Margery Booth was a British opera singer that the BBC calls the WWII knicker spy
Unaware of her activities, Booth was held in high regard by the Nazi leadership and once sang in the presence of the Fuhrer with secret information hidden in her underwear.
Her photographs soon are to be auctioned.
Let’s call it a N.E.W. day
by Doc Gurley
Imagine the entire chain of human activity. The firefighters who drove straight toward the blaze, even as the tower rose higher and higher to engulf the very sky, knowing this was something no one with a hose and a truck could stop or even contain. The sweat and the sizzle as you run from one paint-bubbling house to the next, imagining the screams of children as you knock and yell and draw an X on one house, only to sprint, heart pounding, to the next. Flames flicker and lick and you think, “God, let the other rigs come.” And then they do – rigs from other counties, people who were supposed to be sitting down to supper, firefighters who’ve never even driven these streets. Sixty-seven trucks came. Just think about that for a moment. No ego, no jurisdictional posturing, no hemming and hawing about budgets or how the assignment ought go to someone else, someone closer. All those teams, all those men and women, strapping on heavy gloves and helmets and feeling the claustrophobia and vertigo of wind whipping past as you accelerate onto a freeway in an open firetruck, the straining rumble of the screaming RPMs making your stomach shake. Then you hit the ground and ask, “what can I do?” and you join in, the sprint, the yell, the heavy lifting and the search, the endless search even now, the day after, through embers, dreading what you might find, what will give you nightmares for decades to come. And when you get home, and wipe the ash from your neck, you cough up soot and look at it, hoping your lungs are tougher than average because you’ve been in this, you’ll stay in this, for the long haul.
The Telegraph reports the Hasselt jail is using the security scan as an excuse to get women to remove their bras
Joseph Rowies, a representative of criminal barristers in the Flemish city, stressed that while women lawyers have no problem with the security checks they had spotted that the prettier the visitor, the more sensitive the scanner became.
Rowies points out that even with a high volume of complaints the jail management uses security as a defensive method to stall any investigation.
Mr Rowies has told the prison authorities that he is receiving at least one complaint a month from furious female barristers. “It always strikes me that the younger, and the more babe-like, a lawyer is, the more difficult the device becomes,” he said.
“I’ve suggested that the prison guards to wear name tags so we can verify if it is always the same officers. But the management has refused for security reasons.”
Babe-like? Why not just describe and pinpoint the offending guards the same way — how they look? The situation does raise the inevitable question about trustworthiness of a security control. Perhaps Rowies could also ask that the scanners be randomly audited by a standard calibration.
An audit of Japan’s welfare system has been initiated after an innocent gesture uncovered irregularities in payments: more than 230,000 Japanese centenarians are “missing”
The inquiry followed the discovery of the mummified remains of Sogen Kato, who was thought to be the oldest man in Tokyo.
However, when officials went to congratulate him on his 111th birthday, they found his 30-year-old remains, raising concerns that the welfare system is being exploited by dishonest relatives.
He was mummified? Could it be there is a modern form of sokushinbutsu to help one’s family, or is this more like a Weekend at Bernie’s effect related to the shame of fraud?
Privacy in Japan will surely take a hit after this kind of incident. The fund manager is likely to want to have more ability to verify a recipient and that means more visibility by the government into family affairs. Birthday visits with gifts are probably the least intrusive form of verification and that clearly is not working.
The Japanese government leaves it up to local communities and independent healthcare bodies to check up on centenarians, and methods differ from one municipality to another, said a health ministry official.
“In a small town, it’s easier to check up on the safety of centenarians by visiting them. But in a larger city, officials may just give a quick telephone call to family members who will confirm that the centenarians are alive,” the official said.
In Tokyo, ward offices said it can be difficult to check on the elderly because relatives sometimes refuse to cooperate and prevent welfare workers from entering homes, according to a survey by the Yomiuri daily.
It is easy to see how the fraud became so pervasive. Refusal to cooperate could soon mean an end to payments.