"The Public needs to read the full Mueller Report"!

ATTORNEY-GENERAL’S ‘SUMMARY’ IS MEANINGLESS . . . 

by Selvam Canagaratna-March 30, 2019, 5:16 pm

"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time"
– James Thurber, The Owl Who Was God, 1945.

William Rivers Pitt's opening observation said it all: "From the moment the Mueller investigation began to the moment Attorney General William Barr released his ‘summary’ of Mueller’s labours, Donald Trump acted like the guiltiest man on Earth."

"Trump’s efforts to obstruct the inquiry were egregious, vocal and constant," wrote Pitt, "his denials facile and unconvincing in their serial repetitions. His now-notorious Twitter eruption the weekend before the report’s conclusion was every inch the child frantically deflecting blame after pushing his sister down the stairs."

The announced completion of Robert Mueller’s investigation on Friday launched a 48-hour period of media mayhem, said Pitt. "Those expecting a detailed impeachment map to be immediately revealed endured a number of existential crises after exposing themselves to the television coverage, and no answers were forthcoming until the Attorney General William Barr released his ‘review᾿ on Sunday afternoon."

The third week in January of this year provided a perfect example of the phenomenon when it was revealed that Trump made a habit of confiscating the translators᾿ notes after every meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin before swearing the translators to absolute secrecy. "This was unprecedented behaviour with potentially staggering implications, and never mind the hypocrisy; had Barack Obama done something similar during his tenure, the outrage on the right would have been visible from space. With Trump, however, it was business as usual."

To the astonished horror of millions, Attorney General Barr’s very short "summary" announced that Mueller had found no evidence of collusion between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and agents of the Russian government. Barr further announced that the report contained no actionable evidence to support charges of obstruction of justice against the President, and that no new indictments would be forthcoming from Mueller’s end.

Noted Pitt: "Only one scant sentence out of Barr’s entire four-page letter – "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him" – serves to correctly note that Mueller did not exonerate Trump from wrongdoing. More ominously, Mueller’s office refused to endorse the conclusions reached in Barr’s letter. Perhaps they are playing it with their usual caution, but such an endorsement would have ended the discussion with a resounding thud."

Pitt recalled that William Barr’s first star turn as Attorney General came when he helped George H.W. Bush and his people get away with literal murder in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal. "Before re-taking the post under Trump, Barr wrote a detailed letter explaining how it is legally impossible for a sitting (Republican) President to obstruct justice, and even if they did, they cannot be prosecuted for it while in office. His treatise went a long way toward putting his name at the top of the nomination list after Trump fed Jeff Sessions to the wolves for the crime of doing the right thing by recusing himself from the Russia investigation.

Pitt quoted Trump as telling Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo late last week: "It’s always interesting to me because a deputy, that didn’t get any votes, appoints a man that didn’t get any votes, and he’s going to write a report on me", then pointedly noted: "It does beg the question: How many votes did William Barr get? From where does the media’s absolute faith in the judgment of a lifelong partisan like Barr derive?"

"Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population," wrote Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi, "a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. There will be people protesting: the Mueller report doesn’t prove anything! What about the 37 indictments? The convictions? The Trump tower revelations? The lies! The meeting with Don, Jr.? The financial matters! There’s an ongoing grand jury investigation, and possible sealed indictments, and the House will still investigate, and . . . Stop. Just stop. Any journalist who goes there is making it worse."

"Much respect to Matt – I’m a definite fan – but this journalist is going there, because something reeks. If the moment arrives when crow must be eaten, I will devour my fair portion because it is the writer’s lot to say so when they have been wrong at the top of their lungs. We are not there yet, and Taibbi himself accidently explained why. "There will be people protesting," he wrote. "The Mueller report doesn’t prove anything!" Here’s the problem: We are not talking about the Mueller report. We don’t know what’s in the Mueller report. All we have to go on is the word of William Barr, and speaking personally, that simply isn’t good enough.

"Are we expected to believe that Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone and all the others who were indicted or prosecuted have endured all that in the name of a presidential crime that was never committed? All publicly available evidence flatly states that collusion between Trump’s people and Russian agents was obvious and ongoing throughout the campaign. Those interactions appear to have not risen to the level of "conspiracy," but again, we have only William Barr’s word on that.

"Trump’s allies are positively giddy now that Barr has weighed in and the media has chosen to accept his judgment on its face. Born-again Trump loyalist Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) ran wild at Mar-a-Lago on Friday night after the report came down with no indictments of Trump or his family. Pouring sweat in the pre-summer Florida heat, Graham raised the rafters as he (maybe) joked about Trump’s intention to build a hotel in Jerusalem and put former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-South Carolina) on the Supreme Court, presumably after Justice Ginsburg fulfills a million ghoulish dreams and passes away.

"It’s going to be like that for a while and there’s little to be done about it, for now. Donald Trump isn’t acting like a man who has been vindicated. He’s acting like a man who got away with something and can’t quite believe his own good fortune. His pleasure may not last long; despite the short shrift paid to the other ongoing investigations into Trump’s dealings by Taibbi and other doubters, the fact remains that this story is far from over."

