BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, The Road Through Yemen - "[On hostage taking by a disgruntled Filipinio security guard] [Paray’s] hostages were now free… He's been charged with attempted murder, serious illegal detention and the unlawful possession of a firearm and explosive device. Extraordinarily, days later an opinion poll showed 60% of respondents supported his actions"
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Italy's Invisible Enemy - "‘He checked out her profile and instantly he liked what he saw. But Wada [sp?] wears a full face veil. So it wasn't her looks that appealed. What inspired him was her bio, which said, I'm just a simple woman who has a goal to marry young. Three days later, a direct message pinged into Wada’s inbox, asking for her hand in marriage. Wada was obviously surprised, but pleasantly so. She says he hadn't even heard my voice or seen my face, and he asked me to marry him. So I knew he was really different... Nata [sp?] says that he didn't want to see Wada’s face before they married, but Wada’s family insisted on it. According to her, they didn't want him to be disappointed after the wedding’"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Profiling, Safety and Trust - "‘They called it stop and frisk, and the New York Police were none too gentle about it, targeting overwhelmingly young black and Hispanic men for weapons searches. Then Mayor Bloomberg was bullish about it. Going where the crime and the criminals were, he said, producing figures that showed more than 90% of murderers, and incidentally their victims, were young black and Latino males. Now Democratic presidential hopeful Bloomberg says that was wrong. Discriminatory, counterproductive. He should have apologized earlier he says. Profiling is controversial. As this side of the Atlantic Michael O'Leary, boss of Ryanair has been finding out after he suggested that airport security should concentrate on young men of a Muslim persuasion as he put it, rather than families with kids. Racist, said the Muslim Council. Nonetheless, profiling is part of everyday life. Insurance companies do it, supermarkets, Facebook. Using computer algorithms to categorize us, to weigh up our potential for profit or risk. The police here have been piloting the technique to identify currently low level criminals likely to move on to what they call high harm crimes, perhaps with knives and guns. The civil liberties lobby says profiling to predict crime is a violation of our rights that angers and alienates marginalized communities. Proponents say it's common sense to concentrate on where the data says the danger lies. It actually eliminates bias and human error they say.’...
‘If more than 90% of those convicted of murder in New York were blacks and Latinos, can you explain why it was morally wrong to concentrate on them when searching for weapons?’
‘I think if we think about the ways in which this kind of profiling operates and the idea that people who are convicted or people who enter into prison for whatever reason, is the way in which we understand who is more likely to commit an offense, then what we're becoming blind to is the fact that the criminal justice system and the policing which leads up to those convictions may itself be institutionally racist’...
‘I think one of the best ways in which we can try to reduce levels of violent crime or indeed any type of crime within our economy isn't necessarily simply with policing. So if we look at the economies with the, or the policies of the lowest levels of crime, despite the fact we often keep borrowing policies from the United States, we should probably be looking at places across Europe, which have far lower levels of crime. And the way that they address those kinds of crime isn't simply through profiling or more aggressive forms of policing. It's by increasing levels of access to housing, increasing levels of education’...
‘The police are criticized for the PREVENT scheme, which is actually engaging with civic society, which is actually saying, you know, you come on board with us and help us. Because they can't do this on their own. So they get attacked for that as well when they do try to engage with civic society’"
Presumably men are overrepresented in the criminal justice system due to institutional sexism; it seems the witness is unaware of the criminological literature on homicide data being reliable
Women at war - HistoryExtra - "‘Perhaps this is a tricky question because of the limits of terminology. But is your understanding that most of these women or a lot of the women that you came across in the book, were passing as, as men for pragmatic and practical reasons rather than, for example, they were what we would call today transgender?’
‘I mean, one of the things that makes it so difficult, but I kind of like the difficulty of this is that we have to read a lot of these accounts through other people's lens and through a historical lens as well, because the notion of having a sexual orientation or sexual identity is a fairly modern concept. So on the one hand, I think a lot of women were doing this because it gave them access to so much that they couldn't have as women. So for example, it gave them access to money, it gave them access to a profession. I mean, you have, you know the shipwright Mary Lacey who writes her memoir in the 18th century and not only did leaving her job as a domestic servant, and to become William Chandler, enable her to become a shipwright, carpenter. But it also enabled her to have relationships with other women. So, you know, there was so much that women could gain. Sometimes they were running away from a really abusive relationship. I mean, there's lots of news stories of women on ships or women, you know, women as sailors on merchant, on merchant ships who were there because sometimes they say, a stepfather, a cruel stepfather has forced them into it. Sometimes they say because they're running away from a cruel stepfather or an abusive husband. So there is this idea that, that it offered them liberty, it offered them rewards that they couldn't have as women. But you also read through these accounts that some of them really enjoyed doing this as well. And it, maybe it conformed more with how they felt about themselves, that they were masculine women. But I think that in a period when notions of what it meant to be male and female was so much more rigidly defined, you can understand, you know, that as motivation. I mean, the one thing that we're really lacking is a lot of detailed accounts of how these women felt. You know, what their internal landscape was, as it were. They don't talk a lot about their bodies. They only talk about them in passing’"
The trans brigade is going to lynch her for "erasure"
Coronavirus: A Historical Perspective | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Zamora, which is a town in northwestern Spain, which was and in fact still is very pious Catholic city. And there was a very charismatic, very influential Bishop there at the time, who basically just defied the provincial authorities. And at the height of the pandemic in the autumn of 1918, ordered his flock into the churches to pray for forgiveness for their sins, which he insisted was the cause of this terrible punishment, divine punishment. And so everybody crowded into the churches, and made their prayers to St Rocco, who is the patron saint of pestilence and plagues and that meant lining up to kiss his relics, everybody kissing the same relic and, and Zamora went on to record one of the highest death rates from that flu in the whole of Spain, if not in the whole of Europe. So, you know, very kind of clear effect there. And I think today, you know, you do see the effect of religion, but it's very kind of marginal. So there are reports of people in the Iranian shrine city of Qom, licking the shrine defiantly and we hear that some of the early clusters in South Korea came from churches. But generally speaking, there has been a much less of an effect of organized religion, I think’...
