Laos to increase minimum wage starting Aug. 1 in response to inflation

Recovering businesses say they are not ready for the increase, but workers say wages still won’t be enough.

By RFA Lao
2022.07.12

Factory workers assemble garments to be exported abroad on the outskirts of the Laotian capital Vientiane in this file photo.

 Reuters

Laos’ minimum wage will increase to 1.2 million (U.S. $80) per month starting on Aug. 1, the country’s government announced, despite complaints from business owners that say they cannot afford the increase.

The Lao National Labor Committee announced the raise on July 8, which boosts the minimum wage by 100,000 kip (about U.S. $6.70) per month. 

Business owners told RFA that they are still recovering from the coronavirus pandemic, which sharply reduced their revenue.

“I was not informed of this, and I have not made any increase for my workers,” the owner of a water and ice business in the capital Vientiane told RFA’s Lao Service. “I see that the Lao economy is not going well, and business operators will have a hard time if they have to increase minimum wage at this time.”

A garment worker in Vientiane agreed that businesses need more time.

“Some companies are seeing losses or they are not earning any profits right now,” the garment worker said. “For example, the company I am working for is facing losses and the company owner is still keeping the business running, but has to cut costs here and there to survive. … I only survive month-to-month with this wage.”

The wage increase is designed to help Laotians cope with rampant inflation in the country. But it isn’t clear how extensively the new pay minimum will be applied.

The government cannot force business owners to increase wages if they have reached an agreement with their workers on pay and other benefits, an official from the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare’s Department of Labor Management told RFA.

“If they mutually agreed that the business operators provide food and accommodation to the workers, the business operators and workers can keep wages the same,” the official said. 

“We cannot force the business operators to increase the minimum wage because companies or business operators have their own conditions and policies with their hired workers. If there is any case of taking advantage of the workers, we, as a government body, can go to workplaces and investigate problems,” the official said.

An official from the Lao Federation of Trade Unions told RFA that the union will encourage workers to add clauses to their employment contracts that would force businesses to adhere to minimum wages as set by the government.

“The government has suggested to all business operators to increase the minimum wage.

However, it depends on each company or business’s decision to increase to this suggested minimum wage. Each company and business operator has its own policy and conditions,” the trade union official said.

Even with the increase, the minimum wage is not enough to keep up with the cost of living, several Lao workers told RFA. A worker from Vientiane told RFA that the government should mandate an even higher increase and also do more to moderate food prices.

Fuel shortages and an overreliance on imports have sharply raised the cost of living in Laos. Foreign currency reserves have grown scarcer, leading to a devaluation of the kip, which in turn adds pressure on prices. 

“They will add around $6.50 to the current minimum wage per month to about $79 per month,”  the worker said. “This will not help very much. Even though I earn over 1.3 million kip, or about $85 per month, I still find it very hard to survive.”

After the Aug. 1 increase to 1.2 million kip, the minimum wage should increase to 1.3 million kip by May 1, 2023 according to the National Labor Committee.

The increases are targeted at workers in the manufacturing and service sectors working a minimum of 26 eight-hour days per month, or six days per week.

The minimum wage does not apply to overtime pay. Business owners have to pay an extra 15 percent of minimum wage to workers performing duties that are hazardous.

The move to 1.2 million kip minimum wage comes after Phonesane Vilaymeng, vice president of the Lao Federation of Trade Unions, told state media on May 1 that the current wage of 1.1 million was no longer viable considering the higher cost of living.

An official of the organization also told state media that the country would lose more workers to neighboring Thailand if it kept the minimum wage so low. The Lao Federation of Trade Unions in March proposed that the minimum wage be raised to at least 1.5 million kip, or about $99 per month, by May 1,  International Labor Day.

Translated by Phouvong. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

Selfie-taking American rescued after falling into Vesuvius crater

An American tourist fell into Mount Vesuvius over the weekend while trying to take a selfie, according to Italian officials.

Timothy Bella Jul 13 2022

An American tourist in Italy survived a fall into the crater of Mount Vesuvius after he tried to reach for his phone to take a selfie, according to Italian police and local officials.

A 23-year-old man from Baltimore was hiking on the famed volcano with his family Saturday when they accessed the top of Vesuvius through a forbidden trail, Naples police told local media. When the family reached the top of the volcano, known for destroying the Roman city of Pompeii, the man, identified by NBC News as Philip Carroll, reached for his phone to commemorate being atop the 1219-metre-high volcano.

But when the man's phone fell into the crater about 3pm, the situation worsened, Paolo Cappelli, president of the Presidio Permanente Vesuvio, a base at the top of Vesuvius where guides operate, told NBC.

Instead of recovering the phone and snapping the perfect photo for Instagram, the man slipped and dropped a few feet into the crater.

