Horses differentiate human expressions of sadness and joy

by University of Turku

A horse in the experimental setup, wearing the heart-rate monitor (belt). 

Two video projectors at the back of the testing box project the images on screens placed in

 front of the horse. Credit: Plotine Jardat

A new study shows that horses can differentiate between expressions of joy and sadness displayed by humans through facial movements or voice tones. Horses were more attracted by the facial expressions of joy than sadness and seemed more excited by the joyful voices.

Emotions are present in all interactions and communication from human to human, and they could also play a role in interspecies communication. Diverse animal species from orangutans to pigeons are already known to perceive human emotions, and domestic mammals have been the focus of several studies in the past years. Dogs, cats, horses, and even goats were shown to distinguish different human facial expressions of emotions. However, this area of research has mainly focused on two emotions: joy and anger. What about other emotions, such as sadness?

The international research team from the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment INRAE in France, the University of Tours in France and the University of Turku in Finland observed and analyzed horses' behavior when presented with human faces and voices expressing joy or sadness. The heart rate of the horses was also recorded during the experiment.

"Sadness is a particularly interesting emotion, because it is not only of negative valence—contrary to joy, which is positive—but it is also of low arousal. Previous studies have shown that horses react to high-arousal emotions like anger or joy. Could they also detect signals of sadness, a low-arousal emotion?

"We wanted to study whether horses can associate the vocal and facial signals of human sadness, as they can for joy and anger," says Plotine Jardat, Doctoral Researcher from the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment and the University of Tours, France, and the lead author of the study published in Animal Cognition.

Horses were surprised by the incompatibility of a sad look with a cheerful voice

During the study, the horses were placed in front of two screens displaying two faces of the same person expressing joy on one screen and sadness on the other screen. Simultaneously, a voice was broadcast, expressing either joy or sadness.

The horses' first look indicated they matched the face and voice expressing sadness or joy. The researchers observed that during the horses' first glances at each image, a greater number of the horses spent a longer time looking at the unmatching image than the image that matched the sound.

In other words, when the horses first looked at the images, they were, as expected, surprised by the incompatibility between the sad face and the joyful voice, and vice versa. This suggests that horses can associate a human face and voice expressing the same emotion, be it sadness or joy.

"This is interesting because it would mean that when horses observe our faces and hear our voices, they don't just see and hear separate things, but they are able to match them across different modalities. You could imagine that they have a particular box in their mind labeled 'human sadness' containing the characteristics of both a human sad face and a human sad voice," says Doctoral Researcher Océane Liehrmann from the University of Turku.

A similar setup has been used in several previous experiments by the team. Its purpose is to explore the animals' mental processing of the images and sounds and their congruence. In the previous experiments on anger and joy as well as on the perception of adults and children, the horses reacted to the setup by looking more at the image that did not match the sound. The researchers believe that horses look more at the incongruent image because they are intrigued by the lack of correspondence between this image and what they hear

Horses looked more at joyful images and seemed more excited by joyful voices

The researchers also observed that after the initial look, horses focused on the screen showing the joyful face and looked at it longer and a higher number of times. Moreover, their heart rates seemed to increase more when the broadcast voice expressed joy rather than sadness, suggesting the horses were in a higher arousal state when hearing the former.

According to the researchers, three hypotheses could explain these observations. First, the horses could have been more attracted by the joyful images because of a greater movement, and more excited by the joyful voices because of acoustic characteristics like pitch variations. Second, horses could have associated human joyful faces with positive situations, so they would prefer to look at these expressions linked to positive memories. Third, horses could feel more positively when looking at the images of joy, and more aroused when hearing joyful voices, because of a phenomenon called "emotional contagion."

Emotional contagion is the correspondence of the emotional state of an observer with the emotional state of the individual they observe. It has been described in humans and primates, and several studies have suggested that it could also happen between humans and other animals, like horses. This phenomenon is often regarded as a premise of empathy.

"Overall, our study shows that horses can differentiate audible and visual signals of human joy and sadness, and associate the corresponding vocal and facial expressions. Horses were also more attracted and seemed more animated by joyful expressions, so people who interact with horses could benefit from expressing joy during these interactions," Jardat concludes.

The researchers point out that further studies are needed to better understand horses' perception of human sadness. In the future, researchers aim to find out, for example, whether horses can also differentiate sadness from other negative emotions, or whether sad expressions from humans can influence horses' behavior, especially during human-horse interactions.

More information: Plotine Jardat et al, Horses discriminate between human facial and vocal expressions of sadness and joy, Animal Cognition (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s10071-023-01817-7

Journal information: Animal Cognition 

Provided by University of Turku How do horses read human emotional cues?

How gender inequality is hindering Japan's economic growth

by Sarah Parsons, The Conversation

Credit: Siriwat Sriphojaroen/Shutterstock

Japan's economy is under pressure from rising energy prices and defense costs and the impact of the pandemic. Plummeting birth rates and an aging population further threaten the sustainability of its labor market. A 2023 study by independent thinktank the Recruit Works Institute points to a labor supply shortage of 3.41 million people by 2030, and over 11 million by 2040.

Gender inequality is another significant pressure point. Research shows that a gender-inclusive society and workforce leads to innovation and economic growth. However, Japan has one of the lowest levels of gender equality among G7 countries. It has slipped to its lowest ranking yet in the World Economic Health Forum's latest Global Gender Report, particularly in terms of women in leadership positions.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida recently declared that Japan needs to urgently raise its birth rate. He also vowed to increase the percentage of women executives in Tokyo stock exchange-listed companies, from 11.4% to 30% or more, by 2030. A policy draft released in June indicates that this will be achieved through leadership quotas legally imposed on listed companies.

Japan has tried this countless times, however, and largely failed. As my research shows, this is because gender norms are deeply embedded in Japanese society.

Socialization of gender norms

Gender norms in Japanese society are tightly connected to patriarchal hierarchies that have evolved historically from the influence of Confucianism. The role of a man is linked to being the breadwinner and head of the family. Women, by contrast, are seen as wives and caregivers, ultimately subservient to the head of the family.

Children are taught these norms from an early age. Research shows that Japanese preschool teachers position children in various gender roles by encouraging gendered speech and behavioral patterns. Girls speak softly and act in a cute, non-threatening way. Boys, by contrast, use more dominant language and behavior. Children's books and TV programs often perpetuate these hierarchical linguistic patterns and behavior.

These beliefs and values influence hiring practices and organizational behavior within the Japanese workplace, which is still based on the male-based breadwinner/female-dependent model.

