Enjoy International Women’s Day: in the US, it’s an hour shorter than every other day

Women of the world, today’s your day. Your one day out of 365, so enjoy it while it lasts.

But if you’re in the US, (not Arizona or Hawaii), it will be a bit shorter than the other days. Rejoice in your womanhood for your 23 hours, and if you follow the holiday’s logic, let the men have the remaining 8,746. Thanks, daylight saving time.

Here are some other areas where women—in America and elsewhere—are also short-changed:

The workplace

• It starts early. According to a survey of a number of OECD countries,boys are more likely to get hands-on work experience, preparing for their careers through internships and job shadowing.
• The White House says American women make 77% of what men make. The Pew Research center calculated that to be 84%. Either way, as Patricia Arquette pointed out during her Oscar acceptance speech: “It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America.” Women are also the majority in low-wage sectors:
• A survey of 25,000 graduates of Harvard Business School (HBS) shows that while men and women have similar goals in their professional lives, their career outcomes are different. 59% of men say they find their work meaningful, only 49% of women do. What’s more, 57% of male HBS graduates hold senior management positions compared to 41% of the women.
• Americans still prefer to have male bosses.

  Even women would rather work for a man than another woman.

  

Family life

• Most American women have two full time jobs: in 2011, 65% of women who have children under the age of six worked 35 hours or more a week.
• In South Korea, 22.4% of women left their jobs as a result of marriage, childbirth, or childcare.
• Unwanted pregnancies can be a major source of economic inequality, negatively affecting women’s education and income. One study found that they diminish the probability of participation in the labor market by 25%.
• 26% of American undergraduates are parents. 71% of them are mothers, and 43% are single mothers.

The corporate board room

• Women should obviously rule the financial world, because they make safer investments, are more risk averse, while men will compete even if they are more likely to lose. But, unfortunately this is not the case:
• Indian, Japanese and Portuguese companies all have less than 10% of women on their boards.
• If there’s any indication of how few women take top spots at American companies, this is it: men named John, Robert, William or Jamesoutnumber all the women who serve on corporate boards.
• Even when there’s some progress, it’s rarely satisfactory. Germany passed a law that would require companies to give 30% of their board seats to women, but the regulation is being criticized for not going far enough.

Politics

• Only 22% of US senators are women. In the House of Representatives, there are 66 women Democrats and 22 Republicans, about 20% of the chamber.
• As of January 2015, a mere 22% of all members of parliament around the world were women. Since 1995, this number has increased only 11.3%, according to the United Nations.
• Women also made up only 17% of all government ministers as of January 2014.

Hollywood

• Less than 5% of films released by six major studios in 2014 were directed by women.
• Internationally, there is a paucity of women with speaking roles and named characters in film.
• Less than 30% of writers for the 2011-2012 TV season were women. 

World population

• Finally, women are outnumbered in the most basic sense: population. In 2013, there were nearly 60 million more men in the world than there are women. Even though in most countries women overtake men, the world’s most populous countries, China and India disturb the proportions.

World’s oldest person wonders about secret to longevity too

Japan’s Misao Okawa, 116, who is recognized as the world’s oldest living …

TOKYO (AP) — The world’s oldest person says 117 years doesn’t seem like such a long time.

Misao Okawa, the daughter of a kimono maker, made the comment Wednesday, at a celebration a day before her 117th birthday. Appropriately, she was wearing a pink kimono decorated with cherry blossom prints.

Okawa, born in Osaka on March 5, 1898, was recognized as the world’s oldest person by Guinness World Records in 2013.

“It seemed rather short,” she said after Osaka government official Takehiro Ogura, who brought her a big bouquet, asked how she felt about living for 117 years.

Okawa, her hair decorated with a pink daisy pin, looked up from her wheelchair and said she was “very happy” to be that age.

Asked for the secret of her longevity, she responded nonchalantly, “I wonder about that too.”

Japan has the most centenarians in the world, with more than 58,000, according to the government. About 87 percent of them are women.

Okawa has slowed in recent months and has trouble hearing but she eats well and is in good health, according to her Osaka nursing home, where Wednesday’s televised celebration was held.

Okawa married her husband, Yukio, in 1919, and they had three children — two daughters and a son. She now has four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 1931.

Priceless antiquities in crates

Incredible!!!

Matt on Not-WordPress, mostly photos

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China’s third-ranked leader says to pay more attention to HK youth

A pro-democracy protester holds up a yellow umbrella, which is the symbol of the …

HONG KONG (Reuters) – China’s third-ranked leader wants greater attention paid to young people in Hong Kong, after they staged pro-democracy protests last year that shut down parts of the city for 2-1/2 months.

Zhang Dejiang, who heads China’s largely rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, said last year’s “illegal acts” highlight an urgent need to focus on young people and possibly revive the idea of a patriotic curriculum, Hong Kong media said on Thursday.

The comments echo remarks last month by the head of China’s Hong Kong liaison office, who said Beijing aimed to tighten control of the global financial hub and warned that the central government could take a renewed interest in patriotic education, an issue that sparked mass protests in Hong Kong in 2012.

