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Emmett Till: US closes investigation without charges

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The US government has closed an inquiry into the infamous 1955 murder of a black boy in Mississippi after failing to corroborate an author's claim that a key figure in the case lied.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) made the announcement after meeting Emmett Till's relatives in Illinois on Monday.

The Chicago 14-year-old was kidnapped, tortured and killed after a white woman said he had harassed her at a store.

His death galvanised America's then-budding civil rights movement.

Emmett's mother insisted on an open coffin at the funeral, and the published photos of the boy's brutalised remains shocked the nation.

The DoJ reopened the case in 2018 after a book cast doubt on the testimony of a white woman who was central to the case.

Carolyn Bryant Donham said Emmett had grabbed her by the waist, uttered a profanity and asked her for a date while she was alone in the family grocery store on the evening of 24 August 1955 in Money, Mississippi.

But a 2017 best-selling book, The Blood of Emmett Till, by historian Timothy Tyson, quoted her as recanting this story.

The author said she had indicated - in her first ever known interview - that her courtroom testimony six decades earlier about Emmett's purported sexual advance was unfounded.

However, the DoJ said in a statement on Monday that the FBI had interviewed Ms Donham, and she had denied ever disavowing her testimony, and did not provide any further information.

They added that authorities concluded there was "insufficient evidence to prove that she ever told the professor [Mr Tyson] that any part of her testimony was untrue".

"Although the professor represented that he had recorded two interviews with her, he provided the FBI with only one recording, which did not contain any recantation."

The statement added: "The professor also provided inconsistent explanations about whether the missing recording included the alleged recantation or whether, instead, the woman made the key admission before he began recording the interview."

Officials also said there was nothing to validate the claim that Ms Donham had disavowed her story in any transcript of Mr Tyson's interviews.

The author quotes Ms Donham in the book as saying: "That part's not true. Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him."

But the DoJ said even in the author's account it was unclear what Ms Donham was referring to when she was quoted as saying "that part's not true".

Ms Donham's daughter-in-law, Marsha Holley Bryant, was present for the two tape-recorded interviews with Mr Tyson, and she said in 2018 that Ms Donham had never recanted.

Mr Tyson, a researcher and historian at Duke University in North Carolina, stood by his version in statements to US media on Monday.

He said in an email to the New York Times: "Carolyn started spilling the beans before I got the recorder going. I documented her words carefully."

He added: "My reporting is rock solid."

He said in an email to NBC News: "I am standing in the public square telling the truth as I see it based on solid evidence."

More on this case

Emmett's cousin Simeon Wright was among eyewitnesses who said Emmett had wolf-whistled at Ms Donham outside the store for a laugh, but Mr Wright denied that Emmett had ever spoken out of turn to her.

Four days later, Emmett was dragged from his bed at his uncle's home, beaten and shot in the head. His corpse would be recovered from a local river.

Ms Donham's ex-husband, Roy Bryant, and brother-in-law, JW Milam, were prosecuted for Emmett's death. They were acquitted by an all-white jury after just over an hour of deliberation.

Months later, they confessed to the murder in a paid magazine interview, but maintained they had done nothing wrong.

The pair were not brought to trial again, and have since died.

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Emmett Till: US closes investigation without charges

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The US government has closed an inquiry into the infamous 1955 murder of a black boy in Mississippi after failing to corroborate an author's claim that a key figure in the case lied. The Department of Justice (DoJ) made the announcement after meeting Emmett Till's relatives in Illinois on Monday.

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Lily Cole, the burka and why we were right to leave Afghanistan | The Spectator

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I have the feeling that Joe Biden will have to wait a while before he receives his Nobel Peace Prize, the traditional gift bestowed upon an American president if he’s a Democrat and before he’s actually done anything. The civilised world — by which I mean the mass of deluded lefties and liberals who…

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The Truth Behind the Amazon Mystery Seeds From China - The Atlantic

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Why did so many Americans receive strange packages they didn't think they'd ordered?

Sid Miller, the Texas agriculture commissioner, sat atop his stallion Smokey and faced the camera. It was Saturday, August 1, 2020. Miller had a message to share.

"Good morning, patriots," Miller began, raising the coiled lasso in his right hand by way of greeting. "I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of all these surprises coming out of China. First it was the Chinese virus, then we had the murder hornets, then we had to close the embassy in Houston because of espionage ... Now we've got all these mystery seeds coming in in the mail."

It was the seeds that Miller wanted to speak about. By then, news of the seeds had been circulating for several days. Packets were turning up at homes across the United States; residents of every state would eventually report receiving them. Their address labels and Customs declarations indicated that they had been sent from China. The contents were usually described as an item of jewelry-something like "rose stud earrings"-but inside would be a small packet of unidentified seeds. There was no evident reason why particular people were receiving particular seeds, or why people were receiving seeds at all.

Miller advised anyone who received one of these packages to handle it with extreme care. "Treat them like they're radioactive," he said. As Smokey flicked his tail, the commissioner laid out what he considered to be the worst-case scenario: "My greatest fear is that someone will open these packages up-open these seeds up-and be infected with a new virus of some kind." If you found yourself in possession of such a package, Miller said, you should email him immediately, and he would send an inspector to pick it up.

"You don't want to cry wolf unless there's a wolf at the door," Miller told me when I called recently, "but I have a $100 billion industry here just in Texas to protect." In the face of something so odd, Miller's instincts arced toward suspicion.

"We didn't know what in the world was going on," he said.

Listen to Chris Heath discuss this piece on the Experiment podcast.

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts

If someone had wanted to invent a surreal provocation designed to unnerve Americans in the summer of 2020, it's difficult to conceive of a better one than a deluge of unsolicited Chinese seeds. For one thing, in those first months of the coronavirus pandemic, references to China triggered associations-rational or otherwise-with contagion. For another, these objects were invading private spaces at a time when most of us were newly hypersensitive to our surroundings. And what was happening was something that was hard to explain, in a moment when so many fears that might have once seemed far-fetched were either being realized or, at the very least, suddenly sounding plausible.

Even people who considered themselves above the lure of alarmist theories had to take the seeds seriously. Irrespective of why they were appearing at people's homes, their very existence-as biological matter of unknown origin-constituted a problem. This reality acted as a narrative anchor for what might otherwise have seemed to be fanciful media stories. The government genuinely was concerned. Whenever someone wanted to tell the story of these Chinese seeds, a local or federal agriculture spokesperson was always available to expound on how unknown seeds of foreign origin were, until proved otherwise, a threat to American agriculture or even the whole North American ecosystem. Advice soon circulated that the seeds should not be planted, burned, or even disposed of in the trash, given the possibility that they could germinate and disseminate from a landfill. And if you received any, the government would definitely like to know about it.

This combination of factors-a mystery, multiple anxiety triggers within the perpetual panic chamber we live in, and a bedrock empirical reason this had to be taken seriously-encouraged a proliferation of wild theories. Here, for instance, are some of the explanations that I saw floated, for the most part not at the rabidly conspiratorial fringes of the internet, but on gardening-group and state-agriculture-department Facebook pages: that the seeds were Chinese bioweapons, laced with viruses or poisons, or that they were engineered through genetic manipulation or nanotechnology (threads picked up in a Tucker Carlson Tonight segment with the chyron COULD MYSTERIOUS SEEDS BE BIOLOGICAL ATTACK?); that they were part of a "deep state" strategy to control our gardens, or a false-flag operation to discredit China; that they were a Chinese cure for COVID-19 suppressed by Big Pharma; and that they would grow to feed swarms of invasive murder hornets.

A year later, however, no monstrous mystery vines are strangling America's cornfields. The seeds mostly stopped coming, and the world moved on. But I wanted to know: What was it all about? So I decided to reimmerse myself in the giddy anxiety of last summer. I planned to speak with some of those who had received the packages, dissect the hullabaloo around them, and construct the definitive account of the seeds-from-China moral panic.

It seemed straightforward enough. I had no idea.

It is perhaps ironic, given how many people assumed that America was being targeted, that news of the seeds appears to have first surfaced in the United Kingdom.

On the morning of June 5, a woman named Sue Westerdale, who lives in a small town in northern England, posted in the Facebook group "Veg gardening UK" about something peculiar. She had received a mysterious packet of seeds from China, described on the envelope as "ear studs," and wondered whether this had happened to anyone else.

John Roberts, a retired railway worker who lives 100 miles to the south, replied within the hour; he'd gotten some seeds the previous week. He'd called the local police, who came and picked them up, telling Roberts they'd investigate the seeds and then burn them. Other stories followed.

Over the next few weeks, these British gardeners became exasperated. Amid plenty of thoughtful debate and the occasional xenophobic comment (less than 10 hours after Westerdale's post, someone wrote: "I reckon it's some kind of covert biological thing from China that will affect all our plant life and we'll all die of starvation, then China will take over the world"), there was a sense of frustration that something important was going on and no one was listening. People in "Veg gardening UK" and other groups contacted the British agricultural authorities. They contacted celebrity gardeners and members of Parliament. They contacted the media. One person, tweeting under the name Tinkerpuss I will NOT be silenced! (apparently a beautician named Charlotte), was particularly vociferous, firing urgent messages at British newspapers, to no effect.

Credit for finally breaking the story circles back to the Westerdale household. Sue's husband, Bob, used to be a crime reporter and is now a freelance writer. At first, when his wife told him about the seeds, he didn't think too much of it. He was used to all kinds of packages turning up at their home; maybe his wife had just forgotten that she'd ordered the seeds. As the weeks passed, though, Bob started to pay more attention. He noticed what people were writing online, and began to wonder whether there might be a sellable angle here, in the way the seeds grafted onto fears of infection. "As a news story, I thought that might speed it on its way, if I'm honest," he told me-"you know, feeding on that anti-China paranoia."

Bob pitched the story to an old colleague, Richard Marsden, who works at the Daily Mail. Marsden did some of his own reporting, and on July 18 a small item appeared. " Gardeners Sent Sinister Seed Packs From China," the headline read, introducing the idea that what was happening was both a puzzle and a threat.

These "sinister seed packs" were also arriving at American homes-the U.S. Department of Agriculture would retroactively date the earliest related package that it was aware of to June 2. Aside from a few bemused comments online, though, there's little indication that anyone took too much notice until Lori Culley, a grandmother in Tooele, Utah, just west of Salt Lake City, succeeded in sounding the alarm.

Culley has an autoimmune disease and avoids leaving her house, so she's accustomed to receiving most of what she needs by mail. But one package that showed up in the middle of July was a surprise. It appeared to have come from China, and its contents were described as an ornament, though one perhaps hitherto unknown in the gem trade: "Dogweed Stud earrings." Inside were largish, almost bulblike brown seeds. Culley wrapped two in a wet napkin and left them on her windowsill. "I was going to see what grew," she told me.

A couple of days later, on July 21, a second package arrived. This one, its contents described just as "jewelry," contained tiny near-black seeds. Now Culley was worried. That evening, she posted photos of the seeds and their packaging on Facebook, alongside a photograph of the Daily Mail article, which she had found online.

Within a few hours, eight people had commented to say that they, too, had received seeds. Culley also posted in a Facebook group that she had started in April for, as she characterized it, "ladies going through what I was going through: COVID, I live alone, we're just depressed." More voices chimed in.

Something weird was happening, Culley told me, something that felt potentially dangerous. She used to work as a supply specialist for the Army, she explained, and when she took that job, she also took an oath to "always protect my country." Now she felt she was duty bound to act.

She reached out to the local university-extension office, where agriculture experts offer advice. But she felt like they brushed off her concerns. Undeterred, she DMed four local TV stations on Facebook. Three didn't respond. The fourth, Fox 13, replied immediately.

A reporter named Adam Herbets was assigned the story. He called Culley to arrange an interview. Herbets also reached out to an entomologist he knew at the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food. By the time Herbets arrived at Culley's house, an official was already there to pick up everything Culley had. (This was now five packs of seeds, including three dropped off by Culley's daughter, Kacee, quite independently a recipient too.)

