Snapzu Places: October 2015

Saturday 31 October 2015

Why Are Old Women Often The Face Of Evil In Fairy Tales And Folklore?

Evil stepmothers, witches and crones: When they aren't poisoning princesses, they're mangling mermaids or trying to eat children. One writer traces these villains' roots to a fear of female power. By Elizabeth Blair.
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Is desalination the future of drought relief in California?

San Diego is set to soon start supplying itself with millions of gallons a day of fresh, drinkable water, using saltwater from the Pacific Ocean, converted by a brand new desalination plant. As California's historic drought continues, the plant will likely intensify the debate over the role of desalination may play in the state's water supply. Special Correspondent Mike Taibbi reports.
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The Tragic, Forgotten History of Zombies

The horror-movie trope owes its heritage to Haitian slaves, who imagined being imprisoned in their bodies forever.
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What "Narcos" Gets Wrong About the War on Drugs

The Netflix show distorts history and misrepresents the conflict
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The 1965 Blackout: Hear The Eerie Broadcast When New York Went Dark

Before we hear his broadcast, we need to set the scene. West Island Weather has more: Over 30 million people were affected including some provinces in Canada. Everything went dark. Patients in the middle of surgery, people in subways were trapped in darkness from New York to Canada and most states in between. A plane was getting ready to land when the runway disappeared. 1700 Passengers from a powerless subway train were rescued from a bridge in New York.
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Paris Was Wild, Once

Luc Sante’s new book looks longingly back at a more sinful time.
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Storms, Possible Tornadoes Lash Texas; 2 Still Missing

The second day of turbulent weather in Texas.
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Nazis against Nazis – Germany's most involuntary charity walk

On November 15th, neo-Nazis walked through the streets of Wunsiedel. We could not stop them - but we could make them walk for something meaningful: and that is how for the first time a right-wing memorial march became a charity walk - without knowing of the participants. For every meter they walked, €10 went to EXIT-Deutschland - a Nazi opt-out programme. The result: €10.000 and lots of surprised right-wing extremists.
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31st October 1984 - The prime minister of India is assassinated

Indira Gandhi, the prime minister of India, is assassinated in New Delhi by two of her own bodyguards. Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, both Sikhs, emptied their guns into Gandhi as she walked to her office from an adjoining bungalow.
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Surveillance video shows Waco biker shooting

Surveillance video from Waco, Texas, shows the shootout between police and biker clubs that ended with nine dead and 177 arrested in May.
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Public Faces: Photography as Social Media in the 19th Century

Many of the traits we associate with our selfies were also present in the most popular photographic format of the 1860s, the carte de visite....
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The Fin-de-Siècle Paris Theater Whose Performances Were Literally Torturous

A knife in the eye. A splash of acid in the face. Murder. Comedy. Ah, the theater! By Eric Grundhauser.
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Sci-Fi’s Hugo Awards and the Battle for Pop Culture’s Soul

A battle over diversity is raging in the world of science fiction. And it's a battle for the soul of all popular culture. By Amy Wallace.
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Ten Borders

One refugee’s epic escape from Syria. By Nicholas Schmidle.
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The Caliph at the gates of Vienna

History has a jolly habit of repeating itself as surrealist farce. Is it 1683 all over again, with the Ottoman Empire laying siege to Vienna just to be defeated by the “infidels” at the last minute? By Pepe Escobar.
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The Invention of Pad Thai

By coup-plotting standards, Plaek Phibunsongkhram was in a good position. The year was 1938. Six years earlier, Phibunsongkhram, better known as Phibun in Western historical accounts, had played a prominent role as a military officer in a coup that stripped Thailand’s monarchy of its absolute powers. A year later, he became the equivalent of the Minister of Defense after crushing a rebellion launched by royalists, and in 1938, he became prime minister.
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The church of 40,000 corpses

Travellers with a taste for the macabre will have a field day at this gruesome chapel, which is ornately decorated with skeleton chandeliers, hipbone chalices and skull bunting.
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Friday 30 October 2015

Clarke And Dawe: Australian political Satire

John Clarke and Bryan Dawe explain the Australian political conundrum via a quizz show.
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No, Hillary. You did not bring democracy to Burma

Clinton points to Burma as a prime example of her foreign policy leadership. But how far has the country really come? By Samantha Michaels.
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Law Enforcement: Traveling From Anywhere To Anywhere Is Suspicious Behavior

Want to travel from anywhere to anywhere in the United States without being hassled by law enforcement officers? Good luck with that, citizen. USA Today's Brad Heath pointed out an interesting footnote in an asset forfeiture filing that made the assertion that traveling from Chicago to Los Angeles is inherently suspicious. (One presumes the opposite is also true.)
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Three years on: My country still kills women.

