Personal income increased $50.5 billion (0.2 percent at a monthly rate) in August. Disposable personal income (DPI)-personal income less personal current taxes- increased $34.2 billion (0.2 percent). Personal outlays-the sum of personal consumption expenditures (PCE), personal interest payments, and personal current transfer payments-increased $48.3 billion (0.2 percent) and consumer spending increased $47.2 billion (0.2 percent). Personal saving was $1.05 trillion and the personal saving rate-personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income-was 4.8 percent in August. Full Text
Source: Africa Press Organisation – English (2) – Report:
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, September 27, 2024/APO Group/ —
Next Engineers, a global college-and career-readiness programme working to increase the diversity of young people in engineering, celebrated the graduation of its first-ever Engineering Academy learners in Johannesburg, South Africa on Friday, September 27. The graduation ceremony marked the programme’s contribution towards bridging the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) skills gap in the country through exposing learners to hands-on engineering experiences and career pathways.
The 37 learners from 15 high schools across Johannesburg who completed the programme, many of whom plan to study towards an engineering-related qualification at university or technical higher learning institutions, were joined by their families at University of Witwatersrand, Sturrock Park Sports Hall, to celebrate their achievements. Launched in 2022, PROTEC, University of Witwatersrand, and Kutitiva Foundation are the educational partners for the local Next Engineers programme, and local GE Vernova engineers and employees actively engage with Academy participants through hands-on, skill-based volunteering.
“We are proud to see our first cohort of learners graduating and wish them all a successful learning trajectory in the next stage of their education journey,” said Matsi Eseu, South Africa HR Director for GE Vernova. “At GE Vernova, we believe education is a significant driver of economic inclusion and it’s inspiring to see the positive impact the Next Engineers programme is having, not just in empowering tomorrow’s engineers who will solve society’s most pressing challenges but also in increasing the diversity of young people, particularly females, in the engineering sector. We extend our gratitude to all those involved in the Engineering Academy.”
Learners who complete the Engineering Academy program and enroll in a qualified engineering or engineering-related degree programme receive financial aid to support them as they continue on their paths to becoming engineers.
Balan Moodley, CEO of PROTEC, said, “I extend my heartfelt congratulations to each and every graduate in this programme. Their commitment and hard work inspire us all, and I have every confidence they will continue to make a positive impact in the field of engineering and beyond. I also want to express my sincere gratitude to GE Vernova in Johannesburg for their unwavering support and partnership throughout this journey. Together, we have laid the groundwork for a brighter future in engineering, and I am excited to see the continued success of Next Engineers in empowering young minds.”
The Next Engineers: Engineering Academy is a transformative learning experience designed for learners aged 15 to 18. Through a rigorous curriculum, immersive design challenges, and career coaching, participants learn to think and act like engineers.
Key programme highlights:
Dedication: The Engineering Academy spans three years, with learners dedicating 220 hours outside of regular school hours to participate.
Design challenges: In small teams, learners tackle increasingly complex design challenges, mastering the engineering design process.
Foundational skills: Beyond technical knowledge, learners develop essential skills such as communication, teamwork, persistence, time management, and presentation abilities.
Education and career exploration: Workshops and activities prepare learners for their next steps, including university campus tours and interactions with company volunteers.
Scholarships: Learners who complete the program and enroll in post-secondary engineering degree programs receive partial scholarships. Next Engineers anticipates granting at least $2 million in scholarships to the inaugural classes of Engineering Academy learners worldwide.
Johannesburg, South Africa, was among the first four locations to launch Next Engineers, with a $2.5 million (R44.6 million) investment from the GE Foundation in 2021. To date, Next Engineers, which also includes programming for learners in grades 8-12, has reached more than 3,500 learners across Johannesburg.
STEM training and education, such as Next Engineers, is helping to solve global challenges while also lifting up communities through economic opportunities. Next Engineers is not the only way GE Vernova in South Africa has committed to supporting the next generation of STEM talent. GE Vernova’s South Africa External Bursary Programme has offered comprehensive bursaries to the tune of $5.4 million (R95.6 million) to support over 648 beneficiaries pursuing a Bachelor of Science, Commerce or Arts qualification from 2020 to date. The bursaries are aimed at alleviating the financial strain of tertiary students and covers the tuition, accommodation, textbook costs, and a monthly stipend over the period of study.
For more information about Next Engineers and the Engineering Academy, visit http://apo-opa.co/3BmFfKp.
The Reserve Bank today held a Conference in Bengaluru for the Directors on the Boards of Small Finance Banks (SFBs). Shri Swaminathan J, Deputy Governor inaugurated the Conference. The event, with the theme ‘Governance in SFBs – Driving Sustainable Growth and Stability’, is part of a series of supervisory engagements that the Reserve Bank has been organising with the Directors of its Supervised Entities in recent past. Earlier, the Conferences for Directors on the Boards of Public Sector Banks and Private Sector Banks were held in May 2023 and for UCBs in August 2023 and June 2024.
Executive Directors Shri S C Murmu, Shri Rohit Jain and Shri R L K Rao along with other senior officials representing the Supervision, Regulation, and Enforcement Departments of the Reserve Bank also participated in the Conference.
Deputy Governor Shri Swaminathan J., in his keynote address, underscored the significant role of Governance in guiding SFBs towards sustainable growth with stability. He also exhorted the Directors to be vigilant and proactive in identifying and mitigating emerging risks and highlighted the importance of sustainable business models. He emphasised the need for strengthening cybersecurity to safeguard against digital threats, and urged a stronger focus on financial inclusion, customer service and grievance redressal to ensure a broader reach of banking services.
The Conference also included technical sessions conducted by senior officials of RBI in the areas of ‘Governance and Assurance Functions’, ‘Business Risk – Regulatory & Supervisory Expectations’ and ‘IT Systems & Cybersecurity’. The technical sessions were followed by a talk by an external Expert on ‘Board Conduct in Banks’ and a panel discussion by Independent Directors of select SFBs on the topic – ‘SFBs Prospects & Challenges’.
The Conference concluded with an open house interactive session of the participants with the Executive Directors of the Reserve Bank.
The crew of Coast Guard Cutter Kathleen Moore returned 60 migrants to the Dominican Republic between Wednesday and Thursday, following two separate interdictions of irregular, unlawful maritime migration voyages in Mona Passage waters near Puerto Rico. Two of the interdicted migrants remain in U.S. custody to face federal prosecution by the U.S. District Court of Puerto Rico on separate charges including attempted reentry into the United States subsequent to an aggravated felony under 8 U.S.C. 1326(b)(2), and failure to heave to under 8 U.S.C. 2237.
For more breaking news follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
MIL OSI Translation. Government of the Republic of France statements from French to English –
Source: Swiss Canton of Vaud – news in French
Even though there are still some two years of work and preparation to go, everything will now move very quickly for the Lausanne tramway project, which is expected to transport some 13 million passengers per year between Lausanne-Flon and Renens-Gare on this 4.6-kilometre line.
The Biophysical Society announced Leslie M. Loew, R.D. Berlin Center for Cell Analysis and Modeling, University of Connecticut School of Medicine, is named a 2025 Biophysical Society Fellow for inventing fluorescent sensors of membrane potential and leadership in the development of computational cell biology.
The Biophysical Society, founded in 1958, is a professional, scientific society established to lead an innovative global community working at the interface of the physical and life sciences, across all levels of complexity, and to foster the dissemination of that knowledge.
The Society promotes growth in this expanding field through its Annual Meeting, publications, and outreach activities. Its 7,000 members are located throughout the world, where they teach and conduct research in colleges, universities, laboratories, government agencies, and industry.
This award honors the Society’s distinguished members who have demonstrated excellence in science and contributed to the expansion of the field of biophysics. The Fellows will be honored at the Biophysical Society’s 69th Annual Meeting, being held in Los Angeles, California from February 15-19, 2025.
“The Biophysical Society Annual Meeting is where I discuss science every year and its flagship publication, The Biophysical Journal, is where I send most of my scientific papers. So I am truly honored to receive this recognition by my peers in the BPS,” says Loew.
Loew is Professor of Cell Biology, Boehringer-Ingelheim Chair in Cell Science and University of Connecticut Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the UConn School of Medicine. Throughout his career his work has focused on quantitative mechanistic investigation of cell and tissue biology. He is known for inventing biophysical methods to investigate these systems, including both microscope imaging technologies and fluorescent sensors. Loew pioneered the synthesis of fluorescent dyes to probe the electrical activity of cells and tissue. For the last 25 years he has been leading the UConn team that develops the “Virtual Cell”, comprehensive software to model and simulate cell biology with 26,000 registered users worldwide.
During his 40 year career at UConn he has been awarded research grants amounting to approximately $70M. He established the Richard D. Berlin Center for Cell Analysis and Modeling (CCAM) in 1994 to consolidate research in new optical, photonic, image processing and computational techniques for the investigation of the behavior of living cells.
Small plastic particles are everywhere: in the soil where our food is grown, in the water we drink and in the air we breathe. They got there from the plastic we throw away, which ends up in landfill sites, rivers and seas. There the plastic waste slowly breaks down, releasing tiny particles called microplastics and even tinier nanoplastics into the environment.
Microplastics are also increasingly being found throughout the human body. We are not sure how they got there, though there are three probable routes. We may ingest microplastics when we eat and drink, or breathe them into our lungs, or absorb them through our skin. Another route has recently been suggested, whereby microplastics get up our noses and from there into our brains.
For a long time, it was thought that the human brain existed in splendid isolation from the rest of the body. The so-called blood-brain barrier, a special layer of cells, protects the brain from all manner of pathogens and harmful substances. However, we now know that the blood-brain barrier can be breached because small plastic particles have been found in the human brain.
New research has suggested that the blood-brain barrier has at least one vulnerable spot where microplastics may be able to get into the brain. This potential entry point was suggested by researchers at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of São Paulo. It is in the nose, where there are special nerves, the olfactory nerves, that detect smells.
The olfactory nerves run from the inside of the nose, through the skull, and then directly into part of the brain called the olfactory bulb. The researchers suggest that microparticles breathed into the nose may somehow get transported along the olfactory nerves and into the brain.