Pitt reminded those readers inclined to forget Trump’s ongoing criminality to keep in mind that:

* Roger Stone is set for trial in November;

* The Southern District of New York investigations into Trump’s payments of hush money via Michael Cohen is ongoing;

* Multiple state and federal officials are investigating the collection of a record $107 million by Trump’s Inaugural Committee;

* The New York Department of Financial Services is investigating whether Trump illegally inflated his net worth to insurance companies per Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony;

* The New York Attorney General is investigating Trump’s questionable dealings with Deutsche Bank;

* The Trump Foundation is under investigation for what that Attorney General has called a "shocking pattern of illegality";

* The New York State tax department is investigating Trump’s decades-long tax schemes;

* Federal and state investigators are looking into Trump’s hiring of undocumented workers;

"…and on top of all this are the ongoing investigations by the House Intelligence Committee, the Judiciary Committee, the Oversight Committee, the Financial Services Committee, the Ways and Means Committee, and the Foreign Affairs Committee. As maddening as all the noise may be right now, the fact remains that Trump and his pack of lickspittles are doing their touchdown dance while a large chunk of time remains on the clock."

Trump aides repeat threat to shut down U.S.-Mexico border on migrant crisis

FILE PHOTO: A person looks through the border wall towards the United States at Border Field State Park in San Diego, California, U.S. November 20, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo

Humeyra Pamuk-MARCH 31, 2019

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration on Sunday doubled down on its threat to shut down the southern border with Mexico, a day after it cut aid to Central American countries which President Donald Trump accused of deliberately sending migrants to the United States.

Faced with a surge of asylum seekers from Central American countries who travel through Mexico, Trump said on Friday there was a "good likelihood" he would close the border this coming week if Mexico does not stop unauthorized immigrants from reaching the United States. (Graphic: tmsnrt.rs/2V59n2R)

He also accused, without providing evidence, the nations of having “set up” migrant caravans and sending them north.

Speaking to ABC’s “This Week” show, White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said the president had few other options in the absence of any support from Democrats for more border security or legislative action to change the immigration law.

“Faced with those limitations, the president will do everything he can. If closing the ports of entry means that, that’s exactly what he intends to do,” Mulvaney said. “We need border security and we’re going to do the best we can with what we have,” he added.

White House adviser Kellyanne Conway told “Fox News Sunday” that the situation at the border was at “melting point” and said the president was serious in his threat. “It certainly is not a bluff. You can take the president seriously.”

Neither Trump aide offered any specific details or timeline for the potential border shutdown.
At a Saturday rally on the border in El Paso, Texas, Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke denounced Trump’s immigration policies as the politics of “fear and division.”

Trump has repeatedly said he would close the U.S. border with Mexico during his two years in office. His latest threat had workers and students who frequently cross the border worried about the potential disruption to their lives.

The government says it is struggling to deal with a surge in recent days of asylum seekers from countries in Central America who travel through Mexico and on Saturday cut aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

March is on track for 100,000 border apprehensions, Department of Homeland Security officials said, which would be the highest monthly number in more than a decade. Most of those people can remain in the United States while their asylum claims are processed, which can take years because of ballooning immigration court backlogs.

Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Additional reporting by Howard Schneider; editing by Michelle Price and Lisa Shumaker

Fossils show worldwide catastrophe on the day the dinosaurs died

A tangled mass of fish from the deposit in North Dakota's Hell Creek formation. (Robert DePalma)

By Ben Guarino-March 29

 

Sixty-six million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into a shallow sea near Mexico. The impact carved out a 90-mile-wide crater and flung mountains of earth into space. Earthbound debris fell to the planet in droplets of molten rock and glass.

Ancient fish caught glass blobs in their gills as they swam, gape-mouthed, beneath the strange rain. Large, sloshing waves threw animals onto dry land, then more waves buried them in silt. Scientists working in North Dakota recently dug up fossils of these fish: They died within the first minutes or hours after the asteroid hit, according to a paper published Friday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a discovery that has sparked tremendous excitement among paleontologists.

“You’re going back to the day that the dinosaurs died,” said Timothy Bralower, a Pennsylvania State University paleoceanographer who is studying the impact crater and was not involved with this work. “That’s what this is. This is the day the dinosaurs died.”

About 3 in 4 species perished in what is called the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, also known as the K-Pg event or K-T extinction. The killer asteroid most famously claimed the dinosaurs. But the T. rex and the triceratops were joined by hordes of other living things. Freshwater and marine creatures were victims, as were plants and microorganisms, including 93 percent of plankton. (A lone branch of dinosaurs, the birds, lives on.)

Four decades of research buttresses the asteroid extinction theory, widely embraced as the most plausible explanation for the disappearance of dinosaurs. In the late 1970s, Luis and Walter Alvarez, a father-son scientist duo at the University of California at Berkeley, examined an unusual geologic layer between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods. The boundary was full of the element iridium, which is rare in Earth’s crust but not in asteroids. Walter Alvarez is one of the authors of the new study.

The Hell Creek fossils represent “the first mass death assemblage of large organisms anyone has found” that sits at the K-Pg boundary, study author Robert DePalma said in a statement.

