Postscript: Zaha Hadid, 1950–2016 “Hadid was a woman who had dared to enter a man’s world, and took no shit from anybody, though plenty was offered. She had to be twice as smart and three times as tough as her male counterparts in order to get anything built. And even then she struggled for years to realize her projects, and was forced to endure cruel and humiliating referendums on such thwarted projects as the Cardiff Bay Opera House, or the ongoing Olympic-stadium debacle in Tokyo, in which the government blocked Hadid’s competition-winning design from going forward after protests from prominent Japanese architects.” (Also: A life in projects)
Friday, April 1st
The world thinks Australia should lift its anti-corruption game “Anti-corruption experts in the US and Europe have urged Australia to properly resource and empower its anti-bribery regime as Australia emerges as the ‘dumping ground’ for dirty money from Asia. Officials believe that under-resourcing, ineffective laws and competing priorities between the federal police and corporate watchdog ASIC are a factor in the failure to resolve many cases.”
The Age
The New Yorker
The mastermind “Somewhere between a pile of American legal documents and a two-paragraph story about Jimena’s discovery in a Philippine newspaper, I had noticed a hazy connection between the body and a man named Paul Le Roux, a South African who was reputed to be the most prolific international criminal of the 21st century: weapons shipments, gold smuggling, and online prescription-drug sales. But he was also a kind of phantom, reportedly captured by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration in 2012 and then disappeared to work as a valuable asset.” (Also: The strange origins of TrueCrypt, ISIS’ favourite encryption tool)
Atavist
The luxury of tears “At London’s Centre for the History of the Emotions some academics work on despair, others disgust. One is considering shame and anger in early-modern Spain. Another is examining Busman’s Stomach, a gastric disorder affecting bus drivers in the 1930s, ascribed to carbon-monoxide fumes but probably psychosomatic. (The Marxist biologist J.B.S. Haldane prescribed reading Lenin as a cure.) A founder member, Jules Evans, has found an unexpected enthusiasm in Korea for the ideas of the Greek Stoics, who treated emotions like beliefs or opinions that could be revised.”
1843
Nuns growing weed to heal the world (photos) “Most nuns don’t grow weed. But these nuns are no ordinary nuns.”
Bored Panda
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