The fake news problem. A lot of young people have said to me, the problem is that good information is behind paywalls. Whereas fake news is free. The assumption there is that they shouldn't have to pay for their information"
The Genius Of Artemisia | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘And then the marriage starts to run into problems. And there's complicating factor here, which is that Artemisia was having an affair with a patron, apparently with the kind of knowledge and awareness of her husband. And this, again, is a very, very, it’s a thing that kind of might feel quite uncomfortable and alien to us now. But in these court contexts, when you have marriages, which are still arranged marriages, to some extent, for business reasons, and you have a wealthy patron who's in a position to do you favors in terms of getting you commissions and so on, it wouldn't be unheard of though I could see it might be quite uncomfortable for a husband to go along with his wife having that affair and maybe because she sort of genuinely wants to, but maybe on a little bit of a transactional basis as well, like, I like you enough to do this and to get favours in return. So it is very, very complex’"
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, The mystery of mukbang - "‘Hano [?] has a theory as to why it became so popular so quickly.’
‘So, in South Korea, people not only share a table, but also eat from the same dishes. So eating together and sharing food, are at the centre of Korea's eating culture. And also Korean people think eating as a communal activity. And also eating alone is somewhat socially stigmatized. So I think by watching mukbang, people have, like, social sense of togetherness, even though they are actually physically eat alone’
‘Help me understand, how do people perceive eating alone in South Korea? Why is it so stigmatized?’
‘I think because of Korean people just basically think eating is somewhat social activity that you have to do with other people. Eating alone is associated with loneliness and then people find uncomfortable in some way.’...
‘If someone has a binge eating disorder, they are triggered by anxiety. They're triggered by different things other than hunger or a love of food. That's what classifies it as a disorder. And so this is not that. This is just watching someone else eat. And I don't know that anyone specifically has wanted to binge because of me, but they will crave what I'm eating. And often I hear that people who have trouble eating, like watching my videos, or people who are on diets, watch the videos, they'll watch it while they're having their salad or they're having whatever it is they're eating, to still get that sense of satisfaction, even though they're not actually having it’"
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Fried chicken: Fast food champion - "‘I'm the co founder of something fresh and we own Africa's largest food truck which is a double decker bus. And I'm in South Africa.’...
‘In a way you're trying to create a new, a new sector in the market anyway, like premium fast food.’
‘We had exactly the opposite... When we started off, our chicken was fairly cheap. And people wouldn't buy… it’s too cheap, it's weird. We in the market, and who’s this guy? Where is he getting his chicken from?... Which is like, not coming to my store. And then I literally almost doubled my price. And then I couldn't make enough chicken.’
‘Right. So you pitched it as a premium product.’
‘Yes. So now the perceived value with the people were going crazy and you know people look at fried chicken and think to themselves that's just fried chicken. There is a lot of science that goes into fried chicken. You can overcook fried chicken, you can under fry. No one wants to find any blood especially, you know, if you have bone in, there could be a bit of blood, you could just undercook it’
‘Oh, we stopped doing wings because of that. We stopped serving it because so many people complained’...
‘Buttermilk... is not super acidic. It's just acidic enough, just enough to break down the proteins in the chicken... … fried chicken is not just an easy meal. It's an experience. It's a lifestyle. It's a culture, you know, you go all around the world and everyone has their own version of fried chicken. You go to the US, there’s Nashville Hot chicken, you know, you go to China they've got Szechuan pepper chicken. South Korea has got so many versions of chicken. South Africa, up in Africa. Everyone has, if you meet somebody and they don't know what fried chicken is, you have to find out what is wrong with that person.’...
‘The chicken, the size of chicken in Korea is… very small compared to other chickens over the world because we kill chicken when when they're young, so that it doesn't have those those weird flavor into it. But often people come to our restaurant and complain about the size of the wings, and it's really hard to get the wings by itself. So surprising we're using frozen wings from abroad. However, with our brining and then breading, the funky flavor into it is gone by the time we serve to our customers.’"
Everything You Wanted To Know About Roman Britain: A Podcast With Miles Russell - HistoryExtra - "The great thing about Roman baths is we look at them, we think they're great sort of hygienic health property areas. Most of these baths don't have plugs. There's no way we can see that the water can come out unless someone's bucketing it. So it might be that in a big plunge pool in a town bath, the water's been in there for weeks, it becomes like a human soup. So probably the Roman bathhouse is one of the least hygienic places you can imagine in Roman Britain"
BREAKING: CNN Busted Using Footage from Hurricane Harvey in COVID-19 Report - "Jeremy M. Jack is a father and sign language interpreter living Roseville, CA. Recently, his son frantically contacted him by phone to share the fact that CNN was using footage of him (and others) from a grocery line in Houston during preparation for HURRICANE HARVEY to sensationalize their Covid-19 narrative. Here’s what he posted:
“Okay… I have held my tongue about this COVID-19 insanity but after #CNN used MY face to report outright LIES that continue to incite the mass hysteria around this issue…all bets are off! My son starts blowing up my phone today saying DAD you are on the news about the Corona Virus! I was completely confused… so I find out that while reporting on the conditions in San Francisco as a result of the virus they used footage of ME and others during Hurricane Harvey in Houston lined up outside of Kroger’s on Westheimer near the Beltway! CNN is using MY face to present misleading journalism that continues to seriously impact our economy and the every day decision making of the public. This is not okay.. do actual research for yourself."
