April 28, 2008 Peter
By now I’m sure you’ve heard about Austria’s second* reported case in less than two years of a man holding (a) prisoner(s) in his basement for years on end (see here and hier if not).
Last night the Austrian minister of the interior, the mayor of Amstetten, the district commissioner, police representatives and other experts gathered in the ORF show “Im Zentrum” to discuss (well, actually, the minister had been invited to discuss the police shootings of three unarmed Romanians, but developing events necessitated a change of subject) the crime and answer questions like “How could something like this** go undetected for 24 years?”
The response was predictable with the authorities admitting in the face of such an elaborate scheme they were essentially helpless–”Who could imagine that the biological mother was locked in the basement?” “Such a crime is simply unimaginable.” “The culprit created the perfect ruse; his hiding place was perfectly disguised.”
Admittedly the father did coerce handwritten letters from his daughter to cover the odd events surrounding her own disappearance (as well as the appearance of three of her children on his doorstep in the ensuing years)–another tactic the police had never considered before–but was it really the perfect crime?
In a country that requires its citizens and visitors to report address changes to the police within three days of moving, keeps track of who pays TV tax (and visits those who don’t) and generally plays an active role in maintaining law and order, it is hard to believe that a bureaucratic failure of imagination is solely at fault. In fact, I suspect that Austrian susceptibility to their pet biases vis-a-vis non-mainstream religion kept the police and other authorities from even stretching their imaginations (or even conducting a more than perfunctory investigation) in the first place. As the AFP reports:
A letter was sent to her parents asking that they stop searching for her and local authorities concluded she had been seized by a religious sect.
Austrians tend to be very suspicious of religious cults but at the same time apparently quite gullible as long as their suspicions are confirmed. When the family told their neighbors and authorities that the three adopted children had no mother because she had fallen in with a sect, the response seemed to be: “Well, makes sense to me. I guess we can put this one in the cold case.”
I suppose that as long as citizens place some political value on privacy, there will be limits on the state’s ability to take any and all actions that might have been necessary to solve this case earlier. Still, I can’t help but be a little dismayed that the purported letter calling off the search wasn’t met with more scepticism and an increased resolve to get to the bottom of the missing person case. Being spirited off by a sect is a possibility that should be investigated, but not accepted as a plausible explanation for two and a half decades of absence. Clearly the danger is often closer to home.
*The first being Natascha Kampusch in August 2006.
**In a nutshell, father locks up then-18-year-old daughter in basement in 1984, reports her missing, impregnates her around six times, keeps three of the resulting children in the basement and adopts the other three, claiming they had been left on the doorstep by the missing daughter. When the oldest child in the basement comes down with serious illness, a trip to the hospital uncovers the mess.
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April 23, 2008 RJH
In my family, the wild camp is a rite of passage. Last month I decided the time had come for my boys (8 and 4) to partake of the soma. So off we headed for the Cambrian mountains of mid-Wales and the Elenydd wilderness.
Somewhere north-west of Builth Wells:
We dumped the car outside of this remote Calvinist chapel (Soar y Mynedd):
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February 24, 2008 Peter
Normally I’m not one to take a position on other people’s wardrobe decisions–heaven knows I’ve yet to be recognized for my own fashion sense–but over the past few months a trend has swept Vienna that simply cannot be overlooked, for it involves neon trucker hats perched precariously on top of the heads of the city’s youth. I first noticed the phenomenon last fall and it has become so pervasive that one cannot complete one’s daily commute without seeing at least a few bobbing neon heads somewhere in the crowds. So yesterday afternoon, armed the tools of the documentarian’s trade, I went for a stroll down Vienna’s famous Mariahilfer Straße, where the proletariat go to shop.
Pics after the jump.
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February 5, 2008 Peter
Even if they think they speak German, visitors to the venues of the Euro 2008 in Austria and Switzerland are going to have a rough time communicating in the vernacular. The dialects spoken there are hardly friendly to graduates of foreign university language programs and even native speakers from above the Limes will no doubt curse the isolation of the Alpine valleys that led to the creation of so many confounded dialects.
While most travelers will no doubt opt for English as their vehicular language of choice, the Austrian subsidiary of German soap and glue giant Henkel KGaA has rolled up its sleeves in the interests of Völkerverständigung and produced a mulitlingual Fan Guide for those who want to immerse themselves in the Viennese idiom (which is too bad if you have tickets for France vs. Italy in Letzigrund Stadion ’cause there’s no Swiss German guide, yet).
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February 1, 2008 Hellmut
Not too long ago, Bill Clinton was regarded as the most skillful political operator alive. Yet his attempts to label Senator Barack Obama as the Black candidate woefully backfired. Bill Clinton may be the best tackler of the league. But while the Clintons were trying to play football, Barack Obama was figure skating. Technically perfect, the Clinton appeared silly on the ice wearing cleats instead of skates.
Attempting to pit first Jews, then Latinos and finally Whites against Blacks, the Clintons have underestimated how desperately voters want to be Americans once more. The price has already been steep. Had Hillary cracked thirty percent in South Carolina then she would have earned an additional delegate per congressional district. Not only did Hillary Clinton loose by a wider margin than necessary in South Carolina but the endorsement of Ted Kennedy located Barack Obama dead center in the American dream rather than the ghetto.
Even when Barack Obama lost in New Hampshire and Nevada, he has demonstrated four times that his campaign can close a twenty point gap within short order. After eight years of fear, the American people are hungering for hope. In such a climate, dividers are at a disadvantage and an American candidate will prevail. The only question is if Barack Obama can get his message out fast enough.
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January 30, 2008 Peter
In an article about the “befuddlement” of liquor laws governing the shipment of wine across state lines, the New York Times quotes a key stakeholder, Mr. Wolf, the chairman of the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America, who highlights another problem as a warning to us all:
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January 25, 2008 Peter
A recent NYT article outlines a quiet but remarkable shift in at least some strata of the legal world as more and more law firms begin to implement more family-friendly policies to stop the flight of would-be partners to greener pastures:
A harbinger of changing times might well be the brief filed by the hard-driving white-shoe firm of Weil Gotshal & Manges of New York, asking a judge to reschedule hearings set for Dec. 18, 19, 20 and 27 of last year.
“Those dates are smack in the middle of our children’s winter breaks, which are sometimes the only times to be with our children,” the lawyers wrote.
The judge moved the hearings.
Are the heady days of 2300 billable hours per associate numbered? What’s next, the 35-hour workweek? 26 weeks of maternity leave? A marked increase in the quality of life?
What do the lawyers here think? What kind of weight does your firm grant such considerations? How do you navigate professional and domestic demands?
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January 24, 2008 john f.
The media and supporters of the political opponents of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney have labeled Romney a flip-flopper because he said he was pro-choice and committed to gay rights in 1994 while running against Ted Kennedy for the Senate and now says he is pro-life and has opposed same-sex marriage.
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January 23, 2008 Peter
(Source)
On 23 January 1968 the North Korean navy captured the USS Pueblo, a spy ship operating off the east cost of the DPRK. (See the wikipedia account here.) Never one to pass up an opportunity to poke the US in the eye, the Korean Central News Agency unleashed a no-holds-barred harangue on the 40th anniversary of the Pueblo incident: (Careful about clicking that link–Kim Jong Il is an internet expert and may track you down!)
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