I finally found the time to continue this blog. And as in my new job as an online editor i read tons of weird news pieces i Thiught I'm gonna share some of these with you!
Just yesterday I wrote about a 83 year old killer granny. She's Austrias oldest murderer and...she's on the run! In 2007 she killed her then 77 year old neighbour - smacked her on the head and stole some jewellery and wine. She got caught though and was sentenced to prison for 18 years, in her age that's probably life-long. But, because of health probems she was released after only 10 months. Then police found outthat she was healthy again and therefore had to go back to prison. So officers went to her house to pick her up but she was gone. Her daughter said she was on a pilgrimage to Rome, but police thinks she's actually hiding in Poland, where she's originally from. The search for her is going on.
Every other day I also write about Berlusconi, cause a new scandal came up. The current one is really funny though! That guy got a new penis! Not for himself, (altough you could imagine that if all the sex-scaldals were true he could need a new one cause the original might be a little tired...), he got a for a statue of the god of war Mars that stands in front of the palace. There's also a Venus statue, she got a new arm. Now Berlusconi is being critisized for his noble gesture. The two body parts cost 70.000 Euro and next year it is planned to cut the budget for the cultural ministry in half...so that doesn't look good. Also these statues are almost 2000 years old, it's just wrong to give them plastic surgery. The opposition loves it though. In contrast to Berlusconi they aged gracefully and weren't in need of this virility-lift.
On Thursday a really nasty accident happened in Germany. A 16 year old guy wanted to take a shortcut and crossed some tracks. Apparently he didn't see teher was a train coming, an ICE high-speed train, and got hit by it. He survived but lost both his legs. Of course I'm sorry for him, but he ruined his own life, so it's his fault. But why did he have to ruin the life of the train conductur too? I bet this guy git a huge shock and is probably devastated for years. Why can't people simply take an overdose of some sleeping pill instead of making other people suffer too? I especially hate the peole who jump of bridges and disrupt the train service for hours, usually just at the time when I'm on my work to some really important appointment. Personally I would jump of a building, but would make sure it would be somewhere out in a remote area so I wouldn't accidently land on a school yard...
So, now that I got some time, a working internet connection and a job that provides me with interestung stories, I plan to resume writing regularly! I hope somebody reads this...if not, it's still fun writing about these things :)
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Sänk ju for träwelling wis Deutsche Bahn
Ok, let me start by saying this: This post is not going to be about murder, suicide or any other death related topic. I'm gonna write about the Deutsche Bahn, the German national railway company because....it seriously pisses me off!
You might have heard about it in the news: Last Saturday an ICE high speed train had to be evacuated due to the malfunctioning of the air conditioning. The temperatures inside the trains were as high as 50 degrees (122 fahrenheit) and people were beginning to collapse. Several people actually had to be treated in hospitals afterwards. Shortly after the Bahn comitted to three trains in which the a/c broke down and their comment was:"It was a problem and we're sorry for it but think about it: hundreds of other trains had no problems, arent we good?"...I felt like yelling at the TV screen...what would this guy say if his wife died in a plane crash and the airline would say "We dont get your problem, several other flights didnt crash..."??? (Apparently the a/c's are constructed to work in temperatures up to 32 degrees, if it gets hotter they just cease to work completely).
The following days more and more stories got out about trains that were travelling with broken a/c's. And it's not just that, there have been several incidents during the last years:
Just this April one of the ICEs, going at full speed, lost a door. It hit an oncoming train and resulted in six injured persons. In 2008 an axle broke which led to a derailment with fortunately no casualties. Over the course of the last year the suburban trains in Berlin had massive security problems and needed repair...sometimes only a forth of all trains were running, obviously this led to chaotic situations.
In addition there are the usual weather problems: in winter trains are delayed because of the snow and frozen catenaries, in fall because of storms and leaves on the tracks, in summer because of the heat and in spring..well, they think of something!
and on top of all that, it's getting more and more expensive!
Unfortunately too many people are still dependent from the Bahn and therefore have to use it no matter how much it sucks. I'm sure on routes that Ryan Air is offering, trains will get considerably emptier. But for daily commuting the only alternative is the car and well, that sucks too :)
So I guess we have to keep using the Bahn and at least after every trip and basically at every dinner families have lots of stories to tell about their fun day! Newspapers and magazines are actually offering advice to travellers...calling them survival kits for the Deutsche Bahn!