The researchers came to their conclusions by analysing tissue samples from residents of São Paulo who had died and undergone routine coroners’ autopsies. They removed the olfactory bulbs from these brains and analysed them using a variety of techniques.
Eight out of the 15 brains studied had microplastics in their olfactory bulbs. However, these eight samples had only 16 microplastic particles between them, which is perhaps some comfort.
Those 16 plastic particles included fragments, spheres and fibres, and were made of polypropylene, nylon and other plastics. Some of the fibres could have come from clothing. This makes sense because laundering clothes made from synthetic fibres is a significant source of microplastics in the environment.
Some of our small plastic particles are missing
The new study is just one of many that has reported the presence of small plastic particles in the human body. Most of these studies are about microplastics, which are particles up to five millimetres in size. Very few studies have looked for nanoplastics in the human body.
Nanoplastics are less than one-thousandth of a millimetre in size – so tiny that it is difficult to detect them without special equipment, and few scientists have easy access to this equipment.
The reason nanoplastics are important is that, unlike microplastics, they are well-documented to be harmful to living cells. This is because nanoplastics are small enough to get inside cells. Once inside, they can kill the cell.
Fortunately, there is no evidence that humans have suffered any great increase in birth defects in recent years. Maybe the placenta is able to stop microplastics and nanoplastics from reaching the foetus.
We need to know much more about the presence of microplastics – and especially nanoplastics – in the human body. And we need to know how they get there in the first place.
This makes the new Berlin-São Paulo study so interesting. It suggests a potential entry point, from the nose into the brain. This leaves us with the question: what potential risks are posed to our health by microplastics and nanoplastics? The jury is out, but perhaps feeling a little more nervous than before.
Michael Richardson receives funding from the Netherlands Scientific Organization (NWO) of the Netherlands Government.
Meiru Wang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Addressing his party conference as prime minister for the first time, Keir Starmer made it clear that moving people into work is a priority for his government. He said even the long-term sick should be looking for a job where possible.
In the last fourteen years, progressively more demands have been made on UK benefit claimants to prove that they are looking for a job. This approach is not based on evidence but rather rooted in an ideology with international reach. (Similar approaches have been seen in places like Australia and Ireland).
This involves a simplistic carrot-and-stick model of human motivation to work, and a “work-first” doctrine of getting people into the first available job irrespective of its appropriateness or sustainability.
But as a new report makes clear, looking at people’s lives in a more holistic, long-term way, with a sensitivity to the barriers they face is more likely to get results. Rather than work-first, we need a career-first approach.
Since the start of the COVID pandemic, levels of economic inactivity
in the UK have grown significantly. Fewer workers are entering the labour market and more older people are leaving the workforce early. The number of people not working because of long-term illness has also risen substantially.
This isn’t great news for the new Labour government that is counting on economic growth to get the country into better financial health. It is hard to grow the economy with improved efficiency because that requires investment. A much easier route is to increase the size of the workforce.
Recognising the risks of economic inactivity, the Commission for the Future of Employment Support was launched in December 2022 by the thinktank the Institute for Employment Studies to review the public services that help people to find a job and employers to find staff.
Its newly released report places employment support in the wider context of the challenges in the UK labour market and its effect on economic growth. With the UK government ruling out raising the three main taxes, it must prioritise economic growth. This is why economic inactivity in the workforce really matters.
The commission reserves its strongest criticism for the extent to which employment support has become entangled with welfare conditionality. That is, making behavioural demands on claimants, using surveillance to ensure they comply, and using sanctions – typically withholding benefit payments.
Adults lead complicated lives, and they are unemployed for a reason (or more often, for multiple reasons). This may be to do with skills, confidence, health, local geography, the needs of dependants or many other factors. These issues will not go away if a service fails to address them. So effective career support must consider the whole person and pathways to sustainable work.
A jobs and careers service
The report’s recommendations are aligned with the Labour party promise to create a jobs and careers service, one of its manifesto pledges to kickstart economic growth. Labour has suggested bringing the Jobcentre Plus network together with the National Careers Service.
The commission recommends three modes of delivery: local offices, an online service and outreach for those facing the most significant barriers. It also recommends entitlement-to-employment advice, and drawing a clearer distinction between employment support and welfare benefit administration.
But will it work? It is hard to disagree with the recommendations – the rationale is sound and well argued. It is based on historical experience, international comparison, economic analysis and service evaluation. If a reimagined jobs and career service was provided along the lines described by the commission, then its success will probably depend on sticking closely to this vision.
To make it happen, there are three inter-related problems to overcome. The first is financial pressures on the UK government, which limit its ability to invest.
Second, if service users are seen as a reserve pool of labour that the government can activate in pursuit of economic growth, this may undermine reform.
Third, career development is a professional service involving person-centred counselling and an educational approach. This requires staff trained to a professional level, with a code of ethics, who put the service user first. Previous experience of integrating career guidance in public employment services in Europe suggests that their professionalism can be undermined by the host agency.
Now, the ball will be in the court of the Department for Work and Pensions, specifically work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall and minister Alison McGovern.
The devolved governments of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland may also have a role, as these matters are at least partially in their remit. The report argues for a more complete and consistent devolution of powers for employment support to the UK nations.
Local labour market partnerships in England are also part of this vision. This means bringing the jobs and career service together with local government, skills agencies, employers, trade unions, voluntary and community organisations and health services. Given the enormous geographical variation in labour markets, it makes sense for local areas to develop their own structures for cooperation between services.
The main issue is that employment support policy has tended to see unemployed people as units that could and should be contributing to the economy. This needs to be flipped so that services become about helping people to get the economy to work for them, and to build a decent life with some dignity in the process. Unless this is deep in the DNA of the new service, it won’t be that new after all.
Pete Robertson is the President of the Career Development Institute (CDI). This is the UK professional body for career development practitioners.
The upcoming release of Disney’s live action remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, currently scheduled for March 2025, has been surrounded by controversy – so much so that the film’s trailer has received over 1 million dislikes on YouTube. In particular, many fans have taken umbrage with the fact that computer-generated imagery (CGI) will be used for the characters of the seven dwarfs, now renamed the “miners”, rather than having them played by dwarf actors.
To my mind, unless changes are made, it would be better not to release a live action remake of Snow White in the first place. My doctoral research has shown that it’s common for people with dwarfism to experience mockery influenced by the representation of dwarfism in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But if the film is to go ahead, CGI is a better choice than to cast real people with dwarfism.
Fans lamenting on social media the fact that they will no longer be able to see a film featuring “real dwarfs” ignore the parallels with the Victorian freak show. Frequently their disappointment is masked as supposed concern for the welfare of “actors” with dwarfism who will lose the “opportunity” to play these characters.
But people with dwarfism who play these characters are rarely seen as serious actors. Alice Lambert, an actress with dwarfism, was interviewed for a chapter in my new book, Dwarfism Arts and Advocacy (2024). In it, she recalls that during her time in pantomime, people “would come to the stage door after the show, but I realised that they just wanted to meet ‘a dwarf’ … you are not being represented as a performer, but rather your dwarfism is being paraded for the amusement of others”.
The trailer for Disney’s live action remake of Snow White.
My research has also found that many people still believe that people with dwarfism only work in the entertainment industry. It is not unusual for people to ask someone with dwarfism if they work in pantomime, particularly as one of the seven dwarfs. I have personally lost count of the amount of people who snigger and ask me if I am “Grumpy” or “Happy” (names of two of the dwarf characters) or if I know where Snow White is. If people cannot tell the difference between fiction and reality, then fictional representations need to change to minimise abuse.
Of those people with dwarfism who are actors, many have long refused to play roles that are considered derogatory, including the seven dwarfs. That is because people with dwarfism are capable of so much more.
Many of the fans expressing disappointment that the dwarfs will now be CGI fail to realise how the role impacts people with dwarfism in public. For example, in 2012 German lawyer Silke Schönfleisch-Backofen, who has dwarfism, successfully sued a man after he started laughing and singing Hi Ho, the song the dwarfs sing in the original Disney film, at her in court.
If people cannot tell the difference between fiction and reality, then fictional representations need to change to minimise abuse. Instead of reproducing outdated attitudes, films – and the tales that inspire them – can change with the times to produce stories that are inclusive of everyone.
Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.
Erin Pritchard works for Liverpool Hope University and previously consulted for Disney.
It’s party conference season in Britain, a chance for members to meet and talk through their successes and failures from the election campaign – and start talking strategy for the next.
Perhaps inevitably after it suffered such a crushing defeat and the resignation of its leader, the Conservative party conference in Birmingham risks taking on the air of a wake. Quite a contrast, then, with the Lib Dem bash down in Brighton, which, complete with jet skis and beach volleyball, was very much a celebratory affair.
Admittedly, Labour’s get-together in Liverpool, plagued as it was by newspaper stories about supposedly dodgy donations and the row over winter fuel allowances, wasn’t quite as upbeat as one might expect from a party that has just won a sizeable majority.
Whatever the outcome, many (though by no means all) members of all the parties worked hard to help deliver MPs to parliament. True, the evidence that campaigning by party members makes much of a difference to election results is hardly overwhelming.
But it can obviously make a difference in the closest of constituency contests. Examples in 2024 would surely include Hendon, won by Labour by just 15 votes, Basildon and Billericay, won by the Tories by 20, South Basildon and East Thurrock, won by Reform by 98, and even Ely and East Cambridgeshire, won by the Lib Dems by 495.
The party members project, run out of Queen Mary University of London and Sussex University, has been surveying party members about their activities after every election since 2015 and has just completed the 2024 exercise. And it appears that, following a decline in election campaigning in 2017 and 2019, there was a slight uptick overall this time round.
A simple way of looking at this is to note the proportion of respondents who told us they’d spent no time at all campaigning for their party (see Table 1). This rose considerably in 2017 and even more so in 2019 but dropped noticeably this year, suggesting the grassroots are getting a little more active, even if they’re still spending way less time campaigning for their parties than they were a decade ago.