For the Fox 13 cameraman, Culley acted out picking up her mail-the traditional camera-angle-from-the-inside-of-the-mailbox shot-then stood, masked, on her porch, talking about the seeds. "We just can't be too vigilant," she said. "There's too much crazy stuff going on in our world anymore, and a lot of it's coming from China."

Two days later, on July 24, the first official statements began to appear on state agricultural websites, advising the public about what was happening and what they should do. The advice was sometimes contradictory. The Washington State Department of Agriculture initially counseled that if the seeds were double-bagged, they could be placed in the trash, while Utah proposed killing the seeds by "baking them at 200 degrees for 40 minutes." Soon the advice coalesced: The seeds should be sent to a state facility or picked up by state officials.

Whatever was going on, the USDA was determined to be on top of it. "Early detection is of fundamental importance," says Osama El-Lissy, the deputy administrator of the Plant Protection and Quarantine Program in the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and the man who headed up the response. Within days-in the same period that a cavalcade of local and national media stories appeared-the agency's count of the mystery packets jumped from a dozen to more than 1,000. In most cases, the seeds were collected state by state and then forwarded to one of 13 federal facilities. Those from New York, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Illinois, and Wisconsin arrived at an inspection station at JFK International Airport for the attention of Keith E. Clancy, a botanist and identifier.

Wearing a face mask and latex gloves, Clancy examined what was inside each packet, either with a hand lens or under a microscope. He has been doing this job for 17 years, and most of the seeds, he could identify by sight. They were beans, melons, cucumbers, marigolds, sunflowers, peas, lentils, carrots, radishes, kale, cabbages, ornamental grasses, roses, morning glories, and many other plants. They kept coming and coming. (To date, government botanists have identified some 560 different species from these seed packets.)

Clancy was on the lookout for contaminants. One day, he found four seeds of dodder, parasitic plants that can choke crops such as carrots and potatoes-but nothing to make the USDA tremble.

The few seeds Clancy could not identify, he forwarded to national botanists in Maryland. There, they did molecular testing that could pick up evidence of any viruses, bacteria, or other organisms. They grew the seeds in their quarantined facilities, looking for any signs that they may have been genetically modified. They also mapped where the seeds had been sent, looking for any correlation with crucial agricultural infrastructure or key natural resources. "We have one of the most sophisticated safeguarding systems, probably in the world," El-Lissy told me. If something nefarious was happening, they were doing all they could to find it.

The one rule on which there was consensus from the beginning was this: Do not plant the seeds. Problem was, some people already had. The poster child for this-insomuch as a 70-something retiree from the oil-and-gas industry can be a poster child-was a man named Doyle Crenshaw.

Crenshaw, who lives in Booneville, Arkansas, was watching Channel 5 in late July 2020 when he saw an item about Chinese seeds. He knew just what they were talking about. A couple of months earlier, he'd received precisely such a package: "studded earrings," Chinese writing on the envelope, light-colored seeds inside. They'd arrived at the same time as some "exotic zinnia seeds" that Crenshaw had ordered, but he hadn't a clue what these other seeds were. He thought, Well, I'll just plant them, see what happens.

He cleared some space in the raised beds where he and his wife grew lettuce and tomatoes, and every couple of weeks applied a booster of MiracleGro. That seemed to work. First came bright-green five-lobed leaves, then orange flowers, and then some strange kind of fruit that started out greenish but soon turned off-white.

"I ain't never seen anything it looked like," Crenshaw told me. "It was about 14 inches long and four or five inches round." He broke one open; its flesh smelled sweet. His grandson wanted to taste it, but Crenshaw vetoed this. "Nah, better not."

Crenshaw dutifully contacted Channel 5. It was hardly surprising that the station, upon hearing that a local man had not only planted mystery seeds but now had fully grown plants laden with mystery fruit, was interested. Crenshaw was filmed standing next to the plants, explaining about the MiracleGro and how "they just started growing crazy." As the camera panned over the leaves, a voice-over explained: "Experts are unsure what this plant really is, but the concern is it turning out to be an invasive species, which could hurt local agriculture."

After the segment aired, "I was a celebrity in town-everybody recognized me," Crenshaw told me. Reporters started calling from "Dallas, Mississippi, Oklahoma City, Kansas, Canada ... one from France."

Eventually, he'd had enough. "It got to bugging me," he said, "having to talk so much on the phone ... It's the same story every time-it ain't going to change." Crenshaw told me all this quite amiably, as though the experience had confirmed that there are kinds of absurdity out in the world that he had previously only suspected.

It was Crenshaw's doctor who told him that he was famous on the internet. That was true, though if Crenshaw had looked closely, he might not have liked what he saw. One easy way to spin this tale was to cast Crenshaw in the role of the fool-the naive rural fool. No matter that Crenshaw had planted the seeds long before there was any specific advice not to, or that he was far from alone. The Arkansas Plant Industries Division told me that it dug up plants in about 30 such cases. At one point, the state was deploying 25 agriculture inspectors, 13 Bureau of Standards inspectors, five pest-control inspectors, and two inspectors of honeybee apiaries to deal with these seeds and any resulting plants.

An official bagged up Crenshaw's mystery plants and took them away. A few days later, Crenshaw received a call from Little Rock, letting him know that what he'd been growing had been identified: It was Chinese watermelon. To be precise, Benincasa hispida, a vine whose fruit is also known as a wax gourd or winter melon.

By the time officials came to pick up the plants, Crenshaw had received a second unsolicited packet of the same seeds. He handed them over as well. Three days after that, a third packet arrived. What did he figure was going on?

"Oh, I had no idea," he told me affably, as though I were wasting both his time and mine by asking. "Nor did I care."

Doyle Crenshaw was one of the most prominent seed recipients, but plenty of others enjoyed or endured a moment of celebrity last summer. I spoke with several, but the most remarkable story I found came from a woman named Chris Alwhite, who had posted a single sentence on the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry's Facebook page: "I have about 50 of these packs from china." Before I contacted her, I presumed that this would turn out to be a joke, or an exaggeration. I certainly didn't imagine that it would be true.

And it wasn't-or not exactly. After the seeds stopped arriving, toward the end of last year, Alwhite gathered all the packets, put them in a big plastic Walmart bag, and stashed them in a drawer in her Shreveport home. At my request, she opened the bag and counted the packages as I stayed on the phone. It took a while.

"Five hundred nineteen," she eventually declared.

Alwhite explained that the seeds began to arrive in early 2020. She was a member of Facebook gifting groups, a phenomenon in which people socialize online and buy one another items from their Amazon wish lists. On her list, Alwhite had maybe 25 different vegetable, fruit, and flower seeds-"when my grandbabies had come up for the summer, I had promised them a big garden," she explained to me-so she wasn't surprised when seed packets started arriving. But she soon realized that something wasn't right.

As she understood it, items sent via the gifting group would come with a name, or, if the donor wanted to stay anonymous, a barcode so that you could thank your benefactor without knowing who they were. But the packets Alwhite received, labeled as jewelry or wire connectors, had none of those details. And they just kept coming-three or four or five a day. For some reason, Alwhite had become what we might term a super-receiver.

"It went on for months and months and months," she said. "I just stopped opening them." Last July, when she heard that others were receiving seeds, she contacted the Louisiana agriculture department. That call didn't go the way it was supposed to. "They were like, 'Oh, it's a hoax ... Plant them or toss them, do what you want,'" Alwhite recalled. "That's Louisiana for you."

She didn't follow the advice (which directly contradicted the agency's public statements asking people to mail the seeds to state labs). "I have pets!" she told me. "For all I know, it's going to be some eight-foot-tall Venus flytrap in my house. I'm going to come home from the grocery store and find my cats and my dogs all missing."

I described Alwhite's experience to El-Lissy; he said that the USDA would be keen to examine her seeds. They would join all the other unexplained seed packages the USDA has gathered since last summer-a collection that, as of June, numbers 19,841. Once all the investigations are completed, perhaps some will be kept for future reference, or be added to the department's seed library, or be used for training. Anything that is not needed will be incinerated-"the most proper way," El-Lissy said, "of destroying things like that."

In late July 2020, a retired postal worker from Massachusetts shared a thought on Twitter:

The 2020 election assistance Trump said he would accept if available is coming RIGHT NOW, not DIRECTLY from China but from surrogates-probably poor Chinese citizens desperate for income. They are mailing seeds to US residents/voters in order to further undermine mail in voting.

Others echoed him:

"China did this to find out which US addresses were still valid for mail-in and absentee ballots!"

"Communist China will mail millions of fake ballots. They already did their test run with toxic seeds to ALL 50 states."

There were plenty of problems with this theory, beyond the fact that there was no evidence it was true. For instance: If the seeds were related to the U.S. election, why send them to other countries? Why deliver them to all 50 states, most of which would be electorally irrelevant? And what specifically could be achieved-for all the talk of test runs and undermining-by successfully shipping packages to American addresses?

Perhaps that's why this particular delusion never took hold. But people kept looking for dramatic explanations, as if only something extraordinary could explain something so odd.

And yet one of the strangest parts of the mystery-seeds-from-China panic is that there was never much doubt about why these seeds were sent. The consensus, right from the start, among many government officials, journalists, and comment-section know-it-alls, was that the seeds were probably part of a mundane, illicit e-commerce strategy commonly known as a brushing scam.

Although brushing is a fairly banal form of e-commerce chicanery, it's also weirdly complicated, counterintuitive, and tricky to explain. Let me try.

In one common, modern-day form, it operates something like this: Chinese companies compete for the highest placements in search listings on e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and AliExpress. Although the algorithms behind these rankings are secret, they are presumed to be affected by volume of sales and positive customer feedback. Some companies try to manipulate the rankings by inventing fake transactions. They, or most likely subcontractors, set up accounts using people's real names and addresses. The companies then pretend to send something of value to those addresses and post fake glowing reviews under the recipients' names.

All well and good, in its own crooked way, except that some platforms verify such transactions by requiring tracking data showing that a package has indeed traveled from the company to the customer's address. That's where the seeds come in. For the scam to work, a real package needs to be sent. But instead of the more valuable item the company is pretending to have sold, something cheap is substituted-hair ties, say, or plastic trinkets.

Or-it appeared-seeds. If this was brushing, the fact that seeds were being sent was more or less incidental. The seeds might still represent a biological threat-e-commerce hucksters are hardly likely to have researched which species might be appropriately imported into different parts of the United States-but only a haphazard one, not a targeted attempt to disrupt American agriculture, never mind anything more sinister.

These dots don't seem to have been particularly hard to connect. On July 28, 2020, the USDA said, "At this time, we don't have any evidence indicating this is something other than a 'brushing scam.'" Brushing was referred to or described in almost every American news story I have mentioned, even if sometimes as a party pooper turning up to undermine all the melodrama. Sid Miller referred to it in his August 1 horseback video; a guest on Tucker Carlson's show referred to it the night before; the broadcast that Doyle Crenshaw saw on Arkansas's Channel 5 on July 27 covered it; the technique was even briefly described in Fox 13's segment on Lori Culley back on July 22.

Even weeks before that, sundry members of the public appeared to have worked it out for themselves:

TheRealEvanG, on Reddit, June 22: "Sounds like your relative might have been the victim of a brushing scam."

Becca Clair, on "Veg gardening UK," June 24: "There's not really anything to investigate I'm afraid. It's a well known scam called brushing, and has been going on for years."

If true, this raises a different question, one that may be more about contemporary media storytelling than agronomic perils: How and why was the great Chinese-seed mystery of the summer of 2020 ever allowed to seem like a mystery at all?

As I tried to figure out what happened last summer, I came across one place where two opposing forces-the imperative of telling the simple, apparent truth, and the impulse toward the rich gratifications of fever and froth-ran up against each other in a way that I found unexpectedly delightful: the Facebook page of the Washington State Department of Agriculture.

This page had somehow become the clearinghouse for reports of seeds from all over the country; a single matter-of-fact post on July 24 received more than 22,000 comments. People shared photos; people shared jokes ("who had magic seeds on their 2020 apocalypse bingo card?"); people freaked out. And, with calmness and fortitude, the page's moderator strove to moderate:

Jessica Williams: "They need to call it what it is!!! Terrorism!"

