Sell More Subscriptions or You Get Beaten Up!

Young people are being recruited in America to sell magazine subscriptions on the street. According to this New York Times story, the business is very dubious.

Teaching method

I found this article about a method that an American professor used in his lectures in order to get the students to pay attention. Authorities in America have found that gift token cards (in the US they seem to be called gift cards) are being used as money-laundering devices, partly because they are not counted as legal tender when it comes to border crossing, so you can carry as much as you like in gift tokens across US borders.

Psychopathy

I wrote here about the English psychopathic killer Peter Sutcliffe. Psychopathy is still little understood but there's an interesting article in Science News which looks at the work of Dr. Joseph Newman who views psychopathy as the product of attention deficiency.

Chinese Police Shame Parade Backfired

Chinese police paraded prostitutes and their clients in an effort to shame them out of their behaviour. Here are some pictures of the event This is a tactic often used in China since the Cultural Revolution, but this time it backfired, because lots of citizens complained about the abuse of the privacy of the people involved. Lots of people stood up for the rights of these prostitutes and their clients!

Shoe Bomber

An article about the daily life of Richard Reid, the "Shoe Bomber" in a maximum security prison in the US. The Open Document Format is announced; see the Wired article. I posted a link previously to a lovely picture of a snowflake and now I've found some more at a website dedicated to snow crystal photography and research. There's also a "snow crystal primer" with interesting points about snow formation.

Pretexting

"Pretexting" is variously defined as impersonation of someone in order to obtain proivate information, or in a wider definition, creating a fictional scenario in order to persuade someone to do something they otherwise would not do. Earlier this year, the Chair of Hewlett Packard's board left after accusations that private detectives had impersonated members of the HP board in order to obtain their phone records (this was in pursuit of a leaker on the board). There was also a Congressional investigation at which HP management testified (and refused to testify). Because many authorities are quite slack in the way they implement security, often asking only for date of birth, mother's maiden name etc., pretexting is likely to continue. In the US California legislators introduced a bill aimed at stopping the practice, but Wired News claims it was killed by the Motion Picture industry, who claimed they used it as a method of tracking file-sharers.

Spend Some Dialog Time; Abuse by Proxy

You could spend a lot of time with this dialog! There have been a number of cases in the US where someone impersonating a policeman has called a restaurant (usually a fast food restaurant) and told the manager to detain a member of staff or customer. Because the manager believes the caller, they do as they are told. The caller then instructs the manager to put the victim through all sorts of humiliation and abuse, including rape. It's quite shocking what people will do when they believe in the authority of the person telling them what to do. I knew about this affect because I've heard of the psychlogical experiments, but I hadn't heard of this kind of abuse by proxy over the phone before.

Police Shootings

I think the US should outlaw gun ownership for most people. That stuff about "Right to Bear Arms" is crap; it was written in other times for a totally different environment and wasn't meant to encourage (I guess) an armed populace. There's an article on the Agitator about police shootings in America, and the poster in an associated comment says: "The solution seems simple; stop invading people's homes for non-violent offences". I disagree. Surely the answer is to get rid of the guns in homes and make it much more difficult to get hold of them. The number of mistaken shootings would decrease in proportion to the perception of the police that they are likely to be met by a gun-toting maniac every time they break into a house.

The Yorkshire Ripper

Between 1975 and 1981 Peter Sutcliffe killed thirteen women and severely injured seven others in horrific attacks in Northern England. The attacks betrayed Sutcliffe's real nature as a deeply disturbed man, a nature hidden to his wife and both of their families.

Sutcliffe's attacks actually began early in 1975 when he attacked women on two separate occasions with a hammer, but the police didn't link them to the other attacks until years later. It was later in the year and then in January 1976 when two women were killed in very similar circumstances that the police knew they were chasing someone who had already killed twice in very disturbing ways.

The first woman he killed was drunk after a night out in Leeds. He then killed several prostitutes, so the prostitutes in the area started to go around in couples and make notes of clients' car registration numbers. Cooperation between prostitutes and police was not good though, and general public awareness of the crimes remained low until June 1977, when the newspapers reported that an "innocent" young woman had been viciously killed. In fact four other women had been killed between the first and this latest one. The press and public had not shown much sympathy for the victims of the killings so far because the victims were thought to be all prostitutes. They had not yet linked these murders to the first two attacks, which were not on prostitutes.

Once the news of the latest murder got out, the police were drowned in information.

Some of Sutciffe's victims survived, though they were often disabled for life or suffered depression following the attack. One woman attacked in Bradford in 1977 had major surgery and six weeks in hospital before she was able to go home. The following year she appeared in court charged with stealing from shops because she couldn't make ends meet.

The police were thrown off course by some anonymous letters and later a tape from Sunderland which claimed to be from the killer. The speaker on the tape had a geordie accent and police later issued instructions to their forces that they should be looking for someone with a geordie accent.

I remember hearing about the Yorkshire Ripper at the end of the 70s and 1980-81. In November 1980 Sutcliffe killed a woman who was studying at Leeds University. Around this time I was at university in London and I remember women marching at night in "Reclaim the Night" protests.

Sutcliffe wasn't very careful to hide his tracks when committing the murders and over the years left several clues which detectives followed up, but they never got anything that would single him out and they were not good enough at handling the information (computers were in their very infancy) to piece together the bits that they had. They were also distracted by the hoax letters and tape. Sutcliffe had given the police alibis that were backed up by his wife. A friend that visited red light districts with Sutcliffe had written to the police and got no response. In the end it was just luck that he was stopped in a car with a prostitute and the policeman who stopped him radioed in the registration number of Sutcliffe's car. It was still lucky that one officer was sharp enough to go back to the scene where Sutcliffe had been picked up, because that officer found a ball-pin hammer and a knife, weapons that Sutcliffe used in the attacks.

