The Guardian: Police with body cameras receive 93% fewer complaints – study

Police equipped with body-worn cameras receive 93% fewer complaints from the public, according to a new study that suggests the technology helps to cool down potentially volatile encounters.

Academics at Cambridge University, whose research looked at nearly 1.5m beat hours across more than 4,000 shifts by officers in the UK and California, claim their findings suggest the cameras herald a “profound sea change in modern policing”. [..]

Throughout the year-long experiment, researchers were said to have randomly assigned about half of the officers starting their shifts with cameras. All officers in the forces taking part worked with cameras at some point, the researchers said.

During the 12 months before the study, a total of 1,539 complaints were lodged against police in the areas examined, amounting to 1.2 complaints per officer. By the end, the number of complaints had fallen to 133 for the year across all sites – 0.08 per officer.

The researchers were surprised to find that there was no statistically significant difference between the number of complaints received by officers wearing cameras and those without, a result they said may be a result of “contagious accountability”.

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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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