Washington State Department of Agriculture: "USDA has no indication that it is anything other than a 'brushing' scam."

Stacie Turner: "Biowarfare via CCP that could cross germinate with our crops and contaminate the food supply?"

Washington State Department of Agriculture: "More likely a 'brushing' scam."

Patty Stroe: "Read the article, that's what the USDA believes, that the seeds are to sabotage our agriculture."

Washington State Department of Agriculture: "That is NOT what the article says. USDA believes this could be a 'brushing' scam."

Petulisa Havili-Wolf: "... disguised biological or chemical attack?"

Washington State Department of Agriculture: "USDA doesn't have any evidence that it is anything other than a 'brushing scam.'"

The dialogue reads like a morality play: a lone figure heroically, perhaps forlornly, armed only with logic and patience, holding back the horde. I wanted to know who this person was, so I emailed a public-engagement specialist at the agriculture department.

"That was me," Karla Salp replied.

Salp explained that she was hired almost six years ago, when the department was preparing to spray an organic pesticide across 10,000 acres, including in Seattle and Tacoma, to combat gypsy moths. She has experience dealing with upset people in delicate situations, she said, and with anti-Asian sentiment ("a lot of the pests have unfortunate names-Asian giant hornet, Japanese beetle, Asian gypsy moth"). She said she tries to respond accurately and positively, and stay out of arguments. Answer by answer it is work that, in its own quiet way, has a certain valiance:

Charles Mitchell: "Is this some kind of agriculture warfare from China? Smart yet scary."

Washington State Department of Agriculture: "Probably not. Could be a 'brushing' scam."

If I may, a few notes about brushing:

Brushing is illegal in China, but has been around for many years. (Its name seems to derive from the sense of brushing something clean, a linguistic cousin to money laundering.) Companies have developed cat-and-mouse techniques to evade ever more sophisticated detection. In a 2015 academic paper, "E-commerce Reputation Manipulation: The Emergence of Reputation-Escalation-as-a-Service," researchers provided a snapshot of brushing within China. Over a two-month period, they found evidence of 219,165 fake transactions by more than 11,000 vendors (or "insincere sellers," the paper's lovely phrase). Back then, many companies purchased a mail-tracking label without actually sending a package. When physical packages were sent, some were empty or contained only tissues. But in recent years, judging from the many, many online comments I came across from American consumers who appeared to have been brushing recipients, the phony cargo seems to have evolved.

I was fascinated by the bizarre, random scope of what was mentioned-this cascade of gratuitous debris. But I was also struck by how those receiving the items described them. People know what to feel when you take something from them. But when you give them something they don't want, it's confusing. You could read their baffled reactions as some kind of free-form poem about consumerism:

"My husband got a package from China that had a pair of white ankle socks for women" ... "We received a shoe sole. So strange all these packages" ... "two white masks from china that I did not order ... I threw them away" ... "Got one with a golf ball inside ... threw it right away and washed hands" ... "a tiny bottle of shampoo" ... "a fidget spinner" ... "a toy camera, no joke" ... "Baby socks. I am old. I don't have babies nor baby grandchildren" ... "I didn't get seeds but I did get junky, plastic, creepy little cars" ... "it sounds funny but it was pretty creepy they were like mini ballerina socks" ... "I got mascara, trashed it" ... "Sleepy Time TEA ... I laughed and said NOT TODAY China" ... "a mysterious plastic soap dish from china" ... "a travel tooth brush i I didn't order" ... "I came back from a trip a month ago and had 6 small packages waiting for me, each containing one single hair tie" ... "I have received random things from China in the past, a marble ! a bead ! and a length of ribbon ! none of which I ordered ... I didn't have anyone to tell about my marble!!! It was blue."

As the unexpected seed packets kept arriving at homes across the country, American officials from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies reached out to their Chinese counterparts. According to the USDA's El-Lissy, the Chinese authorities were very cooperative: "They emphasized to these companies that this is a prohibited activity and they should stop immediately." U.S. Customs and Border Protection also upped its efforts to detect and intercept such packages. Meanwhile, the USDA led discussions with Amazon and other e-commerce platforms. Amazon announced in September that plants, plant products, and seeds could no longer be imported into the United States. Its competitor Wish did likewise, citing the " ongoing threat to U.S. consumers."

Some combination of these efforts was apparently effective. By late last year, the seed packets slowed to a trickle. Problem solved, it seemed, and mystery solved too. Brushing was an explanation that, for all its odd contours, made sense-and just as important, nothing else did. As El-Lissy reaffirmed to me this April, "We are not able to think of other reasons behind this event, aside from the brushing scam, at this time."

Even so, I felt there was more to know. For instance: Why had the scammers pivoted, sometime in the first half of 2020, to using seeds? Brushing works only if it stays under the radar. As a continuation of an underhanded e-commerce strategy, this choice would seem to be catastrophically counterproductive. (Indeed, I found articles on Chinese websites ruing the attention that these mystery seed packets were attracting, and how they were messing up the business for all involved.) It also seemed implausible that hundreds of different brushing operators had simultaneously hit on this same new strategy. Maybe there was a single enormous operator? When I floated this theory to El-Lissy, he said he couldn't speculate, and that the USDA was continuing to investigate.

If this was brushing, surely there was somewhere else I could turn to for answers: the companies whose rankings were being manipulated by all this laborious artifice-the e-commerce platforms themselves. If I provided a company with a seed package used for brushing on its platform, it should be able to trace who sent the package, and whether someone had posted an associated review-either of the seeds or of a seemingly unrelated, more expensive item.

I started with the market leader, Amazon. In media reports last summer, Amazon was quoted claiming that it had looked into some of these seed packages and had found that they were genuine Amazon orders delayed by COVID-19. I didn't take this very seriously. It certainly didn't tally with what I'd heard, over and over again. While I'd read about some people who had ordered seeds and were subsequently upset because they hadn't expected them to come from China, or for them to come masquerading as jewelry, many more said they had never ordered the seeds at all. The USDA believes that most, if not all, of its 19,841 packages fit this pattern.

I assumed that Amazon would have come around to this reality, but when I contacted the company in March, I was astonished to hear that its position hadn't changed: As far as it was concerned, any Amazon packages involved had contained real, delayed orders. I didn't try very hard to hide how implausible I found this, and my next move seemed obvious. I proposed that I'd supply examples for Amazon to check out, ones I was confident would not match its narrative. My hope was that, once we'd established that people had received seeds they hadn't ordered, Amazon would work with me to explain further.

None of these mystery packages bore the name or logo of Amazon or any other e-commerce company, but many, I realized, provided a clue: an encrypted phone number on the address label that would turn out to be one of a library of such numbers that Amazon uses to track packages while masking consumers' contact information. Either these were genuine Amazon packages or someone was taking the trouble to make them seem so.

Lori Culley, the grandmother from Utah who first alerted the American media, seemed the perfect test case. Her two packages carried these telltale Amazon numbers, so with her permission, I sent the company her information.

And that's when things got really weird.

Culley ordered those seeds herself, Amazon told me. I took this with a grain of salt. Culley had mentioned that she had bought seeds much earlier in the year, and this matched a pattern I'd observed-that many people who received mystery seeds had previously made genuine seed orders. Maybe, I speculated, the brushers thought it made sense to send something that the recipients were used to receiving.

I assumed that Amazon was speciously linking these different events. I asked Culley to go into her order history and pull out her invoices, so we could show that the seeds she knew she had ordered had been delivered long before the mystery seeds arrived.

What she found was not what she-or I-expected.

On April 25, Culley had ordered three packets of seeds from three different sellers: 100 clematis-flower seeds from C-Pioneer for $1.99, 100 clematis-vine seeds from zhang-yubryy for $1.53, and 25 wisteria seeds from DIANHzu1 for $1.99. Unbeknownst to Culley, these sellers were all Chinese, based in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Changsha, respectively. Each seller had more negative reviews than positive ones, many complaining about seeds that were delayed, or hadn't arrived, or had arrived identified as jewelry. And crucially, Culley's three April orders, the records showed, had not been shipped until between June 15, 2020, and July 7, 2020.

Further corroboration came when I sent this new information to Terry Freeman, the manager of the seed lab at the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food. She had tentatively identified Culley's seeds as amaranth and pongam tree. But now, knowing what Culley had ordered, she agreed that the larger seeds-the ones Culley had tried to germinate on her windowsill-were probably wisteria. At least one packet seemed to be exactly what Culley had paid for.

This sent me into something of a tailspin. Initially, I had dismissed Amazon's explanation, and I had cherry-picked Culley's experience to prove the company wrong. That had backfired. But surely what Amazon was saying couldn't be generally true? How could so many people have ordered seeds and then forgotten? And why would so many seed packets start arriving in a sudden surge?

Now I was shocked to realize that I could see exactly how it may have happened.

Consider this scenario:

1. In the early days of shutdowns, when people were spending an unusual amount of time in-and focused on-their homes and gardens, many ordered seeds online. This is clearly true. There were seed shortages, and according to the Home Garden Seed Association, order volumes were eight to 10 times greater than those in the previous year.

2. Many bought seeds from Chinese companies without knowing it. This seems likely enough. Plenty of evidence shows that China-based merchants were selling seeds online. And while e-commerce companies such as Amazon do post details of where vendors are based, the information isn't obvious or easy to find. Plus, these seeds typically cost less than $3. Few people, I imagine, would suspect that something so cheap could come from so far away.

3. These springtime orders were not delivered; then, in June or July, they were suddenly delivered in great numbers. It seems perfectly plausible that a buildup of orders during China's extremely strict shutdowns could have led to a large volume of seed packages being sent in the summer, when those shutdowns were substantially lifted.

4. Recipients in America, in the many thousands, didn't connect the packages they received with orders they had made earlier. This is the hardest part to explain. How could so many people fail to make the association? I can think of a few reasons, many of them mutually reinforcing: the protracted lag time; the disruption of the pandemic; the bewilderment at receiving a package from a country you hadn't knowingly ordered anything from; the absence of the usual paperwork; seeds that were unidentified and had no planting instructions; the disorienting way the packages were misidentified as jewelry (probably a tactic to get around Customs controls restricting foreign seed sales); and the predisposition, as soon as "unsolicited seeds from China" became a news story, to connect these puzzling packages with that dramatic narrative rather than with a button clicked many months before.

Still, I was uncomfortable with where this logic led. I now had to ask: Could it be possible that during the seeds-from-China fever of 2020, the most delusional theory of all was actually brushing?

I knew it would take only one good counterexample to blow a hole in this forgotten-orders theory, so I continued looking for one. Chris Alwhite seemed like a golden candidate. No one, I was quite sure, forgets ordering 519 seed packets.

This time, after spotting what looked like Amazon numbers on some of the packages, I asked her to go through her order history first. It showed that she had indeed ordered seeds back in May 2020-five times in total. Two orders, from American companies, appear to have shipped quite quickly, but the three she had inadvertently ordered from Chinese sellers (Bravet, Mosichi, and the catchily named PPYPYPYPYPZ) weren't shipped until many weeks later.

That didn't come close to explaining the 519 packets. But after I approached Amazon, the situation only got more complicated. The most likely explanation did relate to gifting groups. At least some of the packages were sent to Alwhite as gifts (while the five seed orders she had placed herself were actually sent as gifts to other people). Alwhite's belief that such packages would always include a barcode or information identifying them as gifts turned out to be mistaken. Why she received quite so many seeds remains bewildering, but given the link between at least some of these seeds and real orders, her case no longer seemed to offer clear indications of brushing.

I moved on to Shayne Duggan, a technical writer for a software company in New Hampshire who'd received seeds on July 20, two days before the first American media story. Her package was labeled "stud earring," and the return address seemed less a postal coordinate than a clue from some magical-realist fable: "North side of the west gate of South China Avenue, Longgang District, Shenzhen." Baffled and perturbed, Duggan reached out to a friend who works as a botanist, and he shared the story on botanist bulletin boards. Duggan received more seeds a few days later.

