‘Workers don’t want toys or free food, they want a higher quality of life’: The Great Resistance is here — as companies struggle to get workers back to the office

May 23, 2022


Amy Faust Liggayu, 32, a market-research project manager based in Tinley Park, Ill., mother of a 7-month-old son, never imagined she would have a life where she could spend five days a week with him, while also working full time. But that was before March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced offices across the country to tell their employees to work from home.

She had previously spent $20 a day commuting four days a week, and worked the fifth day from home, but when her manager called employees back full time, a move many other businesses are making now that vaccines are widely available and the worst days of the pandemic appear to have receded, she was not willing to give up all that freedom remote work had given her.

Those early months of COVID-19 when millions of people worked from home gave them a rare opportunity to reevaluate the role of work in their lives. And in 2022 they have leverage: Unemployment is falling and wages are rising, as companies struggle to attract and retain workers. In fact, there are two job openings for every unemployed American, the highest level on record since 2001.

But many companies want workers back. Google parent company Alphabet
GOOGL, Facebook parent Meta FB and Microsoft Corp. have requested workers go back to the office at least a few days a week. Jefferies Financial Group, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs Group
are among the financial institutions that have also asked workers to return.

Amid these efforts, Faust Liggayu counts herself among the Great Resistance. “I’m very outspoken about my desire to never work in an office again,” she said. “The quality of life is so much better when you can cut out that commute or spend your lunch break with your family.” She would often not arrive home until 6:30 p.m. if she left the office at 5 p.m. Those were precious hours lost with her son.

When she received news that all employees were going to be back in the offices, she told MarketWatch that she was frustrated. “They haven’t been listening to me,” she recalls thinking. “They know I don’t want to go back.” So she took a stand. “Job recruiters were reaching out to me on LinkedIn. All the jobs they reached out to me about were working from home.”

The outcome was a win-win for her: She found a new job two months ago that paid more money, while working full-time from home. “I went from making $50,000 a year to $80,000. When I get to stop at 5 p.m., I’m done. I get to spend that time with my son. Time moves quickly. It means so much at this age. It means so much to get those extra two hours a night with him.”
Amid labor shortage, employees flex their muscles

The Great Resignation — regarded by some observers as more of a Great Negotiation for better pay and working conditions — has led to the Great Resistance, a battle of wills between senior management and, well, everyone else. For those who are fortunate enough to have the option to work remotely, which other figures put at 40% of the workforce, they’re not giving up.

“There is definitely a sense of resistance amongst employees against the full-week, all-day, in-person work concept,” said Vanessa Burbano, associate professor of business at Columbia Business School in New York. “Remote working enables a degree of flexibility in the day that is practically impossible to recreate in a physical co-working space.”

Faust Liggayu said her breakup with her former employer was respectful and without animosity. She had worked at that previous job from 2017 to March 2022, and it was a small team. But the standoff between some employees and their companies has not always been so free of drama. Apple, for one, has suffered at least one high-profile resignation as a result.

“The Great Resignation has led to the Great Resistance, a battle of wills between senior management and, well, everyone else. ”

 

A group, “Apple Together,” signed an open letter to the tech giant, claiming over 3,000 signatures from workers, rejecting a hybrid work model and asking the company to allow them to make their own decisions. “Stop treating us like school kids who need to be told when to be where and what homework to do,” they wrote. (Apple did not respond to a request for comment.)

Thus far, workers have successfully dug their feet into their sofas. Some 64% said they would consider looking for a new job if they were required to return to the office full time, a survey by ADP, a provider of human resources management software and services, found. Younger people (18- to 24-year-olds) are the most reluctant (71%) to return to the workplace full time.

“This shift from the traditional 9-to-5, office-based model cannot be undone and has long-term implications for the jobs market,” the report said. “As companies — and employees — re-evaluate their approach to the workforce, it is clear that having a flexible approach is key, as there are advantages and drawbacks to both exclusively, whether fully remote or fully in office.”

Last month, Airbnb acknowledged that the era of full- or even part-time office working is over, telling workers they could work from home or the office, if they choose, and they can work from anywhere in the U.S. without a change in pay. Starting in September, they can also live and work in over 170 countries for up to 90 days a year in each location.

Ken Steinbach: ‘There is a special connection when we are in the same space together face to face.’

There’s no such thing as a free lunch

Chris Herd, CEO of Firstbase, which helps companies go remote, said there’s no such thing as a free lunch. “Workers don’t want toys or free food, they want a higher quality of life. Forcing people to commute two hours a day — where they carry laptops to an office to sit in a chair for eight hours and then Slack or Zoom people who aren’t in the office all day — has created broken ways of living.”

He said the Great Resignation reflects people’s desperation for better work-life balance and believes that giving ultimatums will lead to “armageddon” inside companies. “Over the last two years, companies have found out people don’t need to be in the office for great work to keep happening,” he said. “Now, companies are pushing back for employees to return to office again.”

Nicholas Bloom, professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University, said neither hard nor soft nudges will work. His own poll of 3,000 people revealed a “fiendishly hard” task for managers to get people back. “Nobody commutes for one hour for a free bagel or box or to use a ping-pong table,” he said. “They come in to catch up with friends and work in person.”

“‘If you have to force somebody to come to the office it is not in their interests to come in.’”

— Nicholas Bloom, professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University

Indeed, some Silicon Valley companies pulled out all the stops to entice people back and foster a sense of community, he told MarketWatch. “Google got so desperate they hired Lizzo to give a concert, which is great for one day, but unless you are planning on getting Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and then Justin Bieber after that, this is not a permanent solution.”

“The resistance is there when employees do not see the point in coming in,” Bloom said. “If you have to force somebody to come to the office it is not in their interests to come in. To avoid forcing people you need to make it benefit them to come in. That means setting up typically two or three days a week of office time on anchor days when everyone comes in.”