How better to end this post than with a famous example of the embarassing english speaking skills of the employees: "Sänk ju for träwelling wis Deutsche Bahn"!
Und nein, wir haben kein Verständnis!
You might have heard about it in the news: Last Saturday an ICE high speed train had to be evacuated due to the malfunctioning of the air conditioning. The temperatures inside the trains were as high as 50 degrees (122 fahrenheit) and people were beginning to collapse. Several people actually had to be treated in hospitals afterwards. Shortly after the Bahn comitted to three trains in which the a/c broke down and their comment was:"It was a problem and we're sorry for it but think about it: hundreds of other trains had no problems, arent we good?"...I felt like yelling at the TV screen...what would this guy say if his wife died in a plane crash and the airline would say "We dont get your problem, several other flights didnt crash..."??? (Apparently the a/c's are constructed to work in temperatures up to 32 degrees, if it gets hotter they just cease to work completely).
The following days more and more stories got out about trains that were travelling with broken a/c's. And it's not just that, there have been several incidents during the last years:
Just this April one of the ICEs, going at full speed, lost a door. It hit an oncoming train and resulted in six injured persons. In 2008 an axle broke which led to a derailment with fortunately no casualties. Over the course of the last year the suburban trains in Berlin had massive security problems and needed repair...sometimes only a forth of all trains were running, obviously this led to chaotic situations.
In addition there are the usual weather problems: in winter trains are delayed because of the snow and frozen catenaries, in fall because of storms and leaves on the tracks, in summer because of the heat and in spring..well, they think of something!
and on top of all that, it's getting more and more expensive!
Unfortunately too many people are still dependent from the Bahn and therefore have to use it no matter how much it sucks. I'm sure on routes that Ryan Air is offering, trains will get considerably emptier. But for daily commuting the only alternative is the car and well, that sucks too :)
So I guess we have to keep using the Bahn and at least after every trip and basically at every dinner families have lots of stories to tell about their fun day! Newspapers and magazines are actually offering advice to travellers...calling them survival kits for the Deutsche Bahn!
How better to end this post than with a famous example of the embarassing english speaking skills of the employees: "Sänk ju for träwelling wis Deutsche Bahn"!
Und nein, wir haben kein Verständnis!
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Suicide rates in Europe
Finally I found the time to write something again. The writing is actually not the problem it's the researching that takes a lot of time - and I do have to do some research, I don't know all the murder rates by heart ;)
so, I promised in my last post that this time I would check out suicide rates...well, here's what I found out:
It actually took quite some time to find out anything as for example the WHO data is very old (in some countries from the 1990s) but good old EUROSTAT helped me out. They have a table which includes numbers separated by sex, but unfortunately several countries are only shown with old numbers and others are missing completely. But this is the gist (for 2007): The European Union average was 9.8 suicides per 100.000 inhabitants that year. Countries that were significantly below this rate were Greece with 2.6 and Cyprus with 2.2, followed by the UK with 6.1, Malta with 6.0, Italy with 5.2 and Spain with 6.1. Now, apart from the UK these are obviously all mediterranean countries...does the weather really have such a significant effect on suicide rates? Several studies concerning the relation of climate and suicide can be found on the web. It seems that scientiests have agreed on the fact that suicide rates usually peak arounf late spring and early summer...which does not at all support the idea that the hot and sunny weather of the South prevents higher suicide rates! well, unfortunately I do not have the time to read through all those studies but this is a very confusing and interesting find!
Usually you would think that prosperity and personal well-being are most important to keep you from becoming suicidal. This should place the Scandinavian countries on the lower end of this list, but it's quite the contrary: Norway (10.0), Iceland (11.5), Sweden (11.4) and Denmark (10.6) have slightly above average rates while Finland with 17.6 is amongst the most suicidal countries in Europe. This would support the idea that the weather, or rather climate, can influence suicide rates. But why the difference between Finland and the other northern countries?
The climate is about the same but Finland does have an alcohol problem. It had become the main cause of adult death recently and obviously alcoholism does not exactly prevent suicide.
(Another country I would connect with a happy and well-off population has a very high rate: Switzerland with 15.1!)
Now let's have a look at the Eastern European countries: They have all above average rates that range from 9.5 (Bulgaria) and 10.5 (Romania) to as high as 18.4 (Slovenia) and 21.4 (Hungary). The relatively high rates for the whole region could be related to low economic and social development compared to other regions of Europe. Why there are so stark differences between the Eastern countries themthelves though I have no idea...
