Month: August 2017

The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist | WIRED

At 2:28 pm on August 28, 2003, a middle-aged pizza deliveryman named Brian Wells walked into a PNC Bank in Erie, Pennsylvania. He had a short cane in his right hand and a strange bulge under the collar of his T-shirt. Wells, 46 and balding, passed the teller a note. “Gather employees with access codes to vault and work fast to fill bag with $250,000,” it said. “You have only 15 minutes.” Then he lifted his shirt to reveal a heavy, boxlike device dangling from his neck. According to the note, it was a bomb. The teller, who told Wells there was no way to get into the vault at that time, filled a bag with cash—$8,702—and handed it over. Wells walked out, sucking on a Dum Dum lollipop he grabbed from the counter, hopped into his car, and drove off. He didn’t get far. Some 15 minutes later, state troopers spotted Wells standing outside his Geo Metro in a nearby parking lot, surrounded him, and tossed him to the pavement, cuffing his hands behind his back.

Wells told the troopers that while out on a delivery he had been accosted by a group of black men who chained the bomb around his neck at gunpoint and forced him to rob the bank. “It’s gonna go off!” he told them in desperation. “I’m not lying.” The officers called the bomb squad and took positions behind their cars, guns drawn. TV camera crews arrived and began filming. For 25 minutes Wells remained seated on the pavement, his legs curled beneath him.

“Did you call my boss?” Wells asked a trooper at one point, apparently concerned that his employer would think he was shirking his duties. Suddenly, the device started to emit an accelerating beeping noise. Wells fidgeted. It looked like he was trying to scoot backward, to somehow escape the bomb strapped to his neck. Beep… Beep… Beep. Boom! The device detonated, blasting him violently onto his back and ripping a 5-inch gash in his chest. The pizza deliveryman took a few last gasps and died on the pavement. It was 3:18 pm. The bomb squad arrived three minutes later.

The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist | WIRED

What Harajuku Girls Really Look Like – Neatorama

The Harajuku shopping district in Tokyo gained international notoriety after it became the hip place for fashion forward Japanese youths to hang out, the most famous group being the so-called “Harajuku Girls”.

But what most people don’t realize is these “Harajuku Girls” are from different subculture groups with totally different styles and attitudes, from the romantic and fancy Lolitas to the rough and tumble Bosozoku biker gangs.

And one of the most adorable Harajuku styles is called Decora, characterized by wearing as many cute accessories as possible to in order to decorate your hair and your wardrobe.

What Harajuku Girls Really Look Like – Neatorama

She thought she was Irish — until a DNA test opened a 100-year-old mystery – Washington Post

Five years ago, Alice Collins Plebuch made a decision that would alter her future — or really, her past.

She sent away for a “just-for-fun DNA test.” When the tube arrived, she spit and spit until she filled it up to the line, and then sent it off in the mail. She wanted to know what she was made of.

Plebuch, now 69, already had a rough idea of what she would find. Her parents, both deceased, were Irish American Catholics who raised her and her six siblings with church Sundays and ethnic pride. But Plebuch, who had a long-standing interest in science and DNA, wanted to know more about her dad’s side of the family. The son of Irish immigrants, Jim Collins had been raised in an orphanage from a young age, and his extended family tree was murky.

After a few weeks during which her saliva was analyzed, she got an email in the summer of 2012 with a link to her results. The report was confounding.

She thought she was Irish — until a DNA test opened a 100-year-old mystery – Washington Post

What Teen-Age Girls See When They Look in the Mirror | The New Yorker

In her series “Spitting Image,” which is on display at Crush Curatorial through May 13th, Eva O’Leary photographs teen-age girls examining their own reflections. The mirror they use is a two-way; O’Leary positioned her camera behind it, so that we see the girls caught in the act of looking. The photos are alarmingly intimate, unguarded, and open. Think of them as the anti-selfie, that punishingly idealized form. Here, each sitter’s individuality constitutes her beauty. There are pimples and oily skin, plucked eyebrows and lip fuzz, lipstick and mascara as well as bare faces. Some of O’Leary’s subjects seem intrigued, even excited, by what they see. Others seem distressed, disgusted, perplexed. Childhood has been shed; these are new faces, but they won’t be theirs for long. The photos are shot against a deep-blue backdrop, like that of a yearbook photo, as if to remind the sitters that adolescence, too, is something they’ll graduate from. Get a good look while it lasts.

What Teen-Age Girls See When They Look in the Mirror | The New Yorker

She Was Convicted of Killing Her Mother. Prosecutors Withheld the Evidence That Would Have Freed Her. – The New York Times

With concern about the case mounting — ‘‘Mystery Stabbing Death Unsolved,’’ local ABC news reported that August — the case went to Amy Weirich, who at 40 was a rising star in the Memphis prosecutor’s office. A long- distance runner and the mother of four children, Weirich was a former chief of the gang- and- narcotics unit and the first woman to be named deputy district attorney in Shelby County. She was considered a highly skilled trial lawyer.

A note that Andrew Hammack, Noura’s friend, gave to the police in the early days of the murder investigation. The note, which raises questions about his credibility, was not provided to Noura’s defense team. It turned out to be a crucial piece of evidence in her appeal.

Studying the case, she developed a theory: Noura was bridling under her mother’s rules and killed her for money that she could use to keep partying with her friends. Jackson’s estate was valued at $1.5 million, including a life insurance policy. Weirich also argued that Noura and her mother were struggling over whether to sell a few cars that Noura inherited from her father, Nazmi Hassanieh, a former Lebanese Army captain. After a long separation, Noura got back in touch with her father when she was 16, and he texted and called her often. Sixteen months before her mother was killed, Hassanieh was shot to death in a Memphis convenience store he owned. His murder was never solved.

The police came to arrest Noura that September as she was finishing up a babysitting job. She had no history of violence, and the case quickly became a local sensation. Weirich asked for a life sentence. The judge, Chris Craft, eventually set a bond of $500,000. Unable to pay, Noura spent a total of three and a half years in jail awaiting trial, on a heavy regimen of anti- anxiety and antidepressant medication.

She Was Convicted of Killing Her Mother. Prosecutors Withheld the Evidence That Would Have Freed Her. – The New York Times

How We Should Respond to Photographs of Suffering | The New Yorker

Several years ago, while staring at a photograph of torture on the front page of the newspaper, I began seriously asking myself a question that many people had asked before: What should one do when faced with images of violence? I spent thirteen years researching the question, which became more urgent as those years passed and social media began connecting people around the globe. Every week, perhaps every day, something terrible happens somewhere in the world, and, whether it is far away or right at home, we are inundated with images of the horror. Do these images harm their subjects? Is it an ethical violation to make a photograph of suffering beautiful? Do I have a right to look at other people’s pain?

I read theorists who claim that violent images are pornographic, theorists who point out the narcissism of worrying about the effects of images on viewers, theorists who fear that looking at images of suffering extends that suffering. Then I read Ariella Azoulay’s “The Civil Contract of Photography,” which was first published, in Hebrew, in 2007, and translated into English by Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli the following year. Suddenly, every question that seemed important to me felt beside the point. Azoulay, a curator, filmmaker, and professor at Brown, is not interested in viewers’ emotional responses to images of suffering. It’s not empathy she’s after; she wants action. Images can transform the world, she argues, and the only reason they haven’t yet is because we don’t know how to look at them. The problem isn’t images; it’s us.

How We Should Respond to Photographs of Suffering | The New Yorker