He said it makes more sense to create a hybrid environment where team members show up on the same day rather than enforce a five-day week and fail. “So I see resistance to returning to the office a symptom of over-ambitious return to office plans. Realistic plans centered around anchor days, probably two to start off with, can work well and firms can build on this.”

For those who can work from home, this may be a luxury problem. The Labor Department says only 7.7% of employees teleworked in April. Millions of jobs necessitate in-person interactions. Retail, manufacturing and essential-services workers such as supermarket and hospital staff and public-transport employees put their lives at risk during the pandemic.

Remote work is a tradeoff for everyone

As managers negotiate with office workers, companies are negotiating with landlords about their office leases. In Manhattan, monthly leasing activity decreased by 11.5% month-over-month to 2.7 million square feet in April, Colliers said. However, companies seem to be betting on some kind of return to office life: Demand more than doubled year over year.

Herd, however, said managers will soon see the advantage of remote work. “E-commerce killed physical stores because people prefer to shop online, it gave them more choice, it was more efficient and costs less,” he said. “E-companies kill office-based companies because workers prefer to work online, it gives them more choice, it is more efficient and costs less.”

It’s obviously not a one-size-fits-all question, even for those who have had the luxury of working from home. “For me, in the mental-health counseling field, I can see both sides,” said Ken Steinbach, a Portland, Ore.,-based counselor. “There is a special connection when we are in the same space together face to face, and I would love to be able to connect that way again.”

“The reality is that most of my clients might not be able to have therapy if they had to block out time to go into an office,” Steinbach told MarketWatch. “Working virtually has made my services much more accessible to a great many people and I can’t see that changing. So yes, I love the idea of being in person, but that may not be the world we live in.”

Peter Gray, professor of commerce at the University of Virginia, said workers miss out on the emotional, social and intellectual stimulation that comes with being around others. For that reason, he favors a hybrid work model. “Employee resistance is to me perfectly natural when people believe that they can be just as effective at home as in the office,” he said.

But spending all that time working from your sofa or kitchen table or — if you’re lucky enough to have one — a home office may be a more expensive tradeoff for employees and management than they anticipate. “What they don’t realize is that their networks will slowly shrink as they spend more time at home, and this can hamper their effectiveness long term,” Gray said.

“Once they realize that some of the rich interactions they used to have in the office have faded, they start to wonder if they might be missing something important,” he added. “And as their broader networks shrink — the ones that expose them to creative new ways of thinking outside of their main work stream — their performance can suffer.”

The resistance appears to be winning

Another obstacle: An empty or half-empty office doesn’t help new employees or interns who rely on those face-to-face interactions for honing their skills and, critically, building a professional network so they can move up the corporate ladder and/or put their name in the hat for a promotion. For every seasoned employee who knows the ropes, there are others who need to be given a helping hand.

Skeptics also worry that some people may be tempted to take advantage of remote work, spend an hour or two catching up on their favorite TV show, while keeping a casual eye on their work emails, or — worse — take the entire day off and go to the beach, while answering the occasional Slack message from under an umbrella. In fact, eight out of 10 workers have admitted to slacking off.

Burbano, the Columbia Business School professor, is not surprised by such polls. “Remote work also comes with increased opportunities for worker misconduct, worker shirking and putting in less effort, as my research has shown, which is likely part of the reason that there is a desire amongst employers to bring people back to the physical office.”

Social media is filled with people claiming they will point-blank refuse to commute again. “I’m not going back to the office with these gas prices,” one person recently wrote on Twitter

“The gas people and the commercial real-estate people are just gonna have to fight it out amongst themselves.” Another added bluntly: “Not in the mood to work or be around people.”

Recent research suggests such resistance is winning. The Conference Board, a nonprofit organization, says only 4% of companies are requiring staff to return to work full time and only 45% were requiring them to work five days a week from the office — even if a few days a week appears too much for some Apple employees and workers like Amy Faust Liggayu.

Faust Liggayu doesn’t fully buy the brainstorming-by-the-watercooler argument. “At my previous job, we had a meeting every morning to go over the workload for the day. That meeting would sometimes last an hour because we would just bulls*** about everything. But if you have enough calls where you can be spontaneous and a good team that works together well, you can still have that environment.”

And now? She is much happier at her new fully-remote, better-paid job. “I make a point of remembering what people are up to and ask them about their plans for the weekend to keep that community together,” she said. “I love it. I officially turned one of our extra bedrooms into an office. I get to spend my lunch with my son, feed him when he’s hungry. The flexibility is incredible.”


Amy Faust Liggayu: ‘I officially turned one of our extra bedrooms into an office.’

Bank of America raises hourly minimum wage to $22

Mon, May 23, 2022,

By Elizabeth Dilts Marshall

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bank of America Corp said it was raising its U.S. minimum hourly wage to $22 on Monday, a step closer to its promise of paying workers $25 an hour by 2025.

The second-largest U.S. bank by assets has been steadily raising its minimum hourly wage since 2017, when it was $15, and has been at the leading edge of banks raising base pay for hourly workers.

Last year the bank pledged to pay its workers at least $25 an hour by 2025, the highest minimum wage of any big retail bank, and also began requiring its vendors to set a minimum wage of $15 an hour.

This latest pay hike comes as inflation in the U.S. hovers at a 40-year high, raising prices for food, healthcare and rent, which, in March, hit the highest level since 2006.

There are also a record number of unfilled jobs, which means banks face stiff competition for hiring new workers and are putting a high priority on keeping the workers they have.

Sheri Bronstein, chief human resources officer, said the bank's raises and other benefits are part of "our focus on being a great place to work ... so that we continue to attract and retain the best talent."