Table 1: Percentage of party members saying they spent no time campaigning during the 2024 general election:
Party members who didn’t campaign. NB: Figures in the Reform column cover Reform in 2024, UKIP in 2015 and 2017 and the Brexit Party in 2019. Party Members Project, CC BY-ND
However, the uptick was due largely to the time put in by members of the smaller parties rather than by those belonging to the Conservatives or Labour – although it should be said that members almost certainly tend to overestimate the time they put in.
Indeed, worryingly for Keir Starmer, Labour members actually appear to have been no more active (and in some respects perhaps somewhat less active) than they were five years ago. This is possibly owing to the departure of many of those fired up by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership in 2017 and 2019.
On the other hand, if we dig into the type of activities members got involved in, a slightly different picture emerges. Members of the smaller parties may be putting in the work, but they’re doing it from the comfort of their homes rather than pounding the pavements.
If we exclude the admittedly large number of party members who told us they either did nothing for their party or just hit “don’t know”, a whopping 71% of Reform members and 67% of Green members who were active said they spent time campaigning on social media in 2024. Just 45% of Conservative members who had done at least something for their party during the campaign said the same.
However, Reform and to some extent Green members too, were less likely than members of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties to do some of what, in the jargon, is known as high-intensity activity – the stuff that involves direct contact with voters (or at least their letterboxes).
Table 2: What active party members got up to in the 2024 election campaign (percentages):
What members got up to. Party Members Project, CC BY-ND
Interestingly, the members of the “old” parties appear to have done less on social media than they did in 2019. Instead they put their efforts into activities that, research suggests, do sometimes make a difference, such as leafleting. The Lib Dems (as ever) emerged as the champions when it came to this activity, with 59% of members who did something for the party during the election stuffing campaign literature through British households’ letterboxes. Whether it got read on its journey from front door to recycling bin, of course, is another matter.
But what also comes through strongly is that, worryingly for whoever takes over as leader from Rishi Sunak, Conservative members seem to be lagging further and further behind their main rivals – Labour and (especially) the Lib Dems – on campaign activities overall (see Table 3).
Table 3: Average number of activities (out of a total of nine) done by all members of each party during the 2024 general election campaign:
Lib Dems come out on top for average number of activities. Party Members Project, CC BY-ND
Now, nobody would argue, of course, that this was the main reason the Conservatives lost the election so badly. Nor should anyone imagine that simply recruiting and enthusing more members – something each of the candidates vying to become Tory leader has vowed to do – will rapidly reverse the epic defeat the party suffered this summer. But it certainly wouldn’t do it any harm in the long term.
After all, the Tories almost certainly have a very long and very hard road ahead of them in opposition. Persuading more people to join the party, and encouraging as many of those who do join to get out “on the doorstep” (or even just to go online if that’s all they feel up to), might not make that road much shorter. But it might make it feel just that little bit easier.
The Party Membership Project received Talent and Stabilization funding from Research England, via QMUL, for this survey research.
Paul Webb has previously received funding from the ESRC to conduct research on political parties.
Stavroula Chrona does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Thousands of genes from deep-sea marine life are being used to create new commercial products ranging from pharmaceuticals to cosmetics. Genes are segments of DNA that provide instructions for making other molecules that are essential for the structure and function of living organisms.
In a paper we recently published with other colleagues, we investigated how bioprospecting – the search and discovery of potential products from animals, plants and microbes – could serve as a less destructive alternative to deep-sea mining.
Notably, all of the largest companies using marine genes have sourced them from deep-sea organisms in some capacity. Deep-sea animals possess unique genes that allow them to live in an environment unlike anything else on Earth, with its intense cold, crushing pressure and total darkness.
What are these organisms? Most are microbes that have evolved over millions of years to thrive in extreme conditions. Among the most uniquely adapted are those found around hydrothermal vents, where mineral-rich seawater, superheated by magma, erupts from cracks in the ocean floor.
Deep-sea enzymes, a type of molecule encoded by the genes of organisms that live in extreme environments, are stable in conditions that other enzymes often cannot function. Their ability to catalyse chemical reactions under high pressure and a wide range of temperatures makes them commercially valuable for making industrial and consumer products, including drugs, food, detergents and biofuels.
Bioprospecting in the deep sea
One remarkable example involves the bacteria that live in very salty habitats. This microbe was isolated from marine sediments collected at a depth of 1,050 meters near the Iheya ridge, 130 kilometers offshore from Iheya Island, Japan.
Deep-sea shrimp in the dark depths of the Pacific Ocean. NOAA
One of its enzymes has been shown to enhance the conversion of farm waste into glucose by helping break down cellulose into easily degradable pulp. This is a crucial step for converting biomass into ethanol, a renewable biofuel.
Another enzyme extracted from a bacterium that exists under extremely high temperatures has been found to be highly efficient in completely removing lactose from milk.
Some organisms contribute to multiple inventions, like a deep-sea worm collected at a depth of 2,625 meters from a hydrothermal vent on the East Pacific Rise, about 600 km off the Mexican coast. The worm hosted a bacterium that produces a molecule that was used to develop a skin cream, as it helps make skin less susceptible to damage from the sun and pollution. The unusual ability of this bacterium to live at temperatures above 100°C also made it a model organism for overcoming overheating in small satellites in Earth’s orbit.
This is just a few examples among over 16,000 proteins derived from deep-sea species and used in technology, catalogued in this database.
The potential for innovation from deep-sea species has not been fully explored. As of 2024, only a quarter of the seabed has been mapped and most deep-sea species remain undiscovered.
The dangers of mining
But the essential role of deep-sea life in the functioning of Earth’s systems may be far greater than previously understood.
Researchers recently discovered an unusually high concentration of oxygen on the seafloor in the Pacific Ocean, referred to as “dark oxygen”. This oxygen may be being produced by electrolysis – when an electric current separates water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Where might an electrical charge be generated at the bottom of the ocean? Perhaps on the surfaces of polymetallic nodules, rock-like formations composed of lots of different metals which can create differences in electrical potential when interacting with seawater. The formation of these metals is influenced by the activity of microbes living on them, which in turn affects the chemical properties of the surrounding environment. The production of dark oxygen could be vital for the respiration of other species living in the ocean where there is no sunlight.
Unfortunately, deep-sea ecosystems are under threat from seabed mining for minerals. Polymetallic nodules are considered potential resources for manganese, nickel, and rare earth elements – materials used to make electronics and computers. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a Pacific region where dark oxygen was recently discovered, has already been divided into 16 mining claims.
Researchers and campaigners have warned that deep-sea mining could severely damage marine ecosystems and have highlighted the lack of scientific consensus on the long-term consequences of these operations. Once disturbed, the evolutionary history these ecosystems represent could be lost forever.
The International Seabed Authority oversees the management of mining activities in international waters. Although it has not yet authorised any commercial mining, it has faced criticism for allegedly dismissing environmental concerns. The recent election of the new ISA secretary-general, Leticia Carvalho, offers an opportunity to safeguard vital areas of the world’s oceans, crucial for both nature and human wellbeing.
We must rethink the true value of the deep sea and consider what losing it may mean for the rest of the world.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Daniel Read, Professor of Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick
The Fyre music festival and its well-publicised failure are widely seen as a mixture of incompetence and fraud, embodied in Billy McFarland, its chief architect. People paid thousands of dollars for what was advertised as a luxury music festival but they were served simple cheese sandwiches and the entertainment was cancelled. McFarland spent almost four years in prison for fraud.
But now McFarland is out and promoting Fyre Festival II. He claims that he has already sold 100 tickets at the early bird price of £499.
Why would anyone give the Fyre Festival a second chance? Research shows that people’s mental shortcuts can give them confidence in someone who has let them down before.
Prices for Fyre Festival II range from US$1,400 and $1.1 million (£1,050 and £824,000). Nothing specific has yet been offered, other than an indefinite location (a private island off the Caribbean coast of Mexico), some activities including scuba diving with McFarland himself, and an approximate date (April, 2025).
McFarland’s former business partner Andy King has said that Fyre Festival II raises “a lot of red flags.”. Yet even King, who lost US$1 million on the original Fyre Festival, admitted he met McFarland for Fyre Festival II talks before becoming wary.
There is little research on this topic, but I found some help in The Big Con, written in 1940 by David Maurer, a professor of linguistics who dedicated his career to studying the language and culture of those leading a criminal lifestyle, including con artists.
The Big Con was the inspiration for the 1973 Paul Newman movie The Sting. You may remember that (spoilers) Newman and Robert Redford and his team fleece Robert Shaw using a con in which the mark is persuaded that he can bet on horse races after they are run because of a delay in messages received by a betting shop.
A central factor is ambiguity. It is hard to be certain from accounts of Fyre Festival whether McFarland set out to be a con man, or is simply a persuasive person who took on more than he could handle. Perhaps McFarland has learned his lessons and will not make the same mistakes. In The Big Con, the grifters tried to make their marks unsure whether they were really being scammed, even after the money changed hands. In The Sting, Robert Shaw’s character never learns that he was conned.
Maurer documents many cases of marks coming back for more, convinced that the original failure was due to bad luck that won’t be repeated. A typical example comes from a con artist named the Big Alabama Kid, who tells Maurer about a mark they had conned out of US$50,000 in Miami. After he had lost all his money in a gambling con they offered him a chance to try again. But he did not return.
Three months later, “who should come in smiling but Mr. Bates with a lot of apologies for keeping me waiting so long. He said that his banker had tried to tell him that this deal was a swindle, and wouldn’t let him have his money. So he waited until things had cooled off at home and the banker had forgotten all about it. Then he went to the bank, drew out his money, and caught the first train for the south.”
Giving the right impression
It is sometimes hard to persuade even the victims of a con that they are victims.
Another factor is confidence, both on the part of the grifter and the mark. People often follow the confidence heuristic (or mental shortcut) when judging whether to believe others. The confidence heuristic is that people are confident when they believe they are right, and this confidence makes them persuasive. Such an ability to exude confidence is one of the key skills that all con men must have.
