is not a religious community but an "extremist grouping" that needs to be banned, said Udo Nagel, the interior minister of the northern German state of Hamburg. According to Nagel, Germany’s Interior Ministry in Berlin is currently probing whether a ban of Scientology would hold up in court. Observers and virtually all political parties in Germany see Scientology as ...

Almost all of those who attended a meeting Monday night to learn about a proposed drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility agreed on one thing. They do not want it in their neighborhood. Narconon Gulf Coast, Inc. wants to purchase a three-story beach house at 263 Snowdrift Road and turn it into a 28-bed residential rehabilitation facility. The nonprofit organization hosted the meeting to answer questions from those who live near the proposed location. Henry Pitts owns property one street over from ...

The Church of Scientology has purchased more property on 125th Street, and one of the buyers is listed in city records as Richard Fear. We kid you not. The L. Ron Hubbard-founded religion recently closed on 230 and 232 125th Street for $10.2 million, according to city records. The latter address was formerly the site of the St. Samuel Church of God. In 2003, the Scientologists acquired 220 East 125th Street for $3.45 million. They're currently building a 33,000-square-foot church on ...

MIRAMAR BEACH — Controversy over a proposed drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility has moved from one beachside neighborhood to another. Narconon Gulf Coast Inc. wants to purchase a beach house at 263 Snowdrift Road and turn it into a 28-bed residential facility. The nonprofit organization drew heated opposition earlier this year with its plan to buy a house on Scenic Gulf Drive for the same purpose. That purchase has since fallen through, and Narconon is now hoping to buy the house ...

The blog Boy Culture ran into (an all too common these days) "Travolting display" in the subway system over the weekend. Scientologists! The religion cult "legendarily opportunistic Church Of Scientology" is back underground giving out free stress tests. Though police kicked them out in 2005 for violating New York City Transit rules about vending in the subways, it seems they've still had a presence down there and, from this photo (taken in late 2006), they're still selling Dianetics (translated in 50 ...

[...] A man who holds no truck with established religion is unsurpris-ingly unlikely to have much good to say about Scientology, which purports to use scientific tools such as its controversial “E-meter”. “It’s purely made-up. It just taps into some ‘gullibiligy’. They find some film star or somebody like Tom Cruise or whatever his name is who’s thick as two short planks and he becomes a sort of advertisement.” [...]

They're ubiquitous at almost every disaster zone, assisting the wounded and consoling grieving families, from Ground Zero to Indonesia to New Orleans and now Minneapolis. The Church of Scientology and its globetrotting team of volunteer ministers have been active over the last several years, arousing the ire of critics who read unholy motives into the group's charitable works. Soon after Wednesday's bridge collapse, at least 20 Scientology volunteers in Minneapolis and surrounding areas headed to the disaster zone, according to a ...

Oh God. Sinister cultists the Scientologists are buying a new headquarters in Philadelphia on which (it being "a place of worship") they'll pay no taxes. The bastards. Soon they'll be out in the street–nicely dressed, glassy-eyed and grinning–conning innocent Philadelphians into taking a "free" personality test in an attempt to lure them into a hell world of unimaginably banal fourth-rate sci-fi gobbledeygook. Here are just some of the crazy mental-in-the-head, batshit insane things Scientologists believe: All humans contain an ancient space ...

L’Église de scientologie de Québec s’apprête à déménager ses pénates sur la rue Saint-Joseph, dans des locaux 10 fois plus grands que ceux qu’elle occupe à Limoilou. Un signe d’expansion ? Plutôt d’une volonté de soigner son image, semble-t-il. À l’heure actuelle, ils sont quelque 200 membres à fréquenter l’Église de façon régulière. Pour une organisation implantée dans la ville depuis le début des années 70, le chiffre est plutôt modeste. « Il y a peut-être eu une légère augmentation récemment, ...

Best-selling science fiction author Kevin J. Anderson felt like a giddy fan while completing the unfinished last novel of A. E. van Vogt, the forgotten... JACKSON, Miss. (AP ) — Best-selling science fiction author Kevin J. Anderson felt like a giddy fan while completing the unfinished last novel of A.E. van Vogt, the forgotten science fiction master's sequel to the influential "Slan." Van Vogt filled the imaginations of boys across America with telepathic mutants and big ideas when he published "Slan" ...

[...] Synanon, I learned later, had taught such cults as Peoples Temple and Scientology how to manage the media through intimidation and litigation. (Two members of Synanon would be arrested only weeks before the Jonestown massacre for putting a live rattlesnake in a critic's mailbox, almost killing him.) [...]

