Locals in a town in southern Kazakhstan sacrificed a white camel in a bid to end a suicide epidemic blamed on an evil spirit. Some 200 residents of the town of Karabulak, which has a population of some 40,000, attended the sacrifice ceremony.

The white camel was slaughtered on advice from the village elders some time after two middle school students hanged themselves. Three more teenagers were recently prevented from committing suicide at the last moment, and dozens more sought help of the imams of the local mosque.

The total death toll from suicides in 2011 in the town stood at 14, most of them adolescent boys. The surviving boys said they saw a vision of an old man clad in white who told them life is pointless and showed them a rope around his neck, imam Abdurrafi Rakhmatullayev said. “That was the Devil in human guise,” Rakhmatullayev said.

A similar incident took place in Karabulak 60 years ago, but the suicides were ended after one of the elders, or aqsaqals, advised a white camel sacrifice, town head Alimzhan Nishankulov said.

In the 1950s, Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union, but Nishankulov did not elaborate on what the Communist Party, notorious for its militant atheism, said about the ritual. No suicide attempts were reported in Karabulak after this week’s sacrifice.

An unusual lawsuit is asking a New York judge to decide if puppies have souls.

In her civil suit, dog owner Elena Zakharova contends that pets — considered “property” under state law — are much more than that: living creatures that feel love and pain.

Zakharova says the upper New York pet store that sold her a pooch with bad knees and hips should be liable for the pup’s pain and suffering, as if it were a person.

She also wants compensation for her astronomical vet bills: $4,000 so far, with another $4,000 on the horizon — a total of about $1,000 a pound for the year-old Brussels Griffon she named Umka.

“Pets must be recognized as living souls, not inanimate property,” said Zakharova’s lawyer, Susan Chana Lask. “Umka feels love and pain like any human being whose pain and suffering would be recognized in a court.”

Amid the proliferation of shady puppy mills that churn out “purebred” dogs with congenital heart and joint problems, New York State has a “Puppy Lemon Law” that lets buyers return a sick animal in 14 days.

But Lask says it took months for Umka’s problems to surface. The 2-month-old puppy, Zakharova bought last February for $1,650, didn’t start limping and whimpering until July.

Despite extensive and painful surgery, the dog will never walk or run properly.

“Umka suffers a disorder causing her pain, her legs hurt, she cries when she is in pain, she drags herself with her front paws, she cannot run like other puppies,” the suit reads.

“She should not have been sired by dogs with genetic disorders,” it says.

If the judge won’t recognize Umka’s suffering, Lask said she will argue the dog should be subject to the Uniform Commercial Code that gives a buyer four years to return a “defective product.”

When the severed head of a wolf wrapped in women’s lingerie turned up near the city of Tabouk this week, the Anti-witchcraft Unit was on the case.

Agents of the Unit were quickly dispatched and set about trying to break the spell that used the beast’s head.

Saudi Arabia takes witchcraft so seriously that it has banned the Harry Potter series, rife with tales of sorcery and magic.

The Anti-Witchcraft Unit was set up in May 2009 and placed under the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPV), Saudi Arabia’s religious police.

“In accordance with our Islamic tradition we believe that magic really exists,” Abdullah Jaber, a political cartoonist at the Saudi daily Al-Jazirah, told The Media Line.

“The fact that an official body, subordinate to the Saudi Ministry of Interior, has a unit to combat sorcery proves that the government recognizes this, like Muslims worldwide.”

The unit is charged with apprehending sorcerers and reversing the detrimental effects of their spells.

The CPV encourages citizens across the kingdom to report cases of sorcery to local officials for immediate treatment.

In the case of the wolf’s head, the Anti-Witchcraft Unit in Tabouk was able to break the spell. The Saudi daily Okaz reported on Monday that the unknown family that had fallen victim to the spell had been “liberated from the jaws of the wolf.”

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A Saudi woman was beheaded on Monday following a conviction of practicing sorcery, which the ultra-conservative kingdom bans.

The Saudi Arabia’s interior ministry announced the exectution of Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar which took place in the northern province of Jawf for “practicing witchcraft and sorcery”.

This brings the number of executions in the kingdom up to 73 this year, Amnesty International said. The exact number of women executed remains unknown, but another woman was beheaded in October after being convicted of killing her husband by setting his house on fire.

“The charges of ‘witchcraft and sorcery’ are not defined as crimes in Saudi Arabia,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty’s interim director of the Middle East and North Africa.

“To use them to subject someone to the cruel and extreme penalty of execution is truly appalling,” he said in a statement, stressing the “urgent need” to stop executions.

Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islamic Shariah law calls for the death penalty for offenses such as rape, murder, apostasy, armed robbery and drug trafficking.