The mark also has to be confident. That is, to be able to rely on their own ability to discern a good opportunity when they see it. Maurer finds the mark is typically someone who has achieved high social status, and sees themselves as having “some inherent superiority, especially as regards matters of sound judgment in finance and investment … as a person of vision and even of genius”.
It is not hard to see the potential Fyre Festival attendee or investor here, someone who has money to spare, and who hopes to discover the new Burning Man or invest in it.
Scarcity, time pressure and the fear of missing out are also powerful psychological motivators likely to make people susceptible to being conned – especially if the essence of the con is that the opportunity is one time only. If we think something is difficult to get, we want it more.
This is what US psychologist Robert Cialdini refers to as the scarcity principle, and is a motivation that emerges early in life. A 2018 study I co-authored found children as young as six preferred scarce goods compared to abundant ones.
Maurer’s studies of con artists showed that they carefully craft the set up so that the mark has an exclusive one time only opportunity to make his big score.
McFarland claims to have 5,000 unique requests for tickets, but only 3,000 slots available. If you go to the Fyre Festival website you cannot buy tickets. Applicants receive the message “Thank you for your application. If approved, the FYRE concierge will be in touch.”
I am currently in the queue for one of these tickets, and so far the concierge has not been in touch. Will I be lucky enough to be one of the chosen few?
Daniel Read does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Support for Liz Truss, attacks on Scottish democracy, and the undermining of climate action. The Scottish Conservative’s new leader plays all the old hits.
The election of Russell Findlay as leader of the Scottish Conservatives shows their determination to hold onto the title of the nasty party, says Scottish Greens co-leader Patrick Harvie.
After a contentious leadership contest where his supporters were accused of lying to members about other candidates, Russell Findlay was elected with 61.7% of the vote.
“I’d obviously congratulate Russell Findlay on his election, but it does seem to confirm that the Scottish Tories are determined to hold on to the title of the nasty party, and to lurch ever further to the right.
“Like his colleagues, he was a cheerleader for Liz Truss, urging the Scottish Government to copy her disastrous plans. He backed the undermining of the Scottish Parliament through Section 35 and the new Internal Market Act. He’d rather cut taxes on the rich than fund public services. He’s an enthusiastic supporter of the Tory culture war agenda, punching down against marginalised people at every opportunity. And in the midst of the climate emergency he wants to hand multinational corporations more licences to drill for fossil fuel – something the world’s scientists are screaming at us to stop doing.
“In short, he’s probably a good fit for all the worst instincts of the Conservative Party.
“We’ve all seen the catastrophic consequences of Tory leadership over the last 14 years. Whether it’s Douglas Ross or Russell Findlay, I’m confident Scotland will continue its long and proud history of rejecting them at the ballot box.”
Lahore (Agenzia Fides) – What role do the “civilian militias” or “vigilantes” of the Islamist party “Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan” (TLP) play, who roam the streets of Pakistani cities to punish people accused of blasphemy or contempt of Islam? This is the question analysts and representatives of politics and civil society are asking in view of a phenomenon that is shaking Pakistani society. In this context, members of non-governmental organizations, social organizations and religious communities of various faiths are asking the government for clarification in the face of the “extrajudicial” actions of groups that are terrorizing the population and threatening the security of citizens and their right to live freely.Three of the recent cases have sparked a heated debate in the Pakistani media. These are cases related to the accusation of “blasphemy on social media”, an area that TLP members seem to be paying a lot of attention to. One case concerns Shah Nawaz Kumbhar, a doctor from Sindh province, who is accused of sharing blasphemous content on Facebook.Another case concerns 50-year-old Abdul Ali, owner of a hotel in Quetta, in Balochistan province, who was also arrested for allegedly posting derogatory comments about the Prophet Muhammad on social media and killed while in police custody. The third case concerns 40-year-old Christian nurse Shagufta Kiran, mother of four children, who was sentenced to death for blasphemy on WhatsApp (see Fides, 20/9/2024). In these and other cases, the active involvement of TLP members was found, appearing publicly or through intimidation attempts.The Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) is an Islamist party banned by the government in 2021. In the autumn of the same year, the TLP entered into an agreement with the Pakistani government, pledging to respect the constitution and not support violent protests. In November 2023, it was officially re-recognized by the Pakistani government as a “political party registered with the Election Commission of Pakistan.”The government entered into an agreement with the TLP “with a view to the overriding national interest and long-term perspective to ensure that violence does not recur in the future.” The agreement stipulated that Section 7 of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 1997 (charges of terrorist acts) would be applicable to persons accused of blasphemy under Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code (defamation of the Prophet Muhammad). In addition, the parties involved agreed to set up a special department called the Counter Blasphemy Wing within the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA). The department was set up with the aim of improving the ability to monitor “desecration of religions,” but because Pakistan’s blasphemy law is designed this way, it actually applies specifically to Islam, especially to content spread online.The agreement also guarantees an impartial and speedy trial for defendants accused of blasphemy, which “should actually protect against extrajudicial actions and lynchings that are still carried out by militants,” notes Farzana Imran of the Christian organization LEAD Pakistan (Legal Evangelical Association Development), calling on the authorities to ensure the rule of law and not allow a para-state militia of “moral or religious police” to obstruct the work of the police or ordinary justice.Muhammad Amir Rana, a Muslim scholar and co-founder of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, who writes as a columnist for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, recalls that last July the TLP called for violence against the Supreme Court of Pakistan after the acquittal of a member of the Ahmadiyya community (considered “heretical” by Islam). And he asks: “Why does the state compromise and tolerate a group that is responsible for mass violence, vandalism, the killing of innocent citizens and damage to property, and that tarnishes the country’s international image by promoting extremism?” (PA) (Agenzia Fides, 27/9/2024)
Share:
Poll data shows that Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in the US presidential election campaign. She has an average vote intention score of 48.2%, compared with Trump’s 45.8%, according to FiveThirtyEight, a website that looks at a range of polls.
She leads in the race, although the margins are still tight. A poll of polls like this one is likely to be more accurate than a single one, giving a much better indication of any trends.
Many factors are at work when people decide how to vote, but four things really matter. These are voter evaluations of the candidates; their perceptions of the major issues; identifying with the Democratic or Republican parties, or being independents; and whether they think of themselves as liberals, conservatives or moderates.
To look closely at these factors we can examine the details of an Economist/YouGov survey of the US electorate completed on September 17. The survey puts Harris on 49%, with Trump on 45% in voting intentions.
There are significant variations in support among different groups and as the figure below shows, there is a large gender gap with women much more likely to vote for Harris than men. In addition, white people favour Trump, whereas Hispanic and black people lean heavily towards Harris. Harris is also strongly supported by those under the age of 45 with Trump leading Harris by a small margin in the 45-64 group – and by a large margin among the over 65s.
Voting intentions for the upcoming US election:
When it comes to judging candidates, voters use several criteria including perceptions that they are strong, competent, honest and in touch with people like themselves. But a good overall measure is the extent to which they like or dislike a candidate. In the Economist/YouGov poll 48% liked Harris and 47% disliked her. In Trump’s case 42% liked him and 55% disliked him. Clearly, Harris has the edge in leadership evaluations in the race.
Existing ideological positions are a very important factor in influencing the vote as the chart below shows. When it comes to ideological preferences liberals overwhelmingly support Harris and conservatives do the same with Trump.
However, 57% of moderates favour Harris compared, with only 30% who favour Trump. Trump’s problem is that his style of campaigning may energise his core supporters, but it tends to alienate many moderates.
In the case of political partisanship, again Democrats overwhelmingly support Harris and Republicans Trump. In this case the independents are neck and neck, with Harris ahead of Trump by only 1%. But she does get more Republicans (5%) than Trump gets Democrats (1%).
Voting intentions among independents and other groups
Harris has the edge when it comes to three of the really important factors that explain voting behaviour. However, she is weak on some issues compared with Trump. When asked about their most important issue, respondents ranked inflation first, immigration second, and jobs, the economy and abortion tied in third place.
The problem for Harris is illustrated by the most salient issue of inflation. Some 96% of respondents thought that this is important, but only 33% approved of the way that Joe Biden had handled the issue, compared with 59% who disapproved.
Since Kamala Harris is the vice-president, she shares responsibility for this. That said, 56% think that Trump’s claim that Haitian immigrants are eating pet dogs is false, while 27% think it is true. So there is a question over his credibility when it comes to issues as well.
More generally, 25% approved of the general direction the country was headed, while 58% thought that America was on the wrong track. When asked if they felt better off or worse off than a year ago, only 12% said better off, 42% said about the same and 40% said worse off. The US economy has been growing rapidly since Biden took office, but clearly many voters still don’t feel the benefits.
Biden stepped down as the Democratic nominee for president following his disastrous performance in the debate with Donald Trump. But the polling shows that discontent with the Biden administration was a lot more widespread than just concerns about his age and ability to communicate.
In relation to the recent TV debate, 56% of respondents thought that Harris won, compared with only 27% who thought the winner was Trump. As a result, she has made a strong start to her campaign. When asked who they thought would win the election in November, 42% said Harris and 32% Trump with 26% unsure.
With that kind of momentum, Harris can be optimistic, though not certain, about the outcome.
Paul Whiteley has received funding from the British Academy and the ESRC.
Source: People’s Republic of China – State Council News
HAIKOU, Sept. 27 — An exhibition featuring more than 400 relics retrieved from two ancient shipwrecks discovered in the South China Sea kicked off on Friday afternoon in Qionghai, a city in the island province of Hainan in southern China.
These artifacts, which had been submerged in the sea for over 500 years at a depth of more than 1,500 meters, are being showcased for the first time.
Located at the China (Hainan) Museum of the South China Sea, the exhibition covers an area of nearly 1,000 square meters. A total of 408 artifacts from the two ancient shipwrecks are on display, along with 34 borrowed artifacts from the Palace Museum and other museums, bringing the total number of exhibits to 442.
The most eye-catching exhibit is Fahua-colored porcelain, with 13 pieces (sets) on display. The archaeological discovery of Fahua-colored porcelain is very rare, and it is the first discovery in a shipwreck.
These archaeological discoveries prove that Jingdezhen colored porcelain was exported in the middle of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), providing facts for finding the kiln sites.