DePalma, a doctoral student at the University of Kansas, began excavating the site at North Dakota’s Hell Creek formation in 2013. Since then, DePalma and other paleontologists have found heaps of fossilized sturgeon and paddlefish with glass spheres still in their gills.

They found squidlike animals called ammonites, shark teeth and the remains of predatory aquatic lizards called mosasaurs. They found dead mammals, insects, trees and a triceratops. They found foot-long fossil feathers, dinosaur tracks and prehistoric mammal burrows. They found fossilized tree gunk called amber that had captured the glass spheres, too.

The site has “all the trademark signals from the Chicxulub impact,” Bralower said, including the glass beads and lots of iridium. In the geologic layer just above the fossil deposit, ferns dominate, the signs of a recovering ecosystem. “It’s spellbinding,” he said.

In the early 1990s, researchers found the scar left by the asteroid — a crater in the Yucatan Peninsula. 

The impact was named after the nearby Mexican town of Chicxulub. Suggested “kill mechanisms” for the Chicxulub impact abound: It may have poisoned the planet with heavy metals, turned the ocean to acid, shrouded Earth in darkness or ignited global firestorms. Its punch may have triggered volcanoes that spewed like shaken soda cans.

Hell Creek is more than 2,000 miles from the Chicxulub crater. But a hail of glass beads, called tektites, rained there within 15 minutes of the impact, said study author Jan Smit, a paleontologist at Vrije University in Amsterdam who also was an early discoverer of iridium at the K-Pg boundary.

The fish, pressed in the mud like flowers in a diary, are remarkably well-preserved. “It’s the equivalent of finding people in life positions buried by ash after Pompeii,” Bralower said.

At the time of the dinosaurs, the Hell Creek site was a river valley. The river fed into an inland sea that connected the Arctic Ocean to a prehistoric Gulf of Mexico. After the asteroid struck, seismic waves from a magnitude 10 to 11 earthquake rippled through this sea, according to the study authors.

This caused not a tsunami but what’s known as seiche waves, the back-and-forth sloshes sometimes seen in miniature in a bathtub. These can be symptoms of very distant tremors — such as the seiche waves that churned in Norwegian fjords in 2011 after the giant Tohoku earthquake near Japan.

Seiche waves from the inland sea reached 30 feet, drowning the river valley in a pulse of water, 

gravel and sand. The rain of rocks and glass followed. The tektites dug “small funnels in the sediment laid down by the seiche,” Smit said, “so you know for sure they are coming down when the waves are still running upriver.” This is preservation, in other words, of a fresh hell.

‘Every rock has a story’: Advice from the man who keeps finding dinosaur fossils

 

Ray Stanford, 79, is a self-taught paleontologist who has single-handedly changed the fossil hunting game in the D.C., Maryland and Virginia metro areas. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)

When primordial identity turns predatory

When primordial instinct turns predatory

Saturday, 30 March 2019 

The carnage in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed almost 50 worshipping Muslims inside two mosques was not the first crime of Muslim hatred in history and will not be the last. The unassailable stand that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern took in support of social and religious pluralism in New Zealand and globally, and the frankness with which she expressed her disgust and horror at the murderer and his poisonous ideology while demonstrating in multiple ways her sympathy with and attachment to the victims, is unique in the prevailing climate of Islamophobia in which politicians of all persuasions with an eye on the ballot box (especially in Western democracies), are soft peddling with this monster. Jacinda Ardern stands toweringly tall among them.

The assailant who committed that heinous crime trumpeted that he was a ‘white supremacist’ who, with his co-supremacists, a tiny minority no doubt, wanted this world cleansed of Islam and Muslims. In the eyes of these supremacists, their target represents evil. What is evident from the Christchurch episode, as it was from a similar episode in 2011 in Norway, is the transformation of the primordial identity of Western nations into predatory identity with an anti-Islam expression.

Primordial identity is defined as the ‘unique traditions and culture’ of a society, and predatory identity as the ‘chauvinistic, aggressive and militaristic expressions, often targeting societies that differ from them, in ethnic or religious terms’. (Akbar S. Ahmed, ‘Journey into Europe: Islam, Immigration and Identity’, Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2018, p. 20).

When the Western primordial identity exhibits an anti-Islam expression that identity is transformed into a predatory identity. That transformation did not take place as long as the West was able to subjugate the world of Islam and Muslims, and impose its will upon their polity, economy and even culture. Edward Said in his pioneering study of ‘Orientalism’ has shown how this subjugation was achieved. Once that grip over the world of Islam started slipping away, due to reasons explained below, the transformation from primordial to predatory identity became unavoidable and even respectable. Islamophobia with its associated violence is the sad reflection of that transformation. How did this transformation take place?

Western imperium 

Even after decolonisation of Muslim lands, Western imperium did not lose control over the Muslim world. When Cold War began Islam was used instrumentally by the US superpower to checkmate Godless Communism. Even Arab socialism espoused by charismatic Nasser and few of his Arab contemporaries could not loosen the imperium’s grip over the Muslim world. With the overthrow of the Shah by the Khomeini inspired revolution and subsequent expulsion of all Americans from Iran, the imperium’s hold over the Muslim world started loosening. Yet, more than the Iranian Revolution it was Al-Qaeda’s attack on the United States in 2001 that really shattered the imperium’s confidence.