In January the bank gave around 97% of its employees special compensation awards, most in the form of restricted stock units.

(Reporting by Elizabeth Dilts Marshall; Editing by David Gregorio)

Aurangzeb: Why is a Mughal emperor who died 300 years ago being debated on social media?


Geeta Pandey - BBC News, Delhi
Sat, May 21, 2022

Mughal emperor Aurangzeb

A Mughal emperor who died more than 300 years ago has become a hot topic of debate in India in recent months.

Aurangzeb, often described as the "last effective Mughal emperor" ruled India for nearly 50 years from 1658 to 1707 - but he was never a favourite in the eyes of historians.

For a start - he came to the throne after imprisoning his father and having his older brother killed.

And in comparison with other Mughal rulers, he fared badly - his great-grandfather Akbar was described as the benign secular ruler, grandfather Jahangir was known for his love for art and architecture and father Shah Jahan was the great romantic who built the Taj Mahal.


But Aurangzeb, the sixth emperor and a devout Muslim, was often described as a ruthless tyrant who was an expansionist, imposed tough Sharia laws and brought back the discriminatory jizya tax that Hindu residents had to pay in return for protection.

He was also described as someone who hated music and other fine arts, and ordered the destruction of several temples.

All that happened hundreds of years ago - but the hate he's been getting recently has been unprecedented.

It started when the dispute over the Gyanvapi mosque began bubbling in the holy city of Varanasi - the mosque is built on the ruins of the Vishwanath temple, a grand 16th Century Hindu shrine destroyed in 1669 on Aurangzeb's orders. Now, his name is trending on social media with thousands of disparaging references, can be found in court files and has been invoked by India's present-day Hindu nationalist rulers.

In December, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke about "Aurangzeb's atrocities, his terror" at an event in Varanasi. "He tried to change civilisation by the sword. He tried to crush culture with fanaticism," Mr Modi said.

He mentioned the Mughal ruler's name again last month - speaking on the occasion of the 400th birth anniversary of Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur who was beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam.

"Even though Aurangzeb severed many heads, he could not shake our faith", Mr Modi said.

His comments seemed to baffle a Canadian-American journalist who asked on Twitter why the Indian Prime Minister was "giving a long speech attacking a Mughal emperor who died 300+ years ago"?


In a series of tweets, historian Audrey Truschke responded that Hindu nationalists believed that "Muslims oppressed Hindus for hundreds of years so they deserve to be oppressed today, as retribution for the past".

She said Aurangzeb's name was being used as "a dog whistle to signal that it is acceptable to hate and use violence against present-day Muslims".

In the days since this Twitter discussion, much more hate has been heaped on Aurangzeb.

Describing him as a "butcher", the mayor of the city of Agra said all traces of him should be removed from public places. On Twitter, the Mughal emperor was called "an invader" who wanted to wipe out Hindus and one user suggested that all monuments and buildings by Mughals built over Hindu places of worship should be bulldozed.

On Thursday, his tomb in the western state of Maharashtra was shut to visitors after a regional politician questioned "the need for its existence" and called for its destruction.

Historian Nadeem Rezavi, author and professor of medieval history at Aligarh Muslim University, says Aurangzeb is "a very convenient name" to bring up to demonise India's Muslim minorities who, in recent years, have been at the receiving end of violence from Hindu mobs.

Prof Rezavi says the Mughal emperor did demolish a number of Hindu temples and imposed the discriminatory tax on Hindus, but he was a complicated figure, and not completely evil.

"He gave the highest number of grants for maintaining Hindu temples, he himself was two-thirds Hindu by blood because Akbar, his great-grandfather, had married a Rajput [a warrior Hindu caste], and there were more Rajputs in higher echelons during his rule than that of any other Mughal."

The tomb of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in Maharashtra has been shut to visitors after threats

Despite popular perception, Prof Rezavi says Aurangzeb was not a fundamentalist in his personal life and that he "enjoyed wine, played the veena - an instrument favoured by Hindu goddesses - and more music books were written under him than any other Mughal".

But, he adds that Aurangzeb "invoked religion to cover up for his political failures and strengthen his authority - much like India's present-day leaders.

"But the question to ask is that even if Aurangzeb was all dark and evil, a sectarian and fundamentalist, who destroyed temples, should we be emulating him today?" Prof Rezavi asks.

"He was a tyrant and an emperor who lived 300 years ago. At the time there was no modern democracy, there was no constitution to guide him. But today we are guided by the Indian constitution and laws of parliament, so how can you duplicate the deeds that were done in the 16th and 17th Century?

"So if someone is indulging in the politics of 17th Century, they are committing a far greater crime than Aurangzeb did in the 17th Century," he adds.

When France extorted Haiti – the greatest heist in history

Marlene Daut, 

Professor of African Diaspora Studies,

 University of Virginia
Sun, May 22, 2022

Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer receiving Charles X's decree recognizing Haitian independence on July 11, 1825. Bibliotheque Nationale de France

Much of the reparations debate has revolved around whether the United States and the United Kingdom should finally compensate some of their citizens for the economic and social costs of slavery that still linger today.

But to me, there’s never been a more clear-cut case for reparations than that of Haiti.

I’m a specialist on colonialism and slavery, and what France did to the Haitian people after the Haitian Revolution is a particularly notorious examples of colonial theft. France instituted slavery on the island in the 17th century, but, in the late 18th century, the enslaved population rebelled and eventually declared independence. Yet, somehow, in the 19th century, the thinking went that the former enslavers of the Haitian people needed to be compensated, rather than the other way around.

Just as the legacy of slavery in the United States has created a gross economic disparity between Black and white Americans, the tax on its freedom that France forced Haiti to pay – referred to as an “indemnity” at the time – severely damaged the newly independent country’s ability to prosper.