"This morning a tourist for reasons still to be determined . . . together with his family they ventured on a forbidden path, arrived on the edge of the crater and fell into the mouth of #Vesuvius," wrote Gennaro Lametta, a government tourism official, on Facebook.

Cappelli told Il Mattino, a Naples newspaper, that a team of volcano guides on the other side of the rim used binoculars to realise that the man "had slipped inside the crater and was in serious trouble," noting that the American tourist was stuck.



"Four volcanological guides were set in motion instantly and, arriving on-site, one of them was lowered with a rope for about 15 meters to allow them to secure the unwary tourist," Cappelli said, according to a Google translation. He noted that Carroll could have plunged 300 meters into the crater.

A photo Lametta posted to social media shows the man with bruises on his legs, arms and back, as well as bloody scrapes on his elbows. Lametta wrote that the man was unconscious when the guides recovered him. Police told CNN that the man was treated in an ambulance farther down the mountain but refused to go to a hospital.

Cappelli told local media that Carroll was taken into custody by the local police. It's unclear what charges he may face.

Attempts to reach Carroll and his family Tuesday were unsuccessful.

Nearly two millennia after a deadly eruption in A.D. 79 left the cities of Pompeii, Oplontis and Stabiae blanketed in ash, Mount Vesuvius remains one of the most popular tourist attractions in the country. While Vesuvius technically remains an active volcano, the last eruption was in 1944, and the volcano is in a state of repose, according to Vesuvius National Park's website. The highest point of the volcano is about 1277m. Vesuvius's crater is nearly 304m deep, with a diameter of about 152m.

VESUVIUS FROM SPACE

The Baltimore man survived, but some others who have tried taking photos of themselves in picturesque but dangerous locations haven't been so lucky. A 2018 study by researchers associated with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, a group of public medical colleges based in New Delhi, found that more than 250 people worldwide had died while taking selfies over a six-year period.

Of the 259 deaths reported between October 2011 and November 2017, researchers found the leading cause to be drowning, followed by incidents involving transportation - for example, taking a selfie in front of an oncoming train - and falling from heights. Other causes of selfie-related deaths include animal attacks, firearm discharges and electrocutions.

"The selfie deaths have become a major public health problem," Agam Bansal, the study's lead author, told The Washington Post at the time.

A study published last year in the Journal of Travel Medicine estimated that 379 people had died while taking selfies from January 2008 to July 2021.

There are more recent examples of deaths linked to selfies. Richard Jacobson, a 21-year-old hiker in Arizona, fell hundreds of feet to his death in January after he walked toward the edge of a cliff to take a selfie in the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix. Police told local media that an investigation into Jacobson's death showed no signs of drug use or foul play, and concluded that the death was "just a very tragic accident."

Cappelli and Lametta praised the volcano guides for quickly recognising that the American tourist was in danger of plummeting farther into Vesuvius's crater.

"Having spoken directly with the rescuers, I can safely say that last Saturday on Vesuvius they saved a human life," Cappelli told Vesuvio Live, according to a translation.

The Washington Post's Allyson Chiu contributed to this report.

The Washington Post

Layoffs, Hiring Freezes Becoming More Common in US Labor Market

Andrew Moran

Jul 12, 2022

Hundreds of unemployed Kentucky residents wait in long lines outside the Kentucky Career Center for help with their unemployment claims in Frankfort, Ky., on June 19, 2020.

 (John Sommers II/Getty Images)

Despite a better-than-expected June jobs report, the red-hot labor market could still be showing signs of cooling down as many large and small companies trim their payrolls.

A growing number of major businesses have announced intentions to lay off employees or install a hiring freeze amid broader economic concerns and recent trends.

Last month, Tesla Motors laid off about 200 workers from its Autopilot team and shut down an office in California. Moreover, CEO Tesla Elon Musk noted that he has a “super bad feeling” about the economy and announced that he would cut roughly 10 percent of salaried staff, although hourly headcount would rise.

Netflix terminated about 300 staff members across multiple areas of the tech giant. Most of the positions were located in the United States.

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase decreased its workforce by 18 percent as part of a restructuring initiative in response to the crash in the crypto market.

In this photo illustration, a person files an application for unemployment benefits in Arlington, Va., on April 16, 2020. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)

A diverse array of other firms has laid off employees this year, including Ford (580), Robinhood (700), Peloton (2,800), CVS Health (208), and instant delivery firm Getir (4,480).

Electric vehicle maker Rivian is reportedly thinking about laying off around 700 employees, accounting for about 5 percent of its 14,000 workers.

It is not all about reducing the number of workers. Uber, Meta, Spotify, and artificial intelligence startup Olive AI have slowed down their hiring efforts or stopped taking applications entirely.

Last week, it was reported that U.S.-based companies announced plans to cut more than 32,500 jobs from their payrolls in June, the highest number since February 2021. This was also up nearly 59 percent from the same time a year ago.

