Links - 12th September 2017 (1)

Swedish footballer sent off for farting during match - "A Swedish footballer has hit out after being sent off for breaking wind during a match – with the referee accusing him of “deliberate provocation” and “unsportsmanlike behaviour”."

British woman held after being seen reading book about Syria on plane
"If you suspect it, report it"

Jews are world's best-educated religious group, study reveals - "In sub-Saharan Africa, Muslims are more than twice as likely as Christians to have no formal schooling – and the gap is widening."

Revealed: how US billionaire helped to back Brexit - "It has emerged that Robert Mercer, a hedge-fund billionaire, who helped to finance the Trump campaign and who was revealed this weekend as one of the owners of the rightwing Breitbart News Network, is a long-time friend of Nigel Farage. He directed his data analytics firm to provide expert advice to the Leave campaign on how to target swing voters via Facebook – a donation of services that was not declared to the electoral commission."
The Guardian doesn't seem to have problems with Soros funding tons of groups and causes

Philippines drugs war: The woman who kills dealers for a living - "When you meet an assassin who has killed six people, you don't expect to encounter a diminutive, nervous young woman carrying a baby... She is part of a hit team that includes three women, who are valued because they can get close to their victims without arousing the same suspicion a man would... I asked her who gave the orders for these assassinations: "Our boss, the police officer," she said... "I thought he would go after the big syndicates who manufacture the drugs, not the small time dealers like me. I wish I could turn the clock back. But it is too late for me. I cannot surrender, because if I do the police will probably kill me"... She has one more hit, one more contract to fulfill, and would like that to be her last. But her boss has threatened to kill anyone who leaves the team. She feels trapped. She asks her priest for forgiveness at confession in church, but does not dare to tell him what she does."

Hello, my name is Abcde: How millennial parents are creating tongue-twisting names for their children - "More people around the world are giving unconventional names to their babies. In a report about millennial mums released by Goldman Sachs last May, research showed that fewer babies are being given "popular" and "traditional" names."

Searching for Toyah Sofaer: born in Baghdad, buried in Chennai - Andrew Whitehead - "Somewhere around 1939 or 1940, Toyah fell in love with an Armenian man from that family. The two met in secret. They were from different communities and different religions, and when Toyah's family found out about the relationship they were determined to put a stop to it. They sought to marry her to a suitable Jewish boy - but when Toyah rejected these suitors, they shipped her out to India... [This photo] shows three of the Sofaer boys - Elias, the oldest and tallest, Abraham, standing next to him and Jack, the toddler. It was taken in around 1927. Toyah would then have been 7. Why doesn't she feature in this professionally taken family photo? Well, she did - she was standing on Elias's left. After her death, the photo was retouched to excise her likeness - you can still make out where her right arm overlapped with Elias's left arm - so that, in Lydia's words, 'there would be no reminder of the scandal and tragedy of her life'. It was apparently a custom in Baghdad - a superstition - that when people died all the photos of them were disposed of. That may be why - much to Abraham's regret- there is no confirmed likeness of his sister"
On From Our Own Correspondent he said she was removed from the photo to hide the shame

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Pride and Prejudice - "[On Brentwood and the MS-13 gang Trump wants to crush] There are random checks with the metal detector and if too many people are wearing the same color they're told to change or go home...
[On Uganda's patriotic clubs] Surely I suggest again nobody can be taught to love their country or anything else. We either feel that way or we don't. Not at all bothered by my skepticism he beckons me closer. Many people say that you can't teach a person to love. So why is it that you can teach someone to hate? I hear how in many parts of the world children are taught to hate America and they seem to succeed. So if they can teach children to hate, why can't we teach them to love?...
Goa is a place where many westerners seem to have left behind old fashioned empirical questioning. Here almost any request for facts or evidence is seen as an encumbrance to conversation. Meeting someone for the first time you don't ask where they're from so much as what they're into. A simple conversation opener might be: what star sign are you? Though that might be considered too obvious. One yoga teacher attempted to get to know me better by suggesting I attend a male tantric initiation where i was promised we would hold each other's private parts in our hands and present them with our blessing... this teacher was unusual in Goa that he actually came from India. Of course Prabaka had not discovered yoga there in the land where it originated. Growing up in a prosperous Delhi family his horizons were limited to a private school education and the hope that one day he might become a lawyer or accountant. But Prabaka was sent off to study in Europe and there for the first time he came across people performing sun salutations and downward dog positions. It's you westerners who keep Indian traditions going, he told me, amused by this apparent contradiction. The friends I grew up with in Delhi, they're only interested in making money"

After the female quota here come the “trans” quota - "the Senate of the Province of Buenos Aires has just approved a law by which 1% of hiring in public offices must be allocated to adult transvestites, transsexual and transgender who have all the necessary requisites for the longed for job. The new law will apply in the whole region surrounding Buenos Aires"