The region with the highest numbers overall are the Baltic states though. All three of them have high suicide rates, from 16.9 (Estonia) to 17.8 (Latvia) to 28.4 (Lithuania) which makes Lithuania by far the most suicidal country in Europe (ten years ago the rate was as high as 46)!
While surfing the web I stumbled across a very good blog article about exactly the same topic...I have only read it after writing my own post, because I didn't want to run the risk of copying everything. Also I had decided to concentrate on Europe while the author of this blog has included numbers from countries from all over the world and compared the suicide rates with happiness rates of these countries. A very interesting point, so check it out if you want to read more about suicide rates!
You can find it at http://nitawriter.wordpress.com/2007/05/11/suicide-rates-of-the-world/
so, I promised in my last post that this time I would check out suicide rates...well, here's what I found out:
It actually took quite some time to find out anything as for example the WHO data is very old (in some countries from the 1990s) but good old EUROSTAT helped me out. They have a table which includes numbers separated by sex, but unfortunately several countries are only shown with old numbers and others are missing completely. But this is the gist (for 2007): The European Union average was 9.8 suicides per 100.000 inhabitants that year. Countries that were significantly below this rate were Greece with 2.6 and Cyprus with 2.2, followed by the UK with 6.1, Malta with 6.0, Italy with 5.2 and Spain with 6.1. Now, apart from the UK these are obviously all mediterranean countries...does the weather really have such a significant effect on suicide rates? Several studies concerning the relation of climate and suicide can be found on the web. It seems that scientiests have agreed on the fact that suicide rates usually peak arounf late spring and early summer...which does not at all support the idea that the hot and sunny weather of the South prevents higher suicide rates! well, unfortunately I do not have the time to read through all those studies but this is a very confusing and interesting find!
Usually you would think that prosperity and personal well-being are most important to keep you from becoming suicidal. This should place the Scandinavian countries on the lower end of this list, but it's quite the contrary: Norway (10.0), Iceland (11.5), Sweden (11.4) and Denmark (10.6) have slightly above average rates while Finland with 17.6 is amongst the most suicidal countries in Europe. This would support the idea that the weather, or rather climate, can influence suicide rates. But why the difference between Finland and the other northern countries?
The climate is about the same but Finland does have an alcohol problem. It had become the main cause of adult death recently and obviously alcoholism does not exactly prevent suicide.
(Another country I would connect with a happy and well-off population has a very high rate: Switzerland with 15.1!)
Now let's have a look at the Eastern European countries: They have all above average rates that range from 9.5 (Bulgaria) and 10.5 (Romania) to as high as 18.4 (Slovenia) and 21.4 (Hungary). The relatively high rates for the whole region could be related to low economic and social development compared to other regions of Europe. Why there are so stark differences between the Eastern countries themthelves though I have no idea...
The region with the highest numbers overall are the Baltic states though. All three of them have high suicide rates, from 16.9 (Estonia) to 17.8 (Latvia) to 28.4 (Lithuania) which makes Lithuania by far the most suicidal country in Europe (ten years ago the rate was as high as 46)!
While surfing the web I stumbled across a very good blog article about exactly the same topic...I have only read it after writing my own post, because I didn't want to run the risk of copying everything. Also I had decided to concentrate on Europe while the author of this blog has included numbers from countries from all over the world and compared the suicide rates with happiness rates of these countries. A very interesting point, so check it out if you want to read more about suicide rates!
You can find it at http://nitawriter.wordpress.com/2007/05/11/suicide-rates-of-the-world/
Monday, May 3, 2010
Homicide rates in Europe
Okay, so no murder was committed and no body found in or around Bremen since the ones I wrote about last time but I still thought it was time to write a new post. When I was trying to find out about murder rates in Europe, complementary to my first post, I stumbled across a very interesting site. It's called europeansafetyobservatoty.eu and offers several reports on, well...European safety :) In one of them I found the general numbers I was looking for: The average homicide rate for the USA is 5.5 per 100.000 while in Europe it is 1 per 100.000. The researcher links this in part to the ownership rates in handguns. 4% of EU households have a gun, pretty high number I thought...29% of American households have a gun, ridiculously high number!!! But I don't want to rant about guns in America, we got Michael Moore for this - this time I want to concentrate on the European numbers. The reports unfortunately don't include any other mentioning of homicide rates...but, luckily I found those on the website of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, so here it goes: (just as a comparison, the number they give for the US is 5.2). All the numbers are between 0 and 4 (Iceland and Monaco actually have 0, no need to kill if you're rich...or got a nice volcano to distract I guess). But there are a few exceptions: Lithuania 8.6, Latvia 4.4, Estonia 6.3, Ukraine 6.3, Belarus 5.6, Republic of Moldova 5.1 and in undisputed first place Russia with 14.2! (All the numbers are from 2007 or 2008)
Obviously all of these are Eastern European countries but that can not be an explanation as for example Poland has a rate of 1.2, Hungary 1.5 and Slovakia 1.7.