“Employers are beginning to respond to financial pressures and slowing demand by cutting costs. While the labor market is still tight, that tightness may begin to ease in the next few months,” said Andrew Challenger, senior vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an executive outplacement firm, in a statement.

The four-week average for initial jobless claims has been on a steady weekly increase since the beginning of April, topping 232,000 in the week ending July 2 (pdf).

According to recent data, the small business community has also been cutting jobs.

The May ADP Small Business Report found that private-sector small business employment tumbled by 91,000 jobs in both goods-producing and service-providing sectors.

There is widespread concern that these numbers could escalate, especially after the latest National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) Small Business Optimism Index fell to a more than nine-year low of 89.5 in June. In addition, a net negative of 61 percent of small business owners anticipated better business conditions over the next six months. This is the lowest level in 48 years.

“As inflation continues to dominate business decisions, small business owners’ expectations for better business conditions have reached a new low,” said NFIB Chief Economist Bill Dunkelberg in a statement. “On top of the immediate challenges facing small business owners including inflation and worker shortages, the outlook for economic policy is not encouraging either as policy talks have shifted to tax increases and more regulations.”

Lisa Speransky, the founder and director of Ivy Tutors Network, a New York City-based tutoring firm, has started the process of cutting staff. Her small business recently consolidated its management team, reducing it from four to three. Moreover, the education firm will begin to raise prices in September.

“Soaring prices and salaries are certainly frightening,” she told The Epoch Times, adding that she is beginning to witness “middle class and upper middle-class families hesitate a bit about spending on tutoring, more than we did before.”

But Vimal Patel, the president of Q Hotels, a hotel management firm in Louisiana, is still unable to fill positions and working understaffed. Even though staffing levels are lower, labor costs are more amid climbing price inflation.

“Inflation is causing wage increases, so even though the workforce is less, the payroll is higher because of the 30 to 40 percent wage increase,” Patel told The Epoch Times. “Energy rates, cost of supplies, and cost of insurance have all gone up, so we have no choice but to raise prices.”

Future expectations are rather bleak for Patel, adding that higher interest rates, soaring costs of operations, and rampant price inflation are weighing on smaller outfits.

“Small business owners are not going to be able to make profits. They will be barely able to make ends meet. So, it’s going to be stressful for small business owners in the next couple of years,” he added.

Market experts warn that if this intensifies and becomes the top trend in the labor market in the second half of 2022, it could hasten a recession.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell had warned that current conditions are “unsustainably hot,” telling reporters during a post-Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) news conference that “you really cannot have the kind of labor market we want without price stability.”

When the U.S. central bank tightens monetary policy, it typically harms the labor market because it generally results in shrinking business activity, sluggish consumer spending, and preventing companies from expanding operations. In addition, a rising-rate environment has helped increase the odds of a recession as many Wall Street firms and economists have either made a downturn their base case or raised the chances of recession within the next two years.

“A potential recession would negatively affect unemployment significantly, so employees should start preparing for one ahead of time. The biggest worry for employees is the chance of layoffs,” said Jill Gonzalez, a WalletHub analyst, in a statement.

That said, after last week’s strong jobs report, New York Fed Bank President John Williams and Atlanta Fed Bank President Raphael Bostic reiterated the position that a 75-basis-point rate hike would be justified at this month’s FOMC meeting as the labor market continues to be resilient.

Following the June rate-setting Committee meeting, the central bank updated its Summary of Economic Projections from March (pdf). On the labor front, the median unemployment rate forecast was raised to 3.7 percent for 2022, 3.9 percent for 2023, and 4.1 percent in 2024. The longer-run estimate for the jobless rate was unchanged at 4 percent.

The current unemployment rate stands at 3.6 percent, the lowest since February 2020.

Colombia releases Truth Commission report on decades of violence

Michelle Begue

Published July 12, 2022 

In 2016, with the signing of Colombia’s peace agreement between leftist rebels and the government, the government set up a Truth Commission to bring to light what happened in more than a half-century of war.

The commission’s mission was to expose the painful reality of war, and what the victims endured.

CGTN’s Michelle Begue reports from Colombia.

Is the world really falling apart or does it just feel that way?

July 12, 2022


Has the world entered a time of unusual turbulence, or does it just feel that way?

Scanning the headlines, it’s easy to conclude that something is broken.

The pandemic.

A protester shouts anti-government slogans at the protest site outside Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s office three days after he was stormed by anti-government protesters in Colombo, Sri Lanka. 

AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena.

World cereal shortage.

Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Political and economic collapse in Sri Lanka.

The assassination of a former prime minister in Japan.

And, in the United States: inflation, mass shootings, a reckoning on January 6, and the collapse of abortion rights.

Is a feeling of chaos can be difficult to square with longer-term data that shows that, on many metrics, the world as a whole is getting better.

War is rarer today, by some measures, than it has been for most of the last 50 years, and when it does occur, it is significantly less deadly.

