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Model Put Up For Sale on Dark Web for $300,000: 'I Would Be Killed If I Escaped'

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The model who made international news after she was allegedly kidnapped and offered up as a sex slave on the so-called dark web is discussing her ordeal. British model Chloe Ayling says she spent six days in hell at the hands of a kidnapping ring.

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Facebook has reversed its decision to block a famous photograph of the Vietnam War on its website. The photo is of a naked, 9-year-old Vietnamese girl and other terrified children running away from a napalm attack in South Vietnam. The napalm badly burnt her back. The iconic photograph was taken by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut and won a Pulitzer Prize for photo-journalism. However, Facebook banned the photo from its site because the child in the photo is naked. Facebook got a lot of complaints after the ban. Even the president of Norway, Erna Solberg, criticised Facebook. She said the photo was an important part of history and that Facebook was editing history by erasing the image.

Ms Solberg explained why she was so angry. She said: "They must see the difference between editing out child pornography and editing out history." She wrote on her own Facebook page: "I want my children and other children to grow up in a society where history is taught as it was." After Facebook decided to allow the photo back on its pages, a spokesperson made a comment, saying: "An image of a naked child would normally be presumed to violate our community standards, and in some countries might even qualify as child pornography. In [the case of the 'Napalm Girl' photograph], we recognize the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time."

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Facebook puts back censored Vietnam photo

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Facebook has reversed its decision to block a famous photograph of the Vietnam War on its website. The photo is of a naked, 9-year-old Vietnamese girl and other terrified children running away from a napalm attack in South Vietnam. The napalm badly burnt her back.

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Norway's largest newspaper has published a front-page open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, lambasting the company's decision to censor a historic photograph of the Vietnam war and calling on Zuckerberg to recognize and live up to his role as "the world's most powerful editor".

Espen Egil Hansen, the editor-in-chief and CEO of Aftenposten, accused Zuckerberg of thoughtlessly "abusing your power" over the social media site that has become a lynchpin of the distribution of news and information around the world, writing, "I am upset, disappointed - well, in fact even afraid - of what you are about to do to a mainstay of our democratic society."

"I am worried that the world's most important medium is limiting freedom instead of trying to extend it, and that this occasionally happens in an authoritarian way," he added.

The controversy stems from Facebook's decision to delete a post by Norwegian writer Tom Egeland that featured The Terror of War, a Pulitzer prize-winning photograph by Nick Ut that showed children - including the naked 9-year-old Kim Phúc - running away from a napalm attack during the Vietnam war. Egeland's post discussed "seven photographs that changed the history of warfare" - a group to which the "napalm girl" image certainly belongs.

Egeland was subsequently suspended from Facebook. When Aftenposten reported on the suspension - using the same photograph in its article, which was then shared on the publication's Facebook page - the newspaper received a message from Facebook asking it to "either remove or pixelize" the photograph.

"Any photographs of people displaying fully nude genitalia or buttocks, or fully nude female breast, will be removed," the notice from Facebook explains.

Before Aftenposten could respond, Hansen writes, Facebook deleted the article and image from the newspaper's Facebook page.

In his open letter, Hansen points out that Facebook's decision to delete the photograph reveals a troubling inability to "distinguish between child pornography and famous war photographs", as well as an unwillingness to "allow[ing] space for good judgement".

"Even though I am editor-in-chief of Norway's largest newspaper, I have to realize that you are restricting my room for exercising my editorial responsibility," he wrote. "I think you are abusing your power, and I find it hard to believe that you have thought it through thoroughly."

Hansen goes on to argue that rather than fulfill its mission statement to "make the world more open and connected", such editorial decisions "will simply promote stupidity and fail to bring human beings closer to each other".

The Aftenposten editorial comes at a time of scrutiny on Facebook for its ever-increasing dominance in the dissemination of news.

News organizations are uncomfortably reliant on Facebook to reach an online audience. According to a 2016 study by Pew Research Center, 44% of US adults get their news on Facebook.

Facebook's popularity means that its algorithms can exert enormous power over public opinion.

A May 2016 report by Gizmodo that Facebook's trending bar was deliberately suppressing articles from conservative news sites set off a firestorm that saw Zuckerberg making personal outreach to top conservatives.

Facebook recently fired the team of editors who managed the trending topics section, choosing to replace them with algorithms that quickly demonstrated the difficulty of automating news editorial judgment by promoting a fake news story.

In his open letter, Hansen points out that the types of decision Facebook makes about what kind of content is promoted, tolerated, or banned - whether it makes those decisions algorithmically or not - are functionally editorial.

"The media have a responsibility to consider publication in every single case," he wrote. "This right and duty, which all editors in the world have, should not be undermined by algorithms encoded in your office in California."

"Editors cannot live with you, Mark, as a master editor."

Speaking in Rome last month, Zuckerberg addressed the question of Facebook's role in the news media and appeared to downplay his editorial responsibilities.

"We are a tech company, not a media company," he said. "The world needs news companies, but also technology platforms, like what we do, and we take our role in this very seriously."

Hansen's suggestions for Facebook to improve its behavior include "geographically differentiated guidelines and rules for publication", "distinguish[ing] between editors and other Facebook users," and a "comprehensive review of the way you operate".

He also called for increased accessibility from the company, writing, "Today, if it is possible at all to get in touch with a Facebook representative, the best one may hope for are brief, formalistic answers, with rigid references to universal rules and guidelines."

"While we recognize that this photo is iconic, it's difficult to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others," a spokesman for Facebook said in response to queries from the Guardian.

"We try to find the right balance between enabling people to express themselves while maintaining a safe and respectful experience for our global community. Our solutions won't always be perfect, but we will continue to try to improve our policies and the ways in which we apply them."
Topics

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Mark Zuckerberg accused of abusing power after Facebook deletes 'napalm girl' post

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Norway's largest newspaper has published a front-page open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, lambasting the company's decision to censor a historic photograph of the Vietnam war and calling on Zuckerberg to recognize and live up to his role as "the world's most powerful editor".

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The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States.

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Alpha B Group Tax and Bookkeeping Services

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| Taxes | Finance & Capital Markets | Khan Academy

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Finance & Capital Markets | Khan Academy

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Alpha B Group Tax and Bookkeeping Services

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This is our first video explaining how getting married will affect your taxes. Voice of Phuc Ly. www.alphabgroup.com https://www.facebook.com/alphab http://www.linkedin.com/company/alpha-b-tax-&-bookkeeping-services http://www.yelp.com/biz/alpha-b-tax-and-bookkeeping-services-santa-clara Alpha B Group | Santa Clara, CA

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London is five hours ahead of Washington, D.C., except when it comes to gay marriage. In that case, it's two years and five hours ahead, which was news to me. "Really?" I said, on meeting two lesbian wives from Wolverhampton. "You can do that here?"

"Well, of course they can," Hugh said when I told him about it. "Where have you been?"

Hugh can tell you everything about the current political situation in the U.K. He knows who the Chancellor of the Exchequer is, and was all caught up in the latest election for the whatever-you-call-it, that king-type person who's like the President but isn't.

" Prime Minister?" he said. "Jesus. You've been here how long?"

It was the same when we lived in Paris. Hugh regularly read the French papers. He listened to political shows on the radio, while I was, like, "Is he the same emperor we had last year?"

When it comes to American politics, our roles are reversed. "What do you mean 'Who's Claire McCaskill?' " I'll say, amazed that I-that anyone, for that matter-could have such an ignorant boyfriend.

I knew that the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage was expected at 10 a.m. on June 26th, which is 3 p.m. in Sussex. I'm usually out then, on my litter patrol, so I made it a point to bring my iPad with me. When the time came, I was standing by the side of the road, collecting trash with my grabber. It's generally the same crap over and over-potato-chip bags, candy wrappers, Red Bull cans-but along this particular stretch, six months earlier, I'd come across a strap-on penis. It seemed pretty old, and was Band-Aid colored, about three inches long, and not much bigger around than a Vienna sausage, which was interesting to me. You'd think that if someone wanted a sex toy she'd go for the gold, size-wise. But this was just the bare minimum, like getting AAA breast implants. Who was this person hoping to satisfy, her Cabbage Patch doll? I thought about taking the penis home and mailing it to one of my sisters for Christmas but knew that the moment I put it in my knapsack I'd get hit by a car and killed. That's just my luck. Medics would come and scrape me off the pavement, then, later, at the hospital, they'd rifle through my pack and record its contents: four garbage bags, some wet wipes, two flashlights, and a strap-on penis.

"There must be some mistake," Hugh would tell them. "You said it was how big?"

My iPad could get no signal at 3 p.m., so I continued walking and picking up trash, thinking that, whichever way the Supreme Court went, I never expected to see this day in my lifetime. When I was young, in the early seventies, being gay felt like the worst thing that could happen to a person, at least in Raleigh, North Carolina. There was a rumor that it could be cured by psychiatrists, so for most of my teens that's where I placed my hope. I figured that eventually I'd tell my mother and let her take the appropriate steps. What would kill me was seeing the disappointment on her face. With my father I was used to it. That was the expression he naturally assumed when looking at me. Her, though! Once when I was in high school she caught me doing something or other, imitating my Spanish teacher, perhaps with a pair of tights on my head, and said, like someone at the end of her rope, "What are you, a queer?"

I'd been called a sissy before, not by her but by plenty of other people. That was different, though, as the word was less potent, something used by children. When my mother called me a queer, my face turned scarlet and I exploded. " Me? What are you talking about? Why would you even say a thing like that?"

Then I ran down to my room, which was spotless, everything just so, the Gustav Klimt posters on the walls, the cornflower-blue vase I'd bought with the money I earned babysitting. The veil had been lifted, and now I saw this for what it was: the lair of a blatant homosexual.

That would have been as good a time as any to say, "Yes, you're right. Get me some help!" But I was still hoping that it might be a phase, that I'd wake up the next day and be normal. In the best of times, it seemed like such a short leap. I did fantasize about having a girlfriend-never the sex part, but the rest of it I had down. I knew what she'd look like, and how she'd hold her long hair back from the flame when bending over a lit candle. I imagined us getting married the summer after I graduated from college, and then I imagined her drowning off the coast of North Carolina during one of my family's vacations. Everyone needed to be there, so they could see just how devastated I was. I could actually make myself cry by picturing it: how I'd carry her out of the water, how my feet would sink into the sand owing to the extra weight. I'd try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and keep trying, until someone, my father most often, would pull me back, saying, "It's too late, son. Can't you see she's gone!"