Now as you might have expected Sweden and Norway are among the less homicidal countries (seems they are indeed practically perfect in every way as Mary Poppins would say), but surprisingly they are accompanied by Spain and Slovenia!
All these numbers are fascinating and I have no idea how to explain them but I promise I will do some further research on this. Also I thought I could try to find out some numbers concerning suicides...watch out for my next post, as I will continue writing about my favourite topic ;)
Obviously all of these are Eastern European countries but that can not be an explanation as for example Poland has a rate of 1.2, Hungary 1.5 and Slovakia 1.7.
Now as you might have expected Sweden and Norway are among the less homicidal countries (seems they are indeed practically perfect in every way as Mary Poppins would say), but surprisingly they are accompanied by Spain and Slovenia!
All these numbers are fascinating and I have no idea how to explain them but I promise I will do some further research on this. Also I thought I could try to find out some numbers concerning suicides...watch out for my next post, as I will continue writing about my favourite topic ;)
Saturday, April 10, 2010
More about dead people
soooo...Bremen has two more dead people! In the last couple of days two bodies were found. On April 1st a body was found near a train station, apparently run over by a train. Police doesn't know yet but probably it was a homeless guy...definitely no murder though. The second case is more interesting/gruesome: a farmer found a pretty decomposed body near a lake...the police thinks the person has been there for about half a year already but only came out in the open recently after all the snow we had this winter melted away. And yes, I'm writing person, because it is so decomposed that they can't even tell the sex yet (Bones would have known in a second, isn't there a good forensic anthropologist in this town?).
Maybe we should tell Gunther van Hagens about it - coincidentally his exhibition "Body Worlds" is in town right now...maybe a decomposed body is just what he needs to spice things up a little! He wouldn't even have to work on it, just put it in a glas case and see what happens - that would actually be a great incentive for people to come back every couple of days :) but to be honest, I don't even like this exhibition, it smells horrendously and watching little dead babys with hydrocephaly or other deformities is NOT funny and nobody seriously needs to see that! Not even me...and as you've probably noticed I'm really into this whole dead people business.
And that's why I've got one more for you: Two weeks ago a dead kid was found buried under a marketplace ´right next to the town hall. Only the skeleton was left therefore it is unknown so far if it's a boy or girl, but it's definitely between 7 and 12 years old. It had a necklace with a little pendant with it and...is about 500 years old. Otherwise I would have come up with this case as my cover story of course :) It was found accidentaly during construction work and is now being examined closer to find out more about peoples lives and especially bodies during the Middle Ages. The marketplace used to be a cementary for the poor back then and therefore it is no surprise that it turned up. I just hope this won't encourage people to go dig the whole place up at night...as they will only find poor people there it doesn't sound like a promising thing to do though, unless they are not looking for jewelry but the bodies itself - don't tell van Hagens about it ;)
I'll be back as soon as a new body turns up ;)
Maybe we should tell Gunther van Hagens about it - coincidentally his exhibition "Body Worlds" is in town right now...maybe a decomposed body is just what he needs to spice things up a little! He wouldn't even have to work on it, just put it in a glas case and see what happens - that would actually be a great incentive for people to come back every couple of days :) but to be honest, I don't even like this exhibition, it smells horrendously and watching little dead babys with hydrocephaly or other deformities is NOT funny and nobody seriously needs to see that! Not even me...and as you've probably noticed I'm really into this whole dead people business.
