Links - 16th July 2018 (1)

Four Women Accuse New York’s Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, of Physical Abuse - "Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, has long been a liberal Democratic champion of women’s rights, and recently he has become an outspoken figure in the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment. As New York State’s highest-ranking law-enforcement officer, Schneiderman, who is sixty-three, has used his authority to take legal action against the disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein, and to demand greater compensation for the victims of Weinstein’s alleged sexual crimes. Last month, when the Times and this magazine were awarded a joint Pulitzer Prize for coverage of sexual harassment, Schneiderman issued a congratulatory tweet, praising “the brave women and men who spoke up about the sexual harassment they had endured at the hands of powerful men.” Without these women, he noted, “there would not be the critical national reckoning under way.”... They allege that he repeatedly hit them, often after drinking, frequently in bed and never with their consent. Manning Barish and Selvaratnam categorize the abuse he inflicted on them as “assault.”... Schneiderman’s activism on behalf of feminist causes has increasingly won him praise from women’s groups"

POLITICO on Twitter: "Eric @Schneiderman has been squaring off with Trump for years. Now he is emerging as the leader of the resistance https://t.co/MYXv6bCcFZ… https://t.co/HqIq1jwEqR"
1 year 3 months before the accusations

Court put in lockdown as dangerous 'dirty protest' transexual prisoner appears in dock half naked - "Tiffany Scott, formerly known as Andrew Burns, was led into the dock, half naked to the waist, wearing the remains of a shirt torn to shreds, before shouting vile abuse at a sheriff... Scott shouted "f*****g transphobe b*****d" and "c***" as Sheriff Livingston jailed him for a further year on five charges of assault and one of criminal damage... prison staff were complying with his requests that he should be known as "Mighty Almighty", or Obi Wan Kenobi."

Vatican denies deal with Saudi Arabia to build churches for Christians - "There are no Christian churches in Saudi Arabia, the only country in the region without one"

Bad Audio Can Hurt a Scientist's Credibility - "Listeners gave more credence to a scientist’s radio interview when the audio was good quality than they did to the same material when the audio was poor"

Police vehicle in Michigan embraces nickname 'Po Po' - "A photo posted on the page of a police cruiser Saturday showed the k-9 Unit’s side painted with the words “Po Po.” The police department wrote that the change in the patrol car graphics was an attempt to be more relatable to the young people in its jurisdiction. They also added the hashtags “#HowDoYouDoFellowKids” and “#HopingForMoreWavingWithAllFiveFingers,” presumably to make it obvious that they were joking around."

This may be the only police department in America with a funny Facebook page - The Washington Post - "The most popular hangout in Bangor, Maine isn’t a restaurant or a bar. You can’t find it on a map. But you can find it online. Bangor Police Department’s Facebook page has become must-read material for legions of fans across the country who log on for Sgt. Tim Cotton’s comedic musings on everything from his fellow officers to catching shoplifters at Kohl’s."

Russian Dating Site FAILs: Must See Funny Profile Photos

Living with the Gods | Podcast | History Extra - "[On Diana in Artemis and Our Lady of Guadalupe] both these goddesses are virgins but also protectors of mothers particularly and of families and speaking to Marina Warner I asked her what's the equivalent today and her answer was Princess Diana is the nearest phenomenon of a figure that is remote but came to represent a certain kind of compassion, care, attention and the shrine to Princess Diana that has arisen in Paris on the site of her death is in a very real sense a popular shrine to an idea of love and compassion...
Most British people are used to thinking of religions as very structured things with a text and the hierarchy and buildings and a doctrine. This is by no means the norm...
When we say a god most of us think of some kind of a person with some kind of job description. This is of course the Greek and Roman way. It's in a sense the Abrahamic way. It is of course a completely inappropriate way to think about the forces we are sharing a landscape with you or how you articulate your relationship to the animal world. Our word spirit sounds a little wispy, whimsy...
As the political structure moves towards control by one person, something approaching monarchy, then the pattern of the gods appears to move in a similar direction. That one god becomes as were the head god and that's a pattern that does appear to match a political evolution...
The victim in these sacrifices was one selected victim in the context of a war usually. Rather than destroy a whole army, maim hundreds of people and kill others the Aztec model was to take a few selected people and sacrifice them. So you can argue... that this is actually a way of limiting the suffering of war. This is if you like doing the same thing as we try to do with the Geneva Convention...
[On the Inuit] You don't talk about killing seals. You don't talk about seals in an offensive way. You treat them as though they were because they are part of your community. And if you have to hunt a seal and kill it you stay with it until it die and you offer it water"