The exhibition also features one red and green bowl with the mark “made in the year of Bingyin.” This confirms that the sunken ship belonged to the Zhengde period of the Ming Dynasty, which is of great value and contributes to the study of trade routes in the South China Sea.
Further investigation of the two shipwrecks will be conducted, so the exhibition will adopt a dynamic update mode and update the cultural relics on display according to the new archaeological findings.
The exhibition also sets up a special zone for the protection of cultural relics, presenting cultural preservation work via multimedia to allow the audience to understand its process and significance.
These two ancient shipwrecks from the Ming Dynasty were discovered near the northwest continental slope in the South China Sea in October 2022.
More than 900 pieces of cultural relics have been retrieved from the two ancient shipwrecks during three investigations from 2023 to 2024.
Xin Lixue, curator of the China (Hainan) Museum of the South China Sea, said this collection of high-grade cultural relics is substantial in size, diverse in variety, and well-preserved.
“Through this exhibition, we hope to show the social and economic development in the middle of the Ming Dynasty and inform the audience about the prosperity of the Maritime Silk Road in ancient China and the exchanges between Chinese and foreign civilizations,” said Xin.
The exhibition will officially open to the public starting on Saturday.
There will be fun for all the family at a series of events across the city, starting with the city centre switch on in Queen Square on Saturday 16 November.
The festivities start at 3pm with a funfair, real reindeer, face painting, food and drink and much more! Get set for a full afternoon of entertainment that you won’t want to miss with the lights switch on as the finale.
The Grinch and Cindy Lou will be there entertaining the crowds throughout the event before X Factor and musical theatre star Niki Colwell and Jake Nelson Music take to the stage performing an array of songs.
They will then be joined by the Mayor of Wolverhampton, Councillor Linda Leach, and Father Christmas to switch on the lights at 6pm.
The city centre fun is not the only festive celebration in Wolverhampton – Christmas lights will also be switched on at Wednesfield, Tettenhall, Bilston and Bantock House with Father Christmas and the Mayor of Wolverhampton doing the honours, plus entertainment from local artists and Wolverhampton’s very own Dicky Dodd.
Councillor Chris Burden, Cabinet Member for City Development, Jobs and Skills said: “It’s been another fantastic year of events in the city, and the Christmas lights is a great way to end what has been a busy events season.
“Thousands of families year on year attend our light switch ons to mark the start of the countdown to Christmas – they are great free events for all the family.”
Wolverhampton based not for profit Health Cash Plan provider Paycare –which gives policy holders the chance to claim back up to 100% of what they spend on healthcare, as well as access to an online GP app, support helpline and discounts on everyday spending – have been announced as headline sponsor for the five events.
Anna Bamford, Paycare Marketing Manager, said: “We’re delighted to support such a wonderful set of festive events, bringing together our wonderful communities to share in the light and cheer of the holiday season!
“Paycare are on a mission to make our communities happier and healthier, so we are delighted to be sponsoring the Christmas lights that bring so much pleasure and joy to the city and surrounding areas.”
The full list of switch on events is as follows:
Saturday 16 November: Wolverhampton City Centre, Queen Square – event 3pm to 7pm, lights switch on at 6pm
Thursday 21 November: Wednesfield, High Street – event 4.30pm to 7pm, lights switch on at 6.30pm
Friday 22 November: Bilston, Church Street – event 4.30pm to 7pm, lights switch on at 6.30pm
Saturday 23 November: Tettenhall, Upper Green – event 4.30pm to 7pm, lights switch on at 6.30pm
Sunday 24 November: Bantock House, Finchfield Road – event 4.30pm to 7pm, lights switch on at 6.30pm
To find out more about Christmas in the City of Wolverhampton, including details on local artists performing at each of the switch on events, visit Christmas in Wolverhampton.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Giang Nguyen-Dien, Postdoctoral Fellow in American Culture Studies, Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis
Members of St. Paul’s Hmong community protest in 1998 after a local radio host said on air that Hmong immigrants needed to ‘assimilate or hit the goddamn road.’Bruce Bisping/Star Tribune via Getty Images
After Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, much of the media coverage zeroed in on Walz’s Midwestern roots, with some pundits using the phrase “Minnesota nice” to describe his appeal.
In the popular imagination, Minnesota nice describes a culture of neighborliness and amicability that’s commonly seen as characteristic of the state. In policy terms, that might mean bigger investments in education, better public health, access to affordable housing and stronger worker rights – an extension of Walz’s achievements as Minnesota governor. Many Americans would probably like to see these values have primacy in the rest of the nation.
I think Minnesota nice, whether represented in policies or in being kind to neighbors, is a worthy ideal. But as someone who has studied the experiences of Vietnamese refugees in Minnesota, I’ve written about how the trope of Minnesota nice has a more complex history – especially when it comes to nonwhite people.
According to Atkins, Minnesota nice denotes “a polite friendliness, an aversion to confrontation, a tendency toward understatement … and emotional restraints.” These traits can be found in Scandinavian literature, film and art, as well as in 19th- and early 20th-century Lutheran values.
To ease those concerns, government officials instituted a dispersal policy to spread out Southeast Asian refugees to ensure they wouldn’t be concentrated in any one region, town or city. They implemented this policy to reduce social and economic impacts on local communities – and also compel Southeast Asian refugees to assimilate into American culture.
In Minnesota, while many newcomers were given a helping hand, many of them also experienced isolation and rejection.
From 1979 to 1999, about 15,000 Vietnamese refugees arrived in Minnesota. My research shows that media outlets often ran articles highlighting the goodwill and generosity of locals, whether they were helping these refugees learn English, acquire job training, find work or secure housing.
The Minneapolis Tribune reported in 1975 that the state was able to avoid any major public reactions against refugees because they posed “no major job threat,” since they were spread out across the state.
Even as locals seemed largely supportive, the dispersal policy wasn’t ideal for many refugees. Many of them ended up in remote areas of Minnesota, far from a familiar ethnic community that could provide much-needed psychological and emotional support. Those in isolated areas often lacked access to social services and English language programs.
For refugees, a more complicated view of Minnesota nice emerges, one that I think depends on being not too visible and not too much of a threat to the existing order. Many refugees were certainly grateful for the state and local support they received. But gratitude also became an “unspoken condition” for acceptance, as Iranian refugee Dina Nayeri reports in her book “The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You.”
In Minnesota, locals could seem largely unsympathetic to the complicated struggles of refugees trying to settle in a strange, new land. Rather than complain, they ought to be happy for the “small blessings” they received, as one local St. Cloud resident wrote to the Minneapolis Tribune in 1975.
When there was a sudden influx of refugees into one area, some residents could become even less welcoming.
That’s what happened with the state’s Hmong refugees.
An ethnic group originally from China, the Hmong arrived in Southeast Asia during the mid-19th century. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. government recruited the Hmong to fight in the Secret War in Laos, where the U.S. had been covertly providing aid and military assistance to anti-communist forces. After the war, some Hmong fled, fearing persecution. Many of them ended up in Minnesota. In 1980, there were about 2,000 Hmong people in Minnesota. By the end of 1981, their numbers had grown to 8,000, raising some alarm.
“Some cynics say our problem is that we are too nice and have provided too many services,” a local resettlement official was quoted saying in a 1980 State Department report. In that same report, an official with a local charity suggested that Minnesota would soon be known as “Hmong-nesota.”
In 1985, the Minnesota Star Tribune published a special report, “Hmong in Minnesota: Lost in the Promised Land,” that explored how many Hmong refugees had become “targets of racial epithets, harassment and violence” in the Twin Cities. The article noted that the Hmong came to realize that most Americans had never heard of them or their roles in the secret war in Laos. Instead, they often found themselves “resented, misunderstood and victimized by their neighbors.”
To me, the anxiety over “Hmong-nesota” recalled the history of “yellow peril” – the imagined threat of Asian invasion and cultural disruptions that first emerged in the 19th century and shaped many U.S. immigration policies.
Benevolence and violence
My own research explores how feel-good tropes that are prominent in the U.S., such as Minnesota nice, usually mask a more complicated story.
The U.S. government has often used the language of goodwill as a cover for violence – a phenomenon I call “bene/violence.”
For example, the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, which began in 1899, was sugarcoated in the rhetoric of benevolence. William McKinley, who was U.S. president at the time, insisted that “the strong arm of authority” would promote “the blessings of good and stable government upon the people of the Philippine Islands under the free flag of the United States.” The story of conquest became the story of “uplifting” those deemed less civilized and incapable of self-governance.
The same sort of talk was also used to justify U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s State of the Union address on Jan. 4, 1965, implored Americans to secure the “peace of Asia” and “the progress of humanity.” The government promoted the war in Vietnam as a just war, in part by claiming Americans were granting the Vietnamese the “gift of freedom,” as Asian American studies scholar Mimi Nguyen has written.
In the end, Minnesota nice signals that there’s something special about the state, just as “spreading democracy” and “protecting freedom” signal American exceptionalism on the international stage.
But the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis illuminated what economist Samuel L. Myers calls the “Minnesota Paradox” – a history of inequality that is totally divorced from the way niceness operates in the cultural imagination of the state’s residents.
“African Americans are worse off in Minnesota than they are in virtually every other state in the nation,” Myers writes.
In a 2021 essay, sociologist Amy August also highlighted the state’s persistent racial disparities in housing, health care, income and education to argue that whatever progressive promises the state makes, Minnesota is not apart from America but rather a part of America.
Ultimately, I think the concept of Minnesota nice can create the illusion of a utopian society largely devoid of the ills of racism and inequality. It reinforces American kindness as a core aspect of national identity and, in doing so, I believe glosses over parts of the country’s history – while hampering its ability to address the very real problems that plague the nation today.
I don’t reject what Minnesota nice purports to offer. But it is not a simple and straightforward cultural value adopted by – and equally applied to – everyone.