Extensive article about The Yorkshire Ripper at the Crime Lab

Use of Tasers by US Police / Security

There have been a couple incidents recently in USA where police and security guards have used tasers to subdue people. This 17 year old kid in Jerseyville sounds a bit crazy, a bit of a nuisance, but nothing serious. He was tasered by police and later died. This argumentative bugger got the shock of his life when security guards at his university library wouldn't accept "No, I don't have my id card" for an answer. Interesting piece in the Register (looks like they're following this issue) about this. Later I found this clip from The Daily Nooz of some guys from the management at Taser International allowing themselves to be tasered; kind of sick.

TWBN#2: The IRA Bombing Campaign Part 2

I wrote earlier about my memories of the IRA Bombing Campaign in the 80's. I also want to say something about how I think it affected people and the Government at the time, though as I said in the earlier post I accept that I'm not an expert, just someone who was around at the time. I'm surprised actually that people aren't talking about this more, because there are some obvious parallels with the current "War on Terror".

There was a lot of pressure on the Police and this led I think to Police mistreatment of irish people, particularly men. Irish people were already somewhat stereotyped and the bombings (particularly the ones in the 70's I think, but also later) made it more likely that you would be stopped, searched and possibly harassed if you were Irish.

The mistreatment went further in the cases of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, two groups of men who suffered appalling injustice at the hands of the Police and the justice system. I don't know enough detail to allow a comparison between the justice system then and now, but what seems obvious is that when the police are under great pressure they are more likely to cut corners and not pay enough attention to the rights and needs of their more vulnerable suspects (I think these cases happened before there was a lot of awareness of how seriously psychological pressure could affect the testimony of people).

It's apparent that stereotypes that were around at the time and had been around for a long time contributed to a dehumanising effect which was part of the environment in which it was seen as OK to mistreat Irish suspects by those in authority. Other aspects of this environment may have been lack of professional control and a general hysteria at certain times, reflected (or encouraged) by the press. You would hope that there should be more awareness of this nowadays, but Abu Ghraib still happens.

The other parallel that I see is that governments enact laws aimed at putting pressure on the terrorists, but the actual effect is to put further pressure on the wider group (i.e. Irish people in the UK, or Muslims in the UK). In 1971 Internment (indefinite detention without trial) was introduced in Northern Ireland. It was ended in 1975. In later years this policy was seen as a great recruiter for the IRA. We might see this as a parallel with the recent repeated demands for longer periods of detention without trial of terrorist suspects.

TWBN#1: The IRA Bombing Campaign

This is the first in what might be a series of "Think the World is Bad Now?" (TWBN) posts, which I warned you about in an earlier post. People seem to think everything is worse than it used to be, but a lot of things that are going wrong now are not unprecedented and some things have actually got better. I'll start with a terrorist campaign that was "provoked", instigated and nurtured, then was relaxed, revived and finally (?) abandoned, all within the UK (although many would say it would never have got far without serious financial support from Irish Americans).

I only want to talk about what I remember of this with just a bit of prompting / help from other sources. I think it can teach us a lot about living with a terrorist threat and what mistakes it can push the Government into. I don't remember much about the first period in the early seventies, I don't think I paid much attention to the news in general at that point, but I did sort of know that some people were letting off car bombs and sending letter bombs. The main attacks in the early seventies were the Guildford and Birmingham pub bombings. The ones I remember are these (I had to look up the dates):

Car bomb kills Airey Neave (1979)
Hyde Park Bandstand Bombing (1982)
Harrods bomb (1983)
Grand Hotel Brighton blown up during the Conservative Party Conference (1984)
Manchester Arndale Centre (1996)
Mortars in Whitehall (1991)
Canary Wharf (1996)
Bus bomb near Waterloo Bridge (1996)

When Airey Neave was killed it was a big shock because it was a car bomb that went off in the House of Commons car park. The Hyde Park bandstand bombing stands out because the press made a big fuss about the horses that were killed and injured. I remember that being on the front pages. The Harrod's bomb apparently made some of my family worry for me because I lived in London at that point. This attack was apparently the model for a similar one in Doris Lessing's "The Good Terrorist" (good book by the way).

The biggest attack of the 80's was the Grand Hotel in Brighton which was blown up during the Conservative Party Conference. The Tories at that time were at the height of their powers, Thatcher particularly. I hated the Government and its policies at that time, but this attack was pretty shocking and the pictures made me queasy. The stand-out image was of Norman Tebbit (he was once paraphrased as telling unemployed people to "get on your bikes" to look for work) being lifted from the ruins in his pyjamas I think (the bomb went off in the middle of the night).

The Arndale Centre in Manchester in June 1996 is the one I remembered out of order. It actually came after Canary Wharf. I just read on the BBC site about this one that it went off while bomb disposal people were trying defuse it (or were about to) and that those injured were mostly outside the police cordon (hit by flying glass). Apparently the Centre has been rebuilt and is much better than it used to be.

The mortars that went off in Whitehall were fired from the back of a van. One exploded in the Garden of 10 Downing Street but no one was hurt.

Canary Wharf was hit by a large bomb in 1996. This marked the breaking of a ceasefire that had lasted over a year. The bomb that went off prematurely in Aldwych near the Strand killed a young man called Edawrd O'Brien, the bomber. This one brought home to me that the IRA frequently chose volunteers who were able to blend into their surroundings and seemed unremarkable.

In 1997 the IRA declared a new ceasefire that has remained in place since then, though there have been further attacks by splinter groups, notably the Real IRA.

Sources
Wikipedia
20th Century London
BBC News