It seemed that I wanted to marry just so I could be a widower. So profound would be my grief that I'd never look at another woman again. It was perfect, really. Oh, there were variations. Sometimes she'd die of leukemia, as in the movie "Love Story." Occasionally, a madman's bullet would fell her during a hostage situation, but always I'd be at her side, trying everything in my power to bring her back.

The fantasy remained active until I was twenty. Funny how unimportant being gay became once I told somebody. All I had to do was open up to my best friend, and when she accepted it I saw that I could as well.

"I just don't see why you have to rub everyone's noses in it," certain people would complain when I told them. Not that I wore it on T-shirts or anything. Rather, I'd just say "boyfriend" the way they said "wife" or "girlfriend," or "better half." I insisted that it was no different, and in time, at least in the circles I ran in, it became no different.

While I often dreamed of making a life with another man, I never extended the fantasy to marriage, or even to civil partnerships, which became legal in France in 1999, shortly after Hugh and I moved to Paris. We'd been together for eight years by that point, and though I didn't want to break up or look for anyone else, I didn't need the government to validate my relationship. I felt the same way when a handful of American states legalized same-sex marriage, only more so: I didn't need a government or a church giving me its blessing. The whole thing felt like a step down to me. From the dawn of time, the one irrefutably good thing about gay men and lesbians was that we didn't force people to sit through our weddings. Even the most ardent of homophobes had to hand us that. We were the ones who toiled behind the scenes while straight people got married: the photographers and bakers and florists, working like Negro porters settling spoiled passengers into the whites-only section of the train.

"Oh, Christopher," a bride might sigh as her dressmaker zipped her up. "What would I have ever done without you?"

What saved this from being tragic is that they were doing something we wouldn't dream of: guilt-tripping friends and relatives into giving up their weekends so they could sit on hard church pews or folding chairs in August, listening as the couple mewled vows at each other, watching as they're force-fed cake, standing on the sidelines, bored and sweating, as they danced, misty-eyed, to a Foreigner song.

The battle for gay marriage was, in essence, the fight to be as square as straight people, to say things like "My husband tells me that the new Spicy Chipotle Burger they've got at Bennigan's is awesome," and "Here it is, Valentine's Day less than a week behind us, and already my wife is flying our Easter flag!"

That said, I was all for the struggle, mainly because it so irritated the fundamentalists. I wanted gay people to get the right to marry, and then I wanted none of us to act on it. I wanted it to be ours to spit on. Instead, much to my disappointment, we seem to be all over it.

I finally got a signal at the post office in the neighboring village. I'd gone to mail a set of keys to a friend and, afterward, I went out front and pulled out my iPad. The touch of a finger and there it was, the headline story on the Times site: " Supreme Court Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage A Right Nationwide."

I read it, and, probably like every American gay person, I was overcome with emotion. Standing on the sidewalk, dressed in rags with a litter picker pinioned between my legs, I felt my eyes tear up, and as my vision blurred I thought of all the people who had fought against this, and thought, Take that, assholes.

The Supreme Court ruling tells every gay fifteen-year-old living out in the middle of nowhere that he or she is as good as any other dope who wants to get married. To me it was a slightly mixed message, like saying we're all equally entitled to wear Dockers to the Olive Garden. Then I spoke to my accountant, who's as straight as they come, and he couldn't have been more excited. "For tax purposes, you and Hugh really need to act on this," he said.

"But I don't want to," I said. "I don't believe in marriage."

He launched into a little speech, and here's the thing about legally defined couples: they save boatloads of money, especially when it comes to inheriting property. My accountant told me how much we had to gain, and I was, like, "Is there a waiting period? What documents do I need?"

That night, I proposed for the first of what eventually numbered eighteen times. "Listen," I said to Hugh over dinner, "we really need to do this. Otherwise when one of us dies the other will be clobbered with taxes."

"I don't care," he told me. "It's just money."

This is a sentence that does not register on Greek ears. It's just a mango-size brain tumor. It's just the person I hired to smother you in your sleep. But since when is money just money?

"I'm not marrying you," he repeated.

I swore to him that I was not being romantic about it: "There'll be no rings, no ceremony, no celebration of any kind. We won't tell anyone but the accountant. Think of it as a financial contract, nothing more."

"No."

"God damn it," I said. "You are going to marry me whether you like it or not."

"No, I'm not."

"Oh, yes you are."

After two weeks of this, he slammed his fork on the table, saying, "I'll do anything just to shut you up." This is, I'm pretty sure, the closest I'm likely to get to a yes.

I took another ear of corn. "Fine, then. It's settled."

It wasn't until the following day that the reality set in. I was out on the side of a busy road with my litter picker, collecting the shreds of a paper coffee cup that had been run over by a lawnmower, when I thought of having to tick the box that says "married" instead of "single." I always thought there should have been another option, as for the past twenty-four years I've been happily neither. I would never introduce Hugh as my husband, nor would he refer to me that way, but I can easily imagine other people doing it. They'll be the type who so readily embraced "partner" when it came down the pike, in the mid-nineties. Well-meaning people. The kind who wear bike helmets and use the word "conversation" in that new way that I hate. It occurred to me while standing there, cars whizzing by, that the day I marry is the day I'll get hit and killed, probably by some driver who's texting, or, likelier still, sexting. "He is survived by his husband, Hugh Hamrick," the obituary will read, and before I'm even in my grave I'll be rolling over in it.

That night at dinner, neither of us mentioned the previous evening's conversation. We talked about this and that, our little projects, the lives of our neighbors, and then we retreated to different parts of the house, engaged, I suppose, our whole lives ahead of us. ♦

David Sedaris contributes frequently to The New Yorker. He is the author of, most recently, "Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002)."
Read more "

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London is five hours ahead of Washington, D.C., except when it comes to gay marriage. In that case, it's two years and five hours ahead, which was news to me. "Really?" I said, on meeting two lesbian wives from Wolverhampton. "You can do that here?"

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Virtual Currency Infographics : How to Explain Bitcoin

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How to Explain Bitcoin - This infographic titled 'How to explain Bitcoin to your Grandparents' is just that-a guide to explaining Bitcoin to anyone. Wha...

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Financial institutions go to great lengths to protect themselves against cyber attacks, but as in Live Free or Die Hard, very little stops these elite hackers. From: THE REAL STORY: Live Free or Die Hard http://bit.ly/Usnr6q

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James Lyne: Everyday cybercrime -- and what you can do about it

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Computer security expert James Lyne gives a fascinating presentation on the ease with which computer hackers can access your vital data.

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Hollywood Walk Of Fame This Diagram Explains Trump

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First Lady Michelle Obama Does Her Best Barack Impression

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Melania Trump Did Not Plagiarize Her RNC Speech

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Stephen invites his friend Melania Trump to defend herself against charges that she stole parts of her RNC speech from Michelle Obama.

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interview with Melania

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Melania Trump On Her Life, Marriage And 2016 | Morning Joe | MSNBC

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Height may be the key to a happy marriage

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English News Lessons: Free 26-Page lesson plan / 2-page mini-lesson - Taller Men - Handouts, online activities, speed reading, dictation, mp3... current events.

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English News Lessons: Free 26-Page lesson plan / 2-page mini-lesson - Taller Men - Handouts, online activities, speed reading, dictation, mp3... current events.

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Researchers have discovered what they believe is one of the keys to a happy marriage. A difference in height between the two partners could be a secret ingredient for marital bliss. Professor Kitae Sohn of Konkuk University in South Korea has discovered that the taller a woman's husband is, the happier she is. Mr Sohn said: "A greater height difference in a couple was positively related to the wife's happiness." However, he said the attraction and benefits for a woman having a tall husband do not last forever and diminish over time. Sohn said the appeal of a taller husband "gradually weakened over time". He said he was surprised to find that it took around 18 years of marriage for this appeal to disappear.

Professor Sohn said he was intrigued as to why women seemed to prefer taller men. He said: "Although it has been known that women prefer tall men in mating for evolutionary reasons, no study has investigated whether a taller husband makes his wife happier." His study included analysing data from 7,850 Indonesian women who expressed a preference for taller men. The women said they did not know exactly why they preferred a taller mate. Sohn wrote: "Women simply like tall men, while unable to say why." He added: "This is similar to people favoring fatty, salty and sugary foods without knowing exactly why." However, the BBC noted that shorter men can be more stable, better husbands.

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Height may be the key to a happy marriage

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Researchers have discovered what they believe is one of the keys to a happy marriage. A difference in height between the two partners could be a secret ingredient for marital bliss. Professor Kitae Sohn of Konkuk University in South Korea has discovered that the taller a woman's husband is, the happier she is.

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When it comes to dating, research has concluded that for the most part, women aren't as shallow as one might think. Various studies have determined that single straight men shouldn't waste their time stressing over things like , or even , because most women just don't care about those things as much as men think they do.

But a new in the March 2016 edition of the journal Personality and Individual Differences suggests that there is still one element of a man's appearance that women do indeed care deeply about. Spoiler alert: It's height.

The idea that taller men have an advantage in the hetero dating world is fairly well-established, as past has already confirmed that many women are indeed height queens. The phenomenon has largely been attributed to the (somewhat vomit-inducing) evolutionary psychology that link height to traits like masculinity, power and the ability to pass on tall-people genes to male children so that they too can reap the societal rewards of being tall.

But the goal of this new study by researcher Kitae Sohn of Konkuk University in Seoul, South Korea was to determine if women who chose to "level up" and marry a tallboy were actually happier in the long-term. "Although it has been known that women prefer tall men in mating for evolutionary reasons, no study has investigated whether a taller husband makes his wife happier," Sohn wrote.

It's worth noting that Sohn's research was limited to a single country - he analyzed the survey responses of 7,850 Indonesian women - so it might not exactly be representative of women's views the world over. Yet Sohn found that women who chose to marry taller men did indeed report higher levels of overall happiness. In fact, he reported that "a greater height difference in a couple was positively related to the wife's happiness," which suggests that the taller the husband, the happier the wife.

