Quartz: Americans think the sexiest languages in the world are…German and Dutch

The dating site PlentyOfFish analyzed 50 million messages sent on their platform in January 2017, and surveyed 325 of their users in the US. The data found that women were most attracted to men who speak German as a second language. For men, it was women who could speak Dutch.

Single men were 73% more likely to send a message to a woman who said she could speak a second language, the research found, while women were 63% more likely to start a conversation with a bilingual than a non-bilingual man. PlentyOfFish advertizes itself as the world’s largest dating site, and has more than 90 million users worldwide. This study only looked at a portion of the US user base.

Michael McDermott, a data scientist at the company who collated the research, said in an email that there were some correlations between being bilingual and other traits that had been found to make people successful on the site. People who listed a second language on their profile were more likely to fill out more information on their profiles generally, and to be more willing to share information about themselves.

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The Guardian: 4,444 victims: extent of abuse in Catholic church in Australia revealed

Up to 15% of priests in some dioceses were alleged perpetrators between 1950 and 2015, with abusers most prevalent in the dioceses of Sale and Sandhurst in Victoria, Port Pirie in South Australia, and Lismore and Wollongong in New South Wales. The numbers were even worse in some national Catholic orders. By far the worst was the order of the St John of God Brothers, where a staggering 40% of religious brothers are believed to have abused children.

Twenty-two per cent of Christian Brothers and 20% of Marist Brothers, both orders that run schools, were alleged perpetrators. More than one in five priests in the Benedictine community of New Norcia were alleged perpetrators, while 17.2% of clergy were accused of crimes against children in the Salesians of Don Bosco order.

In total, between 1980 and 2015, 4,444 people alleged incidents of child sexual abuse relating to 93 Catholic Church authorities. The abuse allegedly took place in more than 1,000 institutions. The average age of victims was 10.5 for girls and 11.6 for boys. The overwhelming majority of survivors were male. Almost 1,900 perpetrators were identified and another 500 remained unidentified. Thirty-two per cent were religious brothers, 30% were priests, 29% were lay people and 5% were religious sisters.

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Business Insider: 12 major cities that are starting to go car-free

In late 2016, Madrid's Mayor Manuela Carmena reiterated her plan to kick personal cars out of the city center.

On Spanish radio network Cadena Ser, she confirmed that Madrid's main avenue, the Gran Vía, will only allow access to bikes, buses, and taxis before she leaves office in May 2019. It's part of a larger effort to ban all diesel cars in Madrid by 2025.

But the Spanish city is not the only one getting ready to take the car-free plunge. Urban planners and policy makers around the world have started to brainstorm ways that cities can create more space for pedestrians and lower CO2 emissions from diesel.

Here are 12 cities leading the car-free movement.

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The New Yorker: Our Part in the Darkness

I remember when the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib came to light. The response was similar. This is not us. Those soldiers were rotten. It began at the top, with George W. Bush, and it filtered down. But we would never do such a thing. Of course, we did do those things, and we kept on doing them over and over, and doing worse. Some objected, but most of us simply moved on, chose to forget. “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible,” the Polish poet Stanisław Jerzy Lec once wrote.

Trump bans Muslims and we claim that this is un-American, that we are not this. I don’t have to talk up “ancient” history to show that we are. I won’t bring up settler colonialism, genocide, and land theft, or harp on slavery, or internment camps for Japanese-Americans. I won’t refer to the Page Act banning those deemed “undesirable,” the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, or the Emergency Quota Act. I don’t have to mention the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans deported in the nineteen-thirties, or the thousands of Jews escaping Nazi violence who were turned away. It was F.D.R., not Trump, who claimed that Jewish immigrants could threaten national security. I won’t mention any of this, because this happened so long ago. We can always delude ourselves by saying that America was this but now we are better. Let me just say that in 2010 and 2011, state legislatures passed a hundred and sixty-four anti-immigration laws.

Many were upset when Trump campaigned on a Muslim registry, but I was surprised to find out how few knew that we’d already had one: the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or nseers, implemented on September 11, 2002. From the Atlantic: “It consisted of two ‘special registration’ programs: one that required foreign nationals from certain countries to check in with the government before entering and leaving the country, and another that obliged some foreigners living in the United States to report regularly to immigration officials.” Obama did not suspend the program until 2011. He dismantled it right before he left office.

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Quartz: In Pakistan’s most violent city, the Virgin Mary from south India brings together Hindus, Muslims, and Parsis

Karachi is the most violent city in Pakistan. A total of 1,046 deaths related to terror and militancy were reported there in 2016, and nearly 50% of the city’s young people want to leave Pakistan completely.

The violence has various causes, including divisions over politics, religion and ethnicity, as well as organised crime.

More than 70 Christians were killed while celebrating Easter in a park in 2016. The forced conversion of Hindu girls and the marginalisation of community members have been among other factors fuelling feelings of insecurity and isolation for minorities. [...]

The Christian devotees then invited both Hindus and Zoroastrians to join them in asking for benediction. In this way, novena prayers to Our Lady of Velankanni became a part of Catholic churches’ ceremonial activities across Karachi, and opened up the veneration of the Virgin Mary to new faiths.

For some Hindu devotees, Our Lady of Velankanni symbolises prosperity, aspirations, well-being, while providing answers to their prayers.

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