IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked the week’s best reads for you to savour.
The Irish band Stump have gone down in musical history, and this new documentary by Paul McDermott sheds light on their story. Their lead singer, Mick Lynch, died last month.
UCC98.3FM / SoundCloud
In 2013, boxer Magomed Abdusalamov fought against Mike Perez in a heavyweight bout at Madison Square Garden. The fight left him bruised, bloodied, and with severe brain damage.
(New York Times, approx 16 mins reading time)
Curreri will later recall asking Mago if he has any pain in his head. The boxer indicates that his face hurts. Any headache? The answer, coming from an interpreter, is no. But Mago’s brother will remember the boxer saying in the locker room that his “whole face was hurting, and everything inside his face was hurting.” That “he felt a lot of headaches, big headaches.”
Meet the team from a special-victims unit who are fighting the epidemic of sexual assault. They’re laden down with cases, but never let that slow up their work. They work with children, the elderly – difficult cases that necessitate difficult questions.
(New York Times, approx 43 mins reading time)
Ideas about what constitutes a ‘‘real rape’’ still hinder rape investigations and prosecutions. In the minds of many police officers, prosecutors, juries, even victims themselves, a ‘‘real rape’’ is committed by a male stranger who uses a weapon to threaten the victim and inflicts serious injury. And yet about three-quarters of all sexual assaults reported to the police are committed by someone known to the victim, only 11 percent involve weapons and most don’t result in severe injuries.
On New Year’s Eve 2015, something terrible happened in Cologne – a wave of sexual assaults and robberies that left people shocked and shaken. This is the latest look into what happened.
(Der Spiegel, approx 31 mins reading time)
As inexact and unclear as the facts from Cologne may be, they carry a clear message: Difficult days are ahead. And they beg a couple of clear questions: Is Germany really sure that it can handle the influx of refugees? And: Does Germany really have the courage and the desire to become the country in Europe with the greatest number of immigrants?
Paolo Macchiarini was a famed transplant surgeon credited with medical miracles. But then Benita Alexander fell in love with him, and discovered all with the doctor was not what it seemed.
(Vanity Fair, approx 31 mins reading time)
Macchiarini bought her red roses and Venetian-glass earrings and took her on a gondola ride under the Bridge of Sighs. Like a pair of teenagers, they attached love locks to the Ponte dell’Accademia bridge, one of them bearing the inscription “B—P 23/6/13, 4 Ever.” Alexander told me that, “when he took me to Venice, we were still shooting the story … He always paid for everything … gifts, expensive dinners, flowers—the works. When it came to money, he was incredibly generous.”
This is the story behind the Republican’s presidential race last year -from Jeb Bush to Trump, here’s what they all got up to.
(The Washington Post, approx 70 mins reading time)
Trump’s entry brought scorn and dismissal. He was a clown, a carnival barker, the leading man in a sideshow with a short run. His outrageous rhetoric — an appeal to nativism and antipathy toward everything from institutional powers to cultural shifts — seemed to guarantee all that. Yet even on that day in June there were signs that the elites in the party and in the political community didn’t get what was stirring.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
The film Dog Day Afternoon was based on a true story, that of John Wojtowicz, desperate for money and determined to rob a bank. It all results in a 14-hour standoff.
(LIFE, approx 34 mins reading time)
The man in charge of FBI operations in New York this August afternoon is Richard Baker, a poised, articulate gentleman who looks more like a banker than an FBI agent-you wouldn’t dream of looking for a telltale pistol bulge underneath his pinstriped suit. Soon to be transferred to Washington, Baker is enjoying his last week in New York. He plans to meet his wife for dinner in a Manhattan restaurant, and at the first report of a bank robbery in Brooklyn, he sees no reason to change his plans. “We usually have one or more bank robberies a day in the New York area,” Baker observes. “You can’t respond to every one of them.” But this is one robbery that Baker will respond to. So will several other FBI agents, including one who is destined to play a decisive role.
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