Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Some recent news items

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Space Oddity: 

An Indian father and son have been arrested for allegedly defrauding a businessman by pretending to work for NASA. The duo told investors that they were building a device called the 'rice puller', which could be used to generate 'electricity from thunderbolts'. They convinced one businessman to buy what was in fact a copper coated plate for £157,600 and told them it could be sold to Nasa, via India's Defence Research Development Organisation, for around £4.1bn. Virender Mohan Brar, 56, and his son 30-year-old son Nitin were reported to have duped 30 people across India, carrying out displays of the bogus device while dressed in doil resembling space suits and pretending to be from NASA. Police paraded them in and out of their foil space suits: 


Virender Mohan Brar (right) and his son Nitin 

They were previously arrested for selling snakes they claimed had medicinal properties. Other scams reportedly included selling magic mirrors and two-headed snakes. 

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Reminds me of the following: 

WARNING: 

I hate hoax warnings, but this one is very important. 

If a man comes to your front door and says he is conducting a survey and asks you to show him your breasts and your buttocks, DO NOT show him either. This is a SCAM!!!!!!! He only wants to see your tits and your ass. I wish I'd gotten this yesterday. I feel so stupid and cheap now. 
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Let's get ready to rumble:

American boxer Rod Salka had what he thought was a great idea in order to play a mind game against Mexican fighter Francisco Vargas. Salka showed up to the fight sporting red, white and blue trunks in a brick pattern with the words "America 1st" on the waist, a clear reference to Donald Trump's promise to build a wall along the Mexican border to keep immigrants out of the United States. 


As it turned out, Vargas was not intimidated by the trunks, and he proceeded to beat up on Salka for six rounds before Salka quit on his stool. 

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Anne Frank story #1: 

A new book by a man called Gerard Kremer, 70, who is the son of a member of the Dutch resistance to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and has the same name, claims to have fresh evidence as to Anne Frank’s betrayal, The book claims that a Jewish woman named Ans van Dijk informed on those hiding in concealed rooms in a building in Amsterdam, being Anne, her family and the van Pels family. They were in hiding from July 1942 until the arrest by the Gestapo in August 1944. Anne kept a diary she had received as a birthday present, and wrote in it regularly. Following their arrest, the Franks were transported to concentration camps. In October or November 1944, Anne and her sister, Margot, were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died, probably of typhus. 

Anne’s father, Otto, the only survivor of the family, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that her diary had been saved by one of the helpers, Miep Gies. The diary is poignant and remarkable in its outlook, observations and in recording the development of a young girl into womanhood. 

Anne Frank 

Kremer claims his father, who died in 1978, knew Van Dijk and that after she was arrested by Nazi intelligence on Easter Sunday 1943, she regularly turned up at the Nazi offices in disguise. He also writes that in August 1944 his father heard Van Dijk talking to people in the offices about Prinsengracht - where the Franks were hiding in a canalside warehouse. 

Ans van Dijk 

Ans van Dijk was executed after Hitler fell for her informing on, and involvement in the capture of, 145 people, including her brother and his family. 

A spokesperson for Anne Frank House has commented: “In 2016, the Anne Frank House carried out research into the arrest of the Frank family and the other four people in hiding in the secret annex. Ans van Dijk was included as a potential traitor in this study. We have not been able to find evidence for this theory, nor for other betrayal theories.” 


Anne Frank #2: 

Using imaging software, researchers have worked out the text in Anne Frank’s diary that she obscured by pasting brown paper over tow pages. The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam announced that the pages contain “five crossed-out phrases, four ‘dirty’ jokes and 33 lines about sex education and prostitution.” Frank wrote the pages on September 28, 1942, about two months after she and her family went into hiding.  Some excerpts:
  • A joke: “A man had a very ugly wife and he didn’t want to have relations with her. One evening he came home and then he saw his friend in bed with his wife, then the man said: ‘He gets to and I have to!!!’” 
  • Another joke: “Do you know why the German Wehrmacht girls are in Holland? As mattresses for the soldiers.” (“Wehrmacht” was the name for the German military force).
  • On menstrual cycles: Frank wrote that when a young woman got her period it would be “a sign that she is ripe to have relations with a man” but added “one doesn’t do that of course before one is married.” 
  • On prostitution: “[a]ll men, if they are normal, go with women, women like that accost them on the street and then they go together. In Paris they have big houses for that. Papa has been there.” 


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