And that's why I've got one more for you: Two weeks ago a dead kid was found buried under a marketplace ´right next to the town hall. Only the skeleton was left therefore it is unknown so far if it's a boy or girl, but it's definitely between 7 and 12 years old. It had a necklace with a little pendant with it and...is about 500 years old. Otherwise I would have come up with this case as my cover story of course :) It was found accidentaly during construction work and is now being examined closer to find out more about peoples lives and especially bodies during the Middle Ages. The marketplace used to be a cementary for the poor back then and therefore it is no surprise that it turned up. I just hope this won't encourage people to go dig the whole place up at night...as they will only find poor people there it doesn't sound like a promising thing to do though, unless they are not looking for jewelry but the bodies itself - don't tell van Hagens about it ;)
I'll be back as soon as a new body turns up ;)
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Some thoughts on murder
So...six murders in Bremen since December, five of them women, that sounds like a lot right? After all, I like to see Bremen as a big city but I guess I have to admit that with only about 500.000 inhabitants - it's not. It actually made me think about criminal statistics: is Bremen really that dangerous or does it just sound so? If we keep on murdering like this through the rest of the year we'll land at about 20 murders. That means a total of 4 murders per 100.000 people (apparently that's the figure they like to break it down to to compare crime rates of cities with a different population). So I checked out wikipedia to see what that actually means. Well, New York has 6.3 murders per 100.000 people which makes it only slightly more dangerous than Bremen (is that something to be proud of? I don't know...). Other big American cities murder rates: Los Angeles 10.0, Chicago 18.0, Philadelphia 23.0...are you starting to get scared?
But these are really big cities that possibly attract more scum than tiny Bremen so we should probably compare it to cities with a similar populations, like...Seattle. It has a murder rate of 4.8 which is one of the lowest in America. Just another reason to love this city! But then there's Washington D.C. with 31.4 - what does that tell us? That a political environment can be a dangerous one...?
Another thing I found interesting about the Bremen murders was which murder weapon was used. In the first case a 21 one year old stabbed a former teacher (cause apparently he loved her and she wasn't interested), then a lunatic stabbed two women (he didn't even know) in broad daylight. Next a guy shot his ex-girlfriend. And finally Tuesday night a woman was found dead in her apartment and (not connected) a young guy was found dead at his work place, a car dealer. For both cases there is no information about the weapon to be found but it is said they both had serious injuries...doesn't sound like a gun to me, more likely like they were stabbed...again! Bremer murderers like their knives...well, I guess it's just the fact that not that many people own guns here. Which, in the end, might be the reason why we have a relatively low murder rate. With more guns we might be closer to the 63.6 murders per 100.000 people in New Orleans (by far the highest in America in 2008, the aftermath of hurricane Katrina might add on to the numbers though). But that a city full of guns can still be a nice place to live is shown by the example of Lincoln, Nebraska with only 1.6 murders...but who whants to live there??? Let's just all move to the second place in this list - Honululu (imagine someone asking you "Why did you movehere? - oh you know, mainly because of the low murder rate...and the weather wasn't too bad either."
hm, after writing all this murderous stuff I am really looking forward to the new Bones episode tonight, maybe potential murderers from Bremen should watch it too, to get some ideas about more interesting murder weapons than knives...
But these are really big cities that possibly attract more scum than tiny Bremen so we should probably compare it to cities with a similar populations, like...Seattle. It has a murder rate of 4.8 which is one of the lowest in America. Just another reason to love this city! But then there's Washington D.C. with 31.4 - what does that tell us? That a political environment can be a dangerous one...?
Another thing I found interesting about the Bremen murders was which murder weapon was used. In the first case a 21 one year old stabbed a former teacher (cause apparently he loved her and she wasn't interested), then a lunatic stabbed two women (he didn't even know) in broad daylight. Next a guy shot his ex-girlfriend. And finally Tuesday night a woman was found dead in her apartment and (not connected) a young guy was found dead at his work place, a car dealer. For both cases there is no information about the weapon to be found but it is said they both had serious injuries...doesn't sound like a gun to me, more likely like they were stabbed...again! Bremer murderers like their knives...well, I guess it's just the fact that not that many people own guns here. Which, in the end, might be the reason why we have a relatively low murder rate. With more guns we might be closer to the 63.6 murders per 100.000 people in New Orleans (by far the highest in America in 2008, the aftermath of hurricane Katrina might add on to the numbers though). But that a city full of guns can still be a nice place to live is shown by the example of Lincoln, Nebraska with only 1.6 murders...but who whants to live there??? Let's just all move to the second place in this list - Honululu (imagine someone asking you "Why did you movehere? - oh you know, mainly because of the low murder rate...and the weather wasn't too bad either."
hm, after writing all this murderous stuff I am really looking forward to the new Bones episode tonight, maybe potential murderers from Bremen should watch it too, to get some ideas about more interesting murder weapons than knives...
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