The cost of independence

Haiti officially declared its independence from France in 1804. In October 1806, the country was split into two, with Alexandre Pétion ruling in the south and Henry Christophe ruling in the north.

Despite the fact that both of Haiti’s rulers were veterans of the Haitian Revolution, the French had never quite given up on reconquering their former colony.

In 1814 King Louis XVIII, who had helped overthrow Napoléon earlier that year, sent three commissioners to Haiti to assess the willingness of the country’s rulers to surrender. Christophe, having made himself a king in 1811, remained obstinate in the face of France’s exposed plan to bring back slavery. Threatening war, the most prominent member of Christophe’s cabinet, Baron de Vastey, insisted,“ Our independence will be guaranteed by the tips of our bayonets!”

In contrast, Pétion, the ruler of the south, was willing to negotiate, hoping that the country might be able to pay France for recognition of its independence.

In 1803, Napoléon had sold Louisiana to the United States for US million. Using this number as his compass, Pétion proposed paying the same amount. Unwilling to compromise with those he viewed as “runaway slaves,” Louis XVIII rejected the offer.

Pétion died suddenly in 1818, but Jean-Pierre Boyer, his successor, kept up the negotiations. Talks, however, continued to stall due to Christophe’s stubborn opposition.

“Any indemnification of the ex-colonists,” Christophe’s government stated, was “inadmissible.”

Once Christophe died in October 1820, Boyer was able to reunify the two sides of the country. However, even with the obstacle of Christophe gone, Boyer repeatedly failed to successfully negotiate France’s recognition of independence. Determined to gain at least suzerainty over the island – which would have made Haiti a protectorate of France – Louis XVIII’s successor, Charles X, rebuked the two commissioners Boyer sent to Paris in 1824 to try to negotiate an indemnity in exchange for recognition.

On April 17, 1825, the French king suddenly changed his mind. He issued a decree stating France would recognize Haitian independence but only at the price of 150 million francs – or around 10 times the amount the U.S. had paid for the Louisiana territory. The sum was meant to compensate the French colonists for their lost revenues from slavery.

Baron de Mackau, whom Charles X sent to deliver the ordinance, arrived in Haiti in July, accompanied by a squadron of 14 brigs of war carrying more than 500 cannons.

Rejection of the ordinance almost certainly meant war. This was not diplomacy. It was extortion.

With the threat of violence looming, on July 11, 1825, Boyer signed the fatal document, which stated, “The present inhabitants of the French part of St. Domingue shall pay … in five equal installments … the sum of 150,000,000 francs, destined to indemnify the former colonists.”

French prosperity built on Haitian poverty

Newspaper articles from the period reveal that the French king knew the Haitian government was hardly capable of making these payments, as the total was more than 10 times Haiti’s annual budget. The rest of the world seemed to agree that the amount was absurd. One British journalist noted that the “enormous price” constituted a “sum which few states in Europe could bear to sacrifice.”

Forced to borrow 30 million francs from French banks to make the first two payments, it was hardly a surprise to anyone when Haiti defaulted soon thereafter. Still, the new French king sent another expedition in 1838 with 12 warships to force the Haitian president’s hand. The 1838 revision, inaccurately labeled “Traité d’Amitié” – or “Treaty of Friendship” – reduced the outstanding amount owed to 60 million francs, but the Haitian government was once again ordered to take out crushing loans to pay the balance.

Although the colonists claimed that the indemnity would only cover one-twelfth the value of their lost properties, including the people they claimed as their slaves, the total amount of 90 million francs was actually five times France’s annual budget.

The Haitian people suffered the brunt of the consequences of France’s theft. Boyer levied draconian taxes in order to pay back the loans. And while Christophe had been busy developing a national school system during his reign, under Boyer, and all subsequent presidents, such projects had to be put on hold. Moreover, researchers have found that the independence debt and the resulting drain on the Haitian treasury were directly responsible not only for the underfunding of education in 20th-century Haiti, but also lack of health care and the country’s inability to develop public infrastructure.

Contemporary assessments, furthermore, reveal that with the interest from all the loans, which were not completely paid off until 1947, Haitians ended up paying more than twice the value of the colonists’ claims. Recognizing the gravity of this scandal, French economist Thomas Piketty acknowledged that France should repay at least billion to Haiti in restitution.

A debt that’s both moral and material

Former French presidents, from Jacques Chirac, to Nicolas Sarkozy, to François Hollande, have a history of punishing, skirting or downplaying Haitian demands for recompense.

In May 2015, when French President François Hollande became only France’s second head of state to visit Haiti, he admitted that his country needed to “settle the debt.” Later, realizing he had unwittingly provided fuel for the legal claims already prepared by attorney Ira Kurzban on behalf of the Haitian people – former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide had demanded formal recompense in 2002 – Hollande clarified that he meant France’s debt was merely “moral.”

To deny that the consequences of slavery were also material is to deny French history itself. France belatedly abolished slavery in 1848 in its remaining colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and French Guyana, which are still territories of France today. Afterwards, the French government demonstrated once again its understanding of slavery’s relationship to economics when it took it upon itself to financially compensate the former “owners” of enslaved people.

The resulting racial wealth gap is no metaphor. In metropolitan France 14.1% of the population lives below the poverty line. In Martinique and Guadeloupe, in contrast, where more than 80% of the population is of African descent, the poverty rates are 38% and 46%, respectively. The poverty rate in Haiti is even more dire at 59%. And whereas the median annual income of a French family is ,112, it’s only 0 for a Haitian family.