Giang Nguyen-Dien does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Aaron X. Smith, Assistant Professor of Africology and African American Studies, Temple University
‘A Radiant Light,’ by Philly-based Afrofuturist artist Mikel Elam, celebrates cultural roots and the infinite possibilities of the future. Mikel Elam, CC BY-NC-SA
From the creation of the Liberty Bell in the 1750s to the world-famous Philadelphia Sound soul music of the 1960s and ’70s, artistic innovation has long been a staple in Philly history. Today, the city’s thriving Afrofuturist scene is continuing this legacy.
“Afrofuturism” is a term coined in the 1990s by American cultural critic Mark Dery. Dery used the label to describe “speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of 20th-century techno culture.”
“Call it the power of the subconscious or the predominance of soul culture gone cyber pop,” Womack writes, “but this dance through time travel that Afrofuturists lived for is as much about soul retrieval as it is about jettisoning into the far-off future.”
Here are five local Philly artists whose innovative aesthetics and ideas are contributing to the still-emerging field of Afrofuturistic art.
Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa
Rasheedah Phillips, an artist and housings rights attorney, and Camae Ayewa, a poet and musician who performs as Moor Mother, attended high school in Philadelphia and graduated from the Beasley School of Law at Temple University. In 2015 they founded the Black Quantum Futurism collective, which could be considered the artistic cornerstone of Afrofuturist art in Philadelphia.
Rasheedah Phillips’ latest book will be published in January 2025. AK Press
This collective hosts various events and creative projects. On their website, Phillips and Ayewa describe their movement as “a new approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in order to see into possible futures.” They blend ideas and beliefs from quantum physics and Black and African cultural traditions of consciousness, time and space.
Although the Black Quantum Futurism website is less active than in previous years, Phillips and Ayewa continue to organize and participate in Afrofuturist events both in Philadelphia and around the world. Phillips has a new book, “Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time,” set for release in early 2025.
Mikel Elam
Though he’s a New York transplant, figure painter and Afrofuturist visual artist Mikel Elam has become an asset to the Afrofuturist art scene in Philadelphia.
“I have a special interest in Africa (which is) considered by many anthropologists to be the origin of all life,” he explains. “In many ways, science, spirituality and art are essential to our cultural and mental development. They are more compatible than we might think.”
In his pieces, Elam often incorporates cultural masks he’s collected from his world travels, as well as shiny metal keys. His work on display at Philadelphia International Airport combines both. The keys are positioned to reflect the flow of people in transit – sometimes they move in harmony and other times in opposite directions. Unapologetically optimistic, Elam also surrounds the heads with keys to suggest halos or auras.
‘Bliss Consciousness’ by Mikel Elam depicts the artist’s meditation practice and belief that the keys to universal connection come from within. Mikel Elam, CC BY-NC-SA
Serena Saunders
Serena Saunders is a mural artist, Philly native and owner and operator of Passion Art Designs LLC. She transforms walls throughout Philly and beyond into futuristic visions of hope, struggle, Black joy and justice.
Her paintings emphasize the potential for a more peaceful and equitable future. Her “Camo” collection includes a painting that displays a map of Africa hovering over an ocean of streaming colors, including elements of the American flag. The continent appears to be dripping blood into the waters below.
A major component of the Afrofuturist arts movement involves reimagining existing symbols relating to Black culture and life. Saunders’ “Heart” collection incorporates elements of transhumanism – the belief that humans should use technology to enhance their minds and bodies – which are common in Afrofuturist art. Images of the precious blood-pumping organ are merged with pipes, a faucet head and even a grenade.
Avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra is an Afrofuturist icon who lived in Philly for 25 years. Leni Sinclair via Getty Images
One of the greatest avant-garde jazz musicians of the 20th century, Sun Ra is also an Afrofuturist icon who once occupied a modest Philadelphia row home at 5626 Morton St. in Germantown.
Sun Ra led the Sun Ra Arkestra, a jazz group, from the late 1950s until his death in 1993 at age 79. With songs including “Love in Outer Space,” “Door of the Cosmos,” “Saturn” and “UFO,” Sun Ra kept intergalactic reimaginings of life and love at the forefront of his creative expression. From his lavish futuristic outfits to the astrological symbolism “Astro Black,” he remains a meaningful pioneer of Afrofuturist art.
In 2022, the house where he and bandmates lived and rehearsed was designated a historic landmark. Though not open to the public, it serves as a reminder of the creative, resilient spirit that often resides in humble and unassuming environments, and why we can think of Philadelphia, the city known for being the birthplace of the United States, also as the city of tomorrow.
Aaron X. Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Todd Allen, Professor of Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences, University of Michigan
Steam billows from two cooling towers serving Unit 1 of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 2005.AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Constellation, an energy company that provides electricity and natural gas to customers in 16 states and Washington, announced on Sept. 20, 2024, that it plans to restore and restart Unit 1 at Three Mile Island, a nuclear plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania, that was shut down in 2019. Microsoft has signed a 20-year agreement to purchase electricity generated by the plant to offset power demand from its data centers in the mid-Atlantic region.
Three Mile Island was the site in 1979 of a partial meltdown at the plant’s Unit 2 reactor. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission calls this event “the most serious accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history,” although only small amounts of radiation were released, and no health effects on plant workers or the public were detected. Unit 1 was not affected by the accident. University of Michigan nuclear engineering professor Todd Allen explains what restarting Unit 1 will involve, and why some other shuttered nuclear plants may also get new leases on life.
What is the history of TMI-1?
Three Mile Island Unit 1 is a large nuclear power station with the capacity to generate 837 megawatts of electricity – enough to power about 800,000 homes. It started commercial operations in 1974 and ran until September 2019.
After the accident at Unit 2 in 1979, Unit 1 was shut down for six years, until the operator at the time, Metropolitan Edison, demonstrated to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that it could operate the reactor safely.
Constellation closed Unit 1 down in 2019, even though the plant’s operating license had been extended through 2034 and it had no operational or safety problems. TMI-1 could not compete economically at that point with natural gas-fueled power plants because gas had become extremely cheap.
The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island had broad, lasting effects on nuclear power regulation.
What is the reactor’s current condition?
Since the shutdown in 2019, the plant has sat idle. The NRC calls this status safe storage, or SAFSTOR. The plant is shut down, uranium fuel is removed from the reactor, and the facility is maintained in a safe, stable condition. Irradiated fuel is stored in large steel and concrete casks on a physically secured portion of the site, known as an Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation.
In addition to the fuel, other materials in the plant are radioactive, such as structural channels that direct the cooling water during operation and the large vessel in which the reactor is housed. Radioactive decay occurs during the SAFSTOR period, reducing the plant’s radioactivity and making it easier to dismantle the plant later.
The United States does not have a licensed long-term disposal site for spent nuclear fuel, so it is stored in large dry casks on-site at operating and closed reactors. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, CC BY
What will Constellation need to do to prepare the reactor to restart?
Constellation will need to ensure that it has enough fuel and sufficiently trained personnel. It also will have to ensure that the reactor’s components are still in a condition that allows for safe operation.
This will require detailed inspections and mandatory maintenance actions to ensure that all components are running correctly. In some cases, the company may need to install new equipment.
The exact work will depend on the results of inspections but could include upgrading or replacing the reactor’s major components, such as the turbine and associated electricity generator; large transformers that move the electricity from the reactor out to the grid; equipment used to cool the reactor during operation; and systems for controlling the plant during startup, shutdown and power generation.
As an analogy, imagine that you move to a city and stop driving your car for five years. When you decide to resume driving, you’d need to ensure you have gas, that your driver’s license is still valid and that all of the car’s components still operate correctly. It would probably need new oil, air in the tires, new filters and other replacement parts to run well.
What will the NRC consider as it decides whether to relicense the reactor?
The agency needs to independently confirm Constellation has enough fuel and trained personnel, and that the plant can run safely. These checks must be approved by the commission before the plant can operate.
In my view, Constellation will need to show that the plant is in a condition to operate at the same levels of safety that existed there in September 2019 when the company terminated operations.
Do you expect other utilities to try this type of restoration at closed reactors?
Constellation is not the only utility considering restarting a nuclear plant. Holtec International, an energy technology company, bought the closed Palisades nuclear plant in southwest Michigan in 2022 with the intent to decommission it, but then the company decided to restore and reopen the plant.
That work is underway now. Recently, in its first major inspection at the plant, the NRC found a number of components that it said required more testing and repair work.
Wolverine Power Cooperative, a not-for-profit energy provider to rural communities across Michigan, plans to purchase electricity from the restored Palisades plant, with support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Empowering Rural America program. Holtec is receiving support for restoring Palisades from the U.S. Department of Energy and the state of Michigan.
As the presidential election approaches, the race is ramping up – including on social media. Although Meta reported in 2022 that only about 3% of the content on Facebook is political, Americans have already begun bracing themselves for a deluge of political news stories, ads, AI deepfakes and arguments on their feeds over the next few weeks.
Despite the tensions building on users’ digital feeds, an impending election doesn’t mean that people need to avoid social media altogether. When used wisely, social media can still be an important source for political information and an outlet to express opinions. I’ve studied how people navigate social media during elections, and I want to share three strategies to help you prepare your accounts for this election season so you can stay connected to what’s important without drowning in partisan back-and-forth.
1. Audit your feeds
While elections can be stressful, they also offer a chance to take ownership of the content that you consume online – or, as digital culture scholar Jessa Lingel says, “be your own algorithm.” Take the time to audit your social media ecosystem before November by considering the accounts that you follow and the settings that you have in place.
Social media platforms and their algorithms have inspired widespread concerns about their role in political polarization, because they enable people to isolate themselves in echo chambers that reinforce their own views. People with different political views can end up with substantially different material on their social media feeds.
While research suggests that echo chamber experiences are generally limited to highly partisan people, it is worthwhile to take a critical look at your feeds. Consider diversifying the content you see on social media, including following people whose life experiences differ from your own.
On the other side of the coin, take a breather before unfollowing people you disagree with during tense moments. While encountering political dissent online can be uncomfortable, studies demonstrate that deliberately blocking it out can contribute to polarization.