Zhang also urged Hong Kong and China to seek “specific solutions” to recent protests against traders and visitors from the mainland, and warned against those with “ulterior motives”, according to reports of a closed-door session of the National People’s Congress held in Beijing on Wednesday.

He urged political appointees from Hong Kong to “carry forward the honourable tradition of loving China, Hong Kong and Macau” and “contribute to safeguarding the country’s sovereignty, security and development, and maintaining its stability,” the official Xinhua news agency said.

The central government would give its full support to the chief executives of Hong Kong and Macau as they seek to “advance democracy and promote social harmony”, Premier Li Keqiang said at the opening of parliament in Beijing on Thursday.

The duration and intensity of last year’s democracy protests surprised government officials in Hong Kong and China.

The protesters, led by students, shut key thoroughfares to press their demand for open nominations in the next election of the chief executive in 2017, saying Beijing’s decision to limit a vote to pre-screened candidates was not good enough.

A former British colony that returned to Chinese Communist Party rule in 1997, Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” framework gives it separate laws and an independent judiciary but reserves key decisions for Beijing.

Anger at Beijing’s unwillingness to negotiate over the election of the next chief executive has upset residents, prompting a new wave of more radical protests against traders and mainland visitors, whom Hong Kong residents have long accused of flooding shopping malls and emptying store shelves.

Since the beginning of the year activists have staged weekend protests at malls, urging mainlanders to return home and advocating a greater Hong Kong nationalism and even independence.

Private email questions emerge as Clinton nears 2016 bid

FILE – In this Jan. 23, 2013 file photo, then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton …

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans are signaling that questions about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s use of a private email account while she was secretary of state will follow her into her widely anticipated presidential campaign.

GOP leaders, who control the investigative powers of Congress, say the revelations reaffirm a long-held GOP portrayal of Bill and Hillary Clinton as secretive and playing by their own rules.

Democrats dismiss the accusations as trivial and question whether the emails will resonate with voters in an election 20 months away.

But as the presidential nominating season begins, Clinton’s use of a personal email account for State Department business has stoked questions about transparency that threaten to cloud her early steps as the Democratic Party’s overwhelming favorite White House prospect.

“The American people deserve all of the facts,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Wednesday. He was responding to an Associated Press report that the computer server that sent and received the secretary of state’s emails — on a private account used for official business — was registered to Clinton’s New York home.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, intends to investigate whether Clinton, by using a personal email account, may have violated federal requirements that written communications of officials are preserved.

The committee will join with a special committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. The Benghazi committee first discovered Clinton’s use of a private email address and issued subpoenas Wednesday for Clinton’s emails when she was secretary of state.

Late Wednesday, Clinton tweeted: “I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.”

In response, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said the department will review for release the emails Clinton provided.

“We will undertake this review as quickly as possible; given the sheer volume of the document set, this review will take some time to complete,” Harf said.

The fresh inquiries create a distraction as she prepares to embark on a second presidential campaign amid a thin bench of potential Democratic challengers.

The questions follow recent reports about the Clinton family foundation’s raising of money from foreign governments, while she was the country’s top diplomat, to benefit the nonprofit’s philanthropic mission.

Democrats say the latest probes are throwbacks to the 1990s when they say Republicans overplayed their hands pursuing President Bill Clinton.

“This is part of what will be the onslaught of attacks that are just getting starting,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich. “It will be attack, attack, attack.”

The Clinton family is no stranger to controversy.

Bill Clinton’s personal and business dealings created a constant swirl of investigations, leading to his 1998 impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice.

Hillary Clinton, as the first lady, was pressed by Republicans in the Whitewater probe of the couple’s real estate investments.

Clinton’s team this week said she acted no differently from her predecessors at the State Department who also used private email addresses. She used a BlackBerry before leading the department and continued to use it after she took the job.

The former secretary of state’s team turned over 55,000 pages of emails from her time at the State Department but had discretion over what was included.

If she emailed someone among the 100 State Department officials with whom she frequently corresponded, they said, it would have been on State Department servers, and Clinton’s office replicated that to ensure it was included in the records.

“I think this is mostly right-wing noise,” Howard Dean, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said by email.

Republicans in the possible 2016 mix have kept relatively quiet on Clinton’s latest challenge to avoid bringing up transparency issues of their own.

Email communication from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, for example, has been the subject of criminal investigations.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., warned of national security considerations, telling reporters Wednesday that even government emails are vulnerable and presidential campaigns are typically targeted by hackers.

“You shouldn’t put anything in an email that you don’t think is going to be read by a foreign intelligence agency. Especially if you’re the president of the United States, or a candidate for it,” he said.

The email dispute may also fall into a “what goes around, comes around” category of presidential politics.

In 2012, Democrats spent several weeks blasting Republican Mitt Romney’s refusal to release his personal tax records, accusing him of trying to obscure details of his investments and vast wealth. “What is Mitt Romney hiding?” was a frequent refrain from the Obama campaign.

This time, Clinton is the one accused of a lack of transparency.