That was not an attack just to register the attacker’s hatred of democracy and freedom, as President George Bush berated before launching his anti-terrorism ‘Crusade’ (a term he was advised to withdraw almost immediately in fear of rekindling the medieval Christian animosity towards Islam), but an attack that signified not only the changing dynamics of centre-periphery relations under post-colonialism, as Salman Sayyid argues (‘A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentricism and the Emergence of Islamism’, London: Zed Books, 2015 edition) but also, and more importantly, the re-emergence of an enemy that Western imperium thought to have defeated and kept under subjugation until very recently. Al-Qaeda challenged the very foundation of the Westphalian based world order.

Attack by a state and non-state actor: US response was the same

60 years before Al-Qaeda’s attack, Japan did the same on Pearl Harbour in 1941. The difference between the two was that the first was launched by a state while the second by an elusive non-state actor. Yet, the response from US was the same. In retaliation, US bombed Japan with atomic weapons, annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and forced its government to surrender to the will and might of West’s imperium. In the same manner in 2001, US and its allies mistook Al-Qaeda for a state or state-based entity and bombed, destroyed, invaded and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, states that were not the home of that elusive enemy. Al-Qaeda escaped from their net, refused to surrender, set an example to other non-state Muslim actors and even tutored them the techniques of how to confront a states-centric imperium with transnational Islamism.

A supercilious US, confident of its military might thundered that there was no place anywhere in the world for the enemy to hide, and with support from its allies, escalated the War on Terrorism, causing death and devastation in a number of Muslim countries, beside Iraq and Afghanistan. Deaths and devastation destabilised, dislocated and destroyed several Muslim nations such as Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Nigeria, Palestine and Lebanon. Thousands died and millions were impoverished and became homeless. While Muslims perished and their economies shattered, the War on Terror cost Western economies trillions of dollars that otherwise could have been spent to benefit their own citizens. According to one estimate, US alone spent $ 1.6 trillion in the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. What a colossal waste!

Double jeopardy

The only way out for the war victims was to migrate to places where they could at least sleep at nights without falling victim to a bomb. US, Canada, the UK, EU countries, Australia and New Zealand became favoured destinations. However, the influx of Muslim refugees with their cultural baggage into Western nations took place at a time when Western economies themselves were facing slowdown in growth.

While Al-Qaeda’s Islamist challenge threatened the Westphalian world order, globalisation brought tremors to the post-World War II economic order. The rise of China followed by India meant that economic power was shifting from the centre to the periphery. The simultaneity in the collapse of a hegemonic West along with its economic superstructure on one side and rise of multiple economic power houses with geopolitical implications on the other spelt double jeopardy to the West’s primordial identity.

The post-World War II generation of ‘baby boomers’ in the West and its Y generation who were fortunate to enjoy a plethora of economic entitlements delivered by a prosperous welfare state, now witnessed those entitlements evaporating in stages by governments that faced repeated budget crises. Economics of Keynesianism that backed the welfare state lost its rationale in the face of stagflation in the late 1970s and 1980s. Governments had no choice but to roll back their interference in income distribution and started transferring that function to the market forces. The result was persistent unemployment and widening income gap. As long as economic growth was robust and affluence was taken for granted, any excess demand for labour in Western factories and farms was satisfied by importing cheap labour from outside. Immigration rules were relaxed and surplus labour from former colonies in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and among them tens of thousands of Muslims flocked to the West with their families. They worked hard and established their own enclaves with all Muslim cultural accoutrement. There was an air of tolerance at that time and the primordial identity of receiving societies rarely felt threatened by this Muslim influx.

A radical shift

That tolerance changed after 2000 when globalisation shifted the economic growth pole outside the West and Islamism threatened the Westphalian order with its own Islamic Order. In addition to these and tough somewhat related to them, two other developments worsened the situation. One was a shift in the theatre(s) of War on Terror from far away Muslim lands to Western cities, and the other was a new wave of Muslim refugees, themselves a product of the War on Terror.

The time was now ripe for politicians of the Far Right to emerge exploiting the twin deterioration in domestic security and economic prosperity. To them Muslim immigration and Islamophobia became vote winning trumps. As the centre right and centre left parties saw their traditional supporters deserting them and moving to the far right they had no choice but to speak the same language although with great subtlety.

‘White Supremacy’ is not something new that came out suddenly. In a sense, it is the product of Orientalism. Similarly Islamophobia occupied European mindset ever since the Battle of Poitiers in 733. They remained subdued under the shade of Western political and economic hegemony. The collapse of that hegemony has enabled the primordial identity to metamorphose into a predatory identity. The Christchurch massacre was its latest manifestation.