Los genocides and mass atrocities they are also becoming less common.

Life expectancy, literacy and living standards are rising, on average, to record highs.

Also steadily decreasing:

hunger, child mortality and extreme poverty, freeing hundreds of millions of people from what are, in absolute numbers, among the main threats facing humanity.

So why does it often seem that, despite all the data, things they only get worse?

There are a few reasons for this apparent disparity, some more reassuring than others, not to mention one important measure:

the state of democracyfor which the world is not improving at all.
Subtle gains versus obvious crisis

The ways in which the world is improving most significantly tend to be gradualdeveloping over generations.

Hundreds of millions could live healthier and more secure lives than their parents.

But those often subtle changes will lift entire societies at once, making it hard for people to notice the change.

We tend to judge how we are doing in comparison to those around us, or in comparison to our own recent past, not in comparison to abstract landmarks or previous generations.

And many of the positive changes have to do with prevention.

no one notices the wars that don’t happen, of family members who are not victims of disease, of children who do not die in infancy.

Still, try visiting a society in crisis, for example, Hong Kong in the midst of an invasive authoritarianism, the Lebanon in economic free fall, and tell people that we live in an era of rising welfare and receding threats.

You are likely to be met with amazing looks.

And thanks to the Internet, with much greater news consumption than before, even those who live far from crises now live in a digital world of constant and terrible updates.

An important story, such as a mass shooting or the war in Ukraine, can feel always present in our lives.

If your social media feeds and home screens display a constant stream of calamities, they can fuel an overwhelming, if sometimes misplaced, sense of threatas if the world itself were collapsing.

When people express that they feel like the world is falling apart, they are not talking about long-term metrics like life expectancy.

Rather, they tend to feel that humanity is defeated by turmoil and emergencies to a degree that it hasn’t been before.

But there is an argument, albeit one that would only console an economist, that today’s crises are rarer and less severe even than those of the recent past.

Consider the mid-1990s, a time Americans tend to remember as a time of global stability and optimism.

If today was truly a time of exceptional upheaval, then surely that world would look better in comparison.

Actually, the opposite is true.

In the mid-1990s there were genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia.

Years of war in Europe amid the collapse of Yugoslavia.

devastating famines in Sudan, Somalia and North Korea.

​ Civil wars in more than a dozen countries.

Crackdowns and coups too numerous to mention.

Such events were, in fact, more common in the 1990s than they are today.

The previous decades were, in most ways, even worse.

But it’s unlikely that you remember all the disasters that occurred decades ago as vividly as you might recount, say, a terrorist attack or a political crisis this week.

And reductions in such crises have only reduced the world’s problems, not erased them.

No one wants to rejoice in a famine less severe than it might have been in the past, especially the families it puts at risk, and especially knowing that future conflict or climate-related crises can always cause another.
uneven optimism

Still, the sense that the world is getting worse is not universal.

In fact, it is mostly in the hands of residents of rich countries like the United States.

Survey after survey has found that most people in low- and middle-income countries like Kenia o Indonesia tend to express optimism about the future, both for themselves and for their societies.

These countries account for the majority of the world’s population, suggesting that optimism is, believe it or not, the prevailing global norm of mood.

Those countries, after all, are where those long-term gains in health and wellness are most pronounced.

Many of these regions also experienced decades of civil conflict and unrest during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union treated them like battlegrounds, propping up despots and insurgents.

But these same surveys also tend to find that in rich countries, most respondents express pessimism about the future.

Much of this may be due to economic mobility, rather than global headlines.

People in low-income countries tend to believe that they will be better off financially in the future, while people in rich countries consider it unlikely.

But pessimism about Personal circumstances of one can easily become pessimistic about the world.

Surveys in the United States have found that people who see little hope for personal financial progress also feel that the country as a whole is getting worse and disapprove of political leaders.

The erosion of secure jobs for the working class, as manufacturing labor flees abroad and unions weaken, is believed to have precipitated much of the Western populist reaction.

Not surprisingly, from this point of view, Americans viewed the 1990s as a time of global peace and prosperity, even if it was primarily a time of peace and prosperity for Americans.

But stagnant economic fortunes are not the only reason for pessimism in rich countries.

Of all the metrics that show constant improvement in the world, there is one where the world really faces a dramatic and destabilizing erosion:

democracy.

An era of democratic decline

For seven decades the number of countries considered democratic grew.

The average quality of these democracies – the fairness of elections, the rule of law, and the like – also steadily improved.

However, that increase began to decline about 20 years ago.

And for five or six years now, researchers have found that the number of democracies in the world it has been reduced for the first time since World War II.

Existing democracies are also becoming less democratic, more polarized and more prone to political dysfunction or outright collapse.

Consider the rise of strongman rule in Hungary, Philippines or Russia attacks on the courts in Poland  Hindu extremism in India fears of a power grab in Brazil.