From 1945 to 1991, a period which economists refer to as the economic miracle years, most Japanese women were isolated from the leadership career path. This resulted in low levels of Japanese women in key decision-making positions.

Today, leadership is still seen as a male-dominated environment—even when the topic is about female empowerment. Japan was the only country to send a male delegate to the recent G7 delegation on gender equality and female empowerment.

Gaining promotions to higher-paid positions relies on long hours and commitment to the company, regardless of gender. Gendered norms therefore result in a significant double burden on Japanese women.

Despite having one of the most generous paternity-leave provisions in the world, only 14% of Japanese men took paternity leave in 2021, compared with Sweden's 90% rate of uptake. Japanese men also spend the lowest amount of time doing unpaid housework (41 minutes a day) among OECD countries.

Both the highly gendered workplace and unequal division of household labor mean that women are more likely than men to miss out on promotions, take on lower-paid irregular jobs, and/or only consider having one child.

Work-life expectations are unrealistic. And in the workplace, women face discrimination and harassment, as well as restrictive expectations of gendered behavior and appearance. Yoshiro Mori stepped down as head of the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee in 2021, after sexist remarks he had reportedly made in a Japanese Olympic committee meeting caused an international furore. Mori was quoted as saying women talk too much, and that when "allowed into" high-level meetings, they take up too much time.

Failed solutions

Previous Japanese government initiatives to raise the birth rate and improve gender equality have focused on introducing quotas for female leadership and executive boards, more childcare places, and enhanced parental leave. However, these have either failed to reach their target or have become tokenistic. In fact, recent initiatives are reported to have exacerbated gender inequality and driven some women into poverty.

Singapore recently embarked on a similar mission as part of a national gender equality review. Its government has gathered ideas and feedback from women's and youth groups, private organizations, academics, policymakers and the wider public. This has resulted in a policy wish list and report, the findings of which will be implemented into both policy and education.

My research shows that this approach would work for Japan, too. It could allow people to voice their opinions and wishes in an open debate—which chimes with Japan's cultural preference for decision-making achieved through consensus—rather than making direct criticisms of the patriarchal order.

Such a review would need to look at all stages of life and aspects of society that are involved in the socialization of gender roles, and the impact these have, from both a human rights and an economic perspective. There is already evidence that gender inequality is leading to mental health issues in Japan, especially for divorcees and single mothers.

This review would also offer an opportunity for feedback from the younger generation. Research shows that many younger Japanese are becoming disenchanted with traditional gender roles. They are looking at new ways of living by choosing careers outside the echelons of power within Japanese society. They are also rejecting the institution of marriage.

Japan has the opportunity to rewrite its gender equality trajectory. Doing so would hopefully include other representations of gender and diversity that have so far not been widely accepted within Japanese society, or protected within the law. Same-sex marriage is still unconstitutional in some prefectures. Societal change at this level will take a generation. The conversation needs to start now.

Provided by The Conversation 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Parenting alone isn't to blame for gender inequality

Research shows school principals preferentially contact students' mothers over fathers

by Christie Allen, Brigham Young University

A study from BYU, Syracuse University and Tufts University finds that moms shoulder 

disproportionate demands from kids’ schools compared to dads, even when school offices

 have contact information for both parents.

 Credit: Rebeca Fuentes/BYU Photo

When a sick child needs to be picked up from school, who is more likely to get the call, Mom or Dad? A new study from Brigham Young University and Tufts finds it's considerably more likely to be Mom—even when the front office has contact information for both parents.

For their research, BYU economics professor Olga Stoddard, Syracuse University's Kristy Buzard and Tufts University's Laura Gee emailed about 80,000 U.S. principals, posing as a fictitious two-parent household looking for a school for their child. Emailing sometimes from a "mother's" account and sometimes from a "father's," they provided contact information for both parents and asked for a call, without specifying which parent to contact. The research is published as a working paper in the SSRN Electronic Journal.

Their suspicions were confirmed: 59% of principals who responded contacted mothers first, making mothers 1.4 times more likely to get a call than fathers. Reframing the email message to encourage principals to call fathers did help even things out, but only to a point. When the email signaled that the father was more available, fathers got 74% of the calls, but mothers still got 26%. Meanwhile, mothers indicating more availability got over 90% of the calls.

Tellingly, even when the father was both the email sender and the designated one to call, mothers were first contacted 12% of the time. When moms both sent the email and asked to be called first, dads were contacted almost zero times.

"There's clearly an asymmetry," Stoddard said. "You can tell external decision-makers, 'We've decided the father is going to be the point of contact,' and that's effective in pushing more of the calls to the father, but there's a ceiling. For the ever-increasing proportion of families that want a more egalitarian split in childrearing responsibilities, this tendency makes it difficult to get to 50/50."

The study was inspired by a conversation between Stoddard and Gee about seeing only women's names on the volunteer sign-up sheets for their kids' activities. Both women observed that while their husbands wanted to take on half the child-rearing responsibilities to support their wives' full-time work, the men didn't often get the chance—it seemed schools and coaches automatically reached out to the moms.

"We looked at each other and said, 'There's got to be research on this already, on how women are disadvantaged in the workplace by shouldering disproportionate demands from outside forces,'" Stoddard said.

It turned out there wasn't, at least not rigorous, quantitative studies that showed whether the lopsidedness was all in working mothers' heads. So they designed one and found that the data backed up their experience.

In the study's accompanying survey, responses from 400 educators pointed to some possible explanations for why principals reach out first to mothers. It seems that principals think mothers are more available and that they like speaking with women more.

In addition, "a large driver of why mothers face more external demands has to do with social norms implying that mothers are better at these tasks and want to do them more than fathers," said Gee.

To explore the link between gender norms and external demands on mothers versus fathers, Stoddard, Gee and Buzard looked at their experiment results in a geographical context. They found that principals from areas traditionally associated with more conservative gender norms—more Republican, more religious, more rural, exhibiting a higher gender-wage gap and so forth—were indeed much less likely to reach out to fathers at an equal rate.

Despite gender norms, most two-parent American households don't have a stay-at-home parent, and disproportionate demands during the workday can have major consequences for women's productivity. The researchers cited a study showing a 9% decline in women's wages from household interruptions. And that's not to mention the effect on how women think about their careers to begin with.

"It's not like in a vacuum, women are born deciding not to major in computer science," Stoddard said. "Choices happen in context of information, expectations and constraints that individuals face. Unequal external demands affect what kinds of careers women choose because they anticipate these constant interruptions coming up in the future."

The inequality can also be damaging for fathers who would like to be more involved, Stoddard noted. Most fathers the researchers surveyed suggested they prefer schools to contact them as often as schools contact their children's mother.