In a global economy in which the armament industry is singularly the largest money spinner and contributor to global economic growth no amount of gun control is going to make even a dent on a weaponised economy and culture. Automatic and semi-automatic rifles are not the only devices that lunatics and haters can use to massacre innocents. There are other novelties in the murderous bazaar that they can access to. What the world needs is not gun control but a radical shift in what it produces, how it produces and to whom it produces. In the meantime, if external aggression, internal oppression and economic injustice can cease guns and weapons will automatically fall silent.

(The writer is attached to the School of Business and Governance, Murdoch University, Western Australia.)

The equilibrium of humans and machines in future workplaces

By Tech Wire Asia | 29 March, 2019

FUTURE workplaces will be manned by both humans and machines. That’s a hard fact.
The rise of workplace technology is rapidly repurposing the roles of humans as machines take over repetitive tasks.

Unfortunately, the outlook is usually rather bleak with worries relating to technological unemployment and tasks displaced by machines.

That is the same train of thoughts that ran through news when computers were first introduced to the mass market. Two decades on, it’s hard to imagine a workplace without a computer being our machine counterpart.

Every technological advancement will bring about a recalibration.

What businesses should focus on is the other side of the same coin instead. This means to say, businesses should explore the new opportunities that technologies can create.

All businesses can effectively benefit from the inrush of artificial intelligence (AI) use in operations, processes, and workflows.

Though, the digital transformation will not happen without pressing focus on the equilibrium of humans and machines in future workplaces.

So, technologists should make it a priority in their digital transformation agenda.

The rise of the machines in Asia

Asia is accountable for more than one-third of the world’s economic output.

According to a new report, the economic value AI will bring to Asia alone is north of US$1.8 trillion per annum by 2030.

Evidently, the benefits of technology will outweigh the short-term disruption.

The region is also a welcoming hotbed of AI adoption with strong regulatory backing as well as growing new-age talents.

The business competitive edge of AI is expansive.

Which is all the more why more attention should be put on the human-machine collaboration to ensure a smooth transition.

Not only does the collaboration amplify productivity but it also boosts the bottom line.

For example, Singapore’s DBS Bankuses AI technology to screen through job applicants for its wealth management business.

The financial services firm claimed to save up to 40 man hours per month per recruiter.
As a result, recruiters are able to fine-tune the interview process as well as upskilling existing employees.

Also, Malaysia’s Hong Leong Bank analyzes customers’ emotions with AI. This is to equip customer care personnel with all the right data and information that is specific to each caller.

The human-machine collaboration will repurpose what humans can and will do in line with a business goal. How well a business uses AI and how much more profit AI can bolster are unique to each business model. Whether we like or not, machines will be a part of future workplaces in all forms of technologies.

Though, the key takeaway here is that we must first find the common ground. This is to prepare us for when the coin flips.

How single women are driving gentrification in Hong Kong and elsewhere

The share of households in Hong Kong led by single women has soared in recent decades. Dorason/Shutterstock.com

March 28, 2019 6.41am EDT

Gentrification is reshaping urban areas all around the world, displacing large segments of the population and making cities increasingly unaffordable.

In San Francisco, only 12 percent of households can afford a median priced home, which is over US$1.5 million. In Hong Kong, the world’s most unaffordable city alongside Singapore and Paris, there are currently some 90,000 families living in inadequate housing conditions.

We study urban development and its social, physical and environmental impacts. We recently examined two decades of cultural transitions in Hong Kong with a focus on how the changing status of women and attitudes toward marriage have altered the real estate market.

What we found is that single women in Hong Kong have played a surprising and little-studied role in gentrification.

Marrying later

Women have been marrying later in life around the world for many years. The extent of this trend has varied globally, though, reflecting different levels of cultural change and resulting in different regional economic impacts.

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, East and Southeast Asia, in particular, witnessed a growing number of single men and women. From 1950 to 1990, the number of young single women across Asia – China excluded – increased almost fourfold, from 22 million to 82 million.

One reason this trend has happened outside of China is cultural. If you’re a woman and you’re single on the mainland, it’s viewed negatively. Unmarried women over the age of 27 are called “sheng nu,” or “leftover women.” But in Hong Kong it’s seen in a more positive light. There, they’re known as “xing nu,” or “blooming women.”

This trend has produced a ripple effect throughout the economy, including the property market and local redevelopment, as the increased number of single women – who are also attaining higher-paid jobs – boosts demand for housing.

The number of single women who have never married living in Hong Kong’s Yuen Long neighborhood is increasing at a rate more than six times greater than for single men. Lee Yiu Tung/Shutterstock.com

Gentrifying neighborhoods

We analyzed standardized census data from 1986 to 2006 across all of Hong Kong, with a focus on exploring the impact of women on neighborhoods that were gentrifying. The analysis, which took four years to complete, identified about 34 percent of Hong Kong as experiencing gentrification.

The process of gentrification involves capital reinvestment into neighborhoods that encourages their physical upgrading, along with the displacement of groups of lower incomes who have traditionally occupied these communities.

A telltale sign of gentrification is the shift from rentals to owner-occupied housing. The share of units with owners living in them in these areas climbed from 45.5 percent in 1986 to 64.2 percent two decades later.