I asked Duggan to check her Amazon order history. And once again, there it was. On April 9, Duggan had ordered 350 Organic Blend Seeds Gourmet Lettuce Unique Tasty Mix, then the following day Garden100 Multicolor Tomato Seeds.

Duggan was somewhat abashed when it all came back to her. "That was, as my kids call it, the OG pandemic, the original pandemic, when we were baking and sewing and doing all that kind of stuff ... We weren't going anywhere; we weren't seeing anyone; we were hunkered down. That was the mode we were in, and that was the impetus: Oh, maybe I'll plant some seeds." When they didn't come, she forgot all about them, and bought some young lettuces and tomatoes at a plant sale instead. When, months later, the mystery seeds from China arrived, she did momentarily wonder about her previous order, but was too thrown off by the weirdness of the packages to imagine that a sufficient explanation.

These are just three examples, of course. But I'd selected them precisely because I'd thought they were the most likely to establish that brushing may have taken place. It was now clear to me that at least some of these packets were definitely forgotten orders.

It's not logically impossible for both explanations to be correct: that some packages were brushing and some were delayed orders. But it is hugely improbable. What are the odds that, last summer, two completely different scenarios led to a simultaneous surge in the same weird-looking Chinese seed packages arriving at American homes?

A researcher and I spent a month tracking down more seed recipients, trying to find someone whose experience punctured the forgotten-orders theory. Looking for signs of brushing, we tried to investigate as wide a range of packages as possible whose recipients believed that the seeds had arrived unsolicited. Not every package's story fit the same pattern. Sometimes the evidence suggested that the seeds had spent months in transit. Sometimes the seeds received didn't seem to match those that had been ordered. A few didn't even come from China, but from nearby countries, such as Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. A few appeared to be connected with other e-commerce platforms, though as hard as we looked for these, the lion's share of what we found was associated with Amazon.

We couldn't always come to a definitive conclusion. Some of the people we contacted either didn't have or didn't want to share the packaging or records required to understand the seeds' history. But, again and again, people who started out confident about what had happened to them, many of whom were bemused by our requests to search through their old orders, would invariably find something. (Even Sue Westerdale, the "Veg gardening UK" Facebook poster who had first raised the alarm, and who was initially quite dismissive when contacted about this possible narrative, eventually unearthed an April order for "colorful flower meadow seeds," its shipping date delayed until June.) In fact, in every single case that we were able to research fully, we found a convincing connection between a mystery package and an earlier order.

Despite the evidence, some seed recipients remained skeptical about the scenario we were describing, and they were not the only ones. A month after El-Lissy told me that the USDA was not able to think of any other reasons behind this event apart from brushing, I presented the agency with just such a reason: my forgotten-orders theory. I wanted to know whether the USDA had any direct evidence of brushing, or had verified that anyone had received seeds they had not ordered. The answer was no, with the proviso that the department is involved in an ongoing investigation into the seeds, in tandem with other government agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Postal Service. The USDA spokesperson was not able to share any more details about that investigation, and reminded me that the agency's focus is on stopping this agricultural threat, not on proving why it happened.

Nevertheless, the USDA clearly remained unconvinced by my arguments. El-Lissy reiterated to me that the agency still thought all the circumstantial evidence pointed to brushing. "We continue to believe it is implausible," he said, "that thousands of people around the globe ordered seeds and either forgot about them or lied about forgetting them."

I don't think that anyone lied. And I certainly don't rule out there being messier aspects to what happened last summer that remain to be uncovered. Maybe some people will read this story and check their own order history, and new patterns will emerge.

But I believe, on balance, that people probably did forget. Or, to put it another way, that they may have never been fully aware of what they did in the first place. Few of us truly understand the machines and systems at our disposal; we click a button and move on. Meanwhile, tens or hundreds or thousands of miles away, something starts to happen. Steps are taken, wheels are set into motion, decisions-and perhaps mistakes-are made. By the time the distorted ripples of cause and effect make their way back to us, we may no longer recognize that we were the ones who threw a stone into the water.

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washington state department of agriculture

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The Truth Behind the Amazon Mystery Seeds

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Why did so many Americans receive strange packages they didn't think they'd ordered? Sid Miller, the Texas agriculture commissioner, sat atop his stallion Smokey and faced the camera. It was Saturday, August 1, 2020. Miller had a message to share. "Good morning, patriots," Miller began, raising the coiled lasso in his right hand by way of greeting.

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I'm reading J.K. Rowling’s fundamental mistake via the Spectator app

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I had my first doubts about Lord Hall, the former director-general of the BBC, when he addressed a group of us BBC editors back in about 1999 in his role then as head of news. A pleasant, emollient man, he revealed that he was thoroughly enjoying reading the second book, which had recently been published. Grow up, Tony, I thought to myself. Get yourself some Dostoyevsky for Christ's sake. Snobbish it well may be, but I can't take seriously an adult displaying such infantile predilections (and this goes for those grown-up admirers of Philip Pullman). was a big sensation at the time. I remember being on the train into London from Salisbury, on the morning commute, and seeing a middle-aged man wearing shorts, eating a packet of crisps and engrossed in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I watched him for ages, fully expecting him to tug on the sleeve of a fellow commuter and plead: 'Can I have some more crisps please? PLEASE?' And then start crying.

Our childhood days may have been halcyon, but they were also moronic and, more to the point, they are gone. Kidultry is just one more facet of the don't-judge-me cretinous society we now all inhabit and which I refer to as the Disenlightenment. We need much more intellectual snobbery and also the rehabilitation of passé concepts such as embarrassment, stigma and shame. I will judge you, whether you like it or not, you stunted halfwit. Exiting the train - detraining, in the modern parlance - at Waterloo I muttered under my breath, 'May you die in loneliness'. Later I felt bad, fearing he wasn't an adult at all but one of those poor children afflicted with a horrible ageing disease and was actually 11. But he didn't seem to have a 'carer' with him, someone like Matt Hancock to tell him to wash his hands and eat some vegetables and explain that wizards don't really exist and that broomsticks are only good for sweeping the floor.

I would have loved the Harry Potter books if I had been 11 when they came out. I felt envious of my kids as they ploughed through them, mesmerised, and then happily relived each moment through the films. Full of mystery, drama, inventiveness, adventure, the stories also have that cliqueiness children really adore. J.K. Rowling fully deserves her success and riches. That she now seems to be systematically wrecking her career on a point of principle is perhaps even more commendable.

For some time, Rowling has been engaged in a vicious battle with the transgender lobby and those many who, for reasons of inherited stupidity, sign up to its absurd shibboleths - especially the one insisting that a man who transitions to a woman actually is a woman. She has been waspishly funny about institutions referring to 'people who menstruate' rather than 'women'. Despite an avalanche of odium from the woke forces, the Twitter campaigns and the petitions, she refuses to recant.

And now she has upped the ante even further, having written a book (presumably for adults) in which a bloke dressed as a woman goes around killing people. It is called Troubled Bloodand the trans-berserk and their fellow travellers are bed-wetting and shrieking once again. One semi-literateidiot, who writes for Metro, proclaimed: 'A serial killer in J.K.'s new book is trans. For someone who has said she "loves" and "supports" trans people, perhaps she should support them by avoiding deeply harmful tropes about our community. But she doesn't care - this is deliberate. It's gross.'

Good for Rowling, then - although I haven't read her book. My only problem is that once again we are in Suzanne Moore territory: a fascinating landscape in which clichés abound and all kinds of petards hoist and chickens come home to roost. Much as with Ms Moore, now revelling in her own Terf victimhood, we would surely have more respect for Rowling's battle against trans lunacy were her enemies not simply a slightly more extreme manifestation of a divisive, foolish, identitarian madness that she herself has connived with in the past.

In the early Harry Potter books, most of the characters were white and straight (and attending a caricature of an English public school). They sold extremely well - but Rowling received criticism for lack of diversity from the perpetually outraged, including a piece in the Guardian which complained that her depiction of the house elves was racist. (One of the letters that followed pointed out there were no disabled people hobbling about either.) As the protests grew shriller, Rowling decided - long after the series was finished - that maybe Hermione Granger, one of the principals, was black, despite being described as 'pale' and 'white' in the books. She also retro-spectively assigned to Professor Dumbledore the status of homosexual - for no reason other than that the deranged liberal left were howling about that 'lack of diversity'. As one writer put it in the Independent: 'The faith, race and sexuality of her characters has been shoehorned in retroactively, and it can't help but ring hollow.'

Well, indeed. Rowling's mistake was to try to gain brownie points from the terminally demented. When she wrote her first book, she did not conceive of Hermione being black any more than she envisaged Dumbledore batting for the other side.

Two other thoughts occur. First, the very lack of diversity - i.e. what the rest of us might call familiarity - may have been one small reason for those books' success. People, especially young people, revel in the familiar. Second, if she had portrayed Hermione as black, she would now be castigated for Writing About That Which She Does Not Know. A white author pretending she might understand how a black character acts and feels? Disgusting. Bang goes the petard, Rowling. Never try to appease a dementor.

''I know there isn't a curfew. We just want you to leave.''

Rod Liddle

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I had my first doubts about Lord Hall, the former director-general of the BBC, when he addressed a group of us BBC editors back in about 1999 in his role then as head of news. A pleasant, emollient man, he revealed that he was thoroughly en

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Listening practice

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London knife crime: 'I don't know how many people I've stabbed'

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"I started carrying a knife when I was 12 because everyone was doing it at the time.

"To fit in more you had to do certain things so I started to stab people. I didn't do it because I wanted to be bad."

Robert Bragg was once heavily involved in the world of knife crime.

The 26-year-old served six years in prison for a range of gang-related crime and tells Radio 1 Newsbeat he believes tougher sentences would have encouraged him to change his ways a lot earlier.

He's now part of a programme to encourage school children not to get involved with knife crime.

"I did it because I wanted the older lot to like me and because I thought it was the right thing to do at the time.

"To be honest with you, I've stabbed quite a lot of people.

"If I was to sit here and count I wouldn't be able to. People remind me, to this day, about people I've stabbed that I don't remember.

"We wanted to be bad - look bad, become the gang that everyone feared. We had to carry out a lot of violent crimes to become that gang.

"Giving tougher sentences will prevent people from carrying knives because nobody wants to go to jail for 10 or 15 years just for carrying a knife."

The number of fatal stabbings in England and Wales last year was the highest since records began in 1946, official figures show.

Home Secretary Sajid Javid has been speaking to Radio 1 Newsbeat about new laws he says are needed to stop social media being used to fuel knife crime.

"In London it's normal," says Robert, who now works for a charity that works in schools to highlight the dangers of being in a gang.

"It's just one of them things: you wake up, you have your breakfast, you stab someone.

"It's mad because we're not actually thinking about damaging a life.

"We don't think we're going to kill you.

"Knives have been pulled on me plenty of times.

"I'm very paranoid and I'm not in gang life no more.

"Because I'm not the same person I used to be I don't carry a knife.

"I wanted to kill myself because I realised the gang life and gang culture was a lie.

"I realised it was just a deception and your boys aren't really there for you.

"They don't really care.

"I didn't want to be part of that life no more.

" I said to myself before I kill myself I'm going to try God and see if God has a plan for my life.

"I went to church one day and I lifted my hands and said: 'God if you're real, help me'.

"I was desperate enough to cry for help.

"Being a man, when I was growing up, I was told not to cry.

"For me that was a big thing because I was crying and I felt free."

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 every weekday on BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra - if you miss us you can listen back here.

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'I don't know how many people I've stabbed'

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"I started carrying a knife when I was 12 because everyone was doing it at the time. "To fit in more you had to do certain things so I started to stab people. I didn't do it because I wanted to be bad." Robert Bragg was once heavily involved in the world of knife crime.

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It seemed skin-tinglingly awks to touch someone I hadn't yet kissed, and still it was more sexy than going straight in for the lips...

Nichi Hodgson

I've always been a romantic. It probably has something to do with growing up watching BBC costume dramas. It might sound old-fashioned - but I've always been into the whole hearts, love letters and serious woo-ing side of things. Call me baby, buy me some red roses and a box of Milk Tray and I'm yours forever. (Just kidding, I'm actually more of a Ferrero Rocher kind of gal).

