Back in June last year The Times in London gave the following statistics:
Almost 60 million people around the world have been driven from their homes by war or persecution. About 14 million people were displaced last year alone, with the Syrian civil war the single biggest cause. Half of the displaced are children.
Since that time the situation has only become worse.
“Israel has a serious racism problem that is quickly building to a crisis. Just consider these three facts:
— Since 2009, more than 43 churches, mosques, and monasteries have been torched or desecrated in Israel and the West Bank – without a single perpetrator indicted.
— According to a survey, 70.2% of Israelis believe the government isn’t doing enough to combat racism.
— Another survey of Israelis found that 35% of Jewish students and 27% of Arab students reported they have never interacted with peers from the other group”. (Part of a newsletter from the New Israel Fund, a Jewish American group campaigning for a peaceful resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict).
The perception is growing that Israel is now an apartheid society, something the Israeli government has done little to dispel. Even the black Jews and those who originated in Arab countries and were forced to leave, even these people are subjected to discrimination from the ultra-orthodox. This threatens Israel’s ability to thrive as a shared society for all Israelis. And this is without the policy of seizing the land and homes of Palestinians in the West Bank.
Unfortunately, long before the conversion of the Jews, the Rapture or the Second Coming, there will possibly be no Israel to convert at this rate. In soccer terms Israeli government policy is an “own goal”. The trick is now to persuade Israelis to clamp down on the very racism that their forebears had to historically undergo. Getting along with others is an Epicurean maxim.
To The Daily Telegraph
The absurdity of Maurice Ravel’s music enriching his brother’s wife’s masseuse’s husband’s second wife’s daughter exemplifies our over-generous copyright laws. The original copyright act of 1842 set the term at seven years from an author’s death. This has been extended, first to 50 years from death, then to 70. In the US, copyright is 70 years after death for works published later than 1 January 1978, and 95 years from publication for works that came out before then.
The authors do not benefit. They are dead. It’s those who have inherited the rights who enjoy the largesse – often banks, companies or unrelated individuals. One company, Chorion, until recently owned Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Enid Blyton and others. (Christie is currently owned by Acorn Media Group; Blyton by Hachette.) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s rights have been sold more than once. Even the song Happy Birthday to You earned Warner Communications $2m a year until a ruling last year.
Woody Guthrie expressed sense in the copyright notice for his works: “This song is copyright in US for 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern.” Graham Chainey, Brighton, East Sussex May 13, 2016
It is rumored that one of the objectives of the TTIP, the so called “trade” treaty, is to extend copyrights and patent protections even further, thus entrenching the rights of rent-seekers everywhere, at our expense.
The US National Center for Health Statistics reports that health gaps between white and black people are finally closing, and people are living longer, although heart disease, cancer and obesity continue to loom large.
Between 2004 and 2014, life expectancy increased by an extra 1.1 years for women and 1.4 years for men, according to the report. The US has a history of racial disparity in life expectancy – generally, white people are expected to live the longest, while black people have the shortest lifespan. But this gap appears to be narrowing. In 1980, for example, white men were expected to live 6 years longer than black men – by 2014 the difference was 4.2 years.
Heart disease and cancer are the biggest killers, together responsible for 46 per cent of all US deaths in 2014. The good news is that these disorders aren’t fatal for as many people as they used to be – death rates decreased by 25 per cent for heart disease and 14 per cent for cancer between 2004 and 2014.
But suicide is on the rise, particularly among teenagers and adults aged between 45 and 64. In the latter age group, suicide rates increased by 27 per cent over a decade. And in the midst of the US opioid epidemic, deaths from heroin poisoning are also on the up, with five times as many deaths in 2014 as in 2004.
Notwithstanding this, the general picture is better. How much of it is down to Obamacare it is hard at this early stage to determine, but the statistics do give the lie to those who want to abolish Obamacare and go back to the old days, when the rich were well served by the medical profession (they still are), and the poor were left to struggle. Epicurus would applaud the improvement.
Research suggests that the benefits of marriage for women may not last and, indeed, that there comes a point when they are better off widowed than shackled to an elderly spouse. (shackled? Ed?) Researchers from the University of Padua tracked almost 2,000 over-65s living in the Veneto region of Italy for four years. Based on the results of earlier studies, they expected to find the singletons more likely to be depressed and physically frail than the married people – and this proved true for men, whether they were widowers or bachelors. But among women, the widows were 23% less likely to be frail than their married counterparts; and they were less likely to be depressed too. The small number of unmarried women in the study were also found to be happier and physically stronger than their married peers.
Dr Caterina Trevisan, who led the study, speculates that in traditional (old-fashioned) marriages, it tends to be the women who are left with the burden of household chores,(I don’t know about that! Ed) leaving them feeling “stressed” and frustrated. And since women generally remain in good health longer than men, many end up acting as carers for their ailing husbands – which could, again, make being widowed something of a relief ( oh, dear! Ed). It may also be the case that women cope better than men do with bereavement, because they are less reliant on their spouses, and have better social and family networks to fall back on. (The Week, May 2016)
So, how did males all over the world manage for centuries to persuade their spouses to do all the cooking, housework, child rearing and other boring tasks, and then nurse them in old age? It couldn’t just be that they were/are gorgeous, attractive hunks. I’m puzzled.
