GMO IS OMG SPELLED BACKWARDS

The hidden race to design the perfect farm animal

We're squeezing as much food as possible out of our livestock. We breed cows to give more and more milk and modify salmon's genes to make them grow faster. But if we can make our animals more productive, can we also make them more sustainable? And, perhaps more importantly, should we? Reporter: Tim Schauenberg Video Editor: Madmo Cem Adam Springer Supervising Editor: Kiyo Dörrer, Malte Rohwer-Kahlmann

 #PlanetA #GMO #SustainableAgriculture

WORKERS REVOLT

'Employees are not showing up': Return-to-office plans unravel as workers revolt in tight job market

WHITE, BLUE, PINK,

NO MATTER THE COLOUR OF YOUR COLLAR 

WE ARE ALL PROLETARIANS NOW

Workers stubbornly sticking to remote work while struggling with child care, the grind of commuting and COVID worries

Bloomberg News
Matthew Boyle
Publishing date:May 13, 2022 

A person works in an office building in San Francisco. 

PHOTO BY DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG

Even the most inflexible bosses are softening their return-to-office expectations.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief Jamie Dimon has been one of the most vocal critics of remote work, arguing that it’s no substitute for the spontaneous idea generation that results from bumping into colleagues at the coffee machine. But in his annual letter to shareholders last month, the head of America’s biggest bank allowed that working from home “will become more permanent in American business,” and estimated that about 40 per cent of his 270,000-person workforce would work under a hybrid model, which includes days in the office and at home.

Soon after Dimon’s missive, one of the bank’s senior technology executives told some teams that they could cut back from three days in the office per week to two, citing internal feedback.

Many white-collar workplaces are making similar retreats as their employees stubbornly stick to working from home while struggling with child care, the grind of commuting and worries about rising COVID-19 cases. Bosses are wary of taking punitive action against those who aren’t following their ambitious so-called RTO plans, fearing it will backfire in today’s tight labour market. That leaves them to re-evaluate their carefully crafted strategies and reconsider what is a realistic long-term approach to in-person work.

A person is reflected in a window of a JPMorgan Chase & Co. bank branch across the street from the company’s headquarters in New York. 

PHOTO BY MICHAEL NAGLE/BLOOMBERG

“We are seeing policies slip in real time,” said Melissa Swift, the U.S. transformation leader at workforce consultant Mercer. “There was previously all this talk about how, for white-collar jobs, collaborating in the office was important. That’s slipping. Now, only the people who need to turn a screwdriver need to be in the office.”

Not all workers are rebelling against directives to return the office, with variation across companies, sectors and job categories. Still, employers are seeing fresh reason to doubt the viability of their RTO guidelines. People are coming back to just about everything else — travel, restaurants, concerts, stores — amid a general loosening in state and federal COVID-related restrictions. So executives can no longer reassure themselves that workers would dutifully come back once those rules relaxed.

We are seeing policies slip in real time

MELISSA SWIFT

At the same time, organizations that returned to the office in the first few months of the year now have loads of feedback from employees, many of whom are frustrated by commuting in just to spend half their day on Zoom calls. That adds to two full years of data on how workforces remained just as productive — and often were more satisfied — while working from home, and emerging research from academics. The result is a groundswell of hard evidence that can convince even the staunchest remote-work skeptics.

Examples of RTO resistance abound. At Apple Inc., a small group of employees has pushed back against the iPhone maker’s plan that will soon require most corporate workers to be in the office three days a week. A worker group called Apple Together penned an open letter to company leadership last month, in which signatories asked “to decide for ourselves, together with our teams and direct manager, what kind of work arrangement works best for each one of us.” The staffers also dismissed the oft-cited desire for in-person collaboration, saying “this is not something we need every week, often not even every month, definitely not every day.” Apple declined to comment.

Some Apple workers are pushing back against plans to return to the office three days a week.