Fake WhatsApp Chat Generator
I bet most of the funny screenshotted conversations online use this

You'd Never Forget Your Child In The Car, Right? - "The basal ganglia play a big part in driving. "Once you've driven from Point A to Point B enough times, you can do it without thinking," Dr. Diamond says. "You might not even remember the trip." If new information enters the picture (say, your partner calls to ask you to stop at the store and buy milk), your prefrontal cortex and hippocampus have to kick into gear to incorporate it. "But it's common to drive right past the store and come home. When your partner says, 'Where's the milk?' you feel flustered because you remember the conversation, but for some reason you came home instead." Why? Because you were on autopilot. "The basal ganglia actually suppress the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus from bringing that memory to your consciousness," explains Dr. Diamond. Stress worsens this phenomenon, he adds. "It affects how our prefrontal cortex functions and makes it more likely we'll do something out of habit." And those factors, ultimately, are what allow otherwise responsible parents to leave their child in a car. In every hot-car death Dr. Diamond has studied, something was different about the routine that day. Jodie Edwards had to make two stops instead of her usual one. In other cases, Dad drove the baby instead of Mom or there was some other extra stress. And the basal ganglia won control... Beneath this harsh judgment is a desire for self-protection, explains Janet Brown Lobel, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in New York City and Pleasantville, New York. "The idea of forgetting a child in a car is such a horrifying prospect for parents that the only way they can deal with it is to make themselves feel as different as possible from the parent who did this," she says. "That parent becomes a neglectful parent with whom you have nothing in common. Therefore, you don't have to think about this tragedy because it could never happen to you." Janette Fennell, founder and president of KidsAndCars.org, a national nonprofit focused on keeping children safe in and around vehicles, agrees: "People try to demonize these parents. The logic goes: 'These people are monsters. I'm not a monster, so it won't happen to me,' and that is the biggest mistake anyone can make.""

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Wednesday's business with Katie Prescott - "Some of the things that account for Uber's outsized success: their business aggressiveness for instance, the speed at which they went to hundreds of cities in dozens of countries, had to do with not accepting usual limits. Not taking no for an answer. That same dynamic leads to a very unhealthy internal culture when it's applied towards employees"
What if a company's criticised culture is what has led to its success?

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Monday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "[On activist investors] For me the single best study is by a Harvard professor who looked at two thousand different examples of activism and I think the surprise for me was not only did they actually create value in the first twelve months but actually three, four and five years on the operating performance of the company was better. So it's almost as if they had a cathartic moment and actually the management felt the feet were to the fire and I was with one company last week where an activist has taken a seat on the board. They just look through a different lens and I think it's on the whole a good challenge for companies"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Hong Kong and China: One country, two systems - "'You heard I know that the Chinese ambassador to London talking on this program half an hour ago saying that he has, they have delivered on the promise that it would be one government two systems. In other words if Hong Kong wanted greater democracy that is what it would have. And you're saying it hasn't had it'
[Anson Chan responding to Liu Xiaoming] 'Well the ambassador and I must come from two very different Hong Kongs. He says that one country two systems has worked very well, that even the British government agree. That they've given to Hong Kong people election. I am afraid the mood today on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of Hong Kong's handover, most people feel there's very little to celebrate. We've just seen an election of our chief executive that was clearly rigged from the very beginning. As you pointed out only 0.03 of a qualified electorate in Hong Kong is entitled to vote for the Chief Executive. So now they orchestrated the election of Mrs Carrie Lam who will take office on first of July. One country two systems is being seriously eroded and this has been happening for several years now... what they fail to acknowledge and appreciate is that the DNA of the Hong Kong people is very very different from the DNA of the average mainlanders... I recollect at the handover when the governor, outgoing governor and the British government made it quite clear - we will not forget Hong Kong. So what do we see today, twentieth anniversary? You've long since forgotten Hong Kong. You've abandoned us to a one party system rule. Hong Kong does not wish to be swallowed up by China'"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Cyber-security: Who can protect us? - "We do see that some of the attacks that are trying to get through are failing because of better protections. Now they're not being widely enough applied yet and it is absolutely vital that people, businesses and government apply those basic protections because when you raise the cost of the attacker they will go somewhere else"
Don't tell me to change my password. Tell hackers to stop trying to hack into my account.
Hacking is the only crime in which the victim becomes the accused.
When you're telling me to apply better protections, you're hoping somebody else will get hacked
People who change their passwords also get hacked. Therefore there's no point changing your passwords

