Stress Can Be a Good Thing If You Know How to Use It | How Your Family Tree Could Catch a Killer | Sweden is suffering a grim wave of gang violence | How a Disaster Expert Prepares for the Worst

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� � � � � � Stress Can Be a Good Thing If You Know How to Use It - Harvard Business Review    With all the media and medical attention on stress and its negative health impacts, it is easy to reach the conclusion that stress is irredeemably bad—something to be avoided as much as possible. Continued here � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium How Your Family Tree Could Catch a Killer - The New Yorker    On Thanksgiving morning, 1987, Rick Bart, a homicide detective in Snohomish County, Washington, got word that a pheasant hunter had discovered a body in a field beneath High Bridge, an overpass spanning the Snoqualmie River. Bart was preparing to spend the day with his family, but he went anyway. He was one of only two homicide detectives in Snohomish—a jurisdiction, just north of Seattle, that covers more than two thousand square miles. He was familiar with the crime scene. It was near the Monroe Honor Farm, where inmates milked cows to provide dairy to the state prison system. The bridge was secluded enough to be private, but accessible by a country road. Teen-agers drank there. When Bart arrived, morning fog was clinging to trees along the riverbank. The body was partially shrouded by a blue blanket. Lifting it revealed signs of a brutal death. The man’s head had been struck with a rock. A clump of hair, ripped from his scalp, was in the grass. A ligature, made from plastic twine and two red dog chokers, was around his neck. An autopsy later revealed that he had been gagged with a tissue and a pack of Camel Lights. “We had no I.D.—didn’t know who he was,” Bart recalled. “We didn’t know when he was put there, at all. There was nothing.” Continued here � � � � � � Sweden is suffering a grim wave of gang violence - The Economist    ON OCTOBER 15TH thousands of followers of 5iftyy, a Swedish rapper, tuned into his Instagram channel for what he said would be an important livestream. They found themselves watching a bearded man brandish a gold-plated AK-47 while hurling insults at rival gang members, backed by three rifle-toting thugs in balaclavas. The man with the golden gun was Mustafa “Benzema” Aljiburi, a leading member of a Swedish narcotics network known as Foxtrot. Mr Aljiburi is believed to be living in Iraq. He staged the appearance to dispel rumours of his death and to threaten various enemies, including a Swedish prosecutor. The livestream looked ridiculous, but the threats were serious. For years Sweden has suffered from high rates of gang-related violence, but for the past two years it has been relentless. In the first ten months of the year there were 324 shootings in Sweden, 48 of them fatal. The rate of gun crime is several times higher than that in neighbouring countries. Gangs have taken to attacking the homes of rivals with hand grenades and dynamite; there have been 139 explosions this year. The government is frantically toughening laws and raising its law-enforcement budget, but it is behind the curve. “We should have seen this coming and taken these measures at least ten years ago,” says Daniel Bergstrom, an adviser to Sweden’s justice minister. The current wave of violence is largely driven by feuds involving Foxtrot. The gang draws its name from its leader, Rawa Majid, a 37-year-old Kurdish Swede. (“Rawa” sounds like räv, Swedish for fox.) Mr Majid immigrated from Iraq with his mother as a child and grew up in Uppsala, a city about 70km north of Stockholm. Over the past few years, police say, he has turned Foxtrot into the country’s biggest distributor of illegal narcotics, co-opting competitors or seizing their territory. He now directs these efforts from Turkey, where he moved after completing a prison stint on drug charges in Sweden in 2018. Continued here � � � � � � How a Disaster Expert Prepares for the Worst - The New Yorker    In another time, or another place, Lucy Easthope says, she would have been a fortune-teller—a woman of opaque origin and beliefs, who travelled from campfire to town square, speaking of calamities that had come to pass and those which hung in the stars. Easthope, who is forty-four, is one of Britain’s most experienced disaster advisers. She has worked on almost every major emergency involving the deaths of British citizens since the September 11th attacks, a catalogue of destruction and surprise that includes storms, suicide bombings, air crashes, and chemical attacks. Depending on the assignment, Easthope might find herself immersed at a scene for days, months, or years. “I am the collector of a very specific type of story and the keeper of a very particular type of secret sorrow,” she has written. Easthope is not how you might picture an emergency responder. She does not drive, and has trouble telling left from right. She wears floral dresses and cardigans and suffers from arthritis in her ankles and hips. Her job is to anatomize the pain of a catastrophe and then—through rehearsals, policy pamphlets, heavily appendixed emergency-planning documents, and the force of her personality—attempt to reduce the agony of the next. She normally fails. “You won’t get it right,” she told me recently. “You will always have an imperfect response.” Even on a good day (which in Easthope’s world is usually a terrible day), a modification that she has argued for—the phrasing of an emergency text, decent showers at a rescue shelter—is likely to go unnoticed by survivors and responders alike. “The value of me is often only perhaps realized later, or not at all,” Easthope said. Her greatest fear is forgetting: that the chain of learning from disasters, fragile and error-prone as it is, breaks one day. Because then there is only despair. She describes herself as a noisy rememberer. In the late spring of 2017, Easthope was the lead trainer for mass-fatality events at Britain’s Emergency Planning College, a government facility that started out, in the nineteen-thirties, as an anti-gas-attack training school. She was increasingly worried about the United Kingdom’s ability to cope with a large disaster. Since 2010, as part of a broad program of spending cuts, Conservative-led governments had reduced funding for the country’s civil-contingency plans, particularly at the local level. Training and research had become more sporadic. The college had been outsourced to a private contractor. Delivering her courses, Easthope found less room for discussion and dissent. “The college was only allowed to teach doctrine,” she said. “You couldn’t problematize.” The U.K.’s official mass-fatality guidance documents, which she worked from, were eleven years old. Continued here

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