Three polls firmly caught my attention over the past month or so. Each was conducted by a different outlet and addressed different questions. However, taken together, they tell one overarching story – implicitly, but unmistakably. Beyond an assortment of data, the story is about direction. The first was a CNN poll. It showed that 76 per cent of Americans now see high prices and the cost of living ...
Three polls firmly caught my attention over the past month or so. Each was conducted by a different outlet and addressed different questions. However, taken together, they tell one overarching story – implicitly, but unmistakably. Beyond an assortment of data, the story is about direction. The first was a CNN poll. It showed that 76 per cent of Americans now see high prices and the cost of living as their country’s most serious economic problem. Even more striking, nearly seven in 10 expect a...
Hong Kong’s Mandatory Provident Fund Schemes Authority (MPFA) is stepping up efforts to detect fraudulent certificates used for early withdrawal of pension contributions after two medical groups reported suspected cases to police in recent weeks. Responding to an inquiry from the South China Morning Post, an authority spokesman said its online platform had recently identified suspected fraud invol...
Hong Kong’s Mandatory Provident Fund Schemes Authority (MPFA) is stepping up efforts to detect fraudulent certificates used for early withdrawal of pension contributions after two medical groups reported suspected cases to police in recent weeks. Responding to an inquiry from the South China Morning Post, an authority spokesman said its online platform had recently identified suspected fraud involving possibly fake medical certificates submitted to withdraw Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF)...
A 76-year-old woman once dubbed China’s oldest mother of twins has returned to the spotlight after a photographic series chronicling her life recently won an international award. Sheng Hailin, from Anhui province in central China, has also become a social media influencer with nearly one million followers, offering solace and inspiration to bereaved parents rebuilding their lives after loss. Her o...
A 76-year-old woman once dubbed China’s oldest mother of twins has returned to the spotlight after a photographic series chronicling her life recently won an international award. Sheng Hailin, from Anhui province in central China, has also become a social media influencer with nearly one million followers, offering solace and inspiration to bereaved parents rebuilding their lives after loss. Her only daughter, Tingting, and her newlywed husband died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 2009,...
The Trans Delusion: A Philosophical Nail In Its Coffin Authored by Chris Milton via The Daily Sceptic The arguments in philosopher Thomas Nagel’s seminal 1974 essay ‘ What is it Like to be Bat? ‘ can help us answer the question of whether a human born with XY chromosomes and a male body can be, can become or can know what it’s like to be a woman, or can know what inhabiting the world is like for a...
The Trans Delusion: A Philosophical Nail In Its Coffin Authored by Chris Milton via The Daily Sceptic The arguments in philosopher Thomas Nagel’s seminal 1974 essay ‘ What is it Like to be Bat? ‘ can help us answer the question of whether a human born with XY chromosomes and a male body can be, can become or can know what it’s like to be a woman, or can know what inhabiting the world is like for a woman. Nagel - who randomly chose bats from the list of mammals - began from the premise that if an organism has consciousness then there is something that it is like to be that organism, and his question was whether we could know “what is like for a bat to be a bat”. Nagel’s essay argues for the wholly subjective character of experience, and how this subjectivity is dictated by differences in the physicality of beings. A creature shapes its Umwelt , or lifeworld, through its interactions with the world, and those interactions are determined by that creature’s body. Men and women inhabit similar yet profoundly different Umwelts . The qualia of sensation — meaning the instances of subjective experience, such as what it’s like to perceive a colour, to taste an apple or hear a baby cry — are different for each individual human. But these differences are also sexed. The last is a good example, as the female body — and therefore mind — responds to a baby’s cry in a radically different way to a man’s. But there are also large differences in the way they experience running for five hundred metres, the colour red, having a nipple touched, and innumerable other things (almost everything, in fact). There are qualia that each sex experiences that the other will never be able experience at all, but which help form their consciousnesses. A woman will never get an erection, and a man will never have a clitoral or vaginal orgasm, menstruate or give birth. All of these ways of experiencing the world physically, along with our anticipations and memories of them, form a human being’s consci...
No renewal notice posted on US Treasury website so far for waiver that had allowed countries such as India to buy Russian seaborne oil. What we know on day 1,544 The Trump administration on Saturday allowed a sanctions waiver to lapse that had previously allowed countries including India to buy Russian seaborne oil after a month-long extension aimed at easing oil supply shortages and high prices d...
No renewal notice posted on US Treasury website so far for waiver that had allowed countries such as India to buy Russian seaborne oil. What we know on day 1,544 The Trump administration on Saturday allowed a sanctions waiver to lapse that had previously allowed countries including India to buy Russian seaborne oil after a month-long extension aimed at easing oil supply shortages and high prices due to Iran’s closure of the strait of Hormuz. The US Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, had previously said he would not renew the general licence allowing the purchase of Russian oil stored on tankers. As of early afternoon Washington time on Saturday, no renewal notice had been posted on the Treasury website. Two top Democratic US senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Elizabeth Warren, on Friday urged the Trump administration against renewing the waiver because it was providing revenue to Russia to aid its war in Ukraine, but said there was no evidence it was bringing down fuel costs for American consumers. An unexploded projectile was discovered on a property in south-eastern Romania near the EU and Nato member’s border with Ukraine on Saturday, its defence ministry said. Romania shares a 650-km (400-mile) land border with Ukraine. Russian drones attacking Ukraine’s ports on the Danube river have repeatedly breached Romanian airspace and fragments have sometimes fallen on its territory as Ukrainian forces shoot them down. An unguided reactive projectile was found in the yard of an uninhabited house in the village of Pardina in Romania’s Tulcea county, the ministry said without indicating its suspected origin. Last month, an explosive drone landed in a back yard in the city of Galati, marking the first time since the start of the Ukraine war that such an incident had damaged property in Romania. The leaders of Nato’s 14 eastern flank nations this week said Russia’s repeated violations of their airspace underlined the urgent need to consolidate the alliance’s air defences against m...