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Friday, April 27, 2018

Fortune favours the skilled and brave

“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”

Aesop 


Ach, everything we do is futile, but we must do it anyway... The MEdia Dragon journey is part hobby, part labour of love, part irony

Linkedin Learning Blog: “Whenever there is change, there is opportunity. With report after report showing the world of work changing faster than ever today, it’s fair to assume there’s more opportunity than ever. The challenge? It isn’t easy to know where that opportunity exists. If only some organization with the resources necessary to answer that question could release a roadmap… Well, consider this is your roadmap. Using a combination of LinkedIn data and survey results, we determined both the soft and the hard skills companies need most. And then we provided LinkedIn Learning courses that teach those skills, which we’ve made free for all of January 2018…” 

A study finds that most people are terrible judges of their own physical appearance.↩︎ Nautilus*Ballerina looking less beautiful
 Booooooom
  THIS JUST IN: Hatred of journalists by leaders and their followers are behind a drop in press freedom in the United States, India, and Philippines. Nordic nations remain the most free. That's from the latest world freedom rankings by Reporters Without Borders. Here are the rankings. “The unleashing of hatred towards journalists is one of the worst threats to democracies,” the organization's secretary-general, Christophe Deloire, said. “Political leaders who fuel loathing for reporters bear heavy responsibility because they undermine the concept of public debate based on facts instead of propaganda."


JOY REID HACKED?: The MSNBC host says she's the victim of hackers who have planted fake items on social media that purport to show homophobic posts from her old blog. But not everyone is buying her explanation, reports the New York Times.
 


At 30, Elizabeth Jennings was a celebrated poet. At 40, she lived in poverty, a shabby eccentric haunting Oxford cafes. What went wrong? At 60  

Berlin has maintained its cool factor by keeping costs low for residents—families, artists, and businesses alike.
↩︎ The Sunday TimesWarner Bros. Faces Tax Fraud Investigation for 'Sully' Airplane Costs 

The fiscal picture is worse than it looks—and it looks bad - Brookings Institution

 Is it too late now to say sorry? O'Dwyer finally concedes on banking royal commission

A week after a painful interview where she repeatedly avoided questions, Financial Services Minister Kelly O'Dwyer finally concedes the Government got it wrong in delaying a banking royal commission.



The Man Who Brought Down Lance Armstrong


Floyd Landis, a former teammate of the cyclist’s, just won more than $1 million in a legal case against Armstrong. Here are his thoughts on the suit, cycling, and his onetime rival.


The Changing Face of the Country Der Spiegel. Part one of two. Part two.

Great Lengths Guardian



Catherine drinks champagne, for when she’s trying not to get too drunk, and vodka, for when she’s seeking refuge from reality. Bohemia Beach 
Review: Bohemia Beach by Justine Ettler
















 
Do ghosts prefer southerly winds? Are Mediterranean ghosts calmer? They say that in Northern Europe ghosts are loud, horrifying, that their shrieks are more out of tune because of the cold. With Northern ghosts — Irish, Estonian, German, it's easy to imagine them coming at you with a knife and no explanation. Mediterranean ghosts, however, are not as gloomy, it's impossible to take them too seriously; even when they kill you, they do it in an incompetent way; Don Juan Tenorio and others like him are laughable, buffoonish, and sometime it's their own comedic candor that makes them all the more fearful; we'd risk our necks to bet that they'd rather dance to a tambourine than use a knife; Mediterranean ghosts sound like they'd be fun to have a few glasses of wine with. "Ghosts fervid for Frescuelo and Maria. "Is there a really frightening and serious ghost in Spanish literature? And in the Basque Country? Who are they? What are Basque ghosts like?
— from Twist, by Harkaitz Cano.

Loyal blue heeler stays with three-year-old lost in bush overnight ABC 

Say what you will about Jozef Imrich's Media Dragon's Dragon Karl Ove Knausgaard, but his recent piece in the New York Times is excellent. The essay focuses on the literature and politics of Russia over the past two hundred years. Part of what I enjoyed most about the essay is its accessibility: Knausgaard orients his readers to Russia's literary titans, and makes a convincing case for the role of stories -- and storytelling -- in Russian identity. For an honest look beyond the standard view of Russia under Putin, give Knausgaard's piece a read. As I say, it's excellent (and it's making me want to read Turgenev).

In the human mind, the word library seems to sit alongside other pregnant and evocative words such as garden, forest, galaxy, and labyrinth. Book lovers speak of their possessions as beautiful flowers, verdant leaves, precious fruit, flowing fountains. Books are stars and planets and meteorites. To browse library shelves is to wander in a maze or a mirror gallery. Cemetery is another neighboring word. Libraries have always been a matter of life and death. They are places of reverence, homes for things long gone. Through books, the dead speak.
 The Strange Magic of Libraries


Surprising habit of the super rich




Nearly One-Third Of U.S. Lottery Winners Declare Bankruptcy SafeHaven

  • Filthy Rotten T.S. Eliot

    When my staff of thousands sent me this book cover, APRIL IS A MOTHERFUCKER, by none other than T.S. Eliot, it put me in mind of Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917, which includes ... read more
    AJBlog: Straight|UpPublished 2018-04-15


These Monks Meditate By Dancing

"In the West, our idea of monastic ritual involves prayer and quiet reflection. But there are monasteries in Assam, in the far reaches of northeastern India, where prayer has always been, and continues to be, expressed through dance. The monks in these communities, or sattras, perform with and for each other, and for the deity. Sattriya, as this dance form is known, became one of the eight official classical dance forms of India only in 2000 - since then, its visibility has grown beyond the monastery walls." … Read More





It can often take time for the impact of our investigations to really be felt. This month, Mauritian authorities froze 91 bank accounts linked to an investor, Jean-Claude Bastos, closely connected to Angola’s former leaders.

The report by our African coordinator, Will Fitzgibbon, highlights how Bastos benefited from his strong ties with global accounting firm KPMG. For example, when offshore law firm Appleby had concerns about Bastos’ credentials it was assumed they could take “a certain amount of comfort” from his relationship with KPMG.



We also launched a new series, Meet the Investigators, to highlight the work of our members - who are often the best in their country. This month we talk with Indian investigative journalist Ritu Sarin about what she calls the Panama Papers “treasure hunt” and what it is like to work "virtually" in a global newsroom.
 





Mauritian authorities have frozen 91 bank accounts linked to an investor who has close relationships with Angola’s former leaders. The latest fall-out from the Paradise Papers offers an insight into the close-knit world of offshore secrecy and the role of global giants like KPMG.






Indian investigative reporter Ritu Sarin is one of ICIJ’s earliest members. We talk with her about what it’s like to work on ICIJ’s global projects and how to overcome the challenge of a "virtual" global newsroom.



Global industrial giant Techint faces multinational money-laundering and bribery allegations spawned by investigations grounded in the Panama and Paradise Papers.


House panel advances bills to guard energy grid from cyberattacks

Creating Data Visualizations Without Knowing How to Code
Center for Data Innovation: “A research collaboration between Adobe and Georgia Tech has published a free data visualization tool called Data Illustrator that allows users to create visualizations in a graphical interface without having to know how to code. Additionally, Dutch data visualization firm Vizualism has published a tutorial for Data Illustrator to walk users through how to create a visualization using data about life expectancy in Dutch cities.”