 PHOTO BY MIKE BLAKE/REUTERS

For some companies, there’s no longer any debate. Airbnb Inc. had previously pegged September 2022 as its return to the office, but Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky dumped that plan last month, instead telling his 6,000 employees that they could work remotely indefinitely. “Each of us works best in our own ways, and we’re giving you the flexibility to make the right choice based on where you’re most productive,” Chesky wrote in an email to staff.

A smattering of law firms have relaxed once-stringent attendance policies. Cooley LLP, a 3,000-person firm, said last month that it would let its lawyers decide whether and when to go into its offices, provided their duties allow for remote work.

When old-school bankers and lawyers grudgingly accept the value of working from home, it’s a sign of how much things have changed. A new survey of real-estate executives by CBRE Group Inc. found that the share of them who expect their workplaces to be “office-based” for most employees going forward declined to 19 per cent from 30 per cent last year. At the recent Milken Institute Global Conference, a popular icebreaker was asking fellow attendees about their organization’s work-from-home approach. “It’s as common a conversation opener as asking about someone’s kids,” said Bob Kricheff, a portfolio manager at Shenkman Capital Management.

A growing body of research supports these shifts. While many companies settled on three or four days in the office when initially establishing hybrid-work arrangements, the ideal setup is actually just one or two days in the office, according to a recent working paper from Harvard Business School. Hybrid work schedules can also reduce employee quit rates by 35 per cent compared with those who work entirely from the office, research co-led by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University found. With Americans quitting jobs at a record pace — 4.5 million in March alone — that flexibility matters.

An empty office in Montreal. 

PHOTO BY ALLEN MCINNIS/MONTREAL GAZETTE

When data-storage giant Teradata Corp. asked employees across all its U.S. locations if they wanted to come back to the office at least a few days a week, about half said yes, according to Chief People Officer Kathy Cullen-Cote. But of that group, only half show up. “If I’m sitting in the corner of the office, and only half the people are there, will I have that watercooler conversation? No,” said Cullen, whose company has cut its real-estate footprint in half.

“Employees are not showing up, and it’s hard for employers to deal with this,” said Stanford’s Bloom, whose ongoing analysis of pandemic-era workplaces has found yawning gaps between what managers and workers desire when it comes to RTO policies. That’s because for every boss who claims that corporate culture and innovation suffer when offices are sparsely populated, there are plenty of workers, particularly women and under-represented racial groups, with no desire to return to the inequities, double standards and microaggressions of daily cubicle life.

Eighty-two per cent of working moms polled earlier this year by Future Forum, a research consortium backed by Slack Technologies Inc., said they wanted flexibility in where they work, the highest level since the group began surveying white-collar workers in 2020. Black workers are also more likely to want some say over where they work than white employees.

While many companies have adopted so-called “work from anywhere” policies akin to the one at Airbnb, others have put a price on remote work. London-based law firm Stephenson Harwood, for example, recently told staff that anyone wanting to work from home permanently will have to take a 20 per cent pay cut.

But such ultimatums are rare. Instead, frustrated bosses are increasingly making more emotional appeals. In a recent memo to staff, Rich Handler, chief executive officer of Jefferies Financial Group Inc., said “we are mentally healthier when we are around each other regularly. Our juniors and mid-level partners need our empathic seniors to truly lead them in person.”

While acknowledging the efficiency of remote work, Handler and President Brian Friedman said it’s left many mid-level and junior staff “feeling abandoned,” and they “need to be in your physical presence” to see big deals get done or learn how to cultivate clients. “They need this from you,” the bosses said to the firm’s senior staff. “It just requires more effort from all of you.”