These may be especially serious cases, but they are vanguards of a global trend.

The same is true of the United States, a country widely described by democracy observers as experiencing a sustained erosion.

Because richer countries are more likely to be democratic, they are more likely to be affected by this trend.

This may speak to the growing pessimism in those countries.

It may also help explain why, for Americans, it can feel like the world as a whole is falling apart.

For Americans who have spent most of their lives in a safe and stable society, the shift to a seemingly endless political crisis is destabilizing.

It can make the world feel darker and more frightening, which can also make faraway events feel more frightening or more annoying.

People naturally look for patterns in the world.

Experience something once, especially if that experience is traumatic, and you will start to see it everywhere.

For Americans who have suddenly tuned in to say, domestic threats of election theft or civil unrest, similar events unfolding abroad will suddenly be felt. much more visceral.

That can add up.

A handful of distant crises that Americans might have dismissed as unrelated 30 years ago may, today, seem connected.

It might even look like evidence of a global collapse.

c.2022 The New York Times Company

USA
Were Jan. 6 attackers extremists? Protesters? Patriots?

Rioters storm a police barrier at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
AP File Photo/John Minchillo

Survey finds most view group negatively but much depends on how you feel about Black Lives Matter, gun ownership

BY Juan Siliezar
Harvard Staff Writer
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette
DATE July 12, 2022


A new survey surprisingly shows that American views of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack do not vary much by race overall, with a majority viewing participants as “extremists.” But Black Lives Matter supporters, regardless of race, age, or sex, tend to view the attackers more negatively, and white gun owners are more likely to see them in a positive light.

The new study, gleaned from a follow-up to a long-running survey of child development and life outcomes, was published Friday in the journal Socius. It asked respondents to label people who stormed the Capitol as “extremists,” “protesters,” or “patriots.” The answers were broken down by race and analyzed to examine how they were affected by a respondent’s support for BLM or whether they owned a gun.

“We wanted to understand how people’s sentiments about recent social movements — in this case Black Lives Matter — and the interaction of race and gun ownership predict views on Jan. 6,” said Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson, one of the three co-authors on the study. “It’s really the intersection of these different things that matters in our data.”

The researchers found that a clear majority — more than 70 percent — of white, Black, and Hispanic respondents labeled the rioters as extremists. Only about 20 percent characterized them as protesters while about 6 percent labeled them patriots, with relatively little variation by race.

Views of Jan. 6 attack vary little by race and ethnicity alone, survey suggests

Respondents were asked: What label do you think best characterizes the people who participated in the events at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to contest the results of the presidential election? Extremist, protester, or patriot?

Source: Rebecca Bucci, David S. Kirk, and Robert J. Sampson; visualization by Socius

The researchers, however, found greater complexity when they went deeper into the results and pulled out responses from Black Lives Matter supporters and gun owners.

BLM supporters were 1.5 times more likely to label the people who stormed the Capitol as extremists than nonsupporters. The pattern persisted across all racial groups but was especially evident among white and Hispanic respondents.

Among white respondents, for example, about 75 percent of BLM supporters saw those who attacked the Capitol as extremists while only about 41 percent of nonsupporters did. Among Hispanic respondents, it was 82 percent of BLM supporters compared with almost 58 percent of nonsupporters labeling them extremists.

Overall a large majority of Black respondents, about 79 percent, viewed the rioters as extremists, and those percentages remained largely unchanged regardless of whether respondents supported or did not support BLM.

Since the attack, several media outlets and scholarly accounts have linked support of the assault to a passion for guns and the Second Amendment. When looking at gun ownership alone the researchers found no relation between the two. It was only when they linked guns to race that they found a connection, with white gun owners an outlier in viewing the political uprising most favorably.

More than 70 percent of Hispanic gun owners and non-gun owners labeled participants extremists while over 90 percent of Black gun owners and nearly 75 percent of non-gun owners did the same. White gun owners were significantly less likely to label participants as extremists than white respondents who did not own a firearm — about 42 percent compared to 66 percent.

“Until you’re breaking it down by race, you’re really not telling the whole story or the accurate story,” said Rebecca Bucci, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard working with Sampson.

Survey participants were enrolled in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a longitudinal study of multiple birth cohorts that started in the mid-1990s.

Nearly 700 participants responded comprising individuals born in 1981, 1984, 1987, and 1995. One hundred forty-three were white; 220 were Black; and 288 were Hispanic. Respondents who identified as any other race were dropped from the study. The researchers controlled for age, sex, current education, growing up in poverty, and parental education.

The study pointed out potential caveats, such as its relatively small sample size and that it was limited to people originally from Chicago.

The study marks the authors first attempt to provide a descriptive portrait of views on the Jan. 6 attack and to probe common assumptions about how race, views on racial issues, and gun ownership are related to support for the attack. The researchers say more study is needed to assess additional sources of views on the Capitol assault and how early-life factors contribute to the development of these views overall.

