CityLab: Protecting the Street Art of Athens

Greece and graffiti go way back: The world’s earliest surviving graffito may in fact be an ancient Greek advertisement for a brothel. More contemporary Greek taggers expressed their political beliefs during World War II and the country’s ensuing civil war and military dictatorship of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In the 1990s, a wave of elaborate public street art—an extension of graffiti that’s often more figurative than (and sometimes in tension with) its progenitor—spread throughout Athens. Today, with much of its surfaces coated in images that often comment on the country’s economic crisis, Athens has been hailed as a “mecca” for street art in Europe.

With such a long and storied history, it’s perhaps no surprise that a group has taken it upon itself to preserve the city’s street art. Four years ago, art and conservation students at the Technological Educational Institute of Athens founded st.a.co.—short for Street Art Conservators—to maintain some of their city’s works of public art. The students had been documenting street art for a class, and were so taken with some of the examples that they decided to help protect them from the elements (and other graffiti artists).

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BBC: The cat man of Aleppo

Mohammad Alaa Jaleel lives in Aleppo, Syria, where he looks after more than a hundred stray and abandoned cats.

Independent: Shimon Peres was no peacemaker. I’ll never forget the sight of pouring blood and burning bodies at Qana

A few days later, Israeli troops inside Lebanon came under attack close to Qana and retaliated by opening fire into the village. Their first shells hit a cemetery used by Hezbollah; the rest flew directly into the UN Fijian army camp where hundreds of civilians were sheltering. Peres announced that “we did not know that several hundred people were concentrated in that camp. It came to us as a bitter surprise.”

It was a lie. The Israelis had occupied Qana for years after their 1982 invasion, they had video film of the camp, they were even flying a drone over the camp during the 1996 massacre – a fact they denied until a UN soldier gave me his video of the drone, frames from which we published in The Independent. The UN had repeatedly told Israel that the camp was packed with refugees. [...]

There was a UN enquiry which stated in its bland way that it did not believe the slaughter was an accident. The UN report was accused of being anti-Semitic. Much later, a brave Israeli magazine published an interview with the artillery soldiers who fired at Qana. An officer had referred to the villagers as “just a bunch of Arabs” (‘arabushim’ in Hebrew). “A few Arabushim die, there is no harm in that,” he was quoted as saying. Peres’s chief of staff was almost equally carefree: “I don’t know any other rules of the game, either for the [Israeli] army or for civilians…” [...]

Yes, of course, Peres changed in later years. They claimed that Ariel Sharon – whose soldiers watched the massacre at Sabra and Chatila camps in 1982 by their Lebanese Christian allies – was also a “peacemaker” when he died. At least he didn’t receive the Nobel Prize. 

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IFLScience: Riding A Roller Coaster Can Help Get Rid Of Kidney Stones

The study, which appears in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, was inspired by anecdotal reports about people passing their kidney stones after enjoying a spin on the Magic Kingdom’s Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. One man even claimed to have gone on the roller coaster three times in a row, passing one stone after each ride. [...]

Amazingly, they found that stones placed in the kidney’s upper passage were dislodged on all 20 rides, although those in the lower passageways were somewhat more stubborn. They also found that sitting at the back of the ride led to a passage rate of just under two in three, while sitting at the front caused a passage rate of one in six. [...]

Large stones normally have to be surgically removed, although smaller stones are sometimes spontaneously passed out of the body in urine. In their study, the researchers found that riding on roller coasters can increase the likelihood of these smaller stones passing without the need for any intervention, thereby preventing the build-up of large stones.

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Independent: Government forced to release 'secret arguments' for triggering Article 50 ahead of anti-Brexit legal challenge

A legal bid challenging Brexit has secured its first major success ahead of a High Court hearing. A senior judge has ordered the Government to reveal 'secret' legal arguments which it says means parliament does not have to be consulted on when to trigger Article 50. The decision has been heralded a major victory as a series of legal challenges trying to block Brexit are beginning.

High Court Judge Mr Justice Cranston has ruled that prior to a hearing of a case from the crowd funded initiative People’s Challenge on 13 October, the Government must publish its previously undisclosed legal arguments about why Article 50 can be triggered without parliamentary assent. As a majority of MPs backed Remain, some anti-Brexit campaigners believe this mechanism could enable them to stall or entirely cancel Brexit. [...]

A number of legal challenges against Brexit have been launched. In addition to the People’s Challenge, a cross-community coalition of politicians in Northern Ireland is bringing a case arguing that the Northern Irish parliament must approve plans to leave the EU due to the detrimental impact it may have on Northern Ireland.