Believing that their findings about schools are likely applicable to many institutions, the researchers suggested that parents can help manage demands by clearly signaling whom should be contacted. Institutions can also design systems to increase equitable outreach, such as by allowing parents to designate times of day when each should be contacted.

Even so, Stoddard expects a long wait. "There's a lot of evidence that gender norms are really persistent. They change, but very slowly. So it's likely going to be many years before we see significant change."

More information: Kristy Buzard et al, Who You Gonna Call? Gender Inequality in External Demands for Parental Involvement, SSRN Electronic Journal (2023). DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.4456100

Provided by Brigham Young University Parents, especially mothers, paying heavy price for lockdown

WAR IS RAPE
Rights group and UN experts single out Sudanese paramilitary with accusations of sexual violence
JACK JEFFERY
Updated Thu, August 17, 2023 

FILE - Women chant slogans protesting violence against women and demanding the release of all detainees before the U.N. rights office in Khartoum, Sudan, Feb. 2, 2022. Sudan's powerful paramilitary has been singled out by a leading rights group and 30 United Nations experts with accusations of rape and sexual violence against women in separate statements, as the country enters its fourth month of conflict. The New York-based Human Rights Watch said Thursday, AUg. 17, 2023, the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary apparently targeted women and girls in the western Darfur region of non-Arab ethnicity as well as activists recording human rights abuses during its fighting with the country's armed forces. 

(AP Photo/Marwan Ali, File) 

CAIRO (AP) — A leading rights group and U.N. experts accused Sudan’s powerful paramilitary on Thursday of sexual violence and attacks on women in the restive western Darfur region as the African country entered its fifth month of conflict.

Sudan plunged into chaos in mid-April, when months of simmering tensions between the military and its rival, the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, exploded into open fighting.

Human Rights Watch said the paramilitary group apparently targeted women and girls in the western Darfur region of non-Arab ethnicity, as well as activists recording human rights abuses during the conflict.

The New York-based watchdog said it had documented 78 victims of rape between April 24 and June 26.

U.N. officials warned in June that the fighting in Darfur has taken an ethnic dimension, with the RSF and allied militias targeting African communities.

Darfur was the scene of genocidal war in the early 2000s, when state-backed Arab militias known as the Janjaweed were accused of widespread killings, rapes and other atrocities. The Janjaweed later evolved into the RSF.

Several victims, who had fled Darfur for neighboring Chad, told HRW they were targeted because they were from the African Massalit community or because they were activists reporting on the conflict. At least one victim said she was pregnant after being raped by a paramilitary member.

In the report, the rights group stated it spoke with nine women and one girl who said they had all been victims of rape, four by multiple men. HRW also spoke with four women who witnessed sexual assaults as well as five service providers, including medical workers, who assisted victims in the West Darfur capital of Geneina.

Rapes and sexual violence reported during the conflict so far by activists and rights groups — including HRW and Amnesty International — have been attributed to the RSF and their allied militias.

Earlier this month, Amnesty accused the paramilitary of abducting 24 women and girls — some as young as 12 — and holding them for days in conditions amounting to “sexual slavery” during which "they were raped by several RSF members.”

“The Rapid Support Forces and allied militias appear responsible for a staggering number of rapes and other war crimes during their attack on El Geneina,” Belkis Wille, associate crisis and conflict director at Human Rights Watch, said in the report.

Several women who spoke to HRW also said they did not receive emergency post-rape care because it was not available or because they did not report the sexual assault they suffered to humanitarian staff in neighboring Chad.

HRW said the paramilitaries’ acts of sexual violence could amount to crimes against humanity. It called on the U.N. human rights council to launch an investigation and initiate “a way to preserve evidence of the abuses.”

Also Thursday, a group of 30 independent U.N. experts expressed alarm at reports “of widespread use of rape and other forms of sexual violence" by the Sudanese paramilitary.

“Sudanese women and girls in urban centers as well as in Darfur have been particularly vulnerable to violence," they said in a brief statement. The group called on the RSF to “demonstrate its commitment to upholding humanitarian and human rights obligations.”

The RSF did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, told the U.N. Security Council last week they were investigating alleged new war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.

At least 4,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the conflict, the U.N. human rights office said. Activists and doctors on the ground say the death toll is likely far higher.

Rights groups and U.N. officials have criticized the military for bombing residential areas with artillery fire and airstrikes. Amnesty said both sides have committed extensive war crimes in the ongoing conflict.

According to the latest U.N. statistics, the conflict has displaced over 4.3 million people. More than 900,000 of the displaced have fled to neighboring countries.

WOMEN AS CHATTEL
Taliban official says women lose value if their faces are visible to men in public
RIAZAT BUTT
Updated Thu, August 17, 2023

Molvi Mohammad Sadiq Akif, the spokesman for the Taliban's Ministry of Vice and Virtue, speaks during an interview in Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Aug. 17, 2023. Molvi said that women lose value if their faces are visible to men in public and that the only way to wear the hijab, or the Islamic headscarf, is if the face is hidden. 

(AP Photo/Siddiqullah Alizai) (

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Women lose value if men can see their uncovered faces in public, a spokesman for a key ministry of Afghanistan’s Taliban government said Thursday, adding that religious scholars in the country agree that a woman must keep her face covered when outside the home.

The Taliban, who took over the country in August of 2021, have cited the failure of women to observe the proper way to wear the hijab, or Islamic headscarf, as a reason for barring them from most public spaces, including parks, jobs and university.

Molvi Mohammad Sadiq Akif, the spokesman for the Taliban’s Ministry of Vice and Virtue, said in an interview Thursday with The Associated Press that if women’s faces are visible in public there is a possibility of fitna, or falling into sin.

“It is very bad to see women (without the hijab) in some areas (big cities), and our scholars also agree that women’s faces should be hidden,” Akif said. “It’s not that her face will be harmed or damaged. A woman has her own value and that value decreases by men looking at her. Allah gives respect to females in hijab and there is value in this.”

Tim Winter, who is the Shaykh Zayed Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University, said there was no scriptural mandate in Islam for face coverings and the Taliban would struggle to find anything in Islamic scripture that backed their interpretation of hijab rules.

“Their name implies they are not senior religious experts,” he told AP. “The word Taliban means students. "

He said the Taliban operate on the basis of textbooks used in village madrassas, religious schools, and that Muslim scholars who have been to Afghanistan during both periods of Taliban rule have been underwhelmed by their level of religious knowledge. “They have just been so isolated from the wider Muslim community.”