“Ultimately, what we want to try to understand is how, in some sense, do different groups arrive at their sentiments about the government and the law,” said David S. Kirk, a sociologist from the University of Oxford and the third co-author on the study. “How do these views develop over time …. This is a first stage of us trying to unpack that.”

This work was supported by the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research and the Leverhulme Trust.

Nine EU states refuse 'terrorist' label for Palestinian civil society groups

Prominent NGOs Addameer and Al-Haq are among those accused of militant links

Activists gather at Al-Haq Foundation in Ramallah to denounce Israel's decision to declare six Palestinian human rights groups as "terror organisations", on 27 October 2021

By MEE and agencies
Published date: 12 July 2022 20:38 UTC | Last update: 7 hours 3 mins ago

Nine states in the European Union announced they would continue working with the six Palestinian civil society groups that Israel designated "terrorist" associations last year because of a lack of evidence for that claim.

The joint statement came on Tuesday and the groups include the prominent advocacy organisations Addameer, which supports Palestinian political prisoners, and Al-Haq, a human rights organisation that works with the United Nations.

Israel declares six Palestinian civil society groups 'terrorist organisations'

Read More »

Also listed are the Union of Agricultural Work Committees; the Bisan Centre for Research and Development; the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees; and Defense for Children International - Palestine.

The foreign ministries of Belgium; Denmark; France; Germany; Ireland; Italy; the Netherlands; Spain; and Sweden said they had not received "substantial information" from Israel that would justify reviewing their policy.

"Should evidence be made available to the contrary, we would act accordingly," they said. "In the absence of such evidence, we will continue our cooperation and strong support for the civil society in the OPT (occupied Palestinian territories).

"A free and strong civil society is indispensable for promoting democratic values and for the two-state solution.”

In October 2021, Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz declared six Palestinian civil society groups as terrorist organisations, accusing them of militant links, in a move condemned by various human rights defenders. The declaration came with criticism from both the United Nations and human rights organisations.

In a statement, Gantz’s office said they are “part of a network of organisations operating undercover in the international arena” on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-Leninist resistance group.

"These organisations operated under the guise of 'civil society organisations', but in practice belong to and form an arm of the organisation's leadership, the purpose of which is to destroy Israel while taking part in terrorist acts," the statement added.

In April, United Nations human rights experts urged the international community to resume funding for the Palestinian civil society groups.

"We call on the funding governments and international organisations to swiftly conclude that Israel has not established its allegations and to announce that they will continue to financially and politically support these organisations and the communities and groups they serve," the groups - which included J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace, and T'ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, among others - said in a statement at the time.

Russian Schools Forming Classes on Basis of Ethnicity Regardless of Russian-Language Knowledge, HSE Study Finds

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 21 – Regardless of how well migrant children speak Russian, they are being put in classes with other migrants of the same nationality who may not know it at all, a practice that is increasing the cultural and religious distance between the migrants and the indigenous Russian population, a Higher School of Economics study finds.

            The HSE scholars reached that conclusion, one that is at odds with what the Russian government says it is doing and wants to see happen, on the basis of interviews with teachers, administrators, parents and pupils in Moscow, Moscow region, Tomsk and Irkutsk (daily.hse.ru/post/193).

            According to an HSE summary, they found that classes in Russian schools are being formed “on the basis of the ethnic origin of the child and not his citizenship or knowledge of Russian. Consequently, even if a child was born in Russia and speaks Russian well, he is put in a class with children who recently came from the countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus.”

            The impact of this approach is exacerbated by the fact that ethnic Russian parents do whatever they can to transfer their children out of such classes, thus leaving them dominated by migrants and putting the migrant children in a marginal position in Russian society from their earliest years.

             Yekaterina Demintseva, the HSE scholar who led this investigation, says that “schools aren’t ready to work with foreign children” so teachers develop their own strategies which often isolate immigrants and parents of migrant children feel discriminated as a result and thus are less and less willing to integrate with Russian society.

            And she adds that many Russian teachers are convinced that the problems they face are very much more serious than they were in Soviet times because migrant children do not arrive in Moscow or other Russian cities knowing at least some Russian. As a result, “the cultural and religious distance between local residents and new arrivals is increasing every year.”

            The situation is made still worse by another structural feature. Because the schools aren’t integrating immigrant children, parents who want their children to be able to function in Russia increasingly are turning to Muslim institutions who can provide help but inevitably with a Muslim accent.

            What that means is that not only are the pupils becoming more ethnic rather than less in the schools but they are becoming more Muslim because of the actions of these structures. Not surprisingly, those who begin their lives with these experiences are going to be far less willing to integrate into Russian life than would otherwise be the case.