The good-ish news for short guys? The tall husband happiness spell does not last forever. Sohn reported that the positive effects of having a taller partner "gradually weakened over time and entirely dissipated by 18 years of marital duration." So if you're shallow and petty enough to marry a dude based on his vertical leap alone, maybe start thinking about calling it quits about 17 years in.

The results of the study are troubling, to say the least: Given how much our society as a whole has started to redefine beauty standards and how little women care about other male physical traits, why do women care so damn much about men's height?

In an effort to get beyond the results of this study and conduct an informal poll of our own, Mic asked our Tumblr audience to sound off on the subject. Good news for shorties: Many of the respondents indicated that, contrary to what any of the research out there might say, they DGAF about a man's vertical measurements.

"I don't see why I wouldn't [date a guy who was shorter than me]," one user. "It may not be likely because I'm 5'3" but fuck those social norms that imply men have to be the taller ones." Another wrote that "of all the things that matter in a partner, height seems pretty meaningless no matter what genders are involved. I genuinely don't understand people that will only date taller partners." And one very candid reader wrote: "I don't care how tall he is as long as he has a big dick."

Let that be a lesson to you, men of various heights: You never really can count on the statistics of one study to tell you much of anything.

Get the news everyone's talking about delivered straight to your inbox every morning by signing up for MicCheck Daily.

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Sorry, Guys - Science Says Women Have One Dealbreaker They Just Can't Get Over

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When it comes to dating, research has concluded that for the most part, women aren't as shallow as one might think. Various studies have determined that single straight men shouldn't waste their time stressing over things like , or even , because most women just don't care about those things as much as men think they do.

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English News Lessons: Free 26-Page lesson plan / 2-page mini-lesson - Doctors - Handouts, online activities, speed reading, dictation, mp3... current events.

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English News Lessons: Free 26-Page lesson plan / 2-page mini-lesson - Doctors - Handouts, online activities, speed reading, dictation, mp3... current events.

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Sky News - First For Breaking News From The UK And Around The World

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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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There is a job available in the small New Zealand town of Tokoroa, but no one wants it. The job is for a doctor and it pays US$265,000 a year. For the lucky doctor who takes the job, there is no night work, no weekend work, and house prices in the area are low. Also, he or she would work just four days a week and get 12 weeks' annual holiday. The town's current doctor Alan Kenny is leaving and cannot find anyone to replace him. He has been looking for a replacement for two years but has had no success. Four medical recruitment companies also failed to find a replacement. Dr Kenny thinks the problem is that the job is in the countryside and everyone wants to live and work in the big cities.

It is not only New Zealand that has problems trying to get doctors to live in rural areas. It is also a problem in many other countries too. Last year, Dr Kenny had to cancel a family holiday because he could not find anyone to replace him. Dr Kenny is from the UK and has been a doctor in Tokoroa for 30 years. He said he has a great lifestyle and he wouldn't swap it for city life. At the age of 61, he wants to retire and pass his patients on to someone younger. He told a local newspaper that his job keeps him busy all day and that he loves his work. He is worried about how he can find a new doctor. He said: "I would like to stay but I hit my head against a brick wall trying to attract doctors."

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There is a job available in the small New Zealand town of Tokoroa, but no one wants it. The job is for a doctor and it pays US$265,000 a year. For the lucky doctor who takes the job, there is no night work, no weekend work, and house prices in the area are low.

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Woman had to go on honeymoon without husband

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English News Lessons: Free 26-Page lesson plan / 2-page mini-lesson - Honeymoon in Greece - Handouts, online activities, speed reading, dictation, mp3... current events.

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English News Lessons: Free 26-Page lesson plan / 2-page mini-lesson - Honeymoon in Greece - Handouts, online activities, speed reading, dictation, mp3... current events.

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A woman had to go on her honeymoon alone because her husband could not get a visa for the trip. Newlyweds Huma Mobin and Arsalaan Sever, a young Pakistani couple, got married earlier this year. They paid for a romantic 10-day trip to Greece for their second honeymoon. They had already been to the Maldives for their first honeymoon. The couple received shocking news when the Greek embassy in Pakistan gave Huma a visa to travel to Greece, but did not issue one for her husband. They both decided that because the trip was already paid for, Huma should go to Greece alone, without her husband. A few weeks later, Huma's in-laws (Arsalaan's parents) decided to go with her.

The photos of Huma on her solo honeymoon have gone viral on the Internet. She took photos in every location she visited. In each picture, she stretched her arm out around her missing husband and posed with a sad face to show how much she missed him. Huma said it was difficult to travel knowing her husband was in Pakistan. She said: "He's the life of the party; my better half. I wouldn't have gone without him but he forced me to." She added: "The first night I cried my eyes out on my mother-in-law's shoulder, who really comforted me and told me to make the best of it." Huma is now back with Arsalaan in Pakistan. They are hoping they will be able to go away together to celebrate their first wedding anniversary.

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Woman had to go on honeymoon without husband

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A woman had to go on her honeymoon alone because her husband could not get a visa for the trip. Newlyweds Huma Mobin and Arsalaan Sever, a young Pakistani couple, got married earlier this year. They paid for a romantic 10-day trip to Greece for their second honeymoon.

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When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And that's exactly what Huma Mobin, a newlywed from Lahore, Pakistan, did on her honeymoon.

Mobin and her husband, Arsalaan Sever Butt had been married for seven months and were all set to go to Greece. But as luck would have it, Butt's visa was not approved. Since, the trip was all paid for and practically everything was set, Mobin decided to go without her husband.

So there she was, on her honeymoon accompanied by her in-laws. Although, miserable at first, Mobin decided to make the most of her unusual situation. So she did what every woman on her honeymoon
alone would do -- click adorable pictures and that showed her husband how much she was missing him!

Speaking to HuffPost India, Huma said, "I hope the Greek Embassy goes through this (article) and feels a sense of obligation to send us on a trip together. Some other airline can do something about it too, maybe".

"I am grateful for my amazing in-laws with whom missing my husband was only a thought in the back of my head. Although, while clicking the pictures, he was surely missed!" she told HuffPost India

We understand Huma, we really do, but at the same time we are glad for these pictures!

You can see her entire album here.

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This Newlywed Pakistani Bride Went On Her Honeymoon Alone And Aced It

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When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And that's exactly what Huma Mobin, a newlywed from Lahore, Pakistan, did on her honeymoon. Mobin and her husband, Arsalaan Sever Butt had been married for seven months and were all set to go to Greece. But as luck would have it, Butt's visa was not approved.

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RANDOM CURIOSITIES FROM AROUND THE INTERNET 1

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RANDOM CURIOSITIES FROM AROUND THE INTERNET 1

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In 1939, the producers of Gone with the Wind had to fight for the inclusion of Rhett Butler's famous line, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn." And it's been downhill ever since.

One survey found almost 90% of Britons swear (an average of 14 times a day) and barely any of them think it's offensive

Swearing is everywhere and we're all to blame. One survey found that almost 90% of Britons swear (an average of 14 times a day) and barely any of them think it's offensive.

So if everyone's doing it and nobody cares, should we just stop clutching our pearls and accept salty language at work? In truth, many of us do it anyway. And while the professional world disapproves (or at least acts like it does), some researchers think swearing has certain advantages.
The right image
Does swearing make you look stupid and unprofessional?

It can make you feel better, but it doesn't earn you respect - James O'Connor

Many people think employees should take the high road. A CareerBuilder survey found that 81% of employers think profanity is unprofessional. And most think it shows immaturity, a lack of control and even makes the employee appear less intelligent.

"You might ask what harm does it do, but what good does it do? It can make you feel better, but it doesn't earn you respect, reflect strong character, solve disagreements, exhibit intelligence, or get you promoted," says James O'Connor, the author of Cuss Control, a book on how to curb cursing.

Then again, there are plenty of people at the top of the pecking order who swear. It's not just celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay or fictitious characters like the industrial-strength foul mouth Malcolm Tucker from The Thick of It.

Executives like Yahoo's former CEO Carol Bartz and T-Mobile's current CEO John Legere have both happily and publicly dropped the f-bomb. Even US President Barack Obama famously said he was trying to figure out " whose ass to kick " after the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Clearly, swearing hasn't stopped every potty-mouth's career progress. One study even shows that "judicious" use of swearing can make you more persuasive. Maybe, out of the right mouth, it's a leadership tool.
A career booster?
Nobody's suggesting that swearing is a substitute for being good at your job. But can it help? Some research suggests it might, in a roundabout sort of way.

In a 2007 study, a researcher went on an undercover mission, as a worker at a British mail-order warehouse. He was initially excluded from the social group in the office, but things changed after he swore at another employee. It was a sort of initiation rite that cemented a bond with the rest of the group.

Swearing like a sailor isn't just a blue-collar hobby

The co-author of the study, Yehuda Baruch, who's now a professor at the University of Southampton Business School, says that swearing like a sailor isn't just a blue-collar hobby.

"We are all human beings, and even if you're a distinguished lawyer, you might swear," according to Baruch.

But how does that help? Well, carpet bombing your workplace with profanity won't get you a promotion, but fitting in at the workplace helps.

"I'm not saying this a major criteria for promotion, but one criteria for promotion is the ability to connect with people. In certain contexts, swearing is a way to connect," he says.
Two sides of the coin
But this might also suggest a broader problem with swearing. If it serves to consolidate the bonds in one group, is it to the exclusion of others? And if so, could it play a part in making the workplace more hostile?

"Swearing usually expresses anger or a negative attitude that can be contagious, creating a less pleasant working environment," James O'Connor says.

And really, its effect on the working environment is where it becomes a genuine issue.

"Context is everything," according to Roland Hassall, who's a Sydney-based workplace lawyer at Sparke Helmore. His firm deals with a case a week where swearing is a factor. But it's almost never the only factor, or even the main one.

Most workplaces today aren't concerned about offending tender ears. They're interested in creating a harmonious and productive working environment. Employment cases that involve swearing are more often about something more serious, like bullying or harassment.

Society is a lot more permissive now than say in the 1960s in terms of what you can say

"Society is a lot more permissive now than say in the 1960s in terms of what you can say," Hassall says.

But there is a clear exception to this rule. There's far less tolerance for sexist and racist language, which can quickly cross the legal line into sexual harassment or discrimination.