Victorian medicine | Podcast | History Extra - "Hospitals in the early nineteenth century were really houses of death. They weren't places that you went if you were wealthy or middle class. You were often treated at home. So these were really places for the poor and they were dingy and grimy and overcrowded and there wasn't much to say about these early nineteenth century hospitals except that they were a slight improvement over their eighteenth century predecessors which isn't saying that much when you consider that the bug catcher was paid more than the surgeons and the doctors in this period. The official bug catcher was the guy who went around and he got rid of all the lice in the beds...
This was a time also before anesthesia so surgeons were lauded for their brute strength and speed at a time when both were very crucial to the patient's survival. So a patient would be brought into this huge operating theater, they'd be strapped down onto a table or sometimes they'd be sat up in a chair. Oftentimes before anesthesia they were sat in these chairs and it's not like a chair that we understand today they often were very high so that your feet dangled so that you couldn't brace against the knife as it came towards you...
A lot of people had bladder stones back then but they tended to be a lot bigger than the ones that we suffer from today because of the diet in the past. And they were painful obviously as you were experiencing them. And they couldn't be passed. And you get stories of you know one guy he's in so much pain he takes a nail and a hammer and he shoves it down his penis to try to break up this, this, this bladder stone that he wants to pass... the surgeon had to go in there and basically shove a pole down the penis and then cut through the scrotum and remove the stone...
It was very scary to see a surgeon certainly before anesthetic and even shortly after because infection rates were so high. So often the people coming into the hospitals had very advanced stages of these diseases. So for instance you get a guy who goes in to see Robert Liston... he has a forty five pound scrotal tumor and you just think how how does it get to that stage? Why man? You know you think at like five pounds it would be so unbearable"

Living with the oceans - History Extra - "That book was going to be called Exploring the Sea of Perpetual Gloom, which is that wonderful phrase that the Arabs used for the Atlantic - they hated it... There's a tendency looking at the ancient, medieval worlds to emphasise so much the risks of travelling by sea and to underestimate the risks of traveling by land where after all there were at least many bandits as there were pirates out at sea. There were at least as many locals, sort of barons trying to exact customs from you as there were out on the water."

The Spanish Flu pandemic - History Extra - "Prince Axel had no doubt as to what was needed to stop him being afflicted with the flu. When they felt the flu coming on they consulted no doctor but took to their berths with a quart of whiskey each. In the course of a day or two whether because of the efficiency of the whiskey or because of their own resistance they were practically recovered...
'Someone killed a family member to stop them from either get, contracting the disease or to relieve them of their, their pain'
'Unfortunately this happened more than once. There were a number of newspaper headlines where somebody, usually the father, sometimes the mother would respond to the disease by a family slaying. It wasn't always the case that they had the disease though as one outbreak in Chicago where a man killed his family and it was later discovered that none of them actually had Spanish Flu. So you could say it led to a form of mass hysteria"

BBC Arabic at 80 - History Extra - "Everyone, especially at that time the older generation, and like the politicians, the elite class - all of those people they all listen to the BBC. They rely on the BBC. Even, it was in my country in Lebanon, if someone wants to emphasize that what he's saying is the truth he would tell you: I've heard that on the BBC"

Israel flip-flops on transfer of African migrants to western countries - "At earlier immigration hearings, migrants were told they could choose to go to Rwanda or Uganda. But rights groups advocating on their behalf say that many fled abuse and war and that their expulsion, even to a different country in Africa, would endanger them further."
Just don't call them shithole countries, that's racist

He came to Britain to study medicine, and now just as he's about to qualify as a GP, he could be thrown out of the country - despite a shortage of NHS doctors - "Luke Ong, 31, who is living in Manchester, appealed against the Home Office decision and an immigration judge ruled it ‘would not be proportionate’ to remove him. But now the Government wants to take the case to a higher court in a bid to throw him out... The move comes as the NHS is planning to spend £100m to bring in 3,000 GPs from abroad to alleviate shortages here. Recruitment agencies will earn around £20,000 for each successful placement in England"