Margaret Atwood defends ‘I told you so’ 

mug likening post-Roe America to 

Handmaid’s Tale

Clémence Michallon Tue, July 12, 2022 

Margaret Atwood attends the 28th Annual Scotiabank Giller Prize Gala on 8 November 2021 in Toronto, Ontario (Jeremy Chan/Getty Images)

Margaret Atwood has expressed her dismay over current similarities between attacks on reproductive rights in the US and those portrayed in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale.

On 11 July, the author shared a photo on Twitter of herself holding a mug with the words “I told you so” written across it. She wrote alongside the image: “In Nova Scotia with appropriately sloganed coffee mug...”

The tweet received more than 65,000 likes, along with comments from some people who questioned the message behind the photo.

The image was a reference to the recent attacks on reproductive rights in the US. Last month, the US Supreme Court reversed the long-held Roe v Wade decision, which had protected abortion rights across the country since 1973.

The overruling of Roe v Wade caused many states to swiftly restrict abortion access via trigger laws instauring bans, designed to take effect after the reversal.

On 12 July, Atwood clarified what she had meant by the picture, writing on Twitter: “My goodness, some of you are good at misreading! To be clear: when Handmaid’s Tale came out in 85, there was disbelief. I thought a religious-right takeover was possible in the US, and was Crazy Margaret. Premature, but unfortunately too close. That doesn’t make me happy.”

The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopia published in 1985, imagines a future in which the US has become a fundamentalist, authoritarian, theocratic regime known as Gilead. Women are assigned roles, which include that of handmaid – a woman assigned to a high-ranking couple and forced to bear children for them.

A fireproof edition of The Handmaid’s Tale on display at Sotheby’s in New York City on 3 June 2022 (ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)

Back in May, after Politico published a draft of the Supreme Court opinion that eventually overturned Roe v Wade on 24 June, Atwood wrote an op-ed for The Atlantic titled: “I invented Gilead. The Supreme Court is making it real.”

In the piece, Atwood explained she had initially stopped writing The Handmaid’s Tale “several times”, because she “considered it too far-fetched”.

“Silly me,” she added. “Theocratic dictatorships do not lie only in the distant past: There are a number of them on the planet today. What is to prevent the United States from becoming one of them?”

Secret schools enable Afghanistan's teen girls to skirt Taliban's education ban

NPR
July 12, 2022
DIAA HADID
FAZELMINALLAH QAZIZAI

A teenage girl wearing a face mask, head scarf and long black robe listens to a math teacher at a tutoring center in Kabul. The center was established by a women's rights activist to circumvent a Taliban ban on girls attending secondary school. The activist said she has informal permission by Taliban authorities to run the center as long as teenage girls abide by a strict dress code.

Diaa Hadid/NPR

KABUL, Afghanistan – Inside a small room in a house on Kabul's outskirts, about ten teenage girls are defying their Taliban rulers who have banned them from attending secondary school. "Let's learn," one student slowly reads to another as they review English lessons from a textbook. "Learn the words: Yellow, blue, red, green."

The girls attend a secret school run by a young woman barely older than her students, 21-year-old Nazanin, whose lavender headscarf matched her nail polish on the day we visited.

"When the Taliban said girls can't go to secondary school anymore, I thought to myself, 'what can I do?'," she tells NPR. "How can I raise the morale of the girls around me?" She and the young students requested they only be referred to by their first names, to avoid being identified by Taliban officials.

It's been nearly a year since the Taliban seized power and stopped some 850,000 Afghan girls from attending secondary school, according to UNICEF figures. The regime had promised to allow girls to return on March 23. But it appears a minority of senior hardliners had a change of heart. Teenage girls arrived to their old classrooms only to be sent home again, many in tears.

The Taliban have been pressured to reverse their decision by the international community, Afghan women, girls — even prominent Afghan clerics known for their loyalty to the Taliban. An Education Ministry spokesman tells NPR they're ready to open those schools whenever their leadership says they can. But hopes are slim. At a nationwide conference of Taliban loyalist clerics and traders that took place from June 30 to July 2, local media reported that girls education was only mentioned by two of the 3,000 male attendees. The communique issued at the gathering's end called on the international community to recognize the Taliban administration but contained only a vague reference to education.

Secret schools and loopholes

A teenage girl revises the words for different colors in an English class held in a small secret school on the outskirts of Kabul. The school was established inside a home in a working class area of Kabul after the Taliban reneged on a promise in late March to allow girls to attend secondary school.

Diaa Hadid/NPR

Many Afghan girls aren't waiting for the Taliban government to change their minds. Nor are their teachers.

In Kabul, the rural province of Parwan and the western city of Herat alike, women are running secret schools like Nazanin's. They're also finding loopholes around the Taliban's ban on girls attending secondary education, by operating girls madrassas — religious schools — or tutoring centers that essentially replicate high school courses.

"The fact that people have found all of these different ways to try to work around the Taliban ban is an indication of how desperately people want education for themselves, for their daughters, for the for the girls in their families," says Heather Barr, who for Human Rights Watch closely tracks violations against women and girls in Afghanistan.

