Weekendish: The best of the week's reads
A collection of some of the best reads from the BBC News website this week, with an injection of your comments.
The story of a man who killed a crocodile who ate his wife should be made into a feature film, according to readers @Kirioth and Jason Winter. But getting the story proved tricky, as our writer Jason Caffrey explains: "Writing Mubarak Batambuze's story proved to be more challenging than I had imagined. Through a translator, he told us how he had hunted down the crocodile that snatched his pregnant wife. But there were questions he could not answer - what had happened to the crocodile, and had any remains been found inside it? To find out, I made dozens of calls to Uganda, being passed from person to person before I managed to speak to the key players - the ranger who had taken the dead crocodile to Makarere University for a post-mortem, and the vet who had found what he believed to be a human bone inside the animal's stomach. With that information, I was ready to publish the story - but first I had a duty to tell Mubarak what I had discovered. It was an emotional moment, but he was very grateful for the call because nobody else had updated him. It was an extraordinary story that attracted enormous attention from our audience."
Artichoke on legs
The world's most trafficked mammal isn't the elephant or the rhinoceros. It's a scaly creature called the pangolin. Readers weren't convinced by this - Jay Todd, David Victor Furman, Kinley Zimba Tshering all asked on Facebook if, in fact, humans were the most trafficked mammals. But pangolins, unlike humans, may be wiped out because their meat is a delicacy and their scales are seen as medicinal. Food columnist Bruce Palling sums up the story, saying that "poor pangolins face extinction because deluded fools in the East think it puts lead in their pencil and cures cancer". Many readers hadn't heard of the pangolin - like Stuart Vernon, who is particularly taken by the fact that it has no teeth so it stores stones in its belly to grind food. But it was already familiar to people like Lando Sanchez who isn't alone in comparing it to the Pokemon character Sandshrew.
If you want a lesson in how a business could and should be run, look to India, urges one tweeter Neil Goodrich. He's impressed by Tata's policy of looking after their workers and planning for the long term. The firm introduced pensions in 1877, the eight-hour day in 1912 and maternity benefits in 1921. Now it's one of the world's biggest companies. Fund manager Sandeep Jaitly is sceptical that the company has kept up this outlook. He thinks founder Jamsetji Tata wouldn't recognise it today, he tweets. The article tells the story of Tata, who was once refused entry to a hotel because of the colour of his skin. Legend has it that he was so incensed he decided to build his own hotel.
Two stories that shook readers this week concerned the scale of child abuse within families and the people working to stop paedophiles before they offend. The NSPCC estimates one in 20 children are victims of sexual abuse. That, as Kent's Police and Crime Commissioner Ann Barnes tweets, makes shocking reading. Psychologist Katharine Barnard says these are deeply disturbing figures and asks when are we going to do better. But Geoengineering researcher Andrew Lockley isn't convinced by the stat, saying "that would require an extraordinarily broad definition of abuse". Work to prevent paedophiles offending in the first place presents a dilemma, tweets Andrew Field, who asks: What do we collectively do? One of the groups that try to stop abusers reoffending does it by offering support to people coming out of prison. Circles is one of a few organisations that tries to protect children by working directly with paedophiles. There's also a helpline called Stop It Now! In the Netherlands they even have a TV ad. That's something Psychotherapist Linda Dubrow Marshall welcomes. She thinks you can't stop what you don't discuss.
Olympic bobsledder Nicholas Frankl has good reason to tweet the story of Raoul Wallenberg - the Swedish diplomat saved his family members. Frankl's dad was six years old when Wallenberg disappeared. In January 1945 Soviet troops arrested him and he was never seen in public again. It's not clear why the Soviets arrested Wallenberg. Some say he could have been seen as a spy for the Americans, while others report seeing him after the Russians claimed he had died in a Moscow prison. But in the years before his arrest he saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews. One of the ways he managed to do this was by giving Jews Swedish passports. This caught Pilar Abella's interest. She says in a reply to Frankl's tweet that her grandfather was the Spanish ambassador in Brussels and he saved many about to be deported by giving them fake passports too.
Maud Gonne was so desperate to reincarnate her son, who died at the age of two, that she had sex in his tomb. This is "properly weird by any standard", tweets legal researcher Conor James McKinney. Gonne was a vocal figure in Irish politics and civil rights. But what interests energy commentator Robert Connors is the "bizarre" events linking WB Yeats, Ezra Pound, Sean MacBride and Django Reinhardt. The poet WB Yeats wrote about her in some of his most famous poems. He also wrote a poem clearly inspired by her dead son, which was published for the first time in our Magazine article.
Here are some things we've enjoyed this week from elsewhere around the web:
What happened when I confronted my cruellest troll - The Guardian
A germaphobe's guide to buying a metrocard - Next City
The mysterious, murky story behind soy-sauce packets - Atlantic
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