There are actually societies that have both bride price and dowry. The reason this is possible is because bride price often comes in the form of live-in labor, as in the groom performing a year's labor for the parents of the bride, whereas in those cultures the dowry is more monetary.

I don't think either is happening here. What you have is a kind of perversion of custom, in the case of the family that wanted a corpse to bury with their son. This isn't what is usually called a ghost marriage in China, AFAIK.

Then it is being combined with a murder that is being done for completely cold blooded money reasons: that the person who had already kidnapped a woman to engage in human trafficking now finds a buyer that wants the woman to be dead.

That is why I wrote my original post, really. Frequently, we get news articles purporting to talk about a weird custom of some distant society, only to describe something other than the custom itself. It more often happens with India: There was a custom, called sati (suttee) that involved a woman throwing herself on the funeral pyre of her husband because she loved him so much she didn't want to live without him. It was an upper class custom, and frequently perverted, with relatives of the husband forcibly grabbing and subduing the widow and throwing her on the pyre. In fact, the latter is how sati was actually really operating. In any event, it was banned a long, long time ago, and although it still may happen in contravention of the law, it is not really a custom anymore.

Along comes the revelation, after shrewd forensic work by government investigators some 20 or more years ago, that people were committing dowry murder -- i.e. marrying a woman until the dowry changes hands and then murdering her, by starting kitchen fires while the wife was in the kitchen. They were going undetected because fancy saris burn well, so they seemed explained as cooking fires. Anyway, these investigators found out that people were staging these accidents to murder women for the dowry, and dubbed them "wife burning".

Along come western journalists, who don't look very carefully and go doing their investigative "native custom" stuff in encyclopedias (or nowadays the internet) and they confused the two, leading to countless articles about the "age-old custom" of wife burning.

In point of fact, it wasn't any custom, it was just a form of first degree murder (so was the original custom most of the time, though). And by the way, there are other ways people have thought of to murder women for their dowries, no one tries to claim they are customs.

My suspicion is that the same thing is going on here, the custom of ghost marriage is getting perverted, and plain old murder is occurring, and we in the west wouldn't know it wasn't a custom -- except that some people do.

Joe Conason's article about the firing and replacing of these prosecutors is good as far as it goes, especially pointing out that a Republican opposition research hack as prosecutor in Arkansas could be to dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton.

But beyond the agglomeration of executive power and keeping the hounds at bay in corruption investigations like Carol Lam's, there is the issue of indictment of Bush Administration officials themselves. 19 of them, including Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Cambone, and others, are under indictment in Germany for war crimes. With a Democratic Congress that has several senators and congressmen doing investigations, there may be more charges along the way, serious ones. And there is the issue that anyone charged with an international criminal offense is supposed to go on Interpol and the U.S. is supposed to cooperate on at least arresting such a person and negotiating terms for extradition.

Gonzales, and others for that matter, may be also trying to save their own necks.

I used to travel a lot more than I do now. The things I noticed were quite different from what I was supposed to, I guess, but, I really liked Singapore Airlines whenever I got to fly it, because it had 3 choices of meals, Indian vegetarian food if I wanted it, without having to sign up for a special meal at ticket time, and best of all...free tubes of hot sauce.

I didn't like Gulf Air that all fired much. No matter where you go, you have to make a pit stop in Bahrain. It's so mandatory that it isn't even printed on your ticket. And one time flying out of New Delhi to (where else? Bahrain and then) London, they served beef as the only meal. A whole planeload of starving Hindu passengers on a 10 hour long flight, not fun.

Yes I noticed the flight attendants, but there's a lot more that Singapore does to make the flight worth it in Coach, maybe that is why they are doing well while everyone else flounders, and they can charge $500 more going across the Pacific through Singapore than any other airline, and get it. Not just from men. Little stuff like booties so you can take your shoes off on a 14 hour flight and still go to the lavatory. And a tour bus giving you a free tour of Singapore for the day when you have a 7 hour layover to kill. Not all big things, but it shows thoughtfulness.