Platforms are taking steps behind the scenes, however, to limit users’ exposure to political content. For example, Meta recently implemented features that limit the amount of political content that users see on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Since earlier this year, the setting has been turned on by default. Now is a great time to double-check that your accounts’ settings reflect the content and ad personalization preferences that work best for you. If you want, you can turn the political content back on using the “content preferences” settings available through Facebook and Instagram.
2. Stay skeptical and practice stepping away
Misinformation on social media remains a constant concern during elections. This year, AI-generated images pose a particular misinformation threat, especially when they’re shared by the presidential candidates themselves.
The News Literacy Project has established a 2024 election misinformation dashboard that has already compiled over 600 examples of inaccurate viral content related to this election, which include items such as misleading memes, altered photos and videos, and out-of-context quotes.
It’s not enough to hope the platforms’ systems protect users. You should approach information about the election with a skeptical eye, especially when it sparks an emotional response from you.
One study found that people who had stronger emotional reactions to fake news headlines expressed greater intentions to comment, share or like items than those who were not emotionally moved to respond. Pay attention to your emotional reactions to the headlines and images you encounter on social media, and take time to step away, process and fact-check information using sources you know are reliable before sharing.
Especially during elections, ideals of “good citizenship” put pressure on people to stay informed about the latest political news. Social media can provide endless election updates, but just because the information is widely available doesn’t mean you need to engage with it all the time. It’s possible to stay informed while also staying in touch with the enjoyable aspects of social media, even when the election rises to the top of everyone’s minds.
Different platforms can serve different political functions, which could include helping you to set boundaries around political information. Just as you might choose to take a break from intense circumstances by taking a walk or calling a friend, you can also designate some social media spaces primarily for decompressing, while still engaging with political information on others.
This might mean joining a new platform or creating an alternative account on a platform that you already use. While people tend to turn to X, Reddit, TikTok and Facebook for politics, you can choose to curate some accounts with less focus on political content for times when you need an escape.
Regardless of how you choose to prepare your social media feeds for the election, keep in mind that feelings of stress around election time are normal. Many aspects of elections can feel out of control, but taking control of your social media feeds allows you to manage your political information diet for the better.
Chelsea Butkowski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Beijing – The proliferation of initiatives in which Chinese priests walk their spiritual journey together is an eloquent sign of a new normality in pastoral and spiritual life in many dioceses, following the ordination of bishops appointed according to the procedures of the Provisional Agreement in force between the Holy See and the Chinese government. The example of the dioceses of Henan Province is a clear example of this return to normality in the pastoral life of Chinese Catholic communities.According to information received by Fides, about fifty priests from the four dioceses of Henan Province took part in the spiritual retreat held for a week in September between the liturgical feast of the Nativity of Mary and the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Bishop Thaddeus Wang Yuesheng, appointed by Pope Francis on December 16, 2023 and consecrated on January 25, 2024, and Joseph Zhang Yinlin, Bishop of the Diocese of Anyang, consecrated with a papal mandate in 2015, accompanied the retreat under the direction of Fr. John Baptist Zhang, founder of the charitable institution and church information organization “Xinde” in Hebei Province.In an atmosphere of exchange and community, the priests prayed and meditated together on biblical and missionary themes and the teaching of the Church. In this context, the priests were also able to exchange their experiences as pastors of grassroots communities.After the resumption of church life in the late 1970s, the Diocese of Zhengzhou no longer had bishops, only diocesan administrators. The consecration and installation of a new bishop in communion with the Bishop of Rome, more than seventy years after the expulsion of his predecessor, was an objective sign of the restoration of normality to ecclesial life and diocesan community, and promoted a missionary flourishing.In recent months, Bishop Thaddeus Wang has visited the parishes of his diocese and reorganized the diocesan structure with various commissions according to pastoral needs. The bishop focuses great importance on communion and reconciliation, as well as the spiritual growth of priests and lay people.In September, similar spiritual retreats for priests and lay people dedicated to the priestly vocation and the personal encounter with Jesus were also held in the dioceses of Weinan, Hanzhou and the diocese of Beijing.
On September 26, a meeting of the HSE management with a delegation from Azerbaijan took place in the historic building of the National Research University Higher School of Economics on Pokrovsky Boulevard — the Durasov House. Representatives of higher education institutions discussed possible areas of cooperation. An agreement was also signed between the Higher School of Economics and Baku State University.
Before the official part, the guests were given a tour of the Pokrovka building and the Durasov House. Nikita Anisimov, Rector of the HSE, gave a welcoming speech and spoke in detail about the HSE. In particular, he noted the multidisciplinary nature of the university, drawing attention to the fact that, in addition to economic departments, the HSE has departments of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, geography, computer science and creative industries, as well as engineering training areas. He emphasized that the Higher School of Economics is the first choice university for talented applicants from both Russia and other countries. Nikita Anisimov expressed confidence that cooperation with Azerbaijani universities will allow for the creation of high-quality academic exchange and student mobility programs.
Adalat Jalal oglu Muradov, Rector of the Azerbaijan State University of Economics, greeted those present and thanked them for the warm welcome. He introduced his university: “We have more than 20 thousand students. We conduct training in the main educational programs in several languages. We also have 10 training programs within the framework of two diplomas.”
He also noted that the Azerbaijan State University of Economics sees demand for education in Russian and the creation of new joint programs, including online, which could lead to increased attractiveness of education.
“We can think about creating a joint faculty, if you are interested. I am ready to transfer all powers to the HSE within the framework of this faculty. Our students will be happy to come to Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities,” Adalat Jalal ogly Muradov is confident.
Elchin Safarali oglu Babayev, rector of Baku State University, noted that HSE is famous not only for the quality of education and research, but also for its infrastructure. “We are interested in cooperation, we need to move forward and expand the horizons of interaction. We are interested in your scientists and professors to teach here,” he said.
At the same time, the rector of Baku State University emphasized that the name “Higher School of Economics” does not reflect the entire spectrum of areas of study and the diversity of levels of education that are represented at the university. “The university could be called the Higher School of All Sciences,” said Elchin Safarali oglu Babayev.
Rector of the Azerbaijan Technological University Yashar Adil oglu Omarov, in turn, expressed a desire to create dual degree programs with Russian universities, including the Higher School of Economics. “We have a faculty of economics and management, where we could establish cooperation, and there are also programs in design and IT,” he noted.
The Azerbaijani delegation expressed interest not only in opening dual degree programs, but also in joint publications.
At the end of the official part, the Higher School of Economics and Baku State University signed a cooperation agreement.
Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.
Please note; This information is raw content directly from the information source. It is accurate to what the source is stating and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.
http://vvv.hse.ru/nevs/edu/967246868.html
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is a translation. Apologies should the grammar and or sentence structure not be perfect.
The authority has accepted an invitation from the Playing Out initiative to become a Play Streets Beacon.
Playing Out is a resident led organisation allowing people to apply for temporary road closures with help from their local councils, so that neighbours and children can come together as a community.
Through working with the city council, many Wolverhampton streets have successfully held Playing Out days allowing children to play outside their homes in a safe and inclusive environment.
Councillor Obaida Ahmed, City of Wolverhampton Council cabinet member for digital and community, said: “I have seen the positive impact that Playing Out can have on an area.
“It is not just brilliant for children; it can have a positive impact on the entire community.
“Many residents have noted how Play Streets have brought their streets together, strengthening relationships and fostering a greater sense of belonging.
“We are delighted to accept the invitation to become a Play Streets Beacon and look forward to sharing our expertise in this field with others.”
Councillor Jasbir Jaspal, City of Wolverhampton Council cabinet member for adults and wellbeing, said: “This is a fantastic way of supporting our physical activity strategy by inspiring young people to move more in fun events right on their doorstep
“We have an ambition to increase physical activity participation rates across the city and initiatives such as Playing Out days will help us to realise that.”
The Beacon recognition highlights City of Wolverhampton Council as an example of best practice, and it will now share its experience and knowledge of Playing Out events with other organisations and residents.
As a Play Streets Beacon, the council will:
Residents organising an event receive a free promotional pack containing hi-vis vests, guidance on organising a Play Street, a giant skipping rope and chalks.
Applications for a road closure must be made at least 8 weeks before the date of the event.
Some roads within Wolverhampton, such as main roads or roads which are on a bus route, may not be suitable.
More information about Playing Out can be found at Playing Out.
Our research, published in June 2024, used data on the racial composition of drivers on every street in Chicago. We then compared who is driving on roads with who is being ticketed by the city’s speed cameras and who is being stopped by the Chicago police.
Our findings show that when speed cameras are doing the ticketing, the proportion of tickets issued to Black and white drivers aligns closely with their respective share of roadway users. With human enforcement, in contrast, police officers stop Black drivers at a rate that far outstrips their presence on the road.
For instance, on roads where half of drivers are Black, Black drivers receive approximately 54% of automated camera citations. However, they make up about 70% of police stops.
On roadways where half of the drivers are white, white drivers account for around half of automated citations – and less than 20% of police stops.
Driving while Black
Our research adds to other evidence that shows racial bias is a problem in traffic enforcement – a problem sometimes summarized as “driving while Black.”
The civil rights era of the 1960s was rife with law enforcement incidents that targeted Black drivers. As the scholar and historian Gretchen Sorin details in her 2020 book “Driving While Black,” the car simultaneously opened new possibilities of freedom as well as new hazards for Black people.
By the 1990s, the whole world witnessed the punishment that could await those caught driving while Black. In 1991, a Black man named Rodney King was stopped after a high-speed chase and beaten by police in Los Angeles. The violent encounter, captured on videotape and shared on local media, became national news.
In recent years, the police killings of Daunte Wright, Tyre Nichols and other Black drivers have shown how traffic stops can escalate quickly and sometimes lethally.
In September 2024, Miami Dolphins player Tyreek Hill was pulled over by local police on his way to a game at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. Police officers physically pulled Hill from his vehicle and handcuffed him. The incident raised questions about the officers’ aggressive use of force.
A screenshot from body cam footage of officers pulling Miami Dolphins player Tyreek Hill from his car after stopping him for speeding on Sept. 9, 2024. Miami-Dade Police Department
Fairer enforcement and safer streets
All humans have biases. These biases can become dangerous when those humans are police – agents of the state who are armed and empowered to make our cities safer.