Savita Halappanavar died three years ago today. She died of septicaemia. She died from a drawn-out miscarriage that went untreated too long. She died after spending a week in hospital. Savita may have died of blood poisoning, but she was killed by the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution. Two decades of Irish governments have blood on their hands. They were too cowardly to legislate to protect pregnant people’s lives.
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The Selling Of Trust

How Russia’s longest and largest bank fraud has been covered up as it passed from one owner to another, starting with Mikhail Khodorkovsky and ending with Ruben Aganbegyan, Alexander Mamut, et al. By John Helmer.
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Extreme haunted house: inside the real life kingdom of masochists

At McKamey Manor, people pay to be kidnapped, bound, masked, slapped, stomped on and held under water over an eight-hour ‘tour’. But unlike other ‘extreme haunts’ of the same variety, here there’s no safe word to make it stop. By Rory Carroll and Mae Ryan.
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Poland's Underground Salt Cathedral

Located 135 meters (443 ft) underground is the famous Wieliczka Salt Mine in southern Poland. Entered into the UNESCO First World Heritage List in 1978, it was also proclaimed a Historical Monument by the President of the Republic of Poland in 1994. The mine is located in the town of Wieliczka and is within the Kraków metropolitan area.
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Daylight Saving Time in the US: when do the clocks fall back in 2015?

The clocks fall back by an hour this weekend as America returns to Standard Time. This signals lighter mornings and an extra hour in bed. But what time do we reset our watches?
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Special Series - Putin's Russia: Kremlin Rules

Twenty-five years after the Cold War, fear of Russia's regional ambitions seems once again to be on the rise; while many Russians, in turn, feel threatened and misunderstood by the West.The country's president, Vladimir Putin, had said that he would "reclaim what was rightfully Russia's", and now this seems to be playing out in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. So how do Russians feel about their president and his "strong armed" way of governing?
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Severe Storms, Possible Tornadoes, Flooding Slam South-Central Texas

Here's what we know about the impacts from this round of severe weather.
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China's 'leftover' women

How a growing number of Chinese women are shunning societal pressures to marry – and the labels attached to them.
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Lush Carpets of Flowers Thrive in the World's Driest Desert

Receiving barely a half-inch of rainfall per year, Chile's Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on Earth, but that all changes when El Niño rolls around every few years.
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Why One Museum Is Fiercely Fighting the Return of Nazi ‘Looted’ Artworks

Inside the protracted $250 million battle for the Guelph Treasure.
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Performers from Cirque du Soleil take part in a full dress rehearsal for their show Kooza

Photograph: Liang sen/Xinhua Press/Corbis
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Bronx Cheer

The New York borough that once symbolized urban decline is safer and more stable—but most Bronxites’ lives are still precarious. By Harold Meyerson.
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Water Clock from Fez: photo of a model in an Instanbul museum

Constructed in 1362 it was used by the astronomer of the Qarawayin Mosque in Fez who was in charge of calculating prayer times. The water flow was calculated to remain uniform over 24 hours. The sinking float in the basin causes a pointer to move every four minutes. This in turn results in two carriages with balls, one indicating four minute intervals, the other hourly intervals dropping balls into ringing bowls. Every hour a door behind one bowl also opens.
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Lockdown: the End of Growth in the Tar Sands

Just a few days ago, Hurricane Patricia became the strongest hurricane ever measured as it made landfall on the western coast of Mexico. It hit as we approach the end of another year that is expected to break last year’s record as the hottest year of recorded temperatures.
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Did this sleepy village stop the Black Death?

Today, tourists amble through the pretty village of Eyam. But 450 years ago, during the plague, the town’s terrible sacrifice meant its streets were filled with the wails of the dying.
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Thursday 29 October 2015

Too Weak, Too Strong

Patrick Cockburn on the state of the Syrian war.
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The Nightmare Of Grocery Shopping In Venezuela

Venezuela's economic model has imploded. With food production, import and distribution now controlled by the government, shelves are bare. A day's hunt for groceries in Caracas can prove futile.
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Is the ‘China Model’ Better Than Liberal Democracy?

“One person, one vote isn’t the only morally legitimate way to select leaders,” a political theorist says. By Eric Fish.
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Infographic: 730 North American Birds In A Single Chart

Pop Chart Labs' latest looks like it came off the wall of a science class in the 1970s.
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The Rhythm of the Tide

When I heard data from an island had proven humans are still evolving, I had to visit. By Scott Solomon.
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Four UK Bird Species Including Puffins 'Face Extinction'

Puffins and turtle doves are among four UK bird species now at risk of extinction, according to the latest revision of a global conservation database.
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American Horror Story: The Cecil Hotel

On January 27, 2013, 21-year-old Elisa Lam stepped off a train from San Diego in downtown Los Angeles, gathered her belongings, and walked to a hostel on Main Street. It was, like most every mid-winter day in LA, sunny and in the mid-60s, the kind of weather that makes people never want to leave. Under such conditions — when a warm, low-angle winter sun softens the entire landscape — it’s possible to not fully absorb the reality that this 54-block section of LA...
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