But recently I've started to question if romance even applies to today's swipe-based dating scene. After a bad break-up several years ago, I embarked on a string of terrible dates - from the media guy who dumped me on Valentine's Day (ouch), to the older man who invited me to tea when, really, he meant sex in his office. I was left down, disillusioned and determined to try something new.

Those friends of mine who were also out in the dating trenches had similar tales of woe. Nearly everyone we met either seemed commitment-phobic or wasn't honest about their relationship/casual goals. But, like me, my friends also admitted to either having one eye on the next swipe, or sticking with someone because the other options might not be much better. What a modern dating mess, right?

As a sex and relationships writer, I'm used to researching dating tips, but I started to wonder whether romance had been this hard for our great-grandparents, and their grandparents before them. Ok, so obviously it would be naive to glorify any era that included repressive gender roles and patriarchy, especially when it comes to things like women's rights (think not being allowed to vote, inherit your own property, or go to college or university). And that's before you even consider the appalling reality for same-sex romance.

Over the next six months, in between library sessions, I continued my search for love, secretly applying old-school tips on approximately 60 dates. These are the five nuggets of advice I carried out... with a 2019 spin:

Today, it seems nothing says "red flag" like asking someone if they want marriage and kids on the first date. But history doesn't agree. In fact, it's packed with examples of how being direct about what you're looking for on date one increases your chances of getting what you want long-term.

Take the Georgians, for example. They were head-over-heels for lonely hearts-style ads published in The Times, which included short, straight-to-the-point descriptions of what they were looking for in a partner. In one dusty letter I read: "Lady, 24, of a forthright nature and considerable beauty, requires gentleman of a gallant disposition with 5,000 a year."

It made me realise that my see-where-it-goes thinking might not be doing me any favours. Instead, I decided to be more clear about what I wanted from dating (and not just rely on app filters to do that job). It's why I started casually sounding out my dates from the off. Asking about their career goals was a natural conversation stepping stone to asking about their personal ones - and it worked. Some guys were just looking for fun, or as one put it "a good time, not a long time". A few shared that they one day wanted marriage and/or kids - something I hoped for in the future, too.

Sure, I made it obvious I wasn't asking if they saw this with me, specifically, but something in the way they said it - with assertion, hesitation, or way too much eagerness - gave me more of an inkling as to whether we might be on the same page. I came to the conclusion that the guy who was comfortable with discussing his future with me was the type of guy I should be dating - even if it didn't feel like a true love match at this point. It was only date one, after all.

Think outside the "drinks?" box

Because of my job, people in the past have pigeon-holed me as 'sex-crazed' which has made me careful not to suggest date ideas which might contain sexual references - even if it was just a film with lots of sexy scenes. It's why I always suggested drinks with anyone I planned a date with because it seemed a safer option, even if it was expensive - and often boring.

But, after reading Marjorie's words, I felt inspired to suggest things I found pleasurable: boxing sessions, cheesy films, long walks. It might sound simple but I thought if anyone enjoyed themselves as much I did, it must be a sign of compatibility - a better test than relying on a dating app, perhaps. And if they didn't share my passion, then I could work out whether I was willing to compromise. So the guy who complained about sweating too much in boxing and the one who got his phone out a lot in the cinema didn't make the cut. But the one who made me laugh so much we ended up getting lost on a long canal walk remained in my WhatsApp list.

Don't over-invest too soon

And it wasn't a secret either, as a 1915 letter I found in the British Library from a soldier called Geoffrey to 17-year-old Edith spelled out. "Darling, you now have a real life lonely soldier somewhere in France. Only he's not very lonely. Also it's beastly conceited to imagine you hadn't got several others."

I never thought I would have the emotional capacity for dating multiple people at the same time. But as psychologist Emma Kenny tells me: "Refining the qualities we like about a partner comes from spending time with a variety of potential suitors - including sexually. Remaining initially open to multiple possibilities at the start means you draw from experience when choosing a long-term partner - and are more likely to make a better choice for yourself."

I decided to go for it, and think of it as 'trialling' - not cheating. Having four potential 'suitors' on the go during the early stage prevented me from getting over-invested in anyone who didn't feel the same too quickly. Comparing the behaviour of different dates at once was also useful for spotting who was game-playing (the narcissistic actor), who was just not that into me (the aloof guy), and who made me feel good about myself (the guy who made an effort to actually plan dates).

Despite Strictly's unwavering popularity (we love you Stacey!), we might as well be living in the least dance-savvy age. Club culture is vibrant but it's not often you see a couple waltzing across a sweaty dancefloor.

But we're missing a trick. From reading about the Georgian balls (where hands could only be touched through gloves after a formal introduction) right through to the jazz dance clubs of the Roaring '20s, it appears dancing has not only got us through the tough times, it's also been a significant aphrodisiac. I reckon one of the reasons millennials like me and my mates are in the midst of a so-called ' sex recession' and having fewer relationships, is because we're dancing together less.

Growing up, comments about my short legs crushed my confidence, and in the years that followed, I'd only ever get on a dance floor if I was inebriated. Until one guy (yep, the one who planned our dates) called Ferdie (aka Ferdose) asked me to an outdoor salsa class on our third date. I was so nervous but within an hour we were twisting and grinding our bodies together. It seemed skin-tinglingly awks to touch someone I hadn't yet kissed, and yet equally it was way more sexy than going straight in for the lips.

As psychosexual therapist Kate Moyle told me: "Dancing with a partner is great because it involves using your body to communicate and connect. Add eye contact into the mix- something that gets lost in modern life with us all staring at our screens - and you can understand why it's such a turn-on."

Turns out, Ferdie could move. I realised I was curious to find out more about him and, so, a fourth date was arranged.

When I pictured "genteel (19th Century-speak for polite and gracious) ladies and their chaperones", I'd think of rebellious young women finding ways to steal a kiss behind a killjoy aunt's back. But after reading etiquette manuals like Mrs Humphreys' Manners for Men (1897), I learnt that in the 18th and 19th Centuries, chaperones weren't just there to police female behaviour (sigh), they'd also give an assessment of the person chatting their 'ward' up - analysing their intentions and compatibility.

More than today's equivalent of a wingman/woman - chaperonage is about added care for your emotional well-being, not just helping you to pull in the first place.

So when I later invited Ferdie to a summer music festival - I made sure my 'chaperone' - a uni friend, Tom, who'd seen me through several heartbreaks - could assess him there too. By this point, I'd tried the other old-school tips out on him and found out that Ferdie also wanted a relationship, and didn't judge me when we went to a naked restaurant (yes, really) for our fifth date.

During the next three days, through the sequins, cider and sodden English weather, we all hung out. Tom knew that guys were often attracted to the stereotype of me as an "up-for-anything" sex writer, and didn't get that I was actually a down-to-earth Northern girl looking for a no-nonsense man. So he spent the next few days trying to get Ferdie to open up about his real intentions, who he'd dated in the past, whether he was ready for a solid relationship with someone - questions I just couldn't ask yet, but wanted to know.

As my chaperone, Tom saw me not care about wearing make-up or dodgy raincoats in front of Ferdie, and watched me laugh with him over terrible falafel at 3am, or first thing on a hungover morning. Slightly awkwardly, we were all camping together in the same tent, which made for some hasty exits from Tom in the morning! Even though it was clear I had feelings for Ferdie, it was Tom's final nod - guided by his friendly questioning and his pledge to never let me choose another bad egg - which gave me the confidence to say yes to letting myself fall for Ferdie.

It also reminded me that it's ok to want more for yourself when it comes to love. By being open about commitment, showing my true self on dates, and taking my time, I strengthened my self-esteem, which had been worn away after a series of disappointments and knockbacks.

So did the project lead me to love? Yes, it did. Ferdie and I got engaged earlier this month. Whether it was my new approach or just good old-fashioned fate that brought us together, I can't be entirely sure. What I do know is that dating the old-fashioned way taught me a lot. I learnt to stay true to my romantic ideals, stopped feeling apologetic about wanting to find someone special, and started caring about my own feelings - a lesson to be truly valued, whatever your relationship status.

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I followed old-fashioned dating advice in real life - BBC Three

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N/A It seemed skin-tinglingly awks to touch someone I hadn't yet kissed, and still it was more sexy than going straight in for the lips... Nichi Hodgson I've always been a romantic. It probably has something to do with growing up watching BBC costume dramas.

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After you have read the texts below, please answer this questionnaire

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After you have read the texts below, please answer this questionnaire

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Below you will find three different texts about Brett Kavanaugh. They describe the same event but they have different opinions about it. One is clearly pro-Kavanaugh, one is anti-Kavanaugh and there is also a third text which...Your task is to tell me which text is positive to Kavanaugh, which is negative and...hm, what about the third? During the lesson on Thursday you will get more information about this task

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His nomination came under intense public scrutiny after accusations of attempted rape and sexual assault surfaced. One of his accusers, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee about Kavanaugh's alleged rape attempt when she was 15 and he 17. Attorney Debra Katz told MSNBC Dr. Blasey Ford is still living in hiding after her testimony.

DEBRA KATZ: This has been terrifying. Her family has been through a lot. They are not living at home. It's going to be quite some time before they're able to live at home. The threats have been unending. It's deplorable. It's been very frightening. And she's also received extraordinary letters of support and encouragement. But these threats are extremely distressing.

The Senate voted Saturday to confirm Kavanaugh's lifetime appointment to the nation's highest court by a vote of 50 to 48. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the lone Republican to oppose Kavanaugh's nomination. She voted "present" so that Republican Senator Steve Daines of Montana could attend his daughter's wedding without voting. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia was the only Democrat to break ranks and back the judge. Vice President Pence was in the Senate gallery to oversee the vote as protesters shouted their opposition.

SEN. MITCH McCONNELL: We stood up for the presumption of innocence. We refused to be intimidated by the mob of people that were coming after Republican members at their homes, in the halls. ... These things always blow over. ... Our base is fired up. We finally discovered the one thing that would fire up the Republican base, and we didn't think of it. The other side did it.

This comes as President Trump is already touting Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court as a major victory. Speaking Saturday at a rally in Topeka, Kansas, he urged voters to support Republican candidates, saying Democrats had become, quote, "too extreme and too dangerous to govern."

For more, we're joined by three guests in Washington, D.C. Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CodePink, was part of the protests in front of the Supreme Court Saturday against Kavanaugh's confirmation. Also with us, Jodi Jacobson, president and editor-in-chief of Rewire. She wrote a piece this weekend headlined "A 'Titanic Fraud': Susan Collins, the 'Moderate' Who Never Was." And Soraya Chemaly, longtime writer and feminist activist and author of the new book Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger. She's also director of the Women's Media Center Speech Project and organizer of the Safety and Free Speech Coalition.

We welcome you all back to Democracy Now! So, that moment, at 3:00 on Friday, when Susan Collins announced that she would vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh as the next Supreme Court justice of the United States, Jodi Jacobson, that's what you focused on in your column. Talk about the significance of this. Of course, Senator Murkowski of Alaska announced she would not support Judge Kavanaugh. In the end, she simply voted "present" to balance out her colleague, Senator Daines, who went home to his daughter's wedding. But Senator Collins, Jodi, why do you call her a fraud?

She has taken a step here-it's really beyond just a vote. She went on the floor of the Senate to literally gaslight the entire nation about both the process and about the nominee himself. She took Republican talking points about the process of the FBI investigation, for example, which was far from complete and far from thorough and did not even include an interview with either Brett Kavanaugh or Dr. Blasey Ford, and called it a complete investigation. It didn't have-there were many, many witnesses that were not called and many leads that were not followed. It was really the epitome of window dressing. So she tried to tell us that a full investigation had been carried out, that she had, you know, examined his record and found it to be far more centrist or liberal than other people-mostly all of us-have deemed it to be, or have read it to be, rather.

And then, also, she then went on to tell Dr. Blasey Ford that she did not know what she was talking about. And there's this Republican line that goes, "Well, we believe Dr. Blasey Ford, but we don't think she really knows what happened to her." And if that is not the definition of trying to gaslight someone, I don't know what is. It was deeply, deeply painful, really. I mean that [inaudible].