The Taliban’s restrictions on girls and women have caused global outrage, including from some Muslim-majority countries.

On Wednesday, U.N. special envoy Gordon Brown said the International Criminal Court should prosecute Taliban leaders for crimes against humanity for denying education and employment to Afghan girls and women.

Akif, who is the main spokesman for the Vice and Virtue Ministry, did not answer questions about the bans, including whether any of them could be lifted if there were to be universal adherence to hijab rules. He said there were other departments to deal with these issues.

Akif said the ministry faced no obstacles in its work and that people supported its measures.

“People wanted to implement Sharia (Islamic law) here. Now we’re carrying out the implementation of Sharia.” All the decrees are Islamic rulings and the Taliban have added nothing to them, he said. “The orders of Sharia were issued 1,400 years ago and they are still there.”

He said that under the current administration men no longer harass or stare at women like they used to do in the time of the previous government.

The Taliban government also says it has destroyed the “evils” of drinking alcohol and bacha bazi, a practice in which wealthy or powerful men exploit boys for entertainment, especially dancing and sexual activities.

The ministry is in a fortified compound near Darul Aman Palace in the Afghan capital, Kabul. Women are forbidden from entering ministry premises, some of the guards who were on duty Thursday told AP, although there is a female-only security screening hut.

Slogans on concrete barricades praise the purpose of the ministry.

One reads: “The promotion of virtues and the prohibition of vices are an effective means of social order.” Another says: “The promotion of virtues and the prohibition of vices save society from catastrophe.”

Akif said the ministry relies on a network of officials and informants to check if people are following regulations.

“Our ombudsmen walk in markets, public places, universities, schools, madrassas and mosques,” he said. “They visit all these places and watch people. They also speak with them and educate them. We monitor them and people also cooperate with and inform us.”

When asked if women can go to parks, one of the spaces they are banned from, he said they would be able to if certain conditions could be met.

“You can go to the park, but only if there are no men there. If there are men, then Sharia does not allow it. We don’t say that a woman can’t do sports, she can’t go to the park or she can’t run. She can do all these things, but not in the same way as some women want, to be semi-naked and among men."

A Talisman Against the Taliban

Phil Klay
Thu, August 17, 2023 

People prepare to board an evacuation flight out of Kabul, Afghanistan, on Oct. 3, 2021. Credit - Marcus Yam—Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Our Lady of the Manifest, who has travelled across continents from one volunteer for refugees to another, started with an atheist. When Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, Sara Gilliam, an Ontario-based working mother, volunteered to help at-risk Afghans navigate the global refugee system.

When most people think of the Afghan evacuation, their minds turn to those critical days in August of 2021, when crowds surged around Kabul’s airport, desperate and doomed Afghans clung to the sides of planes taking off, and a suicide bomber murdered scores of Afghans and 11 U.S. Marines, one soldier, and one Navy Corpsman. But the evacuation of Afghans never ended. There was a pause in flights out of Kabul after August of 2021, but that was time volunteers like Sara used push paperwork through so that in a few months when flights were once more permitted, at-risk Afghans could get on planes.

It was around this time, in November of 2021, that an Afghan family who had arrived in Ontario finally got resettled in a house. Gilliam asked her local community for donations to furnish the home and one family offered a shelf and, well, something a bit more difficult to describe. It had a doll’s legless torso, about the size of an outstretched hand, blankly staring from a pale white face, draped in the blue and white robes of the Virgin Mary stretching down five and half bodiless feet. Perhaps the long robes were meant to give the sense of the Holy Mother ascending into Heaven, but she looks more like an unusually fashionable ghost. Which, even if the relocating family had been pious Catholics rather than refugees from a Muslim country that frowned on religious iconography, would have been bizarre. Better than a bacon-wrapped bust of Mohammed, but still not great.

“Of course, I declined,” Gilliam said, “I felt like they’d been through enough.” But Gilliam, a joker and a gift-giver who sees laughter as a crucial element in keeping people going, posted a photo to a Slack channel for evacuation volunteers—and they were delighted. How hilarious! How creepy! How horrifying and sweet and inappropriate she was! And then Peter Lucier, a former Marine and Catholic volunteer, chimed in. “That’s not creepy. That’s Our Lady of the Manifest. She’s who we pray to, to get people on flights.”

Yeah. OK. Why not? Getting someone on a manifest was the holy grail, and sometimes it seems to require divine assistance. “Everyone immediately got it,” Sara said, and Holy Mary, the Mother of God, the Queen of Heaven, Queen of Mercy, Queen of Martyrs, was bestowed a new name.

Objects such as Our Lady—devotional statues, charms, mascots—aren’t uncommon in violent places. The war correspondent Michael Herr recounted how in Vietnam American soldiers kept a dizzying array—five-pound Bibles from home, St. Christophers, mezuzahs, pictures of JFK, Che Guevara, Jimi Hendrix, a plastic wrapped oatmeal cookie. In World War I, there was the famous Notre Dame de Brebières, a Madonna atop a battered basilica who had originally held the Christ child in outstretched arms, but had been bent low above her artillery shattered church, giving the impression of a mother about to throw her child to the ground in disgust. Or sacrifice. “Our Lady of the Limp,” as she was called by the skeptical, gathered myth around her with, as writer Paul Fussell put it, “an urgency born of the most touching need.”

The Our Lady of the Manifest doll

Peter Lucier

Our Lady of the Manifest, though, hasn’t been circulating through war zones but through small town Ontario, big city London and D.C., and the St. Louis suburbs. Her caretakers aren’t at risk themselves, but live a split screen existence where, through the terrible magic of technology, they get the horror and complacency of modern life all at once, receiving photos of friends released from Taliban custody in Afghanistan while running the local carpool for their kids after school.

There are no genuinely good times in refugee work. Even when you’re successful, that only means that you have helped refugees lose everything but their lives—possessions, home, business, fortune, job, purpose, land, mountains, fields, mosque, community, neighbors, streets, language—successfully.

Nevertheless, there are gradations of suffering, and while it is not exactly happy work to help people flee the land of their childhood impressions, first loves, and native tongue, it is better than failing to help people flee. And so as January of 2022 came around, and flights out of Afghanistan stalled, a more difficult period began. Which is when Gilliam sent Our Lady overseas to Laura Dietz.