MORE ON THIS TOPIC

‘I miss remote work already’: Workers are back in offices — and it’s been very, very awkward

Long COVID: The invisible public health crisis fuelling labour shortages

Workers losing faith in employers as they head back to the office

‘Hybrid work is here to stay’: Canadians more productive, happier and richer working part time from home

Bloomberg.com

U.S., Britain enter commercial spaceflight partnership


Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (L) and his British counterpart, Grant Shapps, sign a commercial spaceflight partnership agreement on Thursday at Maryland's Smithsonian Institution. Photo courtesy of Britain's Department for Transport


May 12 (UPI) -- The United States and Britain entered into a commercial spaceflight partnership agreement Thursday with the aim to launch cheaper, quicker and more streamlined spaceflight operations.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his British counterpart, Grant Shapps, signed the agreement at Maryland's Smithsonian Institution, London's Department for Transport said in a statement Friday.



Under the agreement, the two nations agree to work together to boost opportunities for British and U.S. companies to launch missions from either countries' spaceports through reducing red tape and regulatory obstacles, it said.

Specifically, the agreement removes duplication for licensing between the two countries for commercial space activities, reducing costs and procedure burdens while seeking to maintain a high-level of safety standards.

"Commercial space travel is growing swiftly and it's our responsibility to ensure that these innovations advance safely, encouraging them to develop in ways that benefit us all," Buttigieg said. "We're proud to launch this partnership with the United Kingdom to bring more of the benefits of commercial space travel to our workers, businesses and communities."


Britain's Department for Transport called the agreement a "landmark partnership" that will reduce London's reliance on other countries to launch British-made and -operated satellites.

London has been seeking to bolster is space industry, which supports some 47,000 jobs, as it nears its first-ever launch from home soil at SpacePort Cornwall later this year.

"This transformational partnership is one giant leap for both countries as we prepared for an exciting new era of spaceflight to lift off," Shapps said. "As we look beyond the UK's first planned spaceflight later this year, I look forward to seeing the innovations and opportunities skyrocket thanks to this collaboration."

There are seven spaceports currently being developed across the European island nation.

FDA approves underwear to protect against STDs during oral sex

By HealthDay News

Infections such as herpes, gonorrhea and syphilis can be transmitted through oral sex, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The first underwear meant to protect against sexually transmitted infections during oral sex was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday.

Lorals -- which are available as bikinis or shorties -- are made of vanilla-flavored latex about as thin as condom material and form a seal on the inside of the thigh to keep fluids in, developer Melanie Cristol told the New York Times. They are to be used only once, like a condom.

On Thursday, Cristol's company will begin selling the underwear explicitly for infection protection.

Infections such as herpes, gonorrhea and syphilis can be transmitted through oral sex, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

RELATED Cases of gonorrhea, syphilis rose nationally in 2020, CDC reports

Until now, the only FDA-authorized product for protection during oral sex was a dental dam, a thin sheet of latex polyurethane typically held in place with hands to form a barrier between the mouth and genitals, according to the Times.

"The FDA's authorization of this product gives people another option to protect against STIs during oral sex," Courtney Lias, director of the FDA office that led the review of the underwear, told the Times.

"Oral sex is not totally risk-free," Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, director of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told the Times.

There's growing need for such protection because more "teenagers are initiating their first sexual activity with oral sex," she said.

Offering protection that's enjoyable to use could "reduce anxiety and increase pleasure around that particular behavior," for people of all ages, Marrazzo added.

Human clinical trials of Lorals were not needed for the FDA's approval, but the agency did require documentation about thickness, elasticity, strength and other measures, as it does with condoms, the Times reported.

In the past year, the FDA has also given approval to two new dental dam companies, which may suggest increased consumer interest, according to the newspaper.

More information

Visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for more on sexually transmitted infections.

Copyright © 2022 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Lhakpa Sherpa sets record with 10th climb to top of Mount Everest


Nepalese climber Lhakpa Sherpa reacts during a press conference on Wednesday before leaving for Mount Everest in Kathmandu, Nepal. She set a world record as the first woman to climb the peak 10 times. Photo by Narendra Shrestha/EPA-EFE

May 13 (UPI) -- Lhakpa Sherpa, a Nepalese single mother who works at a Whole Foods in Connecticut, set a world record on Thursday by becoming the first woman to scale Mount Everest 10 times.