During the same time period, the number of people employed in traditional, working-class sectors like manufacturing more than halved, from 177,917 in 1986 to 73,870 in 2006. At the same time, the number of residents employed in finance, insurance, real estate and business services tripled, from 49,276 in 1986 to 150,237 in 2006.

But it is not only the occupational structure that is changing within these neighborhoods. These gentrifying areas have been increasingly dominated by single women.

Single women increased by 53.2 percent over the two decades, compared with a rise of just 15.2 percent among single men. Similarly, the number of divorced and separated women in these neighborhoods rose at twice the pace of divorced and separated men.

As a result, the share of households led by single women, whether never-married or divorced, jumped to 47.1 percent in 2006 from just 25.8 percent two decades earlier.

In Hong Kong, hundreds of thousands live in partitioned apartments called ‘coffin homes.’ AP Photo/Kin Cheung

Global trends

Overall, not only are single women emerging as a growing and critical aspect of Hong Kong’s economy, they are also driving the city’s increasingly unaffordable real estate market.

While our study focused on Hong Kong, we believe there is reason to think the same thing is happening in cities across the world, such as New York, London, Vancouver and Singapore. That’s because these cultural trends – a rising number of single women in high-paying jobs and a delay in tying the knot – have been happening elsewhere for many years.

For example, in the U.S., Pew projects that when today’s young adults reach their mid-40s to mid-50s, a quarter of them will never have married, compared with less than 10 percent a few decades ago. And in Iceland, some 70 percent of children were born to single mothers in 2016, more than double the share in 1970.

This is not to say that we should blame women for gentrification. We believe their growing representation and success in the workforce in Hong Kong and elsewhere is something to be celebrated. And women at the other end of the income spectrum, particularly single mothers, bear the brunt of gentrification.

From moms to medical doctors, burnout is everywhere these days

(Zoë van Dijk for The Washington Post)

 

By Jenny Rough-March 30 at 11:00 AM

 

A common ailment is going around, and you probably know someone plagued by it. Caused in part by social media, the 24-hour news cycle and the pressure to check work email outside of office hours, it could hit you, too — especially if you don’t know how to nip it in the bud.

Burnout is everywhere.

Books are being published about it, high-powered medical groups are raising alarms and ordinary people are feeling it. A recent report from Harvard and Massachusetts medical organizations declared physician burnout a public health crisis. It pointed out the problem not only harms doctors but also patients.

“Burnout is associated with increasing medical errors,” the paper said.

Ninety-five percent of human resource leaders say burnout is sabotaging workplace retention, often because of overly heavy workloads, one survey found. Poor management contributes to the burnout epidemic.

“Organizations typically reward employees who are putting in longer hours and replace workers who aren’t taking on an increased workload, which is a systematic problem that causes burnout in the first place,” says Dan Schawbel, research director of Future Workplace, the firm that conducted the survey along with Kronos.

"Mommy Burnout," a book published last year by psychologist Sheryl Ziegler, resonated with women who had run themselves into the ground trying to be super mom (and dads made it clear they were burned out, too).

A new book, “Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle,” by sisters Emily Nagoski (a health educator) and Amelia Nagoski (a choral conductor who was hospitalized for burnout) aims to help women, in particular, live a more balanced life.

Burnout is a term easily tossed around, the way somebody might claim to be starving when they’re simply hungry, or freezing when cold. That’s harmless if a person is describing a tired day or week.

 But somebody who is actually burned out should be prepared to take serious action because it’s a condition that needs attention.

[How you can battle burnout]

Amelia Nagoski was juggling the demands of a doctoral program when she experienced such severe abdominal pain she was hospitalized. Doctors concluded it was “just stress” and told her to relax. Turns out, she had stress-induced inflammation from burnout.

Ziegler defines burnout as “chronic stress gone awry.” The big three symptoms are emotional exhaustion, cynicism and feeling ineffective, according to the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), a survey designed to measure employee burnout in the workforce. Other symptoms can include frequent colds or sicknesses, insomnia and a tendency to alleviate stress in unhealthy ways, such as with too much alcohol or online shopping.

Part of the difficulty of pinpointing true burnout may be because burnout is a nonmedical term — at least in the United States. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders doesn’t list it as an illness. But other countries including France, Denmark and Sweden, do recognize burnout syndrome and consider it to be a legitimate reason to take a sick day from work.

“Everybody intuitively recognizes what burnout feels like in their bodies and their feelings and their thoughts,” Emily Nagoski says. “It’s like art: You know it when you see it.”

Even without an official diagnosis — or agreed upon definition — American researchers have studied burnout for decades. Psychologist Herbert Freudenberger popularized the term in the 1970s, basing it on his work with drug addicts where he witnessed their veins burn out from needle injections and their cigarettes burn down. Soon after, psychologist Christina Maslach developed the MBI.

Burnout is caused by chronic stress, not stressors, the Nagoskis say in their book. It’s important to differentiate the two. Stressors are external: to-do lists, financial problems or anxiety about the future. Stress, on the other hand, “is the neurological and physiological shift that happens in your body when you encounter [stressors],” the Nagoskis write.