These discrepancies are the concrete consequence of stolen labor from generations of Africans and their descendants. And because the indemnity Haiti paid to France is the first and only time a formerly enslaved people were forced to compensate those who had once enslaved them, Haiti should be at the center of the global movement for reparations.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on June 30, 2020.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

Ethiopian regional authority arrests four staff members of media group

Sun, May 22, 2022

NAIROBI (Reuters) -Authorities in Ethiopia's northern Amhara region have arrested four employees of a U.S.-based online media outlet, while the whereabouts of two others was unclear, the outlet said on Sunday, in the latest round of arrests involving media.

The arrests would add to those of five journalists in another Amhara media outlet on Thursday over what their colleague said was the outlet's reporting of the activity of a local volunteer militia, known as Fano.

"We have four confirmed employees who are in jail and two unknown. Out of the four, one (is a) fulltime editor, one in the process of hiring for editor position, one fulltime reporter, one human resource and finance lead," Nisir International Broadcasting management, said in a message to Reuters on Sunday.

Nisir said three of the employees were arrested on Thursday, and two were in custody in the regional capital Bahir Dar. The third employee and a fourth one who was arrested on Friday are in the town of Gayint, some 160 km (100 miles) from Bahir Dar, Nisir said.

Gizachew Muluneh, spokesperson for the Amhara regional administration and government spokesperson Legesse Tulu did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Nisir calls itself an impartial and independent online media agency focusing on Ethiopian news, paying close attention to Amhara region. It did not give a reason for the arrests.

Amhara is the second-most populous region in Ethiopia, and a key constituency for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. But recently some Amhara leaders who previously backed his government have publicly criticised his handling of a war with the neighbouring region of Tigray.

Amhara forces and the Fano militia backed Abiy's federal troops against rebellious forces in northern Tigray when fighting erupted there in 2020.

Critics say Abiy, who won a Nobel Peace Prize after taking office as a reformer in 2018, is cracking down on dissent around Ethiopia. He says he is guaranteeing stability and law and order in the multi-ethnic nation.

In another case, Solomon Shumiye, an Addis Ababa-based talk show host, was arrested on Friday, taken to court with three others and ordered detained for 14 days, his sister Tigist Shumiye told Reuters.

Solomon has been critical of the government and the war in Tigray.

Government spokesperson Legesse and Markos Tadesse, spokesperson for the Addis Ababa Police Commission, did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment on the arrest.

The arrests add to those of a prominent general critical of Abiy, and some ethnic Amhara activists in the last week.

The state-appointed Ethiopian Human Rights Commission said in a statement on Sunday "the recent arrests don't follow basic Human Rights principles and are inappropriate".

(Reporting by Addis Ababa NewsroomWriting by George ObulutsaEditing by Frances Kerry)

If Roe v. Wade is tossed it would mark the first time the Supreme Court overturned precedent 'to limit civil rights, not expand them,' expert says


Kelsey Vlamis
Sun, May 22, 2022





Pro-choice signs hang on a police barricade at the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC, on May 3, 2022.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

A leaked draft opinion showed the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade this summer.


A former federal prosecutor said it's rare for the court to overturn precedent to limit civil rights.


Experts worry the court's reasoning in the draft opinion could be used to overturn other rights.

According to a leaked draft opinion, the Supreme Court is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade and make history in a number of ways — including by overturning itself to limit the rights of Americans.

"Overturning Roe v. Wade would be such a significant decision because it would be the first time in the history of the Constitution that precedent would be overturned to limit civil rights, not expand them," according to Neama Rahmani, the president of West Coast Trial Lawyers and a former federal prosecutor.

The draft opinion indicates the court seems poised to overturn the 1973 landmark decision that enshrined the right to an abortion. Written by Justice Samuel Alito, the draft was unflinching in its condemnation of the reasoning behind Roe, prompting concerns it could help set the stage for additional rights to be overturned.

For instance, Rahmani said in an email to Insider that the Supreme Court's reasoning to overturn Roe could be extended to erode Miranda rights, which require law enforcement to inform a criminal suspect of their right to remain silent.

"There is no requirement in the Constitution that law enforcement must inform you of your rights, which is essentially what the 1966 Miranda decision provided," Rahmani said. "Miranda is something the court read into the Constitution."

Miranda v. Arizona was an example of the court overturning precedent to expand civil rights. The 1966 position dismissed two prior court rulings and held that law enforcement violated Ernesto Miranda's rights by not informing him of his right to remain silent and request an attorney.

Other prominent cases of the Supreme Court overturning itself have resulted in an expansion of civil rights.

In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education overturned the infamous 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which allowed "separate but equal" segregation laws. By overturning the precedent set by Plessy, Brown granted additional rights to Black Americans, namely the right to attend schools that previously were limited to white students.

More recently, Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 guaranteed the right for couples to marry regardless of their sex, overturning the 1972 decision in Baker v. Nelson and extending the constitutional right to marry to same-sex couples.

"Instead of using the Constitution to expand rights to the citizens of this country, now the conservative right is starting to limit the rights of people in this country," Doron Kalir, a professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, told Insider.

The Supreme Court currently has a 6-3 conservative majority, with three justices nominated by former President Donald Trump, who campaigned on selecting judges that would overturn Roe.

Kalir said landmark decisions like Roe and Obergefell extended rights to those who wanted them, adding Roe never forced anyone to get or perform an abortion, and Obergefell never forced someone to marry someone of the same sex or perform a same-sex marriage.

The language in the draft opinion that would overturn Roe was harsh and sweeping, with Alito calling the decision "egregiously wrong from the start." Kalir said it indicates the court may be open to limiting a whole host of rights that pertain to the right to privacy and the sanctity of the home.

"Can you imagine a police agent knocking on your door and asking if you used contraception?" Kalir said, adding that in a post-Roe world, investigating criminalized abortion could involve police searching homes or internet data for evidence that a person performed or assisted in an abortion.

"This may really be the harbinger of horrible things to come," he said.