Sherpa, 48, first climbed the world's highest peak 22 years ago, becoming the first Nepali woman to climb and make it down alive. Sherpa was born in Nepal. She married Romanian-born climber George Dijmarescu, with whom she climbed Everest five times.

The couple moved to the United States and eventually divorced in 2015, but Sherpa continued climbing.

"I grew up right next to Everest," Sherpa told BBC News. "I could see it from my home. Everest continues to inspire and excite me."

Even though she was always drawn to the mountain, Sherpa said she was discouraged by her mother to pursue climbing it.

"My mum said I would never get married," Sherpa said. "She warned me that I would become too masculine and undesirable. The villagers told me that it's a man's job and I would die if I tried it."

On Thursday's climb, she was joined by her daughter, 15, at one of Everest base camps. Sherpa said she wants to follow in her footsteps as a climber. Sherpa also holds the record for siblings climbing Mount Everest, being joined on one climb with brother Mingma Gelu, and sister Ming Kipa.

Despite her records and climbing exploits, the single mother of three children works nearly without notice at a Whole Foods store in Hartford, Conn. She raised money for her record-breaking climb on Thursday through crowdfunding.

MORE DANGEROUS THAN EVEREST

Now she wants to climb K2 in Pakistan, the world's second-highest peak, to add to her mountaineering conquests.

"I've had a challenging life," Sherpa said. "Mountains made me happy and relaxed. I will never give up. I want young women not to give up."

Kim Jong Un impersonator crashes Australian PM's campaign event

May 13 (UPI) -- A man dressed to impersonate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, disrupted one of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's campaign events Friday, in front of multiple news outlets.

Video of the event, for Liberal MP Gladys Liu at a manufacturing business in Melbourne, shows the man in a black pinstripe suit with slicked back hair and sunglasses, in similar style to the North Korean leader.

The man was apparently able to bypass some of the event's security checkpoints before loudly declaring that Liu was supporting the Chinese Communist Party "and now she's going to support the North Korean regime."

He was confronted by Morrison's staff and eventually questioned by the police after being escorted out of the building.

The man referred to himself as "the Supreme Leader."

"Excuse me, mate, you are going to have to leave, this is the most offensive thing I've ever seen on a campaign ... this is a private business," Morrison's media adviser, Nick Creevey, told him, according to the Brisbane Times.

"Excuse me, you don't tell the Supreme Leader what to do," he replied to a member of the Prime Minister's staff.

Senate candidate Drew Pavlou later took credit for the stunt on Twitter, thanking the impersonator for his work.

"This is actually one of the best things we've ever managed," he wrote.

"Love you Howard you beautiful genius."

Anti-overdose drug buprenorphine given to few Americans with opioid addiction

By HealthDay News

A new study found that only 47% of participants were prescribed buprenorphine, and the rate was even lower (about 30%) for opioid users who also misuse other substances such as alcohol, methamphetamine, benzodiazepines or cocaine. 

Photo by Tmeers91/Wikimedia Commons

A potentially lifesaving drug that reduces overdose risk is prescribed to less than half of Americans treated for opioid addiction, a new study finds.

This underuse of buprenorphine is "equivalent to giving those with advanced cancer a less aggressive treatment," said senior investigator Dr. Laura Bierut. She is a professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

"It seems obvious to many of us that we should be giving the most aggressive and effective treatments to those who are most seriously ill," Bierut added in a university news release.

For the study, Bierut and her colleagues analyzed health insurance data on about 180,000 people nationwide treated for opioid use disorder from 2011 to 2016. Only 47% of them were prescribed buprenorphine, and the rate was even lower (about 30%) for opioid users who also misuse other substances such as alcohol, methamphetamine, benzodiazepines or cocaine.

RELATED Only 1 in 4 people with opioid use disorder in U.S. receive medication, study finds

The study was published online recently in JAMA Network Open.