"Most of the tribunals or commissions would have no hesitation upholding disciplinary action in cases like that," he says.
Properly targeting your f-bombs
But if sexist and racist language is rightfully a no-go zone, there are other well-worn rules for avoiding trouble. If in doubt, don't swear in front of children, microphones, customers, patients or interview panels. And swearing at an actual human is riskier than swearing at the paper jam in the printer.

When, where and how you swear matters just as much as which linguistic grenade you toss

When, where and how you swear matters just as much as which linguistic grenade you toss. But figuring out what's acceptable and what's off-limits is subjective and blurry, and at times pretty weird.

At the extreme end of the spectrum, swearing is flat out illegal in some countries. Recently, rapper 50 Cent was arrested and fined for using profanity during one of his shows in St Kitts. In the United Arab Emirates, there are more serious penalties, even for swearing over a messaging app.

Figuring out what's acceptable in other cultures can be very tricky. While religion-based swearing has lost its impact in many western countries, blasphemy laws are still enforced in the Middle East. In some Asian cultures, a poorly-placed swear word might result in a loss of face, which could sour the relationship. Even within the US, there are some pretty dramatic differences in what people find offensive. In short, it's probably best to err on the side of caution if you don't know the rules.

One Sydney-based journalist, who asked to remain anonymous, broke most of the rules and came out better off. She says firing off nuclear-grade expletives at her boss actually earned his respect.

She was covering a story on a hot summer day, and asked the chief of staff to send a bottle of water and a sandwich when he changed over the camera crew. Neither the water nor the sandwich materialised and she fainted in a press conference.

Later, she called him and gave him both barrels, loudly calling him a name most wouldn't use on their worst enemies.

"I'm really glad I did it, and I think the swear words expressed exactly how angry and upset I was. It may not have been 'professional' but I think it got me a lot more professional respect," she says.

"He later told me he had a lot more respect for me after this incident, and since then has genuinely checked with me to make sure I'm OK (not in a patronising way either - I think it just made him remember I wasn't a robot)."

But again, context is everything. She had the moral high ground in the dispute. She works in an office where swearing is common. Perhaps in another workplace, it would have ended very differently.

To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

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Swearing at work might be good for your career

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In 1939, the producers of Gone with the Wind had to fight for the inclusion of Rhett Butler's famous line, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn." And it's been downhill ever since. One survey found almost 90% of Britons swear (an average of 14 times a day) and barely any of them think it's offensive Swearing is everywhere and we're all to blame.

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English News Lessons: Free 26-Page lesson plan / 2-page mini-lesson - Global Risks - Handouts, online activities, speed reading, dictation, mp3... current events.

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English News Lessons: Free 26-Page lesson plan / 2-page mini-lesson - Global Risks - Handouts, online activities, speed reading, dictation, mp3... current events.

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How did Hitler rise to power? - Alex Gendler and Anthony Hazard

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Decades after the fall of the Third Reich, it feels impossible to understand how Adolf Hitler, the tyrant who orchestrated one of the largest genocides in human history, could ever have risen to power in a democratic country. So how did it happen, and could it happen again? Alex Gendler and Anth…

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It's a nickname so clunky that it's absolutely catchy.

It's the inside joke that makes you laugh every time, even if you don't quite get it.

When anyone says it out loud, you can practically hear the ironic air quotes around it - and these days you're hearing it a lot.

"The Donald's strange pompadour and Hillary's strange server have eclipsed all the usual primary permutations." - Maureen Dowd, New York Times

"Fascination with the Donald has been sucking the life out of the other candidates." - Elaine Kamarck, Newsweek

"I'm willing to concede that The Donald could become the GOP nominee. . ." - Charles Gasparino, New York Post

Which Donald? Oh come on. You know. Not Sutherland. Not Rumsfeld. Not Duck. .

So how did Donald Trump get this nickname - and why has it caught on so big?

Considering that Trump hardly shrinks from the name (opening sentence of his 1997 book "Trump: The Art of the Comeback": "It's usually fun being The Donald"), you might be surprised that its origins lie in what he'd probably consider enemy territory - a fluke moment of harmonic convergence between the long-estranged wife whose fame once matched his and the legendary, long-defunct magazine that built its reputation by ruthlessly mocking him.

In May 1989, Spy magazine published a sensational cover story on Ivana Trump. As a shoulder-padded bouffant blonde with a rich Czech accent, the future GOP front-runner's then-wife cut nearly as flamboyant a profile as her husband in 1980s Manhattan. The article, by writer Jonathan Van Meter, gleefully punctured many of the boasting claims Trump made about his wife - that she was an Olympic skier (sadly untrue) and former top model of Canada (what does that even mean?) - and painted her as an inept CEO of his hotels and casinos.

[Forget the Megyn Kelly and Jorge Ramos incidents. Why Donald Trump is actually the most media-friendly candidate.]

But the most delicious revelation was how she referred to her husband. A name that evokes so many alpha-male icons - The Duke, The Gipper, The King, The Man in Black, The Chairman of the Board - except somehow both more grandiose and more completely absurd.

Ivana! Why the The?

Twenty-six years later, Ivana - who has largely retreated from the spotlight during her ex-husband's campaign - explains that it was simply a matter of broken English.

"As most people know, English isn't my first language, in fact it's my fourth," the former Mrs. Trump wrote in a text message. (She was traveling and unavailable to speak on the phone, her assistant said.) "When I came to live in New York, I really had to learn the language from the beginning almost. Some things come easily, some things don't. And for whatever reason, probably because I was going at my usual turbo speed, I started putting 'The' in front of most people's names. Yes, you know the outcome - 'The Donald' just slipped off the tongue, and now it seems to be making its ways to the political history books."

As for The Donald himself, he laughs that he had "no choice" but to accept the nickname. "I don't mind that it stuck," he told The Washington Post. "I think it's an endearment."

[How the Brat Pack got its name - and spoiled celebrity journalism forever]

Considering the impact, it's funny to go back and read the 1989 story - and see that it was barely a passing reference. And he wasn't even "The Donald" on first introduction.

Very special people are always the source of controversy. And yes: Ivana Trump is a special lady. Her specialness is everywhere apparent: in her special set of white-white teeth, in the slabs of polished pink marble with which she has all but tiled Manhattan, in the kicky little mink flounces attached to the bottom of some of her daytime suits, in her charmingly old-world relationship with her husband, Donald. The Don, she calls him. ("You know how she always put the before people's names?" says the wife of a Trump Organization vice president. "Well, one day she was all flustered, and she needed to talk to the vice president of administration, Richard Wilhelm. She went tearing through the halls of the executive offices shrieking, ' Where's the Dick? I need the Dick now!'")

Van Meter was a 24-year-old writer who had just moved to New York when he pitched Spy the story about Mrs. Trump, drawing on his contacts from his old job in Atlantic City. "In the tiny hot-house of Atlantic City in the 1980s, Ivana was just kind of accessible" to journalists, he recalled. "It was a small town with big-city things happening."

Founded in 1986, Spy was already famous for its scathing takes on New York's VIP culture; Trump was a favorite target, and the magazine had earlier stuck him with another moniker that lingered for years, "short-fingered vulgarian." Young as he was, Van Meter couldn't anticipate just how big a hit the story would be upon release; nor did he quite recognize the comic gold of the sobriquet he was helping to launch in popular culture. He credits Spy's editors with punching up his story for maximum humor. While he made only passing reference to "The Donald," the page designers showcased it in droll, bold-type excerpts:

"I didn't get excited immediately," said the ever-practical Ivana about her first meeting with the Donald. Some people have gone so far as to suggest that Ivana was removed from the management of Trump's Castle. Removed by The Donald himself!

"Wow, did they run that through the funny mill," said Van Meter, later the founding editor of Vibe and now a contributing editor at Vogue. "So many of the editors who worked there were like Letterman writers: They knew what's funny and what's not."

Slowly, the phrase began to catch on with other journalists. Howard Kurtz, then a New York-based correspondent for The Washington Post, was an early adopter. Just weeks after the Spy cover story, Kurtz wrote about Trump's vicious spat with rival hotelier Leona Helmsley and made several references to him as The Donald ("as he is called by his relentlessly glamorous wife Ivana").

Kurtz, now the host of Fox News Channel's "MediaBuzz," doesn't remember whether he saw "The Donald" first in Spy or another newspaper, but once he heard it, "it was like tabloid gold."

"Trump was this flamboyant and over-the-top New York character, but not that widely known by the rest of the country - and he also was saddled with kind of an ordinary first name," he said. "Making him The Donald kind of captured the singular nature of this media-savvy wheeler-and-dealer. And I just decided that was going to be his name in The Washington Post."

It sure came in handy a year later, when the cataclysmic breakup of Donald and Ivana became one of 1990's biggest celebrity stories. "I was writing so much about the divorce war that the nickname provided some much-needed variety, instead of saying 'Trump. . . Trump. . . Trump'" said Kurtz. The phrase was picked up by other writers; by 1991, it even made it into the headlines.

By the end of the decade, the phrase was so popular that the Trumps were fighting over it: In 1999, Ivana attempted to claim a trademark on "The Donald" for a line of lotions, after-shaves and other toiletries. She told the New York Observer at the time that she was filing on behalf of her son, Donald Jr. - but her move drew an angry condemnation from Donald, who filed several competing claims for the trademark. Both parties eventually abandoned their claims, and now it appears to belong to no one - except, of course, for the pundits and headline writers who have made it such a go-to part of their lexicon.

Why is "The Donald" funny? Kurtz offered that "I guess it's funny because it's like a royal title for a guy who's not a senator or a governor or part of the political establishment." (Well, not yet. . .)

For Van Meter, the humor lies in the syntax: "I don't know what it is about the broken English. The misplacement of articles, it's just funny, I don't know why" - and, of course, the source: Ivana. She was a woman of the era, a caricature of "Dynasty"-style glamour and bootstrapping Big Apple ambition - a "Saturday Night Live" character waiting to happen - and, briefly, an unlikely media heroine showcased on the covers of Vanity Fair and Vogue in the years after her husband left her for a newer model, whom he would eventually leave as well.

Who else could have come up with "The Donald"?