'Serious flaws' in UK immigration system, Law Society warns - "Bad immigration decisions are having a "devastating" effect on families and businesses and undermining the rule of law, solicitors have warned. Nearly half of decisions that go to appeal in England and Wales are overturned, suggesting the system is "serious flawed", the Law Society said... Ms Sutherland, who moved to the UK from South Africa as working holidaymaker 16 years ago and then qualified as a teacher, first applied for indefinite leave to remain in March 2015. Her application was rejected because of a Home Office error but it took two appeals and the threat of a judicial review before she was finally granted the immigration status she was always entitled to."
Sutherland is white

'I felt like dirt': disabled Canadian woman told to leave UK after 44 years - "She found the requirement to report every three months at the Home Office very difficult because of her disability. O’Brien walks with a frame and has to be accompanied by someone when she goes out, because she has a health condition that makes her prone to collapsing unexpectedly. The 25-mile journey via bus, train and tram to the Home Office reporting centre in Solihull takes about two hours each way. On one occasion, she arrived only to be told the office was closed for a training day. On another, she queued for more than two hours before being asked to come back another day... Her case worker at the Refugee and Migrant Centre, Daniel Ashwell, helped her find an indefinite leave to remain stamp in her expired Canadian passport that instantly proved she was in the UK legally. She had never noticed it, or realised its significance, and was profoundly grateful for his help."
At least they can't blame racism

Government knew for years that Windrush generation hurt by 'hostile environment' - "In a story that has shocked even veteran immigration rights campaigners, both Trevor and his brother Desmond have had their lives wrecked by hostile environment policies. They arrived as boys from Jamaica in 1971. Trevor has faced threats of deportation, while Desmond has not been allowed to visit Britain, where he has a daughter as well as a brother, since he went back to Jamaica for his father’s funeral in 2001. Desmond has not seen his daughter for 16 years... Warsi, who is also a former Conservative party chair, told ITV’s Peston on Sunday it was a failed policy caused by the party’s obsession with bringing down net migration"

Windrush scandal: a historian on why destroying archives is never a good idea - "It’s unclear why the landing cards were destroyed. The Home Office says the decision was taken on data protection grounds and that does seem to be a valid argument. Of course, that argument, too, can be, and frequently is, abused. Perhaps we should all pay more attention to archives. As the Windrush case shows, their broader significance tends to only come to light when they stop working... Archives are pertinent to the story that an institution or government wants to tell of itself. In some cases, that story can become too uncomfortable and archives are crucial tools to make those institutions accountable. Archives are vital because institutional memory, as the practices of government departments reveal, is usually extremely short."

‘If you create a hostile environment, you shouldn’t be surprised that it’s hostile’ - "Ministers kept raising awkward questions. Wouldn’t landlords simply stop offering tenancies to people with foreign-sounding names? Would landlords really have the skills to operate like border guards? Cameron eventually turned to the junior Tory ministers in the room in search of some unqualified backing. When it failed to materialise, he packed up and left... Even after Rudd’s apology for the Windrush cases, it has emerged that she was privately pushing plans to tighten the net further. In a leaked private letter to May last year, she vowed to give immigration officials more “teeth” to deport thousands more illegal migrants. Rudd even implied that she wanted to switch money from low-level crime-fighting to her immigration enforcement programme... The whole agenda has been driven by the need to cut numbers, says the former head of the UK border force Brodie Clark. “The constant government mantra of ‘hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands’, alongside the 50% success rate on asylum appeals, gives a clear picture of the sheer political desperation and pressure to improve the figures”... Then there is the alleged discrimination created by some of the reforms. Recent research by the Residential Landlords Association found that as a result of the “right to rent” checks on tenants, 42% of landlords are now less likely to let to anyone without a British passport."

Data exfiltrators send info over PCs' power supply cables - "attackers could install malware that regulates CPU utilisation and creates fluctuations in the current flow that could modulate and encode data. The variations would be "propagated through the power lines” to the outside world... With power supplies now representing a data exfiltration vector, defending yourself requires hermit-like separation from the world: you have to do without wireless connections, use a fanless computer, block the USB ports, install machines in a windowless room with any LEDs covered by black tape, make sure nobody can sense a PC's magnetic fields, and disconnect the speakers."

Undercover Police Posing as Drug Buyers Arrested By Undercover Police Posing as Drug Dealer - "in the largely abandoned city of Detroit, Michigan, undercover police who posed as drug dealers ended up getting into an aggressive, public brawl with other undercover cops who were posing as people who purchased drugs"