rpannier
rpannier's Journal'I am really shy': introducing Phoenix, the world's first hijab-wearing champion wrestler
Nor Diana can remember vividly the first time she stepped out to make her wrestling debut. Outside the ropes she had always been a quiet and studious hijab-wearing Malaysian woman, but here in the ring, dressed in black leather embossed with flames and as the crowd roared, she suddenly felt like a fire burst from inside her: here she was Phoenix.
Nor, who last month won Malaysia’s biggest wrestling tournament – defeating four men for the title – cuts an unlikely figure for a pro wrestler. A 19-year-old who is just 152cm (5ft) tall and weighs 43kg (94lbs), she speaks softly as she sits in her training centre in the town of Puchong, close to Kuala Lumpur, dressed in her hijab, wide glasses and floral baju kurung, traditional Malaysian dress.
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Indeed, over the past four years Phoenix has steadily grown to be one of the biggest names in Malaysian pro-wrestling, defying stigmas and the expectations often placed on Muslim women in Malaysian society and bringing in a whole new female crowd to the male-dominated sport. “The response has been amazing,” says Nor. “Last year, we had all-female wrestling tryouts and no one turned up. But this week we had tryouts and three hijabi girls came to the training.”
link
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/07/i-am-really-shy-introducing-phoenix-the-worlds-first-hijab-wearing-champion-wrestler
Tsunami Pool at Chinese water park lives up to name, injures dozens with bone-breaking giant wave
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Like a lot of similar facilities, Yulong Shuiyun Water Amusement Park has a wave pool. The park seems particularly proud of the intensity of its attraction, gong so far as to call it the “Tsunami Pool.” Unfortunately, last Monday that turned out to not really be much of an exaggeration, as this video, shot inside the park, shows.
After sending a series of normal-sized waves swimmers’ way, suddenly a much larger mass of water swells. Several times higher than the heads of the people in the pool, the giant wave doesn’t give them a playful push, but slams into them simultaneously from the front and above, carrying the first row of swimmers crashing into the people behind them. People further back can be seen struggling to get out of the way of the advancing mix of water, bodies, and flat rings, but you can only run so fast in water, and it’s only the guests at the far end of the pool, opposite where the wave formed, who aren’t caught in the mess.
In total, 44 guests were injured, including three who suffered broken ribs or legs.
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The Longjiang city government has denied early rumors that operator error was to blame, and is instead saying that its initial findings show that a power cut damaged the Tsunami Pool’s electronic equipment and caused a malfunction, though it’s not currently clear how a loss of power had the end result of making the machine-produced waves larger than intended.
https://soranews24.com/2019/08/02/tsunami-pool-at-chinese-water-park-lives-up-to-name-injures-dozens-with-bone-breaking-giant-wave/
Communist Berlin: Then And Now (pic heavy)
To mark 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we revisited the precise locations of 14 memorable photos taken when half of the city lay behind the Iron Curtain.
The pictures here are some of the older structures. You must go to the site to see what East Berlin looks like today
The Reichstag in 1962, as seen from behind a ragged barbed-wire fence that would become the Berlin Wall. Before the barrier’s construction in 1961, some 3.5 million people -- 20 percent of the population of Soviet-administered East Germany -- had fled West. // Photo: Fortepan/Gyula Nagy
A woman poses in the center of East Berlin in 1974. From 1949 until 1990, the eastern half of Berlin was ruled by a communist government that was overseen by Moscow. // Photo: Fortepan/Chuckyeager Tumblr
A postal worker on Karl-Marx-Allee in 1961. Public postboxes like this were a favorite stalking ground for the communist secret police, who furtively shot photographs at such sites to help them track who posted what, and to whom. // Photo: Fortepan/Gyula Nagy
The Brandenburg Gate is shrouded in fog as a man looks over the newly erected Berlin Wall to the eastern part of the divided city in November 1961. // Photo: AP/Heinrich Sanden Sr.
A gun-toting communist “combat group” seals off a boundary between East and West Berlin in preparation for the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. // Photo: Creative Commons/Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive) Peter Heinz Junge
***I thought the guy next to last on the right in the sun glasses looks like Al Bundy
The view from Berlin’s television tower, looking east up Karl-Marx-Allee in 1970. The area was almost completely rebuilt in the Stalinist architectural style after being pummeled into rubble by Allied bombing during World War II. // Photo: Fortepan/Gyula Nagy
A group of rain-specked tourists poses next to the beginnings of the Berlin Wall, a few meters east of the Reichstag, in 1962. The historic building, which housed the German parliament from 1894 to 1933, lay in ruins after World War II and was in the process of being rebuilt when this photo was taken. The Bundestag, the federal parliament of a unified Germany, has met there since April 1999, the year that reconstruction – carried out by British architect Norman Foster -- was finally completed. It’s now one of Germany’s most popular tourist attractions. // Photo: Fortepan/Gyula Nagy
https://www.rferl.org/a/communist-berlin-then-and-now-slider-gallery/30075023.html
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