"It was funny because it was coming out of Ivana's mouth," said Van Meter. "No one thinks about her anymore, but she was such a larger-than-life character in the culture then. . . You can just hear it in her Czech accent."
Ben Terris contributed to this story. This story has been updated with a quote from Donald Trump.

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Why does everyone call Donald Trump 'The Donald'? It's an interesting story.

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It's a nickname so clunky that it's absolutely catchy. It's the inside joke that makes you laugh every time, even if you don't quite get it. When anyone says it out loud, you can practically hear the ironic air quotes around it - and these days you're hearing it a lot.

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It seems we're entering another of those stupid seasons humans impose on themselves at fairly regular intervals. I am sketching out here opinions based on information, they may prove right, or may prove wrong, and they're intended just to challenge and be part of a wider dialogue.

My background is archaeology, so also history and anthropology. It leads me to look at big historical patterns. My theory is that most peoples' perspective of history is limited to the experience communicated by their parents and grandparents, so 50-100 years. To go beyond that you have to read, study, and learn to untangle the propaganda that is inevitable in all telling of history. In a nutshell, at university I would fail a paper if I didn't compare at least two, if not three opposing views on a topic. Taking one telling of events as gospel doesn't wash in the comparative analytical method of research that forms the core of British academia. (I can't speak for other systems, but they're definitely not all alike in this way).

So zooming out, we humans have a habit of going into phases of mass destruction, generally self imposed to some extent or another. This handy list shows all the wars over time. Wars are actually the norm for humans, but every now and then something big comes along. I am interested in the Black Death, which devastated Europe. The opening of Boccaccio's Decameron describes Florence in the grips of the Plague. It is as beyond imagination as the Somme, Hiroshima, or the Holocaust. I mean, you quite literally can't put yourself there and imagine what it was like. For those in the midst of the Plague it must have felt like the end of the world.

But a defining feature of humans is their resilience. To us now it seems obvious that we survived the Plague, but to people at the time it must have seemed incredible that their society continued afterwards. Indeed, many takes on the effects of the Black Death are that it had a positive impact in the long term. Well summed up here: "By targeting frail people of all ages, and killing them by the hundreds of thousands within an extremely short period of time, the Black Death might have represented a strong force of natural selection and removed the weakest individuals on a very broad scale within Europe," ...In addition, the Black Death significantly changed the social structure of some European regions. Tragic depopulation created the shortage of working people. This shortage caused wages to rise. Products prices fell too. Consequently, standards of living increased. For instance, people started to consume more food of higher quality."

But for the people living through it, as with the World Wars, Soviet Famines, Holocaust, it must have felt inconceivable that humans could rise up from it. The collapse of the Roman Empire, Black Death, Spanish Inquisition, Thirty Years War, War of the Roses, English Civil War... it's a long list. Events of massive destruction from which humanity recovered and move on, often in better shape.

At a local level in time people think things are fine, then things rapidly spiral out of control until they become unstoppable, and we wreak massive destruction on ourselves. For the people living in the midst of this it is hard to see happening and hard to understand. To historians later it all makes sense and we see clearly how one thing led to another. During the Centenary of the Battle of the Somme I was struck that it was a direct outcome of the assassination of an Austrian Arch Duke in Bosnia. I very much doubt anyone at the time thought the killing of a European royal would lead to the death of 17 million people.

My point is that this is a cycle. It happens again and again, but as most people only have a 50-100 year historical perspective they don't see that it's happening again. As the events that led to the First World War unfolded, there were a few brilliant minds who started to warn that something big was wrong, that the web of treaties across Europe could lead to a war, but they were dismissed as hysterical, mad, or fools, as is always the way, and as people who worry about Putin, Brexit, and Trump are dismissed now.

Then after the War to end all Wars, we went and had another one. Again, for a historian it was quite predictable. Lead people to feel they have lost control of their country and destiny, people look for scapegoats, a charismatic leader captures the popular mood, and singles out that scapegoat. He talks in rhetoric that has no detail, and drums up anger and hatred. Soon the masses start to move as one, without any logic driving their actions, and the whole becomes unstoppable.

That was Hitler, but it was also Mussolini, Stalin, Putin, Mugabe, and so many more. Mugabe is a very good case in point. He whipped up national anger and hatred towards the land owning white minority (who happened to know how to run farms), and seized their land to redistribute to the people, in a great populist move which in the end unravelled the economy and farming industry and left the people in possession of land, but starving. See also the famines created by the Soviet Union, and the one caused by the Chinese Communists last century in which 20-40 million people died. It seems inconceivable that people could create a situation in which tens of millions of people die without reason, but we do it again and again.

But at the time people don't realise they're embarking on a route that will lead to a destruction period. They think they're right, they're cheered on by jeering angry mobs, their critics are mocked. This cycle, the one we saw for example from the Treaty of Versaille, to the rise of Hitler, to the Second World War, appears to be happening again. But as with before, most people cannot see it because:

1. They are only looking at the present, not the past or future

2. They are only looking immediately around them, not at how events connect globally

3. Most people don't read, think, challenge, or hear opposing views

Trump is doing this in America. Those of us with some oversight from history can see it happening. Read this brilliant, long essay in the New York magazine to understand how Plato described all this, and it is happening just as he predicted. Trump says he will Make America Great Again, when in fact America is currently great, according to pretty well any statistics. He is using passion, anger, and rhetoric in the same way all his predecessors did - a charismatic narcissist who feeds on the crowd to become ever stronger, creating a cult around himself. You can blame society, politicians, the media, for America getting to the point that it's ready for Trump, but the bigger historical picture is that history generally plays out the same way each time someone like him becomes the boss.

On a wider stage, zoom out some more, Russia is a dictatorship with a charismatic leader using fear and passion to establish a cult around himself. Turkey is now there too. Hungary, Poland, Slovakia are heading that way, and across Europe more Trumps and Putins are waiting in the wings, in fact funded by Putin, waiting for the popular tide to turn their way.

We should be asking ourselves what our Archduke Ferdinand moment will be. How will an apparently small event trigger another period of massive destruction. We see Brexit, Trump, Putin in isolation. The world does not work that way - all things are connected and affecting each other. I have pro-Brexit friends who say 'oh, you're going to blame that on Brexit too??' But they don't realise that actually, yes, historians will trace neat lines from apparently unrelated events back to major political and social shifts like Brexit.

Brexit - a group of angry people winning a fight - easily inspires other groups of angry people to start a similar fight, empowered with the idea that they may win. That alone can trigger chain reactions. A nuclear explosion is not caused by one atom splitting, but by the impact of the first atom that splits causing multiple other atoms near it to split, and they in turn causing multiple atoms to split. The exponential increase in atoms splitting, and their combined energy is the bomb. That is how World War One started and, ironically how World War Two ended.

An example of how Brexit could lead to a nuclear war could be this:

Brexit in the UK causes Italy or France to have a similar referendum. Le Pen wins an election in France. Europe now has a fractured EU. The EU, for all its many awful faults, has prevented a war in Europe for longer than ever before. The EU is also a major force in suppressing Putin's military ambitions. European sanctions on Russia really hit the economy, and helped temper Russia's attacks on Ukraine (there is a reason bad guys always want a weaker European Union). Trump wins in the US. Trump becomes isolationist, which weakens NATO. He has already said he would not automatically honour NATO commitments in the face of a Russian attack on the Baltics.

With a fractured EU, and weakened NATO, Putin, facing an ongoing economic and social crisis in Russia, needs another foreign distraction around which to rally his people. He funds far right anti-EU activists in Latvia, who then create a reason for an uprising of the Russian Latvians in the East of the country (the EU border with Russia). Russia sends 'peace keeping forces' and 'aid lorries' into Latvia, as it did in Georgia, and in Ukraine. He annexes Eastern Latvia as he did Eastern Ukraine (Crimea has the same population as Latvia, by the way).

A divided Europe, with the leaders of France, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and others now pro-Russia, anti-EU, and funded by Putin, overrule calls for sanctions or a military response. NATO is slow to respond: Trump does not want America to be involved, and a large part of Europe is indifferent or blocking any action. Russia, seeing no real resistance to their actions, move further into Latvia, and then into Eastern Estonia and Lithuania. The Baltic States declare war on Russia and start to retaliate, as they have now been invaded so have no choice. Half of Europe sides with them, a few countries remain neutral, and a few side with Russia. Where does Turkey stand on this? How does ISIS respond to a new war in Europe? Who uses a nuclear weapon first?

This is just one Arch Duke Ferdinand scenario. The number of possible scenarios are infinite due to the massive complexity of the many moving parts. And of course many of them lead to nothing happening. But based on history we are due another period of destruction, and based on history all the indicators are that we are entering one.

It will come in ways we can't see coming, and will spin out of control so fast people won't be able to stop it. Historians will look back and make sense of it all and wonder how we could all have been so naïve. How could I sit in a nice café in London, writing this, without wanting to run away. How could people read it and make sarcastic and dismissive comments about how pro-Remain people should stop whining, and how we shouldn't blame everything on Brexit. Others will read this and sneer at me for saying America is in great shape, that Trump is a possible future Hitler (and yes, Godwin's Law. But my comparison is to another narcissistic, charismatic leader fanning flames of hatred until things spiral out of control). It's easy to jump to conclusions that oppose pessimistic predictions based on the weight of history and learning. Trump won against the other Republicans in debates by countering their claims by calling them names and dismissing them. It's an easy route but the wrong one.

Ignoring and mocking the experts , as people are doing around Brexit and Trump's campaign, is no different to ignoring a doctor who tells you to stop smoking, and then finding later you've developed incurable cancer. A little thing leads to an unstoppable destruction that could have been prevented if you'd listened and thought a bit. But people smoke, and people die from it. That is the way of the human.

So I feel it's all inevitable. I don't know what it will be, but we are entering a bad phase. It will be unpleasant for those living through it, maybe even will unravel into being hellish and beyond imagination. Humans will come out the other side, recover, and move on. The human race will be fine, changed, maybe better. But for those at the sharp end - for the thousands of Turkish teachers who just got fired, for the Turkish journalists and lawyers in prison, for the Russian dissidents in gulags, for people lying wounded in French hospitals after terrorist attacks, for those yet to fall, this will be their Somme.