To reduce enforcement disparities and improve how traffic violations are handled, more fundamental reforms are likely necessary.
What can more ambitious policy reforms look like?
Several recent potential reforms of traffic enforcement center on decriminalization and de-escalation.
Legislators in Illinois recently proposed a bill that would prohibit traffic stops solely based on noncriminal and minor offenses such as improper vehicle registration, seat belt violations or lane usage mistakes.
Berkeley, California, is considering using trained civilians for traffic enforcement to reduce the opportunity for escalation. The idea is akin to how parking enforcement is done in many cities, including Chicago, which has unarmed parking units separate from the police.
More reliance on automated traffic enforcement could improve traffic safety and transform policing.
Red-light cameras like this one detect and punish reckless drivers without requiring person-to-person interactions. John M. Chase via Getty
Cameras can detect dangerous moving violations, such as serious speeding and running red lights, without the need for immediate police involvement. Automated enforcement alone won’t guarantee safe streets, but cameras have reduced fatal and serious injury crashes substantially where deployed, including in Chicago.
Over half of police stops in Chicago for 2023 were license plate, registration or equipment related. Automating enforcement of such nonmoving violations would eliminate a major reason for police-driver interaction, reducing the potential for bias and escalation.
This, in turn, would free police resources to focus on nontraffic priorities.
And as our data shows, cameras are equal opportunity ticketers: They don’t have racial bias and carry no risk of escalation.
David Levinson has received research funding from ARC, UDIA-NSW, iMOVE, and Sydney Metro. He is affiliated with WalkSydney and Peaceful Bayside.
Nebiyou Tilahun has received funding from the Chicago Department of Transportation and the Illinois Department of Transportation.
Michael J Smart and Wenfei Xu do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Abuja (Agenzia Fides) – Various civil society groups in Nigeria have declared a “National Day for Survival” for October 1. The date has a high symbolic value as it coincides with the 64th anniversary of Nigeria’s independence.The initiative was presented to the press on September 26 at the “International Press Center” in Ogba, in Lagos, by Hassan Taiwo Soweto, coordinator of the “Education Rights Campaign (ERC)”, one of the organizations opposing the economic policies initiated by President Bola Tinubu, which were already the subject of a ten-day protest in August organized through social media under the hashtag #EndBadGovernance (see Fides, 1/8/2024).The organizers of the day of action are calling on the government to “say no to the neoliberal policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), restore fuel prices and electricity tariffs to pre-29 May 2023 levels, operate state-owned refineries to ensure affordable petroleum products, reduce food prices and support farmers to ensure sustainable food production.”The organizers are also calling for the unconditional release of protesters and journalists arrested during the August protests, tackling insecurity, including by providing adequate support to soldiers and police officers, introducing a minimum wage and cutting the high salaries of senior officials.“We call on the Nigerian people, progressive organizations, groups, unions, student associations and youth movements to take to the streets on October 1 and protest and demonstrate peacefully,” said Hassan Taiwo Soweto. The October 1st action is an urgent warning and a call to the Tinubu government to “meet our demands immediately. If our demands are not met, further protests will follow on National Survival Day.” He added: “We need a different way of governing our country, one that ensures that national wealth benefits the needs of all and not the greed of a few.”The demands of the organizers of the “National Survival Day” are also to be seen in the context of widespread corruption in the country, which is one of the richest countries in Africa thanks to oil production. A wealth that seeps into countless channels, which in turn has fueled the country’s foreign debt. In the face of the demands of international creditors, President Tinubu has initiated an economic policy focused on higher taxes and cutting state subsidies, which has severely worsened the living conditions of the majority of Nigerians.In his speech to the 79th session of the UN General Assembly, President Bola Tinubu called on world leaders to consider “comprehensive debt relief” for Nigeria and other developing countries to enable them to progress economically.”We must ensure that any reform of the international financial system includes comprehensive debt relief to enable sustainable development financing. Countries in the global South cannot make meaningful economic progress without special concessions and a review of their current debt burden,” warned Tinubu. (L.M.) (Agenzia Fides, 27/9/2024)
Share:
Source: United States Senator Ted Budd (R-North Carolina)
Raleigh, N.C. — This week, Senator Ted Budd (R-NC) met with the families of North Carolinians who were awarded the Carnegie Medal, an honor bestowed by the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission on “individuals in the United States and Canada who risk death or serious physical injury to an extraordinary degree saving or attempting to save the lives of others.”
Senator Budd said in a statement:
“The Carnegie Medal is inscribed with the Holy Words of John 15:13, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ Those words perfectly describe the North Carolina citizens I met. It was nothing short of inspiring to hear their stories, hear their love for others, and their act of courage that brought them this honor. North Carolina is a special state to have produced such heroes. It was my absolute honor to spend time with them and thank them on behalf of our state.”
Below are stories of the two honorees with photos of their meeting with Senator Budd:
Daniel L. Weiss – Stokesdale, NC
Daniel L. Weiss saved a woman from burning, Greensboro, North Carolina, May 17, 2022. The woman, 29, was unconscious in her two-door coupe after an accident in which the car left a rural road and continued down an embankment for about 25 feet, where it struck two trees and caught fire. Weiss, 59, facility technician, was working on a utility pole nearby and responded. He reached the driver’s door and saw the woman in the driver’s seat, unconscious and slumped over the steering wheel. He reached in through the window opening and shook her in an attempt to wake her, but she did not respond. Weiss felt for a pulse, then noticed flames burning at the hood and spreading inside through the dashboard and air vents. He called to his co-worker for a fire extinguisher, which the man provided. Weiss emptied the extinguisher, but the flames at the hood continued to burn. He pulled on the handle of the driver’s door, but the door would not open. He then ran to the passenger side and fully entered the car, knelt on the front passenger seat, and turned the woman so she faced away from him. From behind, Weiss reached his arms around her front, clasped his hands together, and lifted her over the center console onto the passenger seat. Flames again burned through the air vents and spread toward the passenger side, coming within a foot of them. Weiss backed through the passenger door opening and fell with the woman to the ground. Two men responded and, with Weiss, carried her to a point about 20 feet away after seeing fire envelop the front seats. Flames grew to engulf the vehicle’s entire cab. The woman was not burned but was taken to the hospital for injuries sustained in the accident. Weiss suffered minor smoke inhalation and recovered.
Antwaun M. Jackson – Jacksonville, NC
Antwaun M. Jackson died helping to save two women and two children from drowning, North Topsail Beach, North Carolina, July 9, 2022. In the afternoon, several relatives, including two women, 33 and 24, and two girls, 7 and 6, were in the New River Inlet near its confluence with the Atlantic Ocean as the group of four reached a location where they no longer could touch the bottom. Suddenly struggling in a strong current after helping the girls use a bodyboard in shallow water, the women called out for help, alarming their relatives at the nearby beach, including Jackson, 40, production worker. A cousin of the two women and two girls, Jackson waded into the water, first moving toward other children closer to shore, then he swam to the area of the women, along with another female cousin, who helped the girls onto a bodyboard. The women recalled Jackson, who had moved beyond them, trying to push them from behind toward shore. Seeing a cluster of distressed swimmers, including Jackson, other men from separate groups also entered the water and helped to aid the women, girls, and female cousin back to safety in wadable water. All recovered without injury. Jackson remained stranded in the rough current and beyond the reach of some men and responding police officers, who took a rescue disc attached to a rope into the water which was thrown in Jackson’s direction to no effect. Ultimately, Jackson submerged, did not resurface, and could not be found by rescue crews that afternoon or in the days afterward. Jackson’s body has yet to be recovered.
Source: US Department of Health and Human Services
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced today additional resources and flexibilities available in response to Hurricane Helene in Florida. CMS is working closely with the state of Florida to put these flexibilities in place to ensure those affected by this natural disaster have access to the care they need – when they need it most.
The decision by the Pollsmoor Correctional Supervision and Parole Board to place convicted murderer Najwa Petersen on parole has been referred to the Correctional Supervision and Parole Review Board (CSPRB) for review.
The referral was made by Minister of Correctional Services Dr Pieter Groenewald in terms of section 75(8) of the Correctional Services Act.
Peterson is serving a 28-year prison sentence for orchestrating the murder of her husband, popular artist, Taliep Petersen.
“The CSPRB is tasked with reviewing the original decision made by the Pollsmoor Correctional Supervision and Parole Board and must confirm or replace it with its own decision.
“This referral suspends the decision to place her on parole, effective from the 27th of November 2024, pending the outcome of the CSPRB,” the department said.
Furthermore, the department explained that the referral follows representations made by Taliep Petersen’s family.
“The discrepancies in Marius van der Westhuizen’s case have led to a lack of public trust. As a result, I am exercising my discretion under the provisions of the Act to ensure that Parole Boards consider all reports comprehensively to prevent future occurrences of such issues,” the Minister said. – SAnews.gov.za
Government has welcomed the marginal employment growth and expansion of South Africa’s real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the second quarter of this year.
“The growth bears testament to the government’s commitment made during the State of the Nation Address in February to ensure positive economic growth that will encourage business development and provide more employment opportunities,” Acting Director-General of Government Communication and Information System (GCIS), Nomonde Mnukwa ,said on Friday.
According to the Quarterly Employment Statistics survey released by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) this week, the total employment in the formal non-agricultural sector increased by 42 000 in the second quarter of 2024, bringing the level of employment to 10.7 million.
While the survey shows that 144 000 jobs were lost between June 2023 and June 2024, the total number of employees grew by 42 000 (0.4%), with employment rising from 10.67 million in March 2024 to 10.72 million by June 2024.
“The positive developments mean that government’s structural reforms are unlocking the bottlenecks and removing red tape to drive inclusive growth and job creation. South Africa’s business-friendly approach paves a positive sentiment, signalling that South Africa is becoming more and more of an investment destination,” Mnukwa said.
The GCIS said this growth shows commitment by government to work with social partners to stabilise the economy.
“The prudent economic path pursued to turn around our economy is starting to show improvement,” GCIS said. – SAnews.gov.za