Dietz is also a working mother, with a job in London’s financial sector. She’d met Gilliam years before, working on the Syrian refugee crisis, but had found her way into the male-heavy world of the Afghan evacuation. Together they’d created Task Force Nyx, a small volunteer group attempting to aid at-risk women fleeing Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban’s takeover of the country. There were plenty of groups focusing on Afghans who’d worked for the U.S., especially former interpreters, but they wanted to reach out to people they considered “the bravest women’s rights activists in the world.” The pair had a shared sense of humor. Unlike Gilliam, though, Dietz is a believer, a pastor’s kid and a church-going Protestant from a Southern Baptist background.

Faith can be an asset in such work. You can get every necessary document in order, push your case through the sluggish and unresponsive refugee system, get every name of the family you’re working with on a flight manifest, and somewhere between that Afghan family’s home and the airport they can run into the “18-year-old with a gun” problem—a young Afghan running a Taliban checkpoint who doesn’t have much respect for international agreements or paperwork and who might be in a bad mood, or struck by how a woman is dressed, or acting, or who just doesn’t like the idea of a family who wants to flee the country. Everything can fall apart in a moment, and even Gilliam the atheist was known to demand prayers while Afghans were passing through checkpoints (“I’ve never been commanded to pray so much by an atheist,” Dietz jokes).

But at first, religion had very little to do with Dietz’s relationship with Our Lady. She was a source of humor. And so as Dietz was working difficult cases, like the Afghan whose recommendation for visa status couldn’t be verified because his former boss been taken captive by the Haqqani network, she was also bringing Our Lady to Maddam Taussad’s to have Our Lady take a selfie with a wax statue of Donald Trump, to post on volunteer forums and to generate a few laughs.

And then, in January of 2022, about five months into her work with Task Force Nyx, something shifted. At that point a breakdown in negotiations had stopped government sponsored flights out of the country for over a month, and four of the women whose cases Nyx had been working on had been rounded up. “It was our first experience of having any at-risk Afghans that we were in contact with arrested and tortured by the Taliban,” she said. There was very little she could do. And so, half as a joke, she turned to Our Lady of the Manifest.

“I’m trying to come up with a prayer,” she told Peter Lucier, the Catholic veteran who’d given Our Lady her name. And that night Lucier responded with a new version of a four hundred year old Catholic hymn, the Salve Regina. “Hail, Holy Queen of Manifests, to you do we cry,” he wrote, “To you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.” For a moment, Our Lady felt a little less like a joke, and more like a companion on a painful road.

Discussing Our Lady now, Dietz is at pains to note that the goofing around she’s done doesn’t suggest a lack of seriousness about the horrors Afghans are facing. “There is a real isolation among volunteers who are doing this work,” she explains. “We aren't trained to interact with torture survivors. And not only is it the immediate trauma that people experience, but it's the fact that you know people with a dedicated U.S. pathway still languishing in a country run by terrorists 18 months later, so I probably can't underscore the toll that this mentally and emotionally takes on anyone who's trying to help.”

Humor is a response to that—not just a point of connection but a reflection of priorities. Kathleen Stokker, in her survey of humor during the Nazi occupation of Norway, notes that while Norwegians rarely made jokes about Nazi treatment of Jews, Danish humor is full of jokes about Nazi anti-Semitism. Stokker thinks it is no accident that, while half of Norway’s Jews were murdered, over 99% of Denmark’s Jews survived the Holocaust, the result of widespread resistance in which the Danish resistance helped evacuate 7,220 Jews and 686 non-Jewish spouses to Sweden. As Stokker notes, “What a country jokes about, it also takes most seriously.”

The Our Lady of the Manifest doll with a wax statue of Donald Trump

Peter Lucier

Eventually flights resumed, but cracks were appearing in the overall health of the evacuation community. So in the summer of 2022, Laura Dietz sent Our Lady to Kate Kovarovic, then the Director of Resilience Programming for the Afghan Evacuation Coalition, a group of 200 volunteer organizations working toward the safe resettlement of Afghan allies.

Kate, a lawyer in D.C. who grew up in a religious household but considers herself agnostic, was helping set up virtual support groups, developing a network of therapists offering 30 free minutes sessions for people in crisis, organizing training for how to deal with trauma victims and get help specific to this kind of work, and trying to create resources for Afghans as well (while also working cases with Task Force Nyx and other groups…she was busy).

“The amount of human suffering in our chat rooms is unimaginable to people who haven’t witnessed it,” Kate says. Veterans who served and bled with Afghan interpreters are watching former allies be left behind by an indifferent nation. Occasionally, Afghans are murdered. Jeff Phaneuf, Director of Advocacy for No One Left Behind, the largest volunteer organization working to assist Afghans who served the U.S. as interpreters, noted that when the organization surveyed it’s 16,000 contacts in August 2022 it found 180 clear instances of Afghans killed while waiting on a visa, with a 80 further possible murders they’re looking into. One of Peter Lucier’s colleagues at Team America, an Army veteran moved to do this work because of the translator who saved his life, had a case early on with a woman on a kill list who had been severely beaten by the Taliban and was in a hospital under a false name. With fluid in her lungs and a chest tube inserted, she would send him voice memos, pleading for her life, asking, “Why are our lives not worth saving?” To which he had no good answer. Why was his government so indifferent?

“This isn’t just, we’re a little stressed,” Kate explains. “We have volunteers who have experienced repeated cardiac events because of stress. Women who have experienced miscarriages because of stress.”

At the very mention of Our Lady, though, Kate throws her head back and laughs. “Oh, she’s done so much for me,” she says. And what exactly does she do? She startles Kate’s guests, provides a companion for her semi-feral cat from Kuwait, receives beer offerings, and occasionally speaks to something a little deeper.

“When Pete wrote that prayer I was surprised by how moved I was,” she says. “We need her. We need those moments when we can recognize that our best hope is prayer. We can help with paperwork and moving people and pickup up their texts in their time of crisis, but we are extremely limited in what we can do in this realm. And we hit the end very quickly and it’s such a blunt force to your spirit.”

A year’s worth of blunt force to the spirit had left Peter Lucier in need of help. In January 2023 he sought VA mental health care for the first time since he’d left the Marine Corps a decade before, when he’d served as an infantryman in Afghanistan’s violent Helmand Province. And strangely, fortuitously, maybe or maybe not miraculously, the very week he sought therapy Our Lady arrived in the mail.

In addition to his own mental health issues, another dark period had set in for evacuation work, with flights stalling out and mounting fatigue and frustration about the lack of progress. There wasn’t a lot to feel good about. “I opened up the package,” he said, “and just had the biggest smile on my face.”

At this point, it’s hard to say exactly what Our Lady is. A joke, a memento, a meme, a devotional object? When asked about the prayer, at first Lucier dismissed it, calls it “a parody,” and then said he was embarrassed by it. But reading the words aloud, he choked up.