Anyone in contact with monkeypox must isolate for three weeks

Kirsten Robertson

METRO
© Provided by Metro The UK Health Security Agency has confirmed 20 cases of the disease in the UK (Picture: AP/Getty)

People who come into contact with monkeypox cases should isolate for three weeks and avoid children, health experts have advised.

There are currently 20 confirmed cases in the UK.

New guidance from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has urged those who have had ‘unprotected direct contact or high-risk environmental contact’ to self-isolate.

This would include no travel, providing details for contact tracing and avoiding direct contact with immunosuppressed people, pregnant women and children under 12.

Dr Susan Hopkins, chief medical adviser for UKHSA, this weekend warned monkeypox is spreading through community transmission.

Speaking to BBC One’s Sunday Morning, she said: ‘We are detecting more cases on a daily basis and I’d like to thank all of those people who are coming forward for testing to sexual health clinics, to the GPs and emergency department.’

Those who are considered at high risk of having caught monkeypox may have had household contact, sexual contact, or have changed an infected person’s bedding without wearing appropriate PPE.

The UK should expect to see more cases on a ‘daily basis’, Dr Hopkins added.

© Provided by Metro Monkeypox produces a similar to disease to smallpox (Picture: World Health Organisation)

© Provided by Metro Monkeypox cases have been recorded across the globe (Picture: Metro.co.uk)

Monkeypox is rarely seen outside Africa but has been confirmed in the UK, US, Canada, Spain, Italy and more in recent weeks.

Austria, Israel and Switzerland became the latest countries to record their first cases over the weekend.

The disease, first found in monkeys, can be transmitted from person to person through close physical contact, including sexual intercourse.

Globally, the number of confirmed and suspected cases has reached 145 across 13 countries.

A mandatory quarantine has been implemented in Belgium, where the isolation period is also 21 days.

© Provided by Metro Dr Hopkins says the virus is spreading through community transmission 

(Picture: Reuters)

© Provided by Metro The stages of Monkeypox are seen above in this UK Health Security Agency graphic (Picture: PA)

The UKHSA has advised that people at high risk of having caught monkeypox should be offered a smallpox vaccine.

Dr Hopkins said: ‘We are finding cases that have no identified contact with an individual from west Africa, which is what we’ve seen previously in this country.

‘The community transmission is largely centred in urban areas and we are predominantly seeing it in individuals who self-identify as gay or bisexual, or other men who have sex with men.’

Asked why it is being found in that demographic, she said: ‘That’s because of the frequent close contacts they may have.

‘We would recommend to anyone who is having changes in sex partners regularly, or having close contact with individuals that they don’t know, to come forward if they develop a rash.’

The first case in the UK was recorded in 2018 but, unlike several of the cases being identified in this outbreak, was linked with travel to an African country where monkeypox is common.

Monkeypox produces a similar to disease to smallpox but has a lower death rate, with most people making a full recovery.

Initial symptoms include fever, headache, aching muscles, backache, swollen lymph nodes, chills and exhaustion.

A rash can also develop, usually starting on the face before spreading to other parts of the body. It eventually forms a scab which falls off.

Monkeypox does not spread easily and is not airborne like Covid-19, instead relying on people coming into close contact with an infected person or animal.

On Friday, Health Secretary Sajid Javid said: ‘Most cases are mild, and I can confirm we have procured further doses of vaccines that are effective against monkeypox.’

His comments came amid news a child had been rushed to the intensive care unit of a London hospital after they were diagnosed with monkeypox.

Theories emerge for mysterious liver illnesses in children

By MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer 

NEW YORK (AP) — Health officials remain perplexed by mysterious cases of severe liver damage in hundreds of young children around the world.

The best available evidence points to a fairly common stomach bug that isn't known to cause liver problems in otherwise healthy kids. That virus was detected in the the blood of stricken children but — oddly — it has not been found in their diseased livers.

© Provided by Associated Press FILE - Kids are silhouetted against a pond at a park in Lenexa, Kan., on Saturday, Dec. 26, 2020. Health officials remain perplexed by mysterious cases of severe liver damage in hundreds of young children around the world. In May 2022, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials said they are now looking into 180 possible cases across the U.S. More than 20 other countries have reported hundreds more cases in total, though the largest numbers have been in the U.K. and U.S. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

© Provided by Associated Press FILE - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Deputy Director for Infectious Diseases Jay C. Butler speaks during a COVID-19 briefing at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarter campus in Atlanta, Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2020. Health officials remain perplexed by mysterious cases of severe liver damage in hundreds of young children around the world. “This is an evolving situation,” said Butler, in a call with reporters on Friday, May 20, 2022.

 (Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)

“There's a lot of things that don't make sense,” said Eric Kremer, a virus researcher at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of Montpellier, in France.

As health officials in more than a dozen countries look into the mystery, they are asking:

— Has there been some surge in the stomach bug — called adenovirus 41 — that is causing more cases of a previously undetected problem?

— Are children more susceptible due to pandemic-related lockdowns that sheltered them from the viruses kids usually experience?

— Is there some mutated version of the adenovirus causing this? Or some other not-yet-identified germ, drug or toxin?

— Is it some kind of haywire immune system reaction set off by a past COVID-19 infection and a later invasion by some other virus?

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and investigators around the globe are trying to sort out what's going on.

The illnesses are considered rare. CDC officials last week said they are now looking into 180 possible cases across the U.S. Most of the children were hospitalized, at least 15 required liver transplants and six died.

More than 20 other countries have reported hundreds more cases in total, though the largest numbers have been in the U.K. and U.S.

Symptoms of hepatitis — or inflammation of the liver — include fever, fatigue, loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, dark urine, light-colored stools, joint pain and jaundice.