What can we do? Well, again, looking back, probably not much. The liberal intellectuals are always in the minority. See Clay Shirky's Twitter Storm on this point. The people who see that open societies, being nice to other people, not being racist, not fighting wars, is a better way to live, they generally end up losing these fights. They don't fight dirty. They are terrible at appealing to the populace. They are less violent, so end up in prisons, camps, and graves. We need to beware not to become divided (see: Labour party), we need to avoid getting lost in arguing through facts and logic, and counter the populist messages of passion and anger with our own similar messages. We need to understand and use social media. We need to harness a different fear. Fear of another World War nearly stopped World War 2, but didn't. We need to avoid our own echo chambers. Trump and Putin supporters don't read the Guardian, so writing there is just reassuring our friends. We need to find a way to bridge from our closed groups to other closed groups, try to cross the ever widening social divides.

(Perhaps I'm just writing this so I can be remembered by history as one of the people who saw it coming.)

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I have replied to some of the comments on this essay here.

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History tells us what may happen next with Brexit & Trump

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It seems we're entering another of those stupid seasons humans impose on themselves at fairly regular intervals. I am sketching out here opinions based on information, they may prove right, or may prove wrong, and they're intended just to challenge and be part of a wider dialogue.

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How did Hitler rise to power? - Alex Gendler and Anthony Hazard

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EMPOWERMENT
COUP
DICTATORISHIP

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Here are a few things I have recently been told should make me feel "empowered": tweeting a naked selfie; being Miley Cyrus; being Gwyneth Paltrow; looking at advertisements; watching TED Talks; owning my feminism; disowning my feminism; buying leggings; buying designer clothes; masturbating.

It's quite an exciting time to be a woman, I can tell you. Feminism might not have quite finished its work yet - there are still niggly little things such as unequal pay and female genital mutilation, and, unbelievably, abortion remains an actual issue in the US elections in 2016. But never has it been easier for a woman to feel empowered. Indeed, a woman would now struggle to fail to feel empowered every minute of her day, going by the current definition of the word; pretty much everything a woman does - from eating breakfast to being online - has been described as a means to empower her. What girl power was to the 90s, empowerment has become to the 2010s: a catch-all and therefore empty word denoting a watered-down feminism, one beloved of bubbly celebrities and canny advertisers alike.

To understand how such indignity has been visited upon this innocent word, we need to look at what it was supposed to mean in the first place. So, as Jennifer Aniston would say - she of the now-very-empowering "Because you're worth it" advertising slogan - here comes the science part. Empowerment - referring to the idea of providing autonomy and strength to marginalised people - first came into popular use in the English-speaking west in the 70s and was used primarily in reference to black people. African-American magazines such as Jet and Essence used it in encouraging self-help articles, and scholarly books with titles such as Black Empowerment: Social Work in Oppressed Communities were published. Feminism increasingly used the term in the 80s and 90s, often referring to women and girls in third-world countries and other unquestionably terrible situations. Rather sweetly, given that "empowerment" now denotes everything from deodorant to chocolate, back then it was considered rather radical, with its suggestion of revolution. Almost certainly the first time I heard it was in the 90s when my school held a fundraiser to buy computers for a school in India so as to "empower Indian girls through computer literacy".

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African-American magazines such as Essence and Jet used the word 'empowerment' in encouraging self-help articles.

By the late 90s and early 2000s, women's magazines and adverts aimed at women started to pick up on the word. I remember one particular American fashion magazine article in about 2001 urging women to empower themselves by "getting ahead on next season's looks", which sounded a lot easier than sending computers to India. No longer did the term refer to the idea of a demographic gaining power for the good of the group, but just one woman gaining power for the good of herself - a shift from the collective to the individual, if you prefer the lingo, and the TV programme most associated with this change in attitude is, of course, Sex and the City.

Sex and the City is now frequently - and unfairly - dismissed as the TV programme that suggested that buying designer shoes was a feminist act (in fact, as any SATC devotee could tell you, far from celebrating shopaholism, Carrie nearly goes bankrupt from her shoe-shopping habit and is only rescued from homelessness by one of her girlfriends). However, until the show lost its mind and nerve in the last series, if Sex and the City was about anything, it was that independence is great, but be prepared to take responsibility for your actions. Whatever the show's intentions, there is no doubt that it became the face of a somewhat tedious school of thought that suggested feminism could be found at the bottom of a Harvey Nichols bag. The early 2000s was the era of commodified feminism, when women's magazines would crow that maxing out your credit card was a feminist act (such a Carrie thing to do!) because, damn, go, girlfriend! In 2003, satirical website the Onion ran the headline "Women Now Empowered by Everything a Woman Does", and the accompanying article captured the absurdity of this thinking. "Shopping for shoes has emerged as a powerful means by which women assert their autonomy. Owning and wearing dozens of pairs of shoes is a compelling way for a woman to announce that she is strong and independent, and can shoe herself without the help of a man. She's saying, 'Look out, male-dominated world, here comes me and my shoes.'"

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Paris Hilton in Juicy Couture. Photograph: Most Wanted/REX/ Shutterstock

While this approach to feminism blessed one with shoes, it didn't really have much staying power. By the time the first Sex and the City movie came out in 2008 - in which all Carrie wanted was "a really big closet" - a new generation of young women was already starting to trash the show and its money-obsessed mentality as an embarrassing throwback, as dated and tasteless as a photo of Paris Hilton in a Juicy Couture tracksuit.

Yet, just as this idea of feminism as something you bought alongside your Manolo Blahniks was being denigrated, a strong mentality was emerging from fourth-wave feminism, one that at least partially defines the movement: to judge other women for choosing to do something - anything - is inherently anti-feminist, because those women made their choice and therefore it is a feminist act. The word "empowered" regained traction and women who lived their lives according to their own choices and desires were described as "self-empowered". "Choice feminism" replaced "consumer feminism", but the two ultimately come down to the same thing: that is, if a woman does something of her own free will - whether it's pole-dancing or buying shoes - then it's a feminist act. And more than ever, it's not only about feminism; it's about empowering the woman as an individual.

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Former White House intern Monica Lewinsky speaks at the TED talk. Photograph: James Duncan Davidson/TED

To a certain extent, this is a good thing. After all, it's nice for women to cheer each another on, right? We 21st-century feminists have learned from the mistakes of our elders and we won't judge one another about our sexuality (as Betty Friedan did) or sleeping with married men (as certain feminists did in the 90s when writing about Monica Lewinsky), as it was precisely this kind of internal sniping that bogged down previous waves of feminism. We should encourage each other, not push each other down. When one woman casts judgment on another woman, according to today's feminism, she is behaving worse than a misogynist man or (and this is almost worse in today's feminism, so concerned as it is in overturning the past and forging its own newpath) an old-school second-wave feminist.

The problem with this approach is that it leads to a great big pile of nothing. The suggestion that women should unthinkingly celebrate one another purely out of sisterly feeling is about as patronising as the idea that women shouldn't trouble their brains with opinions. Moreover, the idea that fourth-wave feminists don't judge will provoke mirthless laughter from any woman who has been on the web recently - feminists don't just judge, they judge each other, and they do so often. However, they now do it with the added complication that they're judging one another for judging. Feminists who query whether things such as prostitution, pole-dancing or larking about naked while being filmed by self-described "pervert" Terry Richardson (as Miley Cyrus did for her video Wrecking Ball) are really empowering themselves are shouted down as angry anti-sex harridans. In recent years, there have been feminist revisions of everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Kim Kardashian, simply because they were their own self-empowered women, even though both of them explicitly distanced themselves from the label in their respective times. Yet when Kardashian tweeted a topless selfie last month, she claimed that she was empowered by her sexuality and, thus - via the media of her iPhone and her breasts - she was striving to "encourage the same empowerment for girls and women all over the world". Anyone who queried this philosophy was shouted down as an out-of-date loser who encouraged "body-shaming". Empowerment has become the cover for doing whatever the hell you like. It is a self-created safe space: as long as you say you are empowered, anyone who complains is trying to oppress you.

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Miley Cyrus claimed that her raunchy Wrecking Ball video was empowering.

We could sit around and argue about where the line lies between sexual empowerment and sexual objectification until the self-empowered cows come home. Personally, I'd rather not see yet another wave of feminism die on the hill over whether or not pole-dancing is a feminist act. So maybe the easiest way to deal with the kinds of arguments raised by choice feminism is to end with this simple truth: while the ability to choose is feminist, that doesn't mean the choice itself is. As Carrie Bradshaw, that icon of self-empowerment, could tell you, do whatever you like, but don't kid yourself that you're doing anything more than pleasing yourself. Buying shoes is not a strike against the patriarchy. Telling other women to shut up online is not a feminist act. Tweeting photos of your boobs is not empowering the world.

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Jennifer Lopez's new single, Ain't Your Mama, has been sold as being about empowerment.

Nowhere is the word's meaninglessness more obvious than in consumerism. Advertisers have, unsurprisingly, latched on to a term that suggests worthiness but has really become about promising an aspirational female identity. As Jia Tolentino recently wrote in the New York Times, empowerment is now something women "can purchase while conditions determining who can access and accumulate power stay the same". Most people would struggle to argue that telling women to lose weight or look thin is an empowering act. But, as online magazine Jezebel pointed out last week, Weight Watchers and Spanx are now selling their products in the US by promising that they provide empowerment. We're not telling you to be thinner, these adverts say, we're telling you that you'll love yourself if you are, and that will make you feel empowered.

Similarly, Jennifer Lopez's new single, Ain't Your Mama, has been sold as being about empowerment, instead of just boring ol' feminism or independence, as the similarly themed 1999 Destiny's Child song Independent Women was. Unfortunately for Lopez and her PRs, the single was produced by Dr Luke, who was accused by Kesha of somewhat less than empowering behaviour around her.

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From shopping to naked selfies: how 'empowerment' lost its meaning

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Here are a few things I have recently been told should make me feel "empowered": tweeting a naked selfie; being Miley Cyrus; being Gwyneth Paltrow; looking at advertisements; watching TED Talks; owning my feminism; disowning my feminism; buying leggings; buying designer clothes; masturbating. It's quite an exciting time to be a woman, I can tell you.

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One of the biggest stories from this week's Republican National Convention has been news that Melania Trump, Republican nominee Donald Trump's wife, cribbed part of her opening night speech from Michelle Obama. Plagiarism is never a good look for a political figure, and the fact that the lines were lifted from the wife of one of Trump's biggest political targets made the news all the more awkward.