To fix burnout, people need to address the stress itself. They must allow their body to complete its stress response cycle. Instead, people tend to focus on stressors. “They assume their stress will go away if they’re on top of things, if they’re accomplishing things and constantly checking things off their to-do list,” Emily Nagoski says.

That’s a lesson Paula Davis-Laack learned the hard way.

Davis-Laack practiced commercial real estate law before the Great Recession of the late 2000s. The fast-paced environment gave her a constant adrenaline high as she closed deals and kept so busy that she barely left time to grab a handful of peanuts for lunch. Her frequent headaches, stomach aches and colds threatened to drag her down, but no doctor could give her a diagnosis.

One day, drafting a document in her office, she says she felt like she couldn’t breathe. She bolted out of her chair and raced to a nearby health clinic. “Help me!” she gasped. She was having a panic attack. After two more medical crises landed her in the emergency room, she feared a mental or physical collapse if she kept going. She decided to walk away from the law.

“It was like a 50,000-pound weight lifted off my shoulders,” she says.

Still unsure of what was wrong, she poked around the Internet doing research of her own when she came across information on burnout. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is exactly what happened to me!’ ”

Davis-Laack traces the beginning of her burnout back to her teenage years.

“There were a lot of messages to be a high achiever,” she says. “Those check-the-box matrix measurements were important to me. I internalized them.”

The messages took an even stronger hold once she started working.

She returned to graduate school to study well-being, the effects of stress and their effect on the workplace. In 2013, she opened the Davis Laack Stress & Resilience Institute in Wisconsin. She now teaches workshops on burnout.

For those who suspect they might be on the road to burnout, there are practical tools to mitigate it. Among others: physical exercise, sleep and positive social connection (the real kind, not the Facebook kind). The importance of balance and self-care to prevent burnout likely isn’t surprising to most.

“There’s nothing fancy about what it would take to turn things around,” says Ziegler, the “Mommy Burnout” author. “But it’s a huge shift in the cultural mind-set. That’s the challenge.”

Plus, fixing burnout can feel like adding more stressors. An employee who takes a lunch break in a park (time in nature reduces stress) might feel pressured to stay late at the end of the day. A yoga class or walk is another item to squeeze into the calendar. A mom can’t quit her parenting job. To address time-management issues, the Nagoskis provide work sheets in their book to help readers reprioritize activities. Ziegler suggests setting boundaries with social media. Use the Internet for help, such as ordering groceries, but limit scrolling to 10 minutes a day. Also, it’s okay to remove activities from the calendar (or quit them completely) so you can exercise.

Gender might play a role in burnout, too.

Researchers from the University of Montreal questioned 2,026 people, half women, in 63 different workplaces. Their work, published in the Annals of Work Exposure and Health, found that women reported higher levels of burnout.

One reason was because women have more work-and-family conflicts. The women’s rights movement was “supposed to give women choices,” Ziegler says. “Sounds awesome, but it became you need to do it all. You need to run your house and be the perfect wife and mom and work. The stress on women got higher.”

Other studies have shown that rates of burnout are more or less equal among genders, although males and females experience it differently. A study published in BMC Public Health showed that female physicians are susceptible to burnout from emotional exhaustion while male physicians to burnout because of cynicism.

Steven Manning remembers the night he realized he had become pessimistic about practicing medicine. One Wednesday at his family care practice in Williamston, N.C., he worked on electronic medical records well past 9 p.m. His wife and kids waited for him at home. He had seen about 30 patients that day but felt he hadn’t given a single one the highest level of care because the appointment times were too short. Yet the hospital and insurance companies kept pressuring him to see more patients a day, not fewer.

“I began to think, ‘I’m burned out. How did I get to this point? I don’t enjoy coming into work.’ ” It wasn’t too late to make a change. Within a year, Manning started a direct primary care practice, a model where patients pay a membership fee, negating the need for insurance billing. Without mounds of paperwork, he had time to do what he truly wanted: help patients.

“It brought back the joy of medicine I felt I was missing,” he says. “Before, I barely had time to address my patients’ diabetes, hypertension and heart failure, let alone spend time taking a mental and spiritual inventory.”

Now, he talks with patients about depression, anxiety and stress and notices many patients are burned out, especially mothers of young kids.

Lawyer and mom Anna Swain knows the feeling.

She poured her heart and soul into fixing the troubled lives of criminals who had messed up with drugs and violence only to wind up devastated when her hard work seemed pointless.

“I’d call my mom every day on my way home from the office crying,” she says. “I was either sad over a client who was having her third meth-addicted baby or crying over a shockingly rude email by opposing counsel.” When she added motherhood to the mix, her feelings of failure increased. “I didn’t know what I was doing. Nobody does with a first child.”

Burned out on “doing the next thing I was supposed to do to be a good girl and get ahead,” she knew she needed downtime, but she was afraid to take a step back from the hamster wheel. “Boredom goes against everything we’re told to do to succeed, achieve and be proactive,” Swain says. “Even when I clean the house, I think, ‘Well, I should take the opportunity to listen to a podcast. Maybe I can grow as a person.’ Honestly, I’d grow more if I chose to be in silence and let my mind wander.”