“I suppose I’m embarrassed because it’s sincere,” he said, noting how the line about sending up sighs of mourning and weeping in this vale of tears has always meant a lot to him. “Doubt and despair is a part of this. And there’s a good tradition of Catholic prayers that recognize pain in the world.”

There’s also a good tradition of sacred objects of varying strangeness, from miraculous medals and blessed rosaries to alleged pieces of the true cross and severed body parts. Catholicism is not a religion purely of the head, or a set of propositions one assents to. It is a religion of the body, of the material world infused with the sacred. As the great Catholic poet and World War I veteran David Jones noted, “Angels only: no sacrament. Beasts only: no sacrament. Man: sacrament at every turn and all levels of the ‘profane’ and ‘sacred’, in the trivial and the profound, no escape from sacrament.”

So perhaps Our Lady, absurd and grotesque and touching and beautiful and silly, coming to believer and nonbeliever alike in a guise meant to provoke laughter, is a fitting respite in hard times, inviting ironic devotion while every once in a while making space for something more sincere, more desperate, a prayer than cannot be fully admitted to in a world that rarely answers prayers.

“In the first few weeks, we were sort of able to get support,” Kate says, noting the surge of enthusiasm for Afghan refugees as Kabul was falling and Afghans were literally clinging to the sides of departing aircraft in their desperation and terror. “And then over the past year and a half that's waned to a point where it's practically non-existent.”

No One Left Behind estimates that there are close to 200,000 people still in Afghanistan eligible for visas set aside for Afghans and their family members who are at risk because of work they did for America. That doesn’t count the women’s rights activists Task Force Nyx is working on. And those who do make it out often exist in an indeterminate legal space because of the inaction of governments to give them permanent status. “Within any given month, we're providing financial support to 60 to 80 or more people,” Dietz says, along with emergency micro grants to activists, pay for safe movement within country, and other expenses that arise.

Many of the people evacuation volunteers are trying to help are literally starving. In August 2022, when No One Left Behind asked Afghans applying to leave about the conditions they lived under, only 5.5% reported being able to feed their families. “Those numbers are likely worse now,” Phaneuf said.

As Lucier was starting therapy, Kate was working on the case of a 5-year-old girl with what the State Department has classified as a “skin condition,” making her a lower priority. Her whole body is covered in in blisters, which get infected, requiring hospitalizations. Her esophagus is so scarred that she can't eat solid foods. “She's currently the size of an 18 month, old and she is starting to lose her vision,” Kate siad. “But because the State Department classifies this as a skin disability, we haven't been able to get any movement. So she is still living in a refugee site without access to even clean bandages, let alone consistent health care. I am actively watching a 5-year-old lose her childhood.”

There’s nothing special about Kate or Sara or Laura or Peter that singled them out for this work. Two working moms. A lawyer in D.C. moved by how betrayed veterans felt by the abandonment of our allies. A recent law school grad trying to deal with his mental health before taking the bar exam. Anyone with an internet connection could have done this. No travel necessary. Training happened on the fly, in the midst of an unfolding crisis where the rules changed daily. In the modern world it’s easy for any of us to reach out and connect with the desperate.

Mostly, we don’t. It’s hard, and Afghanistan doesn’t leave much for Americans to feel good about. A failed war and a failed evacuation and no easy partisan blame to go around, with a Democratic administration that activists complain has dragged its feet and a set of Republican immigration hawks in Congress who have blocked even modest efforts to help Afghans who have fought for America and who have faced genuine threats, been attacked or sent into hiding or had the Taliban roll a grenade into their home where their 18-month-old daughter was sleeping.

Nevertheless, those with a personal connection have kept working the issue. Congressman Jason Crow from Colorado, a former Army Ranger who claims, “Had it not been for our Afghan partners I might not be here,” has a variety of proposals, from improvements to remote processing capabilities, helping interagency coordination, and, crucially, expanding the number of visas.

“I believe in this new honest American patriotism which allows us to have more honest conversations about the unfulfilled promise but also opportunity of America,” he says. “Therein lies our essential greatness, to self-correct, and to improve.” Which means that, while he argues the decision to withdrawal from Afghanistan was a courageous one, that doesn’t mean mistakes weren’t made in how it was done, and especially in how we treated our partners. In June he helped introduce bipartisan legislation that would increase the number of visas for Afghans, and earlier this year he proposed an amendment to the last National Defense Authorization Act to create a centralized database for tracking local partners in future conflicts. That amendment failed. Maybe next year.

To those within the community, such proposals seem obvious and sensible. But those in the community know better than most how little room we leave for the obvious and the sensible. The grotesque and the absurd demand their place in the halls of power, too.

Until then, they’ve got Our Lady, grotesque and absurd as she is, touching and earnest as she can be, to help atheist and believer alike deliver prayers into the charnel-house we’ve made of the world.

time.com.

CULTURAL MISOGYNY 

Men prefer office working – to get away from their wives

Sam Meadows
Thu, 17 August 2023 

commuters in London

Men are twice as likely as women to go to the office to avoid their families and steal stationery, a survey has found.

Nearly a quarter of respondents to a survey gave “getting away from family” as a reason for going into the office, with men twice as likely to give this answer.

Men were also far more likely to say they go to the office to take stationery supplies for their personal use, when questioned by Runway East, a co-working space provider.


Office banter also had a greater pull for men, who are twice as likely as women to go to the office to make friends and meet people, the study found.

The research chimes with other studies, such as a report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), published in June. It found, after the pandemic, men had returned to the office at a much higher rate than women, with women more likely to spend time doing household chores.

Research carried out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in 2021, meanwhile, found that women were more likely to report that working from home gave them “more time to complete work and fewer distractions”.

Runway East said its findings showed that offices were not “dead”, despite many companies shifting to hybrid working in the wake of the pandemic. But it said companies would need to provide more perks, with more than one in 10 saying they liked to go to the office for access to better coffee.

Natasha Guerra, the firm’s chief executive, said: “The rhetoric is that people don’t want to go back into the office, the reality is people don’t want to commute and they want more than a desk.

“Employers need to shift their thinking from providing just the basics to providing a space to work, collaborate and enhance their experience of working.”

She added: “For some men, it would appear that it’s an opportunity to leave that pile of washing.”

The pandemic has shifted attitudes to work. The BLS study found that a third of workers did some or all of their work from home on days they worked last year – a 10 percentage-point increase compared to 2019.

Women were more likely than men to work from home – 41pc compared to 28pc – with women more than twice as likely to spend time cleaning or doing the laundry.