Last Sunday, the German Protestant Church's religious cult specialist called Tom Cruise the "Goebbels of Scientology." This comparison of the War of the Worlds actor and the head of the Nazi propaganda machine is only the most recent example of a German official having harsh words for the Church of Scientology. Last month, a German Defense Ministry spokesman said Cruise couldn't film his movie at military sites because the actor had "publicly professed to being a member of the Scientology cult." ...

The Church of Scientology has bought the former Duckworth Mills in Trafford, Greater Manchester. The church, which counts celebrities including Tom Cruise, pictured, and John Travolta among its followers, has paid Merseyside-based Maghull Group £3.65m for the 51,000 sq ft Victorian building. Maghull, which bought the property from Cargill Flavor Systems for £2.1m last year, had planned to redevelop the building as 42 flats and 20,000 sq ft of offices. The Church of Scientology has already submitted plans to turn the ...

NEW YORK – An Armenian immigrant accused of plotting to sell anti-aircraft missiles and other military weapons from the former Soviet Union to an FBI informant was convicted Tuesday along with five co-defendants. Artur Solomonyan could face up to life in prison on charges including arms trafficking conspiracy, firearms trafficking conspiracy, interstate firearms trafficking and illegal transfer and possession of a machine gun. The charges accused the men of conspiring from December 2003 to March 2005 to import shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, ...

The question I've just discovered that someone I work with is a Scientologist. It's not something I've ever heard him talk about, but I asked him about it and he said yes, he was. He's pretty high in the organization, too, an “operating thetan,” whatever that is. I actually like the guy, but I can't help it: Ever since I found out about his beliefs, it's coloured the way I look at him. It just seems like such a kooky group. ...

The German Protestant Church compared the Hollywood film star Tom Cruise to the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels yesterday and claimed the actor was using his celebrity status to publicise the controversial Church of Scientology, of which he is a prominent member. The criticism of Mr Cruise, who is in Germany to make a film about an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, was the most vitriolic in a series of attacks on the actor over his membership of Scientology - regarded ...

[...] RANDI KAYE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): He's played a top gun and secret agent. But it's his latest role, anti-Nazi war hero that's landed Tom Cruise in hot water. Germany is boiling over his religion. Filming began outside Berlin today, for a movie starring Cruise, as Count Klaus von Stauffenberg, a famed colonel who tried to kill Hitler. Back in 1944, Stauffenberg and his coconspirators were executed here at the defense ministry building. Cruise was planning to shoot scenes at the ...

A SYDNEY woman allegedly stabbed by her daughter in an attack that killed two other family members has been released from hospital. The 52-year-old mother of six, who cannot be named, has been recovering in hospital since the deadly attack at the family home in Revesby, in Sydney's south-west, on July 6. A St George Hospital spokeswoman said the woman was discharged yesterday. The woman's 25-year-old daughter is accused of fatally stabbing her 53-year-old father and 15-year-old sister and injuring her ...

L'Église de scientologie prend de l'expansion à Montréal. Actuellement située sur l'avenue Papineau, elle déménagera dans un immeuble qui appartenait à l'UQAM. Considérée par ses opposants comme une secte, l'Église triplera sa superficie. L'organisation occupera l'immeuble La Patrie, ancienne propriété de l'UQAM, rue Sainte-Catherine Est, dans environ un an. La transaction de 4,25 millions vient d'être conclue. L'Église de scientologie, qui rassemble près de 1000 membres dans la métropole, y entreprendra des travaux de «plusieurs millions de dollars», a précisé le ...

Giovanni Ribisi called me. Burt Reynolds asked me to call him at home. The director Joel Schumacher called me from Romania between takes for his next movie. Anne Archer and I played phone tag for two weeks. A-list, B-list, stars of stage, stars of screen, they were all eager to talk. The Tony winners John Glover and Tyne Daly. Edie McClurg, the dippy secretary in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” David Carradine. Put the word on the street that you’re writing about ...

THE Sydney woman accused of murdering her father and sister last week was discharged from a hospital psychiatric unit after a magistrate refused a request from medical staff that she receive further treatment. The 25-year-old woman from the southwest suburb of Revesby was admitted to Bankstown Hospital for involuntary psychiatric treatment late last year. The Australian can reveal that when the hospital sought an order to continue that treatment in the community, the visiting magistrate refused to grant this. The reasons ...

IT was Hollywood, so it was bound to follow the script. Two minutes after walking through the ornate gates of the world famous Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre, an exquisitely renovated 1920s chateau-style, former hotel overlooking Los Angeles, I came face-to-face with my first Scientologist. He was impressive, tall, broad-shouldered and impeccably groomed with a set of blindingly white teeth. He looked like an actor who'd play a secret service agent.