She tried it. Rocking her baby to sleep, she wanted to watch the TV series “Game of Thrones” or scroll through her phone. But she couldn’t. One wrong move — or the glow of a screen — would wake her baby up. At first, Swain felt angry and resentful at the lack of distractions, but the stillness gave her an opportunity to daydream. That opened the door to creativity.

“I started creating little poems and rhymes in my head. I felt exhilarated,” she says. Eventually, Swain wrote a children’s book. “I felt a sense of purpose again,” she says.

The Nagoskis agree that daydreaming during low-demand tasks, having a creative outlet and engaging with something larger are three more keys to preventing burnout. They suggest writing your own obituary to find out what is meaningful to you.

“It sounds dark,” Amelia Nagoski says. “But it makes you think about who you are and what’s important to you.”

Making space in our lives so we’re not so hurried and harried isn’t easy, especially in a culture that shames slow living, Amelia Nagoski says. Preventing burnout requires hard decisions. Everyone has the same amount of time in a day: 24 hours. To rest — whether with a walk, an extra hour of sleep or a talk with a friend — means something else drops off the schedule.

At first, you might panic that you’re not “accomplishing” something. But before long, you may notice you’ve moved farther away from a breaking point. Your downward spiral will change directions.

New antibiotics could be developed using fish slime, scientists say

Mucus that protects fish contains substances that could help tackle MRSA and E coli

A garibaldi fish near Santa Catalina, California. Researchers swabbed 17 species of fish caught off the southern California coast. Photograph: Michael Greenfelder/Alamy Stock Photo

Nicola Davis @NicolaKSDavis-Sun 31 Mar 2019

Fish slime could be key to the development of new antibiotics, researchers say.

Antibiotic resistance is a growing danger, with experts warning of a return to a situation where everyday infections could become life-threatening. The NHS is aiming to cut antibiotic use by 15% by 2024 in a bid to tackle the problem – which has been called a danger to humanity – while the government has also announced it is looking into offering incentives to drug companies to come up with new antibiotics.

But academics are also on the case. Now researchers say new antibiotics might be found in the layer of mucus that coats the outer surface of young fish.

While the mucus itself helps protect fish from harmful bacteria, fungi and viruses, the team are interested in the collection of microbes it is home to – the so-called microbiome – and the substances it produces.

“We believe the microbes in the mucus add chemistry to the antiseptic power of the mucus and that new bioactive compounds might be discovered from the fish microbiome,” said Dr Sandra Loesgen, the head of the research group behind the work at Oregon State University.

The research, presented at the American Chemical Society spring national meeting in Orlando, Florida, involved the team swabbing 17 species of fish caught off the southern California coast.
In total, 47 different strains of bacteria found in the mucus of the fish were grown separately and the cocktails of substances they produced were collected and tested for their antimicrobial prowess.

The team say a number of the strains produced chemical mixtures that were able to tackle the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, with a smaller proportion able to tackle E coli. Some also proved effective against the problematic yeast Candida albicans, and even colon cancer cells.

While the team say it is not clear whether the bacteria found are part of the typical surface flora of the fish species, they are now working to unpick which particular substances within the chemical mixtures are behind the antimicrobial effects.

“Thus far, we only analysed in detail one strain [found on a pink surfperch] and no novel chemicals have been found,” said Loesgen. But, she added, there are many more strains to go.

Dr Mark Webber, an expert on antibiotic resistance at Quadram Institute Bioscience, said that while the research was in its early stages, it was important to hunt for antibiotics in unusual places.

“Most of our current antibiotics were originally identified from microbes that live in the soil and produce them to kill other, competing bacteria. We now face a critical lack of new antibiotics for use in people so searching for new drugs in other environments is exciting and timely,” he said. “The new drugs found here by bacteria living on fish are only active against some of our main problem pathogens but it may be possible to modify these or find future drugs effective against the most dangerous superbugs.”

Laura Piddock, a professor of microbiology at the University of Birmingham, was also cautiously optimistic.

“Finding antimicrobial substances from any natural environment is helpful in the search for new antibiotics – particularly if they are active against the WHO priority pathogens,” she said. “However, going from the test tube to a safe and efficacious drug in a patient is only the beginning of a lengthy and costly drug development process.”

Annai Poopathy remembered in Batticaloa 31 years on

190327 Annai Poopathy remembrance EA 4.jpg

28 March 2019

Annai Poopathy, who fasted unto death in protest against the atrocities committed by Indian Peace Keeping Forces (IPKF), was remembered yesterday by the Tamil National People's Front (TNPF) in Kurunthaiyadi Munmaari village in Batticaloa. 

As member of the Navatkerny Mother's Front, Poopathy Kanapathipillai from Batticaloa, commenced a fast unto death on March 19, 1988 to protest the injustices and atrocities committed by the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF). 

She had called for an immediate ceasefire and peace talks between the IPKF and the LTTE.

Her fast ended on April 19 with her death. 

Her 28 year old son was shot dead by the Sri Lankan army and another son randomly shot dead by the Special Task Force. Another son, arrested during round up operations, was held in Boosa army camp and subjected to severe torture.