The ONS has previously found that the vast majority of workers – 85pc – wanted to continue hybrid working in future.

Chess ban for transgender women is sexist, FIDE told

THERE SHOULD BE NO GENDER SPECIFIC COMPETITION

Henry Samuel
Thu, 17 August 2023 

The world governing body of chess said that transgender players present an 'evolving issue for chess' - Westend61

The world’s top chess federation faces allegations of sexism after ruling that transgender women cannot compete in its official events for females until an assessment of gender change is made by its officials.

The decision by the FIDE, based in Lausanne, Switzerland, and published on Monday has prompted criticism.

Angela Eagle, the Labour MP, won the British women’s under-18s chess championship in 1976 said: “There is no physical advantage in chess unless you believe men are inherently more able to play than women.

“I spent my chess career being told women’s brains were smaller than men’s and we shouldn’t even be playing – this ban is ridiculous and offensive to women.”

The complaints came two weeks after a group of 14 of France’s top female chess players published a petition calling for sexism and sexual harassment to be stamped out in a sport whose organisers, they said, were predominantly male.

FIDE said it and its member federations have received and increasing number of recognition requests from players who identify as transgender, and that the participation of transgender women would be assessed on a case-by-case basis that could take up to two years.

Trans men would have titles abolished

“Change of gender is a change that has a significant impact on a player’s status and future eligibility to tournaments, therefore it can only be made if there is a relevant proof of the change provided,” the federation said.

“In the event that the gender was changed from a male to a female the player has no right to participate in official FIDE events for women until further FIDE’s decision is made,” it said.

Holders of women’s titles who change their genders to male would see those titles “abolished,” said the federation, although it also held out the possibility of a reinstatement “if the person changes the gender back to a woman”.

“If a player has changed the gender from a man into a woman, all the previous titles remain eligible,” said the federation.

It acknowledged that such questions regarding transgender players were an “evolving issue for chess” and that “further policy may need to be evolved in the future in line with research evidence”.

The federation issued no further comment on Thursday.

‘These are dark days’

Yosha Iglesias, a professional player who is trans, criticised the new policy.

“Can someone tell me what qualifies as an official FIDE event?,” asked Iglesias. “Will I be allowed to play the French Championship in three days? The European Club Cup in September?”

Some social media users responded to the question with dismay with one writing: “These are dark days.”

In their petition, the 14 female players from France complained about the level of “sexism and sexual violence” in chess.

Speaking to Ouest-France, Mathilde Choisy, 35, a female FIDE Master, said: “The problem is that as female players we cannot fight alone against something systemic. We need more awareness from (chess) leaders, who are in the vast majority men.”

Many sports have been grappling over which rules should apply to transgender athletes in recent years.

Last month, the cycling federation ruled that transgender women athletes who transitioned after male puberty will no longer be able to compete in women’s races.

Progress toward parity for women on movie screens has stalled, report finds

The Canadian Press
Thu, August 17, 2023 



NEW YORK (AP) — A new study on inclusion in film shows just how much of a rarity “Barbie” is. For every woman as a speaking character in the most popular films of 2022, there were more than two men, according to report by University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.

The USC report, published Thursday, found that 34.6% of speaking parts were female in the top 100 box-office hits of last year. The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has been annually tracking that and many other metrics since 2007.

And in its first such study in three years, USC researchers found that in many areas, progress toward parity on screen has stalled since the pandemic — and in some respects hasn't changed all that much since 14 years ago. In 2019, 34% of speaking characters were female. In 2008, it was 32.8%.

"It is clear that the entertainment industry has little desire or motivation to improve casting processes in a way that creates meaningful change for girls and women,” said Stacy L. Smith, founder and director of the Inclusion Initiative, in a statement. “The lack of progress is particularly disappointing following decades of activism and advocacy.”

In analyzing the top films in ticket sales, the report doesn't include the large amount of films produced for streaming platforms and smaller releases. But it does offer a snapshot of how Hollywood is evolving — or not.

And it comes on the heels of the enormous success of Greta Gerwig's “Barbie,” which has made $1.2 billion worldwide since opening last month and domestically has become the highest grossing movie ever from a female filmmaker. Last year, one in 10 of the biggest box-office films were directed by women, down from record rates in 2019, 2020 and 2021.

Some findings in the study point to progress in inclusivity on screen. There are more female leading or co-leading roles in the top grossing movies than ever. Some 44% of such lead roles were girls or women in 2022, a historical high and more than double the rate of 2007 (20%).

Speaking characters from underrepresented ethnic groups have also made sizable gains. In 2022, Black, Hispanic, Asian and other non-white minorities accounted for 38.3% of speaking characters, nearly matching the U.S. population percentage of 41%. Most notably, Asian characters have gone from 3.4% of characters in 2007 to 15.9% last year, a movie year that culminated with the best picture win for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

But other metrics show that the film industry regressed in some areas of diversity during the pandemic. In 2022, the top grossing movies featured 31% of leads from underrepresented ethnic groups, down from 37% in 2021. Out of those 100 2022 movies, 46 didn't include a Latino speaking character.

“These trends suggest that any improvement for people from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups is limited,” said Smith. “While it is encouraging to see changes for leading characters and for the Asian community, our data on invisibility suggests that there is still much more to be done to ensure that the diversity that exists in reality is portrayed on screen.”

Of the top 100 films in 2022, just 2.1% of speaking characters were LGBTQ+ — roughly the same number as a decade ago. Of the 100 films, 72 didn't feature a single LGBTQ+ character. Only one was nonbinary.

The number of characters with disabilities has also flatlined. In 2022, 1.9% of speaking characters were depicted with a disability. In 2015, the percentage was 2.4%.

With actors and screenwriters striking over fair pay, AI and other issues, Smith said Thursday's report should add to the demands of workers on screen and off in Hollywood.

“When people from these communities are rendered invisible both on screen and behind the camera, the need to ensure that every opportunity merits a living wage is essential. This cannot happen if people are not working at all," said Smith. “Hollywood has a long road ahead to address the exclusion still happening in the industry alongside the concerns actors and writers are bringing to the forefront.”

Jake Coyle, The Associated Press

Third group of hospital doctors in England warn of industrial action over pay

Alan Jones, PA Industrial Correspondent
Thu, 17 August, 2023



The threat of industrial action by a third group of hospital doctors in England has been raised in the ongoing pay dispute in the NHS.

The BMA said its members working as specialist doctors will consider planning for an indicative ballot for industrial action unless the Government makes an offer to “urgently improve” their pay and working conditions.