"It's concerning that the majority of people misusing multiple substances don't appear to be getting the lifesaving medication they really need," said study co-author Dr. Kevin Xu, a resident physician in the university's psychiatry department.

"While the data we analyzed predates COVID-19, the pandemic saw an escalation in overdoses, yet we're still not seeing many eligible patients get buprenorphine prescriptions," Xu noted.

RELATED  ERs can boost efforts to stamp out opioid addiction, study suggests

The data the researchers analyzed are a few years old, Bierut said. "But we think this information can be extrapolated to what's happening now because even more people using opioids -- or using opioids as well as other substances -- are showing up in emergency departments today. The problem has only gotten worse during the COVID-19 pandemic," she added.

Nearly 107,000 people in the United States died of drug overdoses from early 2021 through early 2022, compared with 70,237 drug overdose deaths in 2017, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There are a number of possible reasons for the low rate of buprenorphine prescriptions among people treated for opioid addiction, according to Xu.

RELATED Study: Opioid addiction treatment in jail reduces re-arrest risk after release

Buprenorphine itself is an opioid, which may make doctors hesitant to prescribe it to people with opioid addiction. Buprenorphine can be taken at home and does not require daily trips to a clinic, but that lack of supervision could also affect decisions about prescribing it. Another reason may be insufficient data about the drug's effectiveness in those who misuse multiple substances.

But such concerns appear to be unfounded, Xu said.

"Buprenorphine appears to be a safe opioid," he noted. "It's specifically designed to be different from other opioid drugs in that it won't cause a user to stop breathing, which pretty much every other type of opioid will do. That means it can be taken safely at home, which is very helpful, even essential, to recovery."

More information

There's more on opioid addiction at the American Academy of Family Physicians.

Copyright © 2022 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Female House Democrats condemn criminalizing women's reproductive health


Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other House Democrats speak during a press conference on the House steps Friday after the Senate failed to codify Roe vs. Wade earlier this week. Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo

May 13 (UPI) -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday joined female Democratic members of Congress in passionate defense abortion and reproductive rights, urging Americans to politically mobilize beginning this weekend.

"As Republicans seek to control and criminalize women's reproductive health freedoms, Democrats are fighting to enshrine Roe vs. Wade into law," Pelosi said during a news conference on the steps of the House of Representatives.

She said Republicans in the Senate lined up in lockstep with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and former President Donald Trump to vote to "rip away the constitutional right to health freedom for American women."

Pelosi said Republicans want a nationwide ban on abortion. And she asserted they won't stop with stripping abortion rights away from millions of American women.

"Make no mistake. Once Republicans shred long-standing precedent and privacy rights, they intend to wage an all-out assault on more of our rights, including access to contraception and marriage equality," Pelosi said.

Rep. Barbara Lee, D.-Calif., said rallies for abortion rights will be held this weekend on the National Mall in Washington D.C., and in cities across the country.

"We're not going to be denied the right to make decisions about our own bodies," Lee said. adding that no Republican senator voted to consider legislation that protects "our rights to make our own reproductive health decisions."

A Senate vote to codify Roe vs. Wade into federal law lost 51-49 with every Democrat except West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin voting for abortion rights, while every Republican voted against those rights for women.

Lee said that for many women, the impending loss of abortion rights is personal.

"I've personally experienced the fear, the stigma, the trauma, the despair of being denied care that you need," she said.

Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., who co-chairs the Pro-Choice Caucus with Lee, urged everyone to mobilize and rally politically starting with the weekend rallies.

"It's the beginning of the march to the November elections," Lee said.

She said the 218-211 House vote to pass the Women's Health Protection Act and put Roe vs. Wade abortion rights into federal law was the most support for abortion rights ever in Congress.

Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York said that a Republican minority has worked for decades to roll back the rights of women. She said that minority has worked systematically to politicize the Supreme Court by packing it with "activist ideologues."