I want to turn to the fact that neither Blasey Ford or Kavanaugh was interviewed by the FBI-a very different situation than being questioned at the Senate Judiciary Committee. This is what Dr. Blasey Ford had called for, an FBI investigation. The criticism at the beginning, once it was going forward, is don't just interview the two of them; go beyond that. But I think very few people thought-maybe Mitch McConnell did-that the two of them weren't going to be interviewed.

And it's particularly significant when it comes to Brett Kavanaugh, because he would be under oath. It wouldn't be the Democrats asking questions, and he could attack them for being Democrat, and then the Republicans simply supporting him. He would-having to directly answer FBI questions. Can you explain how it was possible that the FBI investigation didn't include interviews with these two primary people?

[inaudible] investigation was controlled by the White House in conjunction with the Republican side of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and they decided together what would happen in the investigation. And literally, there were people that were-that the FBI was not allowed to interview, and among those were Kavanaugh and Dr. Blasey Ford. So, you have a situation where Kavanaugh, who lied under oath numerous times outside the scope of this issue of the sexual assault, but on many other issues, was not being put under oath by the FBI. And if you watched the hearing, when he was questioned repeatedly-I think it was by Dick Durbin and several others-"Would you call for an FBI investigation?" he remained silent. So he clearly did not want to be put under oath, and he did not want other people to be interviewed.

And let's face it: He spent the better part of the two weeks, before the FBI investigation, in the White House with Don McGahn. So, there's no way there was going to be a fair and thorough FBI investigation, because he was part of the group calling the shots. I think the key thing here to realize is, if you wanted justice and if you wanted to really understand if Dr. Blasey Ford had merit and credibility and her claims were credible, then you would want to do a thorough investigation, and you would want to remove any question. But the reality we have to grapple with is they did not care, and they did not want to understand. And that is what's so-

I wanted to bring in Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who spoke on Thursday, making a new claim about the contents of the FBI documents on Kavanaugh that were reviewed by senators in the Senate basement, one after another, not being able to bring in a pen, not being able to take out any notes. This is what she said.

Jodi Jacobson, president and editor of Rewire.News, wrote a piece this weekend headlined "A 'Titanic Fraud': Susan Collins, the 'Moderate' Who Never Was." A crowdfunding website was set up after she said she was voting for Brett Kavanaugh. Four million dollars was immediately raised for whoever her opponent will be in Maine. Among the names that were bandied about was Susan Rice and Cecile Richards. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We'll be back with reaction in the streets and in the Senate chamber in a moment.

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"They Did Not Care": How the GOP Dismissed Assault Accusations & Confirmed Kavanaugh

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Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in Saturday as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, just hours after the Senate voted to confirm him amid massive protests outside the Capitol. He will begin hearing cases Tuesday and could vote as early as Tuesday or Wednesday on a case that tests how much power courts would wield over the executive branch.

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Kavanaugh1

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Agenda 11-12 October

1 The lesson on 11 October is cancelled due to the talk at Vallaskolan

Listen to this Podcast: Do not shoot me. Take Notes during the podcast.  Be preparded to Discuss the Podcast on Friday 12 October

2 Read the first part of this  article Stop reading after the first scenario.

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5 October

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Hundreds of people are killed by police in the US each year, and much attention has been paid recently to the high proportion that are black. But there's another disturbing trend that is rarely discussed.

It was shortly after 05:00 when three West Milwaukee police officers broke into the home of 22-year-old Adam Trammell to find him naked and bewildered, standing in his bathtub as water from the shower ran down his body.

Adam, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was having some form of breakdown. A neighbour had called 911 to report that she had seen him naked in the corridor, talking about the devil. She thought Adam's name was Brandon, and told police this when they arrived at the building.

According to his father, Larry Trammell, Adam often had delusions and hallucinations. He would take showers to help him calm down when he felt anxious.

Adam was not armed and he did not appear to behave in a threatening manner. But he did not leave the shower as the police commanded.

The officers then fired their Tasers at him 15 times, administering long, painful electric shocks as he screamed and writhed in the bathtub.

Then more officers arrived, and after dragging him, still naked, from his apartment, they held him down and he was injected with sedatives - midazolam at first, and then ketamine.

Moments later, Adam stopped breathing. He was taken to hospital and pronounced dead soon after arrival. The date was 25 May 2017.

We know this is how events unfolded because the incident was caught on cameras worn by the officers.

"I could barely stand to watch it," Adam's mother Kathleen says of the footage. "He was being brutally tortured and screaming out in agony and I could feel the pain, almost. It was like a nightmare with my son as the victim."

Kathleen is at a loss to explain why the police behaved the way they did.

"He was just in his own place, he was not out on the streets, he didn't have a weapon. He didn't even have any clothes on, in his own shower. Where was the imminent danger? There was none. He didn't deserve it at all," she tells me, wiping tears from her eyes.

Larry thinks his son may have believed the police were a hallucination. The officers who found him in the bathroom addressed him as "Brandon", not "Adam", because this was the name they were given by the neighbour. "By them calling him by a different name, he was thinking, 'This ain't real,'" says Larry.

At one point Adam splashed water at the officers, something Larry says he might have done as a test to find out whether they really existed.

Even the police acknowledge Adam had not committed a crime and was not suspected of committing one. So why did it happen?

The police say they broke into the apartment solely to help Adam. They say they acted the way they did to restrain him and get him medical care. In spite of the footage, Milwaukee's District Attorney John Chisholm went so far as to rule that "there was no basis to conclusively link Mr Trammell's death to the actions taken by the police officers". No officers were prosecuted.

There was no national media attention and there were no riots or protest marches. Almost unnoticed, Adam became part of a disturbing statistic that is rarely talked about - the hundreds of disabled people who die after interactions with US police each year.

Conservative estimates suggest that about a quarter of those who die in these interactions have a disability - whether mental, intellectual or physical. But other research indicates that the proportion may be far greater.

Already in 2018, across the US, at least 136 people with a disability are known to have been killed by police officers, according to a database maintained by the Washington Post and analysis of local media reports.

In many countries the police would be the last resort when people are going through mental health crises but in the US, they are often the first to respond because of the lack of more specialised agencies.

And when I began to look at these interactions between police and disabled people in different parts of the country, clear patterns began to emerge. Adam's story may be extreme, but some aspects of it are repeated time and time again.

Ethan Saylor, 26, had Down's syndrome. On the evening of 12 January 2013, in Frederick County, Maryland, he was at the cinema with his carer, watching the film Zero Dark Thirty.

He was fascinated by its CIA characters and applauded the end of the movie, insisting he did not want to go home. Instead, he wanted to see the film again.

Ethan and his carer left the auditorium but he refused to leave the building. His carer went to bring her car around, hoping this would persuade him, but Ethan went back into the cinema to the same seat in which he'd watched the film.

In the carer's absence, three off-duty police officers who were working as security staff in their spare time heard someone was in the cinema without a ticket for the next showing.

"At some point it becomes, 'You need to leave or you are going to be arrested,'" says Ethan's mother, Patti, who sat through the evidence given in a subsequent investigation.

Ethan apparently told the officers he was a CIA agent and was not going anywhere. "So the officers put their arms under his arms to lift him up and remove him from the theatre," says Patti.

Ethan, crying out for his mother, was restrained and handcuffed.

Find out more

Watch Aleem Maqbool's Our World documentary Don't Shoot, I'm Disabled on the BBC News Channel at 21:30 on 6 and 7 October and on BBC World News at these times

Or watch later on iPlayer

Listen to the documentary on BBC World Service's Assignment

"Somehow in the next seconds or minutes, Ethan ends up on the floor face down and not breathing," Patti says. Attempts to resuscitate him failed.

Initially she thought he had died as a result of some unexplained medical complication.

"I believe it was two weeks later when we were called to the sheriff's department," Patti tells me. "The autopsy report was back and they told us the medical examiner had ruled this a homicide and that he had died of asphyxiation.

"That was the most dramatic and traumatic moment in all of this - realising he had been killed."

Ethan had idolised police officers, even wanting to become one. He frequently called 911 just so he could meet officers and see the squad car pull up to his house.

In the weeks leading up to his death, Patti had visited the local sheriff's office with cookies to thank the deputies for being so patient with Ethan. Now he had died in a confrontation with some of the same officers.

"I took a step back and thought about how ridiculous it was for a young man to lose his life over the cost of a movie ticket. There was no reason for that to occur," says Patti.

"What is the state of mind for a law enforcement officer that they would literally intervene physically with someone with Down's syndrome to the point of their death?"

Patti says the attitude among some members of her community, even some close to her, was that Ethan must have done something to deserve what happened to him.

She says both they and the law enforcement community have made the case that Ethan would still be alive if he had just followed instructions.

But therein is precisely the problem - his ability to follow instructions. Ethan, like Adam, did not have this ability.

It is a problem that is even more apparent in the case of Magdiel Sanchez, a 35-year-old man who was confronted by police on the porch of his own home in Oklahoma City on 19 September 2017.

Police believed he was carrying a weapon - it emerged that it was a section of piping - and shouted instructions at him to drop it, but he did not. The confrontation ended with him being shot dead on his front lawn in front of several of his neighbours.

Tragically, Magdiel never heard the police commands - because he was deaf. During the stand-off, neighbours shouted to the officers to tell them this, but they shot him anyway.

Surveillance footage from the house across the street shows that at one point Magdiel, holding the pipe, did run towards officers. He then walked away again and moments later, out of view of the cameras, he was killed.

"He was a special needs child and he was deaf and he was real timid. He was an older boy but he was like a child," says Regina Smith, who saw the end of the incident from her kitchen window.

"I realised it was him and I thought: 'What could he have done?'"

In fact, police only went to his house because they suspected his father had been involved in a hit-and-run incident, and once there they saw him walking around with the pipe.

As I stand outside Magdiel's home, I see one of the neighbours, Kevin Tillery, riding along the street on his bicycle, holding a piece of wood.

Tillery says he always carries it for protection against stray dogs and that at a certain point Magdiel decided to copy him. "He would see me going up and down the street with the stick and one morning he held a stick up (to me) and smiled," Tillery tells me.

But Oklahoma City Police Department defends the actions of the officers.

"Nobody disputes neighbours were yelling that he was deaf," says William Citty, Oklahoma City's police chief.

But he adds: "He understood that they were police officers. That's why we wear uniforms."

Police Chief Citty does not accept that Magdiel's deafness and the extent of his learning difficulties mean the officers should have behaved differently. He says his officers feared being hit with the piping and acted in self-defence.

"It's our job to be able to respond to situations in a manner which creates the best outcome," he says.

"That may include the use of lethal force.

"Under the circumstances at that moment, with what they had to work with, it was the best possible outcome."

As in the cases of Adam and Ethan, none of the officers involved have been prosecuted.

Data concerning the number of disabled people who are killed by police in the US is hard to come by. Researchers are left to go through media reports of individual cases from around the country.

The figures are not officially collected at national level. The current estimate of 136 for this year may therefore be a gross underestimate. In hundreds more cases it was never determined whether the person killed had a disability at all. And there may be other cases that are not reported or that the researchers failed to spot.

This was an issue before President Donald Trump was elected. But his administration has signalled that there will be fewer investigations into police departments when things go wrong, arguing that federal oversight of local police departments reduces morale among police officers.

So what of the officers who have taken the life of someone in these circumstances?

One is Sgt Cory Nooner, who told me about the moment near a school, 15 years ago, when he shot and killed a woman who had schizophrenia.

"I was forced into a situation where I didn't have any other choice," he says, becoming visibly emotional.

"We were outside the school, she had a knife and she wasn't responding to my instructions," he says.

Nooner says that given the same circumstances today, he would do exactly the same thing. "I have to make sure I go home to my family at night," he says.

But it is clear that the incident had a profound impact on him.

"After the incident was over, I was told that she had a history of mental illness. I didn't know that at the time. I didn't understand what was going on at the time," he says.

He is angered, though, by any suggestion that American police may be too ready to use lethal force.

"Who would welcome that kind of encounter?" he says. "The reality is that no-one wants to be involved in that moment when they have to point to a weapon at another individual and pull the trigger."