The Trump campaign made a bad situation worse by refusing to admit the obvious for more than 36 hours after the speech. The news cycle was dominated by coverage of the Trump campaign's ever-shifting excuses for the lifted text, drawing attention away from the GOP's preferred message about the 2011 Benghazi attack and Hillary Clinton's email scandal.

Finally, on Wednesday, a Trump speechwriter admitted that she had accidentally included some lines from Michelle Obama's speech in Melania Trump's text. The big question is whether the incident will damage Trump's image with voters.

Parts of Melania Trump's speech sounded a lot like Michelle Obama's

On Monday night Melania was the headliner, in one of her first notable primetime speaking appearances as Trump's adoring wife and so-called "model immigrant."

It wasn't a particularly notable speech: She touched on the same themes of family, pride, and patriotism that generations of prospective first ladies have spoken to in past election years. But one moment stood out among the rest, not for its brilliance but for its uncanny similarity in sentence structure, paragraph structure, and language to Michelle Obama's 2008 Democratic convention speech.

Here's the moment:

Melania's speech was written by two prominent political speechwriters, Matthew Scully and John McConnell, known for penning George W. Bush's address to the nation after 9/11. However, according to a New York Times report, the speech Scully and McConnell wrote, drafted last month, was not the speech Melania gave Monday night:

Inside Trump Tower, it turned out, Ms. Trump had decided she was uncomfortable with the text, and began tearing it apart, leaving a small fraction of the original.

[...]

The Trump campaign declined to say who or how many senior campaign officials read or reviewed the speech. But when Ms. Trump and her staff had finished revising the speech, virtually all that remained from the original was an introduction and a passage that included the phrase "a national campaign like no other."

On Wednesday, the Trump Organization's in-house staff writer, Meredith McIver, admitted to wrongdoing and said she had offered her resignation, which she said the Trump family rejected. McIver explained that during the brainstorming period she wrote down some of Melania's favorite passages from Michelle Obama's speech - "A person she has always liked is Michelle Obama" - and some of those phrases made it into the final script, which she mistakenly did not check against Obama's original speech.

The Trump campaign took a long time to admit it was plagiarism

The similarities are so blatant it's hard to argue that a portion of the speech wasn't cribbed from Michelle Obama's. But the Trump campaign, as with most controversies, denied the allegations at first, coming up with many excuses in its defense.

Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson argued the speech was an incident of two people touching on the same values in the same language. The "concept that Michelle Obama invented the English language is absurd," she said. RNC chief strategist Sean Spicer invoked the My Little Ponycartoonto defend the speech, arguing that the sentences in question were common phrases, like those said by My Little Pony character Twilight Sparkle.

"Melania Trump said, 'The strength of your dreams and willingness to work for them.' Twilight Sparkle from 'My Little Pony' said, 'This is your dream. Anything you can do in your dreams, you can do now,'" Spicer said on CNN.

It's true, of course, that clichés are rampant in political speech. Presidential candidates and their wives often touch on similar themes and common values.

But the problem wasn't just that Melania used common phrases like "word is your bond" and "the strength of your dreams and willingness to work for them." Taken individually, any one of these shared phrases could be an innocent mistake. The problem is that Melania strung together a long sequence of these clichés in exactly the same order as they were found in Michelle Obama's speech. The chances of that happening by accident are infinitesimal.

Trump's campaign chair, Paul Manafort, even tried to shift blame to Hillary Clinton, claiming that the negative response to Melania's speech is "an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, how she seeks out to demean her and take her down." And Trump delegates at the convention seemed to all chalk it up to unnecessary harping on simple political clichés.

Despite a packed RNC schedule of notable, newsworthy, and often inflammatory speakers, the news cycle on Tuesday largely revolved around the Trump campaign's growing list of excuses.

The Trump campaign's denials are a testament to Trump's character

This denial, as political consultant Stuart Stevens observes, is telling of the culture of Trump's campaign.

The problem with Mrs. Trump's speech is less that it happened & more campaign trying to deny it did. One is a mistake; other character flaw.
- stuart stevens (@stuartpstevens) July 19, 2016

No matter the egregiousness of the error, misspeak, or offense, even when presented with undeniable evidence, the Trump campaign's consistent strategy is to never surrender. Vox's Timothy Lee explains:

This has become the Trump campaign's standard response when it's caught making a mistake: refuse to admit they've made an error no matter how obvious it might seem, and then escalate by blaming everyone except themselves for the misstep. This tactic has often produced poor results for Team Trump, magnifying what could have been minor gaffes into major scandals that consume the media's attention for days.

Why does Trump do this? For one, as he admitted himself in a tweet Wednesday, it brings him publicity and drags out the news cycle.

Second, as scholar Roy Peter Clark explains in Poynter, stunts like these allow the campaign to pit its candidate against the institution of the media, which we know Trump supporters love to hate. The Trump campaign doesn't care to what untruthful or unethical lengths it has to go to in order to get there:

The school of Trump (based upon the scrupulous work of professional fact-checkers) exists and thrives in a post-fact - and now post-plagiarism - world. Concern for irresponsible borrowing of texts has somehow become a problem for the elites: intellectuals and the so-called mainstream media.

History and conventional wisdom show plagiarism seriously hurts politicians. But conventional wisdom doesn't always apply to Trump.

Conventional wisdom and past experience suggests that plagiarism can't be taken lightly.

"The most cardinal rule of any speech-writing operation is that you cannot plagiarize," Matt Latimer, who was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush, told the Times. "You lose your job."

Past cases of plagiarism have come with serious ramifications for the careers of politicians, ending some and derailing others.

In 1987, plagiarism allegations against now-Vice President Joe Biden put an end to his then-presidential run. The New York Times's Maureen Dowd uncovered the similarities between a speech given by former British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock and Biden's closing debate statement at the Iowa State Fair.

Kinnick had said:

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? [Pointing to his wife in the audience:] Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick?

Months later, Biden said essentially the same thing:

I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? [Pointing to his wife in the audience:] Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I'm the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?

In 2014, BuzzFeed found that Wisconsin's Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mary Burke, who was vying to oust Gov. Scott Walker, was campaigning on a "jobs plan" that had been copied from three previous gubernatorial candidates. The discovery led Burke to fire her campaign consultant and led to a particularly negative news cycle just months before state elections. Burke ultimately lost to Walker that November, which she attributed to image.

The same year, the US Army College rescinded Democratic Sen. John Walsh's Montana masters degree for plagiarizing portions of his dissertation in 2007. The controversy pushed Walsh, who had been appointed to fill former Sen. Max Baucus's seat, to drop his election bid.

The list goes on.

Each time, the lesson learned is the same: Plagiarism comes with serious consequences, in part because it breaks the impression of authenticity most politicians try to build.

When the originality of Burke's jobs plan came under scrutiny, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Christian Schneider opined that plagiarism controversies often have the most impact when they reinforce preexisting weaknesses in a candidate's validity. For Burke, a businesswoman with no experience in elected office, the cribbed jobs plan solidified "the impression that she is the pyrite candidate," Schneider wrote.

Trump, by virtue of being the Republican Party nominee, defies most conventional political wisdom. But he, too, has a stake in maintaining authenticity as a political outsider. On the campaign trail, he has gained support by claiming to be the anti-politician.

His wife's use of a political insider's speech doesn't improve that image.

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Melania Trump and plagiarism in politics, explained

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One of the biggest stories from this week's Republican National Convention has been news that Melania Trump, Republican nominee Donald Trump's wife, cribbed part of her opening night speech from Michelle Obama. Plagiarism is never a good look for a political figure, and the fact that the lines were lifted from the wife of one of Trump's biggest political targets made the news all the more awkward.

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www.engrish.com/

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One of the greatest simple joys of learning a new language is stumbling across a word that has a completely different meaning in English. In linguistics, these words are called "false friends", and they occur when two words from two different languages (or dialects) either look or sound similar, but have different meanings. False friends happen for a number of reasons, but they often occur by chance or by sharing an etymological origin that has diverged over time.

These types of words can be confusing for both language learners and translators, but they can also be funny and interesting to those of us that still appreciate a little grade school humor. So wake up your inner child and get to reading, because we've rounded up 10 of the most giggle-worthy English language false friends just for you!

1. Fart

We all know the English meaning of the word fart, but did you know that fart means speed in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish? If that doesn't make you snicker enough, the words for speed bump in each language are fartbump, fartshump, and farthinder.

2. Gift

In German, a gift is not quite as pleasant as in English - it means poison! Taking it a step further, gift in the Scandinavian languages can mean both poison and marriage. These two meanings are related and stem from the same root word, to give.

3. Crap

In Romanian, crap means carp, which is a type of commonly-eaten fish. To be fair, English has a fish called a crappie.

4. Brat

As perhaps the most fitting example on our list, brat (or ????) means brother in Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Croatian, and Serbian. Next time you call your brother a brat, just tell him you're learning one of these languages!

5. Kiss

Kiss has a more juvenile meaning in Swedish - pee. Simple, yet amusing!

6. Preservative

In France, a préservatif isn't quite what you might expect. If you tend to have many conversations about jams and jellies, it might be useful to be aware that préservatif actually means condom. In fact, many European languages have variations of preservative that all mean condom.

7.Lol

The ubiquitous piece of Internet slang lol is either an acronym or initialism depending on how you would pronounce it, but in Dutch it means fun.

8. Slut

Slut is yet another false friend coming from Swedish, in which it means end (and rhymes with loot). If you happen to see Slut onscreen after watching a film, it's the equivalent to The End. And Slutstation is not what you might hope - it's just the last stop on a train route.

9. Barf

Barf in Farsi, Hindi, and Urdu means snow.

10. Sean Bean

If the actor known for Game of Thrones ever goes to Ireland, he might be surprised to learn that his name translates to old woman in Irish. This one might be a bit of a stretch, because while the individual words do mean old and woman, one would need to say seanbhean in order to be grammatically correct.

There you have it, 10 of our favorite false friends that have different meanings outside of English! Keep in mind that most of these are pronounced differently than their English friends and only work in writing. Did we get something lost in translation or miss any of your favorite false friends? Let us know in the comments!