British court rules calling man 'bald' amounted to sexual harassment

A British court ruled Wednesday that a supervisor sexually harassed an employee by calling him bald. File Photo by Activedia/Pixabay

May 13 (UPI) -- In Britain, calling a man bald can now be classified as sexual harassment, an employment tribunal ruled Wednesday.

The tribunal said calling a man bald was akin to commenting on the size of woman's breasts, based on case law dating back to 1995. The case involved Tony Finn, an electrician at British Bung Manufacturing, who was threatened by his shift supervisor, Jamie King, and called a "bald" expletive.

Finn was eventually fired in 2019. 

The tribunal said the insult violated Finn's "dignity, it created an intimidating environment for him, it was done for that purpose, and it related to the claimant's sex."

Employment judge Jonathan Brain said he believed the comment was made as a form of intimidation.

"It is much more likely that a person on the receiving end of a comment such as that which was made in [that] case would be female," Brain said, according to the Evening Standard. "So too, it is much more likely that a person on the receiving end of a remark such as that made by Mr. King would be male."

Finn also won claims of unfair dismissal, wrongful dismissal along with sexual harassment. The court did not agree on his claims of age discrimination. The tribunal will determine compensation at a later date.

USA 

ER wait times longer for Hispanic people with chest pain, study finds

Hispanic patients with potential heart problems wait longer for care in hospital emergency rooms, according to a new study.

 Photo by paulbr75/Pixabay

May 13 (UPI) -- Hispanic adults in the United States who visit hospital emergency rooms complaining of chest pain wait longer to receive treatment than those of other racial and ethnic groups, a study presented Friday found.

Nationally, people of Hispanic descent waited 39% longer than people of all other races or ethnicities to be taken care of by healthcare professionals in emergency rooms, according to data presented Friday during a meeting of researchers hosted by the American Heart Association.

This included longer waits for further testing, 24-hour observation, hospital admission or ER discharge, the researchers said.

On average, Hispanic adults wait 99 minutes for these and other services compared with an average of 71 minutes for those of other races and ethnicities, according to the researchers.

RELATED Pandemic's unequal toll on people of color underlines U.S. health inequities

Although Hispanic adults were admitted to the hospital slightly more often than people of all other races or ethnicities, they waited nearly twice as long as others -- 86 minutes versus 44 minutes -- for that, the data showed.

Hispanic people represented less than 5% of all people who arrived in the ER complaining of chest pain during the study's one-year period, and they tended to be younger and have lower blood pressure than others, the researchers said.

In addition, Hispanic people were nearly three times more likely than people from any other racial or ethnic groups to be uninsured, and Hispanic women were 58% more likely to visit the ER with chest pain than Hispanic men, according to the researchers.

RELATED Heart health rises with education, but not for all races, study suggests

"Even with continued efforts to eliminate disparities and achieve health equity, our research confirms Hispanic people continue to face significant barriers to health care," Dr. Katiria Pintor Jimenez, a co-author of the study, said in a press release.

"Chest pain is one of the most common symptoms of presentation in the emergency room,' said Pintor Jimenez, an internal medicine resident at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta.

Racial and ethnic health care disparities contribute greatly to overall health, risk for death and healthcare costs related to heart disease and stroke, research indicates.

RELATED Sex, racial disparities found in cardiac rehab referral

Heart disease is the leading cause of death across almost all ethnic groups in the United States, including Hispanic people who represent the largest and fastest growing ethnic population nationally, according to the American Heart Association.

The findings of this study are based on an analysis of more than 11,000 medical records of people arriving at the emergency room at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta n 2020 with a chief symptom of chest pain, the researchers said.


"Our findings suggest that Hispanic people with chest pain may experience unwarranted delays in the emergency department and in receiving overall medical care in the hospital," Pintor said.

"Contributing factors in delayed care among Hispanic people may include language barriers, cultural values and behavior, immigration status, the lack of health insurance or a lack of Hispanic healthcare professionals who can better promote healthcare equity," she said.