Dr Ujjwala Mohite, who chairs the specialist, associate specialist and specialty (SAS) UK committee, said in a letter to health secretary Steve Barclay that while preliminary talks have been encouraging, the Government is still to make an offer reversing years of pay erosion for SAS doctors.

The committee said if an offer is not made before September 20, they will have no choice but to move forward with an indicative ballot for industrial action.

SAS doctors are senior and highly experienced healthcare professionals who decided not to go down the traditional consultant or GP pathway, with most working in hospitals, alongside junior doctors and consultants as well as in the community.

The BMA said the Government had continually failed to recognise and reward SAS doctors, who have seen their real-terms pay fall by more than a quarter over the last 15 years, leading many to leave the NHS.

Dr Mohite said: “Not many people will have heard of SAS doctors, but they play an incredibly important role in the NHS, making up the trinity of hospital doctors alongside consultants and junior doctors.

“Like our colleagues, we have seen our value steadily erode over the past 15 years, leaving many wondering whether they should stay working in the health service.

“With every doctor that reduces their hours or leaves altogether, the less safe it becomes for those who are left, risking exhaustion, burnout and yet more doctors deciding to move out, out of the NHS.

“Our patients deserve the highest quality of care, but we are seriously struggling to deliver that when so many SAS doctors feel undervalued.

“The Government has the power to prevent another group of doctors from taking industrial action, and we implore the Secretary of State to make sure that we don’t have to.”

Junior doctors in England staged a four-day strike which ended on Tuesday, while consultants are on strike for 48 hours next week.

Strike dates announced at Scottish schools for September 13 and 14

Sarah Ward, PA
Thu, 17 August 2023 



School and early years staff in 10 council areas will walk out on September 13 and 14 in a dispute over pay, a union has announced.

Essential staff in schools and early years will strike for two days next month, as the GMB union claimed low-paid Scots education workers were being offered a rise £700 less than their southern peers.

About a third of council areas will be impacted – with 10 local authorities being warned of industrial action from catering staff, janitors, cleaners and support workers.


The action comes after GMB Scotland’s members rejected the 5.5% offer from council umbrella body, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (Cosla), in April, branding it unacceptable amid surging inflation and the cost-of-living crisis.

The union, which represents more than 21,000 workers across 32 councils, claimed Cosla refused to revise the offer or ask the Scottish Government for support.

Staff will walk out on September 13 and 14 in Aberdeen, Clackmannanshire, Comhairle Nan Eilean Siar, Dundee, East Dunbartonshire, Falkirk, Glasgow, Orkney, Renfrewshire and South Ayrshire.

More strikes could occur across schools and early years in September with the members of another union already voting for industrial action while another is currently balloting members.

GMB Scotland said the Cosla offer would mean a rise for the lowest-paid workers in Scotland’s councils that is £700 less this year than that offered to colleagues in England and Wales.

Keir Greenaway, GMB Scotland senior organiser for public services, said a meeting on August 25 would be the final opportunity for Cosla to avert disruptive strikes.

Mr Greenaway said: “The latest figures show that, despite rising wages, pay is still being outstripped by inflation.

“The pay offer to council workers does not come close to matching the surging cost of living and one that is worth less with every month that passes.

“Scotland stands on the shoulders of our local authority workers and the value of their work must be reflected in their salaries.

“Cosla has refused to seriously engage with our members during what has been a protracted, frustrating process. If they had, parents and pupils would not now be facing disruption.

“Cosla and Scottish ministers need to engage now or risk turning a crisis into a calamity.”

A Cosla spokesperson said: “The reality of the situation is that as employers, council leaders have made a strong offer to the workforce.

“A strong offer which clearly illustrates the value councils place on their workforce, and it compares well to other sectors.

“It recognises the cost-of-living pressures on our workforce and critically, it seeks to protect jobs and services.

“While the offer value in year is 5.5%, the average uplift on salaries going into the next financial year is 7%.

“Those on the Scottish local government living wage would get 9.12% and those at higher grades, where councils are experiencing severe recruitment challenges, would see 6.05%.

“It is an offer which recognises both the vital role of the people who deliver our essential services across councils every day and the value that we, as employers, place on them.

“Crucially, it also raises the Scottish local government living wage by 99p to £11.84 per hour and sets out a commitment to work with our trade unions to develop a road map to £15 per hour in a way that protects our workforce and services we deliver.”

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “Local government pay negotiations are a matter for local authorities as employers and unions.

“The Scottish Government and Cosla have committed to respect this negotiating arrangement as part of the Verity House Agreement.

“Despite UK Government cuts, the Scottish Government has provided a further £155 million to support a meaningful pay rise for local government workers, which has been taken into account in the pay offer already made by Cosla.

“The Scottish Government urges all the parties involved to work together constructively and reach an agreement which is fair for the workforce and affordable for employers.”

Americans will run out of pandemic savings next month, Fed warns

Szu Ping Chan
Thu, 17 August 2023

A shopper carries a Zara retail bag along the Magnificent Mile shopping district in Chicago, Illinois, US,

Americans will burn through all their pandemic savings by the end of September, according to estimates by the Federal Reserve.

Research by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found Covid-related savings in the US had fallen to less than $190bn (£149bn) in June.

This was down from $2.1 trillion at its peak in August 2021, which was fuelled by a $800bn giveaway that handed American households Covid support cheques worth thousands of dollars.

Tim Drayson, head of economics at Legal and General Investment Management, said the “unsustainable drawdown of savings” had put the world’s biggest economy “at a potential turning point”.

He said: “Once you have run out of excess savings, your savings rate needs to bounce back potentially quite quickly, so that would be the period when consumption will be weaker than income growth.

“That could be occurring at a time when payroll growth is slowing, income growth is slowing, you’ve got headwinds from student loan repayments restarting, and a lot of fiscal support going into reverse.”

He added that a long series of interest rate rises by the Federal Reserve was also starting to bite.

It came as separate research by Société Générale showed UK pandemic savings were currently estimated at £316.5bn “and rising”.

This is equivalent to around 12.5pc of the entire UK economy, which is the highest as a share of GDP among major advanced economies.

Klaus Baader, an economist at Société Générale, said a recent rise in precautionary savings” could reflect a “fear of unemployment or renewed surges in electricity bills”.

However, he added: “If it is the latter, and assuming that a further energy price shock will be avoided, it points to a particularly large rebound potentially in UK household spending.”

The Fed research showed household disposable income was lower and personal consumption was higher than previously anticipated.

It said: “Should the recent pace of drawdowns persist – for example, at average rates from the past three, six, or 12 months – aggregate excess savings would likely be depleted in the third quarter of 2023.”