The scope of the problem only started to become clear last month, though disease detectives say they have been working on the mystery for months. It's been maddeningly difficult to nail a cause down, experts say.

Conventional causes of liver inflammation in otherwise healthy kids — the viruses known as hepatitis A, B, C, D and E — didn't show up in tests. What’s more, the children came from different places and there seemed to be no common exposures.

What did show up was adenovirus 41. More than half of the U.S. cases have tested positive for adenovirus, of which there are dozens of varieties. In a small number of specimens tested to see what kind of adenovirus was present, adenovirus 41 came up every time.

The fact that adenovirus keeps showing up strengthens the case for it playing a role, but it's unclear how, Dr. Jay Butler, the CDC’s deputy director for infectious diseases, told The Associated Press.

Many adenoviruses are associated with common cold symptoms, such as fever, sore throat and pink eye. Some versions — including adenovirus 41 — can trigger other problems, including inflammation in the stomach and intestines. Adenoviruses previously have been linked to hepatitis in children, but mostly in kids with weakened immune systems.

Recent genetic analysis has turned up no evidence that a single new mutant version of the virus is to blame, said Dr. Umesh Parashar, chief of the CDC group focused on viral gut diseases.

Adenovirus infections are not systematically tracked in the U.S., so it's not clear if there's been some recent surge in virus activity. In fact, adenoviruses are so common that researchers aren't sure what to make of their presence in these cases.

“If we start testing everybody for the adenovirus, they will find so many kids” that have it, said Dr. Heli Bhatt, a pediatric gastroenterologist who treated two Minnesota children with the liver problems.

One was a child who came in nearly five months ago with liver failure. Doctors couldn't figure why. Unfortunately, “not having a cause is something that happens,” Bhatt said. Roughly a third of acute liver failure cases go unexplained, experts have estimated.

Bhatt said the second child she saw got sick last month. By that time, health officials had been drawing attention to cases, and she and other doctors began going back and reviewing unexplained illnesses since October.

Indeed, many cases added to the tally in the last few weeks were not recent illnesses but rather earlier ones that were re-evaluated. About 10% of the U.S. cases occurred in May, Butler said. The rate seems to be relatively flat since the fall, he added.

It's possible that doctors are merely discovering a phenomenon that's been going on for years, some scientists said.

Another possible explanation: COVID-19.

The CDC recently estimated that, as of February, 75% of U.S. children had been infected by the coronavirus.

Only 10% to 15% of the children with the mysterious hepatitis had COVID-19, according to nasal swab tests given when they checked into a hospital, health officials say.

But investigators are wondering about previous coronavirus infections. It's possible that coronavirus particles lurking in the gut are playing a role, said Petter Brodin, a pediatric immunologist at Imperial College London.

In a piece earlier this month in the medical journal Lancet, Brodin and another scientist suggested that a combination of lingering coronavirus and an adenovirus infection could trigger a liver-damaging immune system reaction.

“I think it's an unfortunate combination of circumstances that could explain this,” Brodin told the AP.

Butler said researchers have seen complex reactions like that before, and investigators are discussing ways to better check out the hypothesis.

He said it was “not out of the realm of plausibility, at all."

A Case Western Reserve University preprint study, which has yet to be peer reviewed, suggested children who had COVID-19 had a significantly higher risk of liver damage.

Dr. Markus Buchfellner, a pediatric infectious diseases doctor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, was involved in the identification of the first U.S. cases in the fall.

The illnesses were “weird” and concerning, he said. Six months later, “we don’t really know exactly what we’re dealing with.”

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Two Palestinians Go Dogging review – devastatingly human portrait of conflict sears itself on the mind

Arifa Akbar

THE GUARDIAN

FILM

Don’t be fooled by the title. This is not – bar a few fruity scenes – a play about dogging, and there are more than two Palestinians in it. There are Israelis too, living in contested territory and enacting the fear, hostility and oppression of that conflict which has become so dreadfully familiar to us through news feeds that even the language around its reporting is inflammatory.

What this slowly rumbling earthquake of a show does so startlingly well is take the conflict and make it small, specific, multi-layered – yet as devastatingly epic as Greek tragedy. Sami Ibrahim’s script revolves around a Palestinian family living in a village east of Jerusalem and being slowly destroyed. Reem (Hala Omran, bolshy, mercurial) is its matriarch and our central narrator; alongside her is her melancholic husband, Sayeed (Miltos Yerolemou, just wonderful).

When an Israeli soldier, Sara (Mai Weisz), is murdered, there are calls for retribution; but Reem has her own scores to settle after her children are killed. Through her we get a sense of a community living under siege, seething with powerless anger, while Sayeed just emanates hopeless resignation.

This local focus on one family has echoes of Lorca, in its intractable grudge-bearing and cycles of violence. Reem tells us of the terror of the Red Zone, of Israeli troops taking sniper shots at unarmed Palestinians, of drone strikes on houses, of children being gunned down at point blank range – including her own 12-year-old girl and then a second daughter, Salwa (Sofia Danu).

Directed by Omar Elerian, the production is many things at once: playful and tragic, baggy and taut, always pulling back from whimsy at the tipping point of self-indulgence. Just as we are lulled by a moment of comedy or metafictive silliness, violence comes careering around the corner.

So many of its scenes stay seared on the mind: Reem watching a video of her son’s last moments; Sara begging for her life before it is horrifyingly stamped out. The saddest scene, for me, is a quiet one with Reem and Sayeed sitting side by side, she sifting lentils, he peeling an orange. “Can you imagine what it’d be like, not living here? Not doing all of this? … Protests and campaigns and watching people die?” he says to her, and she sounds nonplussed by such an implausible thought.