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10 English words that mean something else in other languages

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One of the greatest simple joys of learning a new language is stumbling across a word that has a completely different meaning in English. In linguistics, these words are called "false friends", and they occur when two words from two different languages (or dialects) either look or sound similar, but have different meanings.

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English News Lessons: Free 26-Page lesson plan / 2-page mini-lesson - Turkey Coup - Handouts, online activities, speed reading, dictation, mp3... current events.

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The Turkish government is increasing its efforts to detain those it deems responsible for the weekend's failed coup attempt. It has arrested around 6,000 members of the judiciary and military, including top judges and senior-ranking generals. It has also suspended nearly 8,000 police officers suspected of having links to the coup attempt. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to purge all government institutions of what he calls the "virus" that caused the uprising. The president is taking a very hard line with all those suspected of wrongdoing and has announced that Turkey would consider reinstating the death penalty. This would hurt Turkey's efforts to join the European Union.

Turkey's Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag announced that: "There are currently around 6,000 detentions. It will surpass 6,000. The legal process on these will continue." He added that: "Suspects are being charged with membership of an armed terrorist organisation and of attempting to overthrow the government of the Turkish Republic using force and violence, or of attempting to completely or partially hinder its function." At least 290 people were killed and thousands wounded in the coup attempt. President Erdogan addressed the country via mobile telephone, urging people to "take to the streets" to defeat the coup and to reclaim democracy. Forces loyal to the president soon retook control of the country.

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The Turkish government is increasing its efforts to detain those it deems responsible for the weekend's failed coup attempt. It has arrested around 6,000 members of the judiciary and military, including top judges and senior-ranking generals. It has also suspended nearly 8,000 police officers suspected of having links to the coup attempt.

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Download this mini-lesson

The reading

The Turkish government is increasing its efforts to detain those it deems responsible for the weekend's failed coup attempt. It has arrested around 6,000 members of the judiciary and military, including top judges and senior-ranking generals. It has also suspended nearly 8,000 police officers suspected of having links to the coup attempt. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to purge all government institutions of what he calls the "virus" that caused the uprising. The president is taking a very hard line with all those suspected of wrongdoing and has announced that Turkey would consider reinstating the death penalty. This would hurt Turkey's efforts to join the European Union.
Make sure you try all of the online activities for this reading and listening - There are dictations, multiple choice, drag and drop activities, crosswords, hangman, flash cards, matching activities and a whole lot more. Please enjoy :-)
Turkey's Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag announced that: "There are currently around 6,000 detentions. It will surpass 6,000. The legal process on these will continue." He added that: "Suspects are being charged with membership of an armed terrorist organisation and of attempting to overthrow the government of the Turkish Republic using force and violence, or of attempting to completely or partially hinder its function." At least 290 people were killed and thousands wounded in the coup attempt. President Erdogan addressed the country via mobile telephone, urging people to "take to the streets" to defeat the coup and to reclaim democracy. Forces loyal to the president soon retook control of the country.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36824045

http://www.turkishweekly.net/2016/07/18/news/6-000-detained-from-turkish-army-judiciary-in-probe-into-failed-coup-attempt/

http://in.reuters.com/article/turkey-security-idINKCN0ZY082

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Download this mini-lesson The reading The Turkish government is increasing its efforts to detain those it deems responsible for the weekend's failed coup attempt. It has arrested around 6,000 members of the judiciary and military, including top judges and senior-ranking generals. It has also suspended nearly 8,000 police officers suspected of having links to the coup attempt.

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The Turkish authorities have announced the closure of 131 media organisations, as a crackdown continues following the failed coup on 15 July.

Three news agencies, 16 TV channels, 23 radio stations, 45 papers, 15 magazines and 29 publishers will be shut.

One of them, Zaman, once one of Turkey's biggest newspapers, was put under state control in March. Arrest warrants have been issued for 47 staff.

Many of the media outlets are linked to the US-based cleric Fetullah Gulen

The government says Mr Gulen was behind the army-led attempted coup, a claim he denies.

Separately, the government announced on Wednesday that nearly 1,700 members of the armed forces, including 149 generals and admirals had been discharged.

At least 246 people died during the coup, and more than 2,000 people were injured.

What you need to know

'What's happening to our country?'

How mobiles beat tanks and saved Erdogan

Who was behind coup attempt?

Why did Turkish coup plot fail?

Both the closure of the media outlets and the soldiers' dismissal were announced in Turkey's official Resmi Gazete.

While most are relatively small provincial outlets, several with a national audience have also been targeted.

Zaman's readers were mostly Gulen supporters, who stopped reading it after the state takeover in March, rendering it unprofitable.

In addition to the warrants issued for the 47 Zaman staff, authorities had sought the arrest of 42 other journalists earlier in the week.

Some of the media outlets closed

Cihan, which used to be one of Turkey's largest news agencies

National papers: Zaman and its English language publication Today's Zaman, opposition daily Taraf, Bugun, Meydan - most linked to Gulen movement

TV stations: Kanalturk, Samanyolu, Samanyolu News, Bugun TV, Yumurcak (children's channel)

Radios: Aktuel, Burc, Dunya

Periodicals: Aksiyon, Sizinti, Nokta

A purge too far? Analysis from Mark Lowen, BBC News, Istanbul

The numbers are staggering: 131 media outlets - newspapers, TV channels, radio stations, magazines, news agencies and publishing houses - will be closed, accused of spreading the ideology of Fethullah Gulen or backing the failed coup.

A legitimate clampdown - or a purge too far? The debate rages.

It has long been known that the exiled cleric has controlled or been close to a wide array of media organisations.

Months ago, the main Gulenist press organs - Zaman and Cihan news agency - were taken over, amidst a chorus of dissent.

Turkey's ranking in the press-freedom index of Reporters without Borders, a media watchdog, was relegated to 151st.

After the attempted coup, the government feels vindicated in its suspicions - and the state of emergency has given it the power to act.

But the accusations are growing that it is not just Gulenists but also critical journalists with no proven links to the movement who are being targeted.

Among those discharged from the armed forces are 87 army generals, 30 air force generals and 32 admirals.

The Turkish army also revealed that 8,651 members, or 1.5%, of the nation's armed forces had taken part in the failed coup.

President Erdogan has vowed to purge state bodies of the "virus" he says caused the revolt.

Last week, Turkey declared a three-month state of emergency, allowing the president and the government to bypass parliament when drafting new laws and to restrict or suspend rights and freedoms.

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Turkey shuts more than 130 media outlets

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The Turkish authorities have announced the closure of 131 media organisations, as a crackdown continues following the failed coup on 15 July. Three news agencies, 16 TV channels, 23 radio stations, 45 papers, 15 magazines and 29 publishers will be shut. One of them, Zaman, once one of Turkey's biggest newspapers, was put under state control in March.

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First Lady Michelle Obama Carpool Karaoke

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Trump Campaign Denies Melania Plagiarized Michelle Obama

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Melania Trump & Michelle Obama speeches compared

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Melania Trump's well-received speech Monday to the Republican National Convention contained two passages that match nearly word-for-word the speech that first lady Michelle Obama delivered in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention. The passages in question focus on lessons that Mrs.

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English News Lessons: Free 26-Page lesson plan / 2-page mini-lesson - Plagiarism - Handouts, online activities, speed reading, dictation, mp3... current events.

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An employee of the Trump Organisation has admitted plagiarism in helping to write Melania Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention. Mrs Trump was speaking at the convention to support her husband Donald becoming the Republican nominee in the race to be President of the USA in November. She made a speech about how great she thought her husband was. Unfortunately, many journalists recognised several lines from the speech. They were identical to lines in a speech given by Michelle Obama in 2008 about her husband Barack. Newspapers have been full of stories in recent days about how Donald Trump's organisation allowed Mrs Trump to make a speech that was plagiarised.

Plagiarism is copying the work of other people without saying you are copying it. Students are taught from a very young age not to copy because it is stealing. Students who copy the work of others usually receive an F-grade for their work. Schools often expel students for plagiarism. Dr Alex Goodall, a university examination expert, said: "Melania's speech offers us a graphic example of plagiarism in action, from the highest levels of American politics." Writing expert Dr Declan Kavanagh said that because of the plagiarism, people will not trust or believe her words. Donald Trump said the story was "good news" because the speech, "got more publicity than any [speech] in the history of politics".

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Trump employee apologises for plagiarising Michelle Obama speech

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An employee of the Trump Organisation has admitted plagiarism in helping to write Melania Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention. Mrs Trump was speaking at the convention to support her husband Donald becoming the Republican nominee in the race to be President of the USA in November.

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The reading

An employee of the Trump Organisation has admitted plagiarism in helping to write Melania Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention. Mrs Trump was speaking at the convention to support her husband Donald becoming the Republican nominee in the race to be President of the USA in November. She made a speech about how great she thought her husband was. Unfortunately, many journalists recognised several lines from the speech. They were identical to lines in a speech given by Michelle Obama in 2008 about her husband Barack. Newspapers have been full of stories in recent days about how Donald Trump's organisation allowed Mrs Trump to make a speech that was plagiarised.
Make sure you try all of the online activities for this reading and listening - There are dictations, multiple choice, drag and drop activities, crosswords, hangman, flash cards, matching activities and a whole lot more. Please enjoy :-)
Plagiarism is copying the work of other people without saying you are copying it. Students are taught from a very young age not to copy because it is stealing. Students who copy the work of others usually receive an F-grade for their work. Schools often expel students for plagiarism. Dr Alex Goodall, a university examination expert, said: "Melania's speech offers us a graphic example of plagiarism in action, from the highest levels of American politics." Writing expert Dr Declan Kavanagh said that because of the plagiarism, people will not trust or believe her words. Donald Trump said the story was "good news" because the speech, "got more publicity than any [speech] in the history of politics".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36850215

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2016/07/19/teachers-melania-trump-would-have-gotten-an-f-or-even-expelled-if-shed-turned-in-her-speech-for-a-class/

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/us/politics/melania-trump-convention-speech.html?_r=0

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Trump employee apologises for plagiarising Michelle Obama speech

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Download this mini-lesson The reading An employee of the Trump Organisation has admitted plagiarism in helping to write Melania Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention. Mrs Trump was speaking at the convention to support her husband Donald becoming the Republican nominee in the race to be President of the USA in November.