So why are so many disabled people killed by the police?

All police in the US are, of course, armed. There is also the very real prospect that they could face criminals who are, too.

Across the US, 40 officers have been shot dead so far this year.

So a large proportion of police training is geared towards the use of firearms and personal protection. But critics say this creates a police culture that is excessively confrontational, particularly in certain types of neighbourhoods.

An area that has seen a spate of disabled people killed in interactions with officers is Chicago's South Side - one of the most heavily policed areas in the US.

The complaint from many there is that officers too often employ a "command and control" style of policing, especially in low-income areas - shouting commands and physically dominating, especially when someone doesn't immediately comply. This can sometimes, very quickly, lead the police to use guns.

The problem is - as we know from the cases of Adam, Ethan and Magdiel - that there may be reasons why it is harder for some people to comply with commands shouted at them.

Candace Coleman, who has cerebral palsy, is an organiser with Access Living, an advocacy group for people with disabilities.

She grew up in the South Side of Chicago and works with people there who are disabled, particularly those diagnosed with schizophrenia and autism.

"If they do encounter police, it's a scary situation," she says, saying any confrontation with a police officer could lead to extreme panic and confusion in those with similar challenges to those of the young people she works with.

"'Who is this person with a gun?'", they might ask themselves, she says. "'Why are the lights flashing?' 'What are these loud sounds?'"

Being ordered to stand in a certain way - for instance, with their hands where they can be seen - or to look an officer in the eye can also be a problem, she says. So can being touched or grabbed by an officer. "If I'm not used to that then I'm going to respond in a way that would look as if I'm being defiant," she adds.

That all rings true for Larry Trammell, Adam's father.

"There were times when you couldn't touch Adam," Larry says. "He [could get] really withdrawn or get excited, so I always knew when I dealt with Adam, I was to stay back and let him talk.

"If I went in there and just used my authority as a father and said 'You have to do this' - it just didn't work."

After weeks of trying, I finally manage to speak to the Milwaukee District Attorney, John Chisholm, who ruled Adam did not die as a result of the actions of the officers who used Tasers on him numerous times.

"They are not doing this because they wanted to harm Adam. It's the exact opposite, right?" says Chisholm.

"Their expressed intent, any number of times, is that they were there to help him. That they wanted to get him out of that situation."

I put it to Chisholm that they had, indeed, been saying that they wanted to help Adam, but they did so as they were issuing electric shocks - that they had their Tasers drawn even before they entered his home, even though he was in a building where others with mental illness lived. And I point out that the officers started Tasering him moments after the encounter started.

"Right, because they had to get him under control, so they could get him some medical attention," the district attorney repeats.

Lawyers for Adam's family highlight many other breaches of police guidelines that, for example, say someone should not be exposed to more than 15 seconds of cumulative electric shocks using a Taser.

They point out the terrible injuries, including broken ribs, that the post-mortem showed Adam had sustained.

The guidelines say that police encountering someone in a mental health crisis should "avoid increasing the subject's agitation or excitement, avoid physical engagement, avoid restraint and attempt to calm down the subject."

And yet the district attorney ruled that the behaviour of the officers had not been negligent or abusive.

"Not based on their training," he says. "The decision that they have to make is - what's the appropriate means to get him under control so that they can get him the medical attention at that point and time?"

Chisholm insists that Adam may have died anyway because of his health crisis - and that the officers' choice was either to do what they did, or do nothing.

"I would have liked it to have gone to trial," says Adam's father, Larry.

"If it had gone to trial and they had found the officers innocent, it still would have been hard, but we didn't even get that."

Police officers are prosecuted in very few of the hundreds of cases each year involving the deaths of disabled people each year. They are presumed to have acted in good faith and often given legal protection on that basis.

Adam's case illustrates how police in the US are often called on to do a job that trained medical professionals would be far better placed to handle.

"Our calls concerning mental health from 2012 to 2016 have more than tripled," says Citty, Oklahoma City's police chief, whose officers shot dead Magdiel Sanchez.

"This society has not effectively dealt with mental health. They haven't provided the dollars for treatment," he says. "Officers are running from call to call to call dealing with this."

So if the police are to be the first to be called, how can things improve?

"I have to tell you, if you don't know someone with Down's syndrome, you are missing out," says Patti Saylor, Ethan's mother, as she trains a group of police officers in how to interact better with disabled people.

She is trying to turn the devastation caused by the death of her son into something positive, using her own horrific personal experience.

"Ethan didn't have the cognitive ability to recognise those officers needed an explanation," she tells the room. "Like, 'Officer it's OK, I'm going to sit in the seat and watch this movie a second time, my mom is on her way, she'll pay for the ticket when she gets here.' He didn't understand he should do that."

Patti tells me that she is sometimes struck by the level of ignorance about disability among officers, but that this simply mirrors the lack of awareness in society as a whole.

"I have been asked questions like 'You mean they are not all the same?' or 'So they are not out to hurt us?'" she says of officers she has trained.

Officers often apologise to her when they hear her story and display some degree of shame about what happened, she says.

But the Frederick County Sheriff's Office, whose deputies were involved in Ethan's death, has not engaged with Patti. It did agree a financial settlement with her but never apologised or admitted any wrongdoing.

Oklahoma City Police may defend the death of Magdiel Sanchez on his front lawn, but it is clear that the department has tried to make changes since the incident - offering more training to officers on how to approach disabled people.

The force deploys these specially trained officers to incidents where their skills will be useful.

One is Sgt Cory Nooner - the same officer who, 15 years ago, says he was forced to shoot and kill a woman with schizophrenia. That experience pushed him to try to understand mental illness better and he underwent a considerable amount of additional training.

I go out on patrol with him as he is dispatched to a home in an affluent neighbourhood in Oklahoma City.

A man has called to say that his wife, who has recently been discharged from a medical facility, is having a manic episode and experiencing paranoia and delusions.

At their home, Nooner patiently listens as the woman talks, visibly distressed, about how she is being watched by government agencies.

Ultimately though, after she refuses to accompany him to see a psychiatrist and when she tries to dive into her bedroom, he restrains and handcuffs her.

Later, he tells me he had feared she might try to arm herself and that his basic police instincts kicked in.

For many, the nub of the problem is the way police are taught to interact from the very beginning - with so much emphasis on firearms training and personal protection, and relatively little on de-escalating confrontations.

As things stand, the deaths and injuries of people with disabilities at the hands of the police have left some of the people Candace Coleman works with in Chicago's South Side wondering who might be next, she says. Some of them have made pacts never to call the police under any circumstances, she adds, so worried are they that harm could come to them.

Coleman says they've also got together in groups to discuss what they can do to protect themselves in any interactions with the police.

"Extra disability training for police is one thing but is not enough," she says. "We need a cultural shift across the board."

"The way in which they approach situations needs to change. It shouldn't always be that the immediate reaction is to pull out your gun or your Taser or to yell or scream," she adds.

Until that happens, some of the most vulnerable people in US society will be left to work things out for themselves.
Follow Aleem Maqbool on Twitter Additional reporting by Haley Thomas, videos by Pete Murtaugh @AleemMaqbool

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Hundreds of people are killed by police in the US each year, and much attention has been paid recently to the high proportion that are black. But there's another disturbing trend that is rarely discussed.

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Six people, one of them a juvenile, were put on trial for the notorious December 2012 gang rape and murder of a female student on a bus in the Indian capital, Delhi.

All of them denied charges of rape, murder, kidnapping and destruction of evidence - five were found guilty, while a sixth died in jail.

Here are brief profiles of the men.

Ram Singh

The man described as the main suspect, Ram Singh, was found dead in Tihar jail in March. Police said he had hanged himself, but defence lawyers and his family allege he was murdered.

A 33-year-old widower, he lived in a small two-room shanty in the Ravi Dass slum colony in southern Delhi.

He was the alleged driver of the bus on which the 23-year-old woman was raped and her male friend assaulted.

He is remembered by his neighbours for being a troublemaker who frequently got involved in drunken brawls.

Like many migrants, his family came to Delhi from their village in Rajasthan more than 20 years ago in search of a better life.

The third of five brothers, Ram Singh was enrolled into the neighbourhood government school but dropped out while still at primary level.

He was the first person to be arrested for the 16 December gang rape that shocked India.

A cousin who lives in the same district said he "was fond of music and would often play very loud music at home".

A neighbour said: "Ram Singh would often be found drunk and involved in brawls, though we never thought he could commit a crime as heinous as rape."

His father, Mangelal Singh, said Ram Singh would not have been able to orchestrate a suicide because he only had the effective use of one arm - he had damaged his right arm in a driving accident in 2009.

But some of his relatives say he was a strong man who, even after the accident, did not quit driving because a rod had been inserted into the damaged arm.

Mukesh Singh

The younger brother of Ram Singh, Mukesh is in his early 20s.

He lived with his brother in a two-room shanty in the Ravi Dass slum and worked as an occasional driver and cleaner on the bus.

He was charged with raping as well as hitting the woman and her boyfriend with an iron rod - charges that he denied.

It was alleged that he - and not Ram Singh - was driving the bus when they picked up the couple.

In court, Mukesh Singh said that he was driving the bus and the other five raped the woman and assaulted the couple, reports say.

His lawyer claimed that his client had been abused and tortured in jail, charges denied by prison authorities.

He has been sentenced to death for the rape of the woman.

Vinay Sharma

A 20-year-old gym assistant and fitness trainer, Vinay Sharma also lived in the Ravi Dass slum, not far from the house of Ram Singh.

Of the five convicted, he was the only one who had a school education and spoke English.

Earlier this summer, he sought a month's bail to sit his first-year university examination - a request turned down by the judge who ordered the university officials and jail authorities to make arrangements for him to sit his exams inside prison.

In court, Vinay Sharma claimed that he was not on the bus when the crime took place and that he had gone to a music function along with co-accused Pawan Gupta.

When he was sentenced to death in court, he broke down in tears.

Akshay Thakur

A 28-year-old helper on the bus, Akshay Thakur is from the eastern Indian state of Bihar.

He was arrested in Bihar on 21 December - five days after the crime.

Along with rape, murder and kidnapping, he was convicted of trying to destroy evidence by helping to wash the bus after the attack.

A school dropout, he moved to Delhi last year.

According to reports, he is married and has a young son. The family lives in his village in Bihar.

In court, he denied being on the bus and said that he left Delhi on 15 December - a day before the crime - and reached his village in Bihar the next day.

But he was nevertheless convicted and handed the death sentence.

Pawan Gupta

A 19-year-old fruit-seller, Pawan Gupta, claimed in court that he was not on the bus at the time of the crime and had gone to attend a music function with Vinay Sharma.

His father, Heera Lal, who appeared as a witness in the trial court, said his son was "innocent" and had been "falsely implicated".

He said his son had closed his shop in the afternoon on the day of the incident and left for home.

After consuming alcohol and eating chicken at home, he had gone to a nearby park to attend a music function.

Mr Lal said he went to the park along with his brother-in-law and took him home.

According to reports, in the days after his arrest he said in court that he had "done a horrible thing... I have done a bad thing and I should be hanged", but his lawyer later denied he had made the statement.

Along with the other three defendants being tried as adults, he was sentenced to death.

Convicted juvenile

The sixth defendant's name cannot be given for legal reasons. He was 17 at the time of the crime, so was tried as a minor. He is now and adult.

On 31 August he was found guilty on charges of rape and murder and sentenced to three years in a reform facility, the maximum sentence available to a juvenile.

The eldest of six children, he left his village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh at the age of 11, and lived his formative years alone, doing menial jobs in Delhi.

His mother told the BBC that she last spoke to him just before he boarded the bus to the city.

She had thought him dead until police came knocking on her door in December 2012 and told her he was one of the accused in the gang rape case.

His family is among the poorest in the village. The father is mentally disabled and cannot take care of the children.

His mother says she sent him to work in Delhi in the hope that he would earn well and bring the family out of poverty.

He sent the family money for a few years and then disappeared, they say. His mother insists he was a gentle boy.