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The Atlantic: Taking the Fear and Desperation Out of Online Dating

One old eHarmony commercial on YouTube starts with a man saying “I was skeptical about anything that was on an internet.” (Yes, an internet.) Later, in the same commercial, a woman says, “I don’t think anybody, no matter how old they are, should ever give up.” Evoking skepticism and giving up may not be the best way to make people excited for a dating service. [...]

Wolfe said she hoped her app could erase some of those fears for heterosexual women who are online dating; the gimmick of Bumble that separates it from Tinder, Hinge, and the scads of others is that the woman has to send the first message. Unfortunately, men regularly send women harassing messages on dating platforms like Tinder and OKCupid, and the culture around online dating can seem toxically misogynist at times. (Wolfe herself is a former Tinder employee, and settled a sexual harassment and sex discrimination lawsuit against her former bosses in 2014.) [...]

More generally, Wolfe thinks dating apps can, contrary to the old stereotype, make people’s searches for love less desperate. When the opportunity to meet new people is always available, there’s less need to scan every bar and party for prospects, panning for gold in a river of bros.

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Quartz: Police are investigating a bizarre wave of reports of creepy clowns scaring people around the US

There have been reports since this summer from around the US of people dressed in clown costumes yielding weapons and trying to lure children. They struck in South Carolina in late August, where authorities were on high alert after some children said clowns were trying to lure them into the woods. Investigations haven’t turned up suspects yet. [...]

Police suspect many of these clowns are harmless pranksters and some of the reports are hoaxes. Four children admitted to lying about seeing clowns in and around Annapolis, Maryland. A 24-year-old North Carolina man was charged with fabricating a story about a clown knocking on his window. On Sept. 20, the police department in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, warned people that false reports could lead to prosecution. [...]

With this latest wave of creepy clown sightings, real clown businesses are being hurt, the AP reports. “In South Carolina, two of the clowns were afraid to go out and perform, and they’re two of my customers,” said Tricia Manuel, owner of the Mooseburger Clown Arts Camp in Buffalo, Minnesota. “If they don’t perform, they don’t need supplies.”

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Böll-Stiftung: The European Union and its Southern Neighbourhood

Prior to the Arab Spring, the policies pursued by the EU and most of the Member States were focused on dealing with the regimes. In most cases, European governments shied away from dealing directly with the small, courageous and genuinely independent civil society movements or groups of individuals who campaigned for human rights. The EU’s interlocutor was the status quo. Moreover, the EU really had no unified, coherent long term strategy towards the region. As for the Member States, they had their own network of bilateral economic and trade ties built up over many years. [...]

At the time, the aim of the ENP was to foster stability, security and prosperity in these countries. It reflected the EU’s first European Security Strategy drawn up by Javier Solana. That document referred to establishing an arc of stability, from Europe’s east around to Europe’s south. Clearly for those campaigning for democracy in the MENA countries, neither the ENP nor the EU’s Security Strategy addressed the underlying tensions in the region: the irreconcilability of authoritarianism and democratisation; that the kind of stability prevailing in the MENA countries was inherently unstable.

The Arab Spring could have and should have provided the EU with a new and bold opportunity to radically overhaul its policies toward the region as a whole and towards particular countries. Certainly, in the immediate aftermath of the Arab Spring, the EU did realise that its previous policies had been flawed. But because of the sheer scale of the upheaval engulfing that Syria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt particularly, the EU scrambled for a reactive policy. [...]

The long term consequences of Europe’s role as bystander in the Syrian war is extremely damaging. Salam Kawakibi summed it up in a piece he wrote for Carnegie Europe. He argued that if the Europeans do not take the Syrian conflict seriously, other global actors will not take the Europeans seriously either. Indeed, one wonders if European governments now see its southern neighbourhood through the lens of security and stability in order to ensure the security of EU citizens. [...]

Echoing the Commission’s Review, the official insisted that the EU’s policies would be able to reconcile security and stabilisation with promoting good governance, ‘democracy, rule of law and human rights.’ But as the Commission itself states throughout the 21-page long review, it is the security and stabilisation issues that take priority.

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IFLScience: Here’s How People Judge You Based On Your Face

Scientists have identified countless ways that we judge people based on their looks, even when those judgments have no basis in reality.

"We form these immediate impressions of people — we just can’t help it," Alexander Todorov, a psychology professor at Princeton University, told Business Insider.

Todorov’s lab tests responses to computer-generated faces to model traits associated with perceived attractiveness, trustworthiness, competence, and more.

Todorov warns that these impressions are highly inaccurate. People have many biases, including halo effects — where we assume one positive trait will be followed by others — and stereotypes — where we associate behaviors with looks. Still, the professor says it’s worth understanding them, if only to fight them.

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