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Rosa Luxemburg - "Freedom is always the freedom to think otherwise. It's one of my favorite quotes from Rosa Luxembourg"

audioBoom / Anjem Choudary: There is a war against our brothers and sisters - "[On condemning the Lee Rigby murder] 'I think that to talk about condemnation or to talk about how we feel, I think, is not the most important question now... what is important now is to learn lessons from what has taken place, whether we agree or disagree with what took place. You cannot predict the actions of one individual among a population of 60 million when the government is clearly at war in Muslim countries...
'Do you condemn British foreign policy?'...
'I tell you what. Let's do a deal here this morning. You condemn the murder of an innocent man on the streets of London and then we can talk about British foreign policy'
'You condemn the British foreign policy first and then we'll have a look-'
'We've established quite clearly that you do not condemn murder on the streets of London'
'I think it's irresponsible to talk about that now'...
'If I went to Saudi Arabia and found an off-duty soldier on the streets of Saudi Arabia and I happened to disapprove of the Saudi Arabian foreign policy, I would be entitled to go and murder him, would I?
'No, John, because I don't agree with your parameters of judging scenarios. I am a Muslim. And a brother mujahid does things that you will never understand because... you're not looking at it from an Islamic perspective. I'm trying to give you an Islamic perspective. I'm saying to you-'
'So therefore you understand their killing'
'There are people who see the Muslims as one body worldwide. We don't look at nationality, we don't look at our own passports. There is a way against our brothers and sisters around the world'...
'I call for the Sharia but I do it very peacefully you know we recently had a demonstration talking about alcohol'...
'If you want Sharia why don't you live in a country where there is Sharia?'
'They don't implement the sharia for your information in any country. They implement parts of it in certain countries but we haven't had... we haven't had an Islamic State implementing the whole of the Sharia for the last 89 years. Now if there was a state I wouldn't make hizja [sp?] I would go there. But the point is that I was born in Britain, I grew up here... I don't believe in democracy'"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, 'Democrats cannot run purely on an impeachment campaign' - "What he was promising was hollow but the problem is the Democrats weren't offering something else that energized their base... And still aren't. I mean one of the things that's really worrying about this relentless focus on Russia, both in the news media but also coming straight from the Democrats is that it seems that the plan in twenty eighteen for the next round of elections is to run on it just to a purely impeachment campaign. Elect us because we will impeach Donald Trump. And it's just doubling down on this purely negative strategy. And I think one of the messages we learned watching what happened here in the UK is that things turned around for Jeremy Corbyn when he put out this manifesto that raised people's hopes about actually addressing their most urgent and pressing need"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Lord Browne: I had to lead a double life - "It taught me a lot about, I think the following. First is I had a tremendous number of fears in my head, that if I were seen to be gay I would be regarded as nothing, no one would treat with me, business would collapse, I'd never be allowed to go and see a foreign country and so forth and that was conditioned by all the statements in my youth about being gay and poofed a shirt, left all these things that went on and on. Of course when I was outed none of that was true. Quite the reverse. People supported me, they said you are who you are and we respect that and we like it. And rather than losing friends I actually gained friends... you'll be surprised how many people accept you
Sometimes, fears of discrimination are just in your head, and you're just imagining it

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tuesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "Mike Ashley the boss of Sports Direct... The way he does business: drinking competitions and very admirably if he finds a meeting boring he goes to sleep under the table...
I have written a piece calling Trump the Uber of the political world in the sense that he is disrupting, disintermediating the traditional power structures"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Grenfell Tower: 'We are not the criminals here' - "They offer her a two bedroom house... It's far. It's about let's say about, if you, fifteen minutes, fifteen, twenty minutes. Twenty minutes which is far from the school, from the whole area and, and the biggest, biggest massive problem is Westminister... It's not our borough...
'You didn't even go to see it'
'Even the, even the place is not, is not suitable for us. It's not for us... the area itself is not for us. We don't know the area'"
15-20 minutes away from your home is far, and you can turn down alternative housing and blame the government

New Zealand river granted same legal rights as human being - "The new status of the river means if someone abused or harmed it the law now sees no differentiation between harming the tribe or harming the river because they are one and the same."
Comment: "So it can be sued it if floods and causes damage?"
"A living entity? There's an opportunity for the government to tax the fucker forever. Get in!"
"It also gets to vote, choice translated by a esteemed gathering of river whisperers."
"Are they now going to give brother sun and sister moon legal status as human beings? What other theological fantasies are they now going to enshrine in legislation. So much for being a modern secular nation."
"New Zealand is an excellent case study on why Australia is lucky it never signed a treaty with Aboriginals and why it never should."
"how would you react if laws were made to make cathedrals legal persons"
"So the traditional Guardian sneering at religion goes out of the window when dealing with indigenous peoples' superstitions, does it? Interesting."