It is a play with a reach way beyond its fictive bounds, addressing everything from Palestinian martyrdom to the international community’s inaction over illegal settlements, while the recent, appalling killing of Shireen Abu Aqleh casts a long shadow. Yet there is no simple binary of Palestinian victimhood versus Israeli oppression here. Reem’s son, Jawad (Luca Kamleh Chapman), is a murderer turned mascot. Sara is given a voice beyond her death, and a searing scene brings a battle for supremacy between her and Salwa after they have died: the conflict is clearly never-ending, even reaching into the afterlife. Meanwhile, Sara’s father, Adam (Philipp Mogilnitskiy), gives us one of the play’s most furious satires on the absurdities of war.

Initially, Two Palestinians Go Dogging feels like a rambling piece of improv, beginning as a standup act and slowly turning into a family story set two decades into the future, in the midst of the “fifth intifada”. It seems deliberately scrappy, too: bare-boned in its staging with minimal props (some rocks, fake blood, microphones) and a set made of corrugated iron and draped sheets. All of which gives it a furtive sense of illicit street theatre that could be dismantled quickly if needed.

It also resembles a Complicite production in the meta-theatrical games it plays – sometimes too drawn out and distracting – and contains a boldness that is almost reckless in its dramatic risks. Every actor is in a flak jacket, and the performances are moving across the board. As a drama, it seems to call for action even as it tells us that the conflict is so unresolvable it will still be chugging on in 2046.

It ends with a letter from the playwright stating its own Truman Show artifice, but we walk out in discomfort, not able to ignore the fact that this fiction is someone’s reality. If I have a grumble it is that the show could be tighter, but it nonetheless comes with an enormous gut-punch, and is all that theatre should strive to be.

• At Royal Court theatre, London, until 1 June.

Beyond The Scream: why Edvard Munch was no one-hit wonder

Nicholas Wroe 

THE GUARDIAN 

Few artists are as strongly associated with a single painting as Edvard Munch is with The Scream. Even before its endless memeability became apparent it was as much a fixture of popular culture as of art history. But there has always been more to Munch than his most famous work, and a new show at London’s Courtauld Gallery gives a rare chance to trace his wider career.

The exhibition comes from the collection of Norwegian industrialist Rasmus Meyer, who discovered Munch’s work in the early years of the 20th century and soon became an avid supporter and collector, going on to buy paintings directly from Munch’s studio, the paint almost still wet, as the saying goes. This is the first time his collection, held in the Kode art museum in Bergen, has been shown together outside Scandinavia. It takes work from the 1880s, when Munch was the rising star of Norwegian art, through his “golden decade” of the 1890s – when he developed his characteristic style and produced what became known as his The Frieze of Life series, including various iterations of The Scream – and into the 20th century.

“Norway had only really begun to crystallise as an independent nation at the end of the 19th century,” explains Courtauld curator Barnaby Wright, “and Meyer wanted to put together a collection of Norwegian art that would say something powerful about their culture and identity.” Not that Munch’s work was universally appreciated in 19th-century Norway. While he was attaining international recognition, disputes between conservative and avant-garde opinion played out in similar ways as they had with French impressionism in the 1870s.

The layout of the Courtauld, passing through their stellar collection of impressionist and post-impressionist art on the way to the exhibition space, is fortuitously suited to this show. Munch had been fascinated by the impressionists’ exploration of the effects of light, and new techniques for capturing them, but the lessons he took were then deployed for his own purposes. Rather than following Monet in taking his canvas outdoors to nature, Munch was more interested in painting from memory and out of his imagination, using light in a far more expressive and symbolic way.

By the 1890s he had developed this style of painting, employing richer and moodier colours to conjure an atmosphere of anxiety in which figures and landscapes increasingly reflected one another. He named these explorations The Frieze of Life, and “his ambition was to cover a spectrum of the most profound human emotions and experiences”, explains Wright. “Often drawing on his own memories from childhood; the loss of loved ones; torturous relationships with women. What makes these pictures endure is the complexity and multiplicity of feelings and emotions he evokes. However great The Scream is, it is just one example of Munch’s extraordinary output. This collection shows why so many of his pictures still speak so powerfully to us.”

‘Morbidity, death and precarious anxiety’: four key works from the exhibition

Evening on Karl Johan Street (1892, main picture)Light plays a critical role in all of Munch’s work, and here he captures the creative possibilities of a strange moonlight mixed with gaslight. Evening on Karl Johan Street is a key Frieze of Life picture and the first time Munch used those skeletal faces that loom out of the canvas, which he repeated in his Scream paintings. This is the origin picture for that now famous visual device.

Self-Portrait in the Clinic (1909)When Munch had a nervous breakdown he sought treatment at a clinic in Copenhagen. His life had been lived at an intense pitch. When Munch was a child, his father was zealously religious, and an air of morbidity and death hung over the family. It clung to Munch for the rest of his life and it was this sense of precarious anxiety that fed into his art. This particular work has an interesting parallel with Van Gogh’s self-portraits after his severe mental episodes in depicting a man and an artist attempting to rebuild himself.

Children Playing in the Street in Åsgårdstrand (1901–03)Munch spent many of his summers in the small coastal fishing town of Åsgårdstrand. Here, he takes a seemingly mundane everyday activity and turns it into something more profound. Are the boys taunting the young girl, looking at her as an object of desire or just playing? Equally enigmatic, is she, on the borderline of adolescence, pleading for assistance or facing them down?

Melancholy (1894–96)The idea that emotions are at their most extreme when people are on the edge between areas, such as the shore and the water, was a fertile one for Munch. Here it reflects the state of mind of the central figure, lost in his own tragic thoughts and also isolated from the two background figures on the jetty. This was the first time Munch adopted this new deeply moody and symbolic manner.

Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen is at the Courtauld Gallery, London, from Friday to 4 September.