"He was a very sensitive child and would be scared to confront anybody in the village. I'm sure he fell into bad company in Delhi and was led into committing this shameful act," she said.

He was released from a correctional centre on 20 December 2015, despite protests and legal challenges.

He has now been handed over to a charity, where he will remain because of fears over his safety.

His identity is being changed and no record of his crime will remain in the public domain.

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Six people, one of them a juvenile, were put on trial for the notorious December 2012 gang rape and murder of a female student on a bus in the Indian capital, Delhi. All of them denied charges of rape, murder, kidnapping and destruction of evidence - five were found guilty, while a sixth died in jail.

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Sky News - First for Breaking News, video, headlines, analysis and top stories from business, politics, entertainment and more in the UK and worldwide.

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Documentary on much talked about Rape case of Delhi.

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People have called her Braveheart, Fearless and India's Daughter, among other things, and sent up a billion prayers for a speedy recovery.

When the unidentified woman died in a Singapore hospital early on Saturday, the victim of a savage rape on a moving bus in the capital, Delhi, it was time again, many said, to ask: why does India treat its women so badly?

Female foetuses are aborted and baby girls killed after birth, leading to an appallingly skewed sex ratio. Many of those who survive face discrimination, prejudice, violence and neglect all their lives, as single or married women.

TrustLaw, a news service run by Thomson Reuters, has ranked India as the worst G20 country in which to be a woman. This in the country where the leader of the ruling party, the speaker of the lower house of parliament, at least three chief ministers, and a number of sports and business icons are women. It is also a country where a generation of newly empowered young women are going out to work in larger numbers than ever before.

With more than 24,000 reported cases in 2011, rape registered a 9.2% rise over the previous year. More than half (54.7%) of the victims were aged between 18 and 30. Most disturbingly, according to police records, the offenders were known to their victims in more than 94% of the cases. Neighbours accounted for a third of the offenders, while parents and other relatives were also involved. Delhi accounted for over 17% of the total number of rape cases in the country.

And it is not rape alone. Police records from 2011 show kidnappings and abductions of women were up 19.4%, women being killed in disputes over dowry payments by 2.7%, torture by 5.4%, molestation by 5.8% and trafficking by an alarming 122% over the previous year.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has estimated that more than 100m women are "missing" worldwide - women who would have been around had they received similar healthcare, medicine and nutrition as men.

New research by economists Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray estimates that in India, more than 2m women are missing in a given year.

The economists found that roughly 12% of the missing women disappear at birth, 25% die in childhood, 18% at the reproductive ages, and 45% at older ages.

They found that women died more from "injuries" in a given year than while giving birth - injuries, they say, "appear to be indicator of violence against women".

Deaths from fire-related incidents, they say, is a major cause - each year more than 100,000 women are killed by fires in India. The researchers say many cases could be linked to demands over a dowry leading to women being set on fire. Research also found a large number of women died of heart diseases.

These findings point to life-long neglect of women in India. It also proves that a strong preference for sons over daughters - leading to sex selective abortions - is just part of the story.

Clearly, many Indian women face threats to life at every stage - violence, inadequate healthcare, inequality, neglect, bad diet, lack of attention to personal health and well-being.

Analysts say deep-rooted changes in social attitudes are needed to make India's women more accepted and secure. There is deeply entrenched patriarchy and widespread misogyny in vast swathes of the country, especially in the north. And the state has been found wanting in its protection of women.

Angry citizens believe that politicians, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, are being disingenuous when they promise to toughen laws and speed up the prosecution of rapists and perpetrators of crime against women.

How else, they ask, can political parties in the last five years have fielded candidates for state elections that included 27 candidates who declared they had been charged with rape?

How, they say, can politicians be believed when there are six elected state legislators who have charges of rape against them?

But the renewed protests in Delhi after the woman's death hold out some hope. Has her death come as an inflexion point in India's history, which will force the government to enact tougher laws and people to begin seriously thinking about the neglect of women?

It's early days yet, but one hopes these are the first stirrings of change.

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People have called her Braveheart, Fearless and India's Daughter, among other things, and sent up a billion prayers for a speedy recovery. When the unidentified woman died in a Singapore hospital early on Saturday, the victim of a savage rape on a moving bus in the capital, Delhi, it was time again, many said, to ask: why does India treat its women so badly?

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Today's story is "The Lady, or the Tiger?" by Frank R. Stockton. The story was written by Frank Stockton in 1882. It was adapted for VOA Learning English by Shelley Gollust. The storyteller is Barbara Klein.

Long ago, in the very olden time, there lived a powerful king. Some of his ideas were progressive. But others caused people to suffer.

One of the king's ideas was a public arena as an agent of poetic justice. Crime was punished, or innocence was decided, by the result of chance. When a person was accused of a crime, his future would be judged in the public arena.

All the people would gather in this building. The king sat high up on his ceremonial chair. He gave a sign. A door under him opened. The accused person stepped out into the arena. Directly opposite the king were two doors. They were side by side, exactly alike. The person on trial had to walk directly to these doors and open one of them. He could open whichever door he pleased.

If the accused man opened one door, out came a hungry tiger, the fiercest in the land. The tiger immediately jumped on him and tore him to pieces as punishment for his guilt. The case of the suspect was thus decided.

Iron bells rang sadly. Great cries went up from the paid mourners. And the people, with heads hanging low and sad hearts, slowly made their way home. They mourned greatly that one so young and fair, or so old and respected, should have died this way.

But, if the accused opened the other door, there came forth from it a woman, chosen especially for the person. To this lady he was immediately married, in honor of his innocence. It was not a problem that he might already have a wife and family, or that he might have chosen to marry another woman. The king permitted nothing to interfere with his great method of punishment and reward.

Another door opened under the king, and a clergyman, singers, dancers and musicians joined the man and the lady. The marriage ceremony was quickly completed. Then the bells made cheerful noises. The people shouted happily. And the innocent man led the new wife to his home, following children who threw flowers on their path.

This was the king's method of carrying out justice. Its fairness appeared perfect. The accused person could not know which door was hiding the lady. He opened either as he pleased, without having knowing whether, in the next minute, he was to be killed or married.

Sometimes the fierce animal came out of one door. Sometimes it came out of the other.

This method was a popular one. When the people gathered together on one of the great trial days, they never knew whether they would see a bloody killing or a happy ending. So everyone was always interested. And the thinking part of the community would bring no charge of unfairness against this plan. Did not the accused person have the whole matter in his own hands?

The king had a beautiful daughter who was like him in many ways. He loved her above all humanity. The princess secretly loved a young man who was the best-looking and bravest in the land. But he was a commoner, not part of an important family.

One day, the king discovered the relationship between his daughter and the young man. The man was immediately put in prison. A day was set for his trial in the king's public arena. This, of course, was an especially important event. Never before had a common subject been brave enough to love the daughter of the king.

The king knew that the young man would be punished, even if he opened the right door. And the king would take pleasure in watching the series of events, which would judge whether or not the man had done wrong in loving the princess.

The day of the trial arrived. From far and near the people gathered in the arena and outside its walls. The king and his advisers were in their places, opposite the two doors. All was ready. The sign was given. The door under the king opened and the lover of the princess entered the arena.

Tall, beautiful and fair, his appearance was met with a sound of approval and tension. Half the people had not known so perfect a young man lived among them. No wonder the princess loved him! What a terrible thing for him to be there!

As the young man entered the public arena, he turned to bend to the king. But he did not at all think of the great ruler. The young man's eyes instead were fixed on the princess, who sat to the right of her father.

From the day it was decided that the sentence of her lover should be decided in the arena, she had thought of nothing but this event.

The princess had more power, influence and force of character than anyone who had ever before been interested in such a case. She had done what no other person had done. She had possessed herself of the secret of the doors. She knew behind which door stood the tiger, and behind which waited the lady. Gold, and the power of a woman's will, had brought the secret to the princess.

She also knew who the lady was. The lady was one of the loveliest in the kingdom. Now and then the princess had seen her looking at and talking to the young man.

The princess hated the woman behind that silent door. She hated her with all the intensity of the blood passed to her through long lines of cruel ancestors.

Her lover turned to look at the princess. His eye met hers as she sat there, paler and whiter than anyone in the large ocean of tense faces around her. He saw that she knew behind which door waited the tiger, and behind which stood the lady. He had expected her to know it.

The only hope for the young man was based on the success of the princess in discovering this mystery. When he looked at her, he saw that she had been successful, as he knew she would succeed.

Then his quick and tense look asked the question: "Which?" It was as clear to her as if he shouted it from where he stood. There was not time to be lost.

The princess raised her hand, and made a short, quick movement toward the right. No one but her lover saw it. Every eye but his was fixed on the man in the arena.

He turned, and with a firm and quick step he walked across the empty space. Every heart stopped beating. Every breath was held. Every eye was fixed upon that man. He went to the door on the right and opened it.

Now, the point of the story is this: Did the tiger come out of that door, or did the lady?

The more we think about this question, the harder it is to answer. It involves a study of the human heart. Think of it not as if the decision of the question depended upon yourself. But as if it depended upon that hot-blooded princess, her soul at a white heat under the fires of sadness and jealousy. She had lost him, but who should have him?

How often, in her waking hours and in her dreams, had she started in wild terror, and covered her face with her hands? She thought of her lover opening the door on the other side of which waited the sharp teeth of the tiger!

But how much oftener had she seen him open the other door? How had she ground her teeth, and torn her hair, when she had seen his happy face as he opened the door of the lady! How her soul had burned in pain when she had seen him run to meet that woman, with her look of victory. When she had seen the two of them get married. And when she had seen them walk away together upon their path of flowers, followed by the happy shouts of the crowd, in which her one sad cry was lost!

Would it not be better for him to die quickly, and go to wait for her in that blessed place of the future? And yet, that tiger, those cries, that blood!

Her decision had been shown quickly. But it had been made after days and nights of thought. She had known she would be asked. And she had decided what she would answer. And she had moved her hand to the right.

The question of her decision is one not to be lightly considered. And it is not for me to set myself up as the one person able to answer it. And so I leave it with all of you:

Which came out of the open door - the lady, or the tiger?

Download activities to help you understand this story here.
QUIZ

For Teachers
This lesson plan, based on the CALLA approach, teaches the strategy, predict, to help students understand the story.

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Words in This Story

poetic justice - n. a result or occurrence that seems proper because someone who has done bad things to other people is being harmed or punished

innocence - adj. the state of being not guilty of a crime or other wrong act

mourn - v. to feel or show great sadness because someone has died

ancestor - n. a person who was in someone's family in past times; one of the people from whom a person is descended

tense - adj. nervous and not able to rela

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The Lady, or the Tiger? by Frank R. Stockton

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Long ago, in very olden times, there lived a powerful king. Some of his ideas were progressive. But others caused people to suffer. This story is a classic tale of a tough decision. Which door has the tiger behind it, and which door has the lady? We'll let you decide!

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Dear Friends,
It is time to prepare your Oral presentations in English 7.The project is called Individual Project work which also includes a written part. Maria will be in charge of the written part and I(old H) will do the oral part. Since we have a focus week currently (week number 11) I give you the instructions now . Please click on the text below and read it before we meet next week on Thursday :

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Write a formal letter

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How to Write a Letter to the President of the United States of America | Synonym

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The President of the United States represents people just like you. The best way to have your concerns understood is to write to the President. A letter allows you to introduce yourself, offer your thoughts on a current issue, and express your support or constructive criticism.

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This site has been updated and relocated under a new name to International School Tutors.

If you are unable to find what you are looking for on the new site, send an email to the webmaster via the Contact page.

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This site has been updated and relocated under a new name to International School Tutors. If you are unable to find what you are looking for on the new site, send an email to the webmaster via the Contact page.

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The site below has books on different levels

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The Who - My Generation Lyrics | AZLyrics.com

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Toby Heckler placed the slip of yellow paper under the windshield wiper of the black Oldsmobile which straddled two parking spaces. On the paper Toby had printed in red ink ″PRAKING MISTEAK″ and signed his name ″TOBY″ in a childish-looking hand. He snapped the cover on his Pilot Razor Point, sli…

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