While some governments may let poor girls fall through the cracks of the school system or have educational or general policies that discriminate against girls, only Afghanistan has banned girls' secondary education outright, she says. "The Taliban should be deeply ashamed that they've made Afghanistan the only country in the world that's denying girls access to education based on their gender."

After the Taliban reneged on their promise to let girls return to secondary school in late March, Nazanin decided to open her small school. Those close to her pitched in. She described her thinking at the time: "If we follow the Taliban, we'd just stay home. No. We have to do something."

Her family helped transform a spare room in their house and painted it a warm yellow. Her grandmother donated a rug. Friends handed over books. Nazanin g-teaches grades seven and eight as well as art. Her cousin teaches the older grades. A friend handles the English class. 

A scene from a small secret school on the outskirts of Kabul.

Diaa Hadid/NPR

Word of mouth has filtered across the alleyways in Nazanin's hardscrabble, working-class area. Her class is filled with students like 14-year-old Leila.

Leila pulls out a black pen from her Barbie-themed pencil case, opens her notebook and hunches over the low table she shares with the other girls. She copies English sentences off the whiteboard. "She is pretty," she whispers as she writes. "Our classroom is hot."

The Taliban's ban is just the latest barrier to Leila's education. During the pandemic, Leila missed a year of schooling. Last year, after she returned, tragedy struck: militants targeted teenage girls at her school, Sayed al-Shuhada, as they were streaming out of the gate, detonating a vehicle rigged with explosives that killed more than 80.

Leila was still inside her school when the attack occurred, but she lost many of her friends. And yet she returned three days later, expecting to resume studies. The school hadn't even reopened. Weeks later, her parents pulled her out, fearing another attack. Then, the Taliban swept to power.

Now, Leila walks to her secret school from her house nearby.

To avoid suspicion, she tucks her notebooks behind whatever novel she's borrowed from Nazanin's modest book collection. This week, it's a book of Persian poetry. The girls think if they're seen reading, that's okay. But studying — that could get them into trouble.

Even the Taliban isn't 100% opposed to schooling for teen girls

Teenage girls take notes in an English class in a small secret school on the outskirts of Kabul.

Diaa Hadid/NPR

The Taliban, as a group, don't all agree on banning girls' secondary education. One senior Taliban bureaucrat requested anonymity to explain the ban to NPR because of the subject's sensitivity. He says the Taliban's hardcore loyalists demanded the ban in accordance with the conservative tradition that girls should stay home.

There are exceptions: The ban isn't applied in a handful of provinces where community leaders, typically men, voice support for girls' education.

The ban, paradoxically enough, does not apply to colleges either.

That has led to a surreal situation in Afghanistan where teenage girls must stay home, but a young woman lucky enough to have been in college when the Taliban seized power can still legally pursue her degree. A lack of professors to teach the women alongside strict dress codes appears to have kept many college-age women home, however.

The Taliban official says that in places where the ban is in effect, girls and their families can pay to attend privately run tutoring centers, where students typically go to improve their grades.

It's not clear how many Afghan girls are in secret schools or otherwise finding ways to educate themselves, but it almost certain that it is only a fraction of the some 850,000 girls who live in parts of Afghanistan where secondary schools have closed. According to UNICEF figures from 2019, which was the last time a school census was conducted, there were 1.1 million girls in secondary school. Some 250,000 of those girls live in provinces where secondary schools are still operational.

In Kabul, some of the luckiest girls end up in a basement on a quiet Kabul street, where 34-year-old Zainab set up a tutoring center in April to keep girls learning. She conducts online language lessons for Afghans abroad to raise money and is seeking external sponsors as well. "We cover secondary school subjects. We even hired teachers who lost their jobs. It's all free. I don't [want] the girls to miss out on an education."

Zainab says Taliban authorities have informally allowed her to run the center, provided the girls obey strict dress codes. And they do: The teenagers filter in wearing black robes, headscarves and face masks.

The center offers classes for English and Quran memorization. The most popular course prepares girls for the college admissions test. It's unclear, however, if the Taliban will allow new female college entrants.

One top achieving student at Zainab's center, 17-year-old Sahar, says her current situation is not like school.

She's meant to be in grade 11. She goes to three different tutoring centers to round out her education. She leaves home at 6 a.m. each morning and races between classes. She worries her bag, filled with books, might attract hostility. "I get really scared when the Taliban guys see me. I change my routes," she says.

Some days, Sahar says, her morale collapses. "I've always wanted to be a doctor and until the Taliban took over, I was getting top marks. Now I've got no chance. She and her mother cry together sometimes, Sahar says, "because our future is so dark."

It's a deep sadness she says her mother shares. Because when the Taliban were last in power, her mother was a teenager. And she couldn't attend school either.

Additional reporting by Khwaga Ghani from California.