There he was, baseline royalty, right under the basket. First time back at Ball Arena in about six years, and Jamal Murray lands like a dead fish three feet in front of him, rolling on the floor.
Suddenly, in a cruel twist of irony and a crueler twist of an ankle, one of the greatest shooters in Nuggets history had a front-row seat to watch the Blue Arrow, his spiritual successor, writhe in agony.
“I just heard him say, ‘Oh my God,’” Adams, the Nuggets’ 3-point ace from 1987-91, said of the Blue Arrow’s sprain just before halftime, the one that cast a pall over the Nuggets’ scrappy 103-97 victory over the Miami Heat in an NBA Finals rematch.
“So when (Murray) grabbed his ankle, I was like, ‘OK, it’s his ankle … it wasn’t his knee.’”
Join the club, brother.
I know what you’re thinking: Man, the Lakers are next. Is there a better, sweeter feeling for Nuggets faithful than watching Murray prop his feet up on the couch in The House Kobe Built and drop daggers all over Tinseltown? Especially on LeBron’s big night? Over his last six regular-season appearances against the Lake Show, the Blue Arrow’s averaged 23.5 points, 6.3 assists and 3.2 treys.
But by the same token, did you see the anguish on the guy’s face as he staggered off the baseline and limped to the locker room? Why push your luck? Especially when that luck is as fickle as Jamal’s?
“Injuries happen,” Adams told me, “but in this situation, you want the Nuggets to be healthy toward the end of the season … if he’s not ready to go, they’ll sit him down and let him get healthy. They’ve still got some time (to finish) the season with him on the floor.”
This ain’t about want-to. Or toughness. Murray was raised like a basketball ninja in chilly Ontario, a childhood montage that included push-ups in the snow and balancing cups of hot tea on his thigh during squats. The Arrow would sooner swim through shark-infested waters wearing a chum suit than accept defeat.
Still, if I’m Nuggets coach Michael Malone, I’m overriding Murray’s inner Bruce Lee and reaching for the bubble wrap.
The NBA Playoffs, the land of bright lights, big stages and swollen egos where No. 27 reigns supreme, is seven weeks away yet. The No. 1 seed in the West is a heck of a target, yes, and the Nuggets went into Friday trailing the Wolves by a game-and-a-half.
Everything’s on the table now. Including disaster. And you sure as heck don’t get a parade in June by redlining Murray in early March.
“When Jamal realizes, ‘Hey, man, we’ve got 23 games to go, this (ankle) is not feeling great right now,’ I think it’s great for him to realize being cautious right now is probably the really prudent decision,” Malone said late Thursday night. “And that shows also (his) maturity. He’s growing and realizing that we (need him long-term) …
“(People insist), ‘You should be the No. 1 seed.’ Yeah, that’d be great. I want to be healthy. Because I know if we’re healthy, that we can beat anybody, anywhere.”
Dang straight.
Murray ended the first quarter Thursday by draining a 3-pointer at the buzzer with four Miami hands in his face. He ended the second in the bowels of Ball Arena, getting treatment on a right ankle that got rolled during an accidental collision with teammate Aaron Gordon.
The tumble happened, as kismet would have it, right in front of Adams, now 61 and working with the Washington Wizards, and his son.
“I actually wanted to bring my All-Star ring here to let him hold onto it until he actually made one,” said Adams, who represented Washington at the NBA’s mid-winter classic back in 1992. “And to (tell Murray), ‘You deserve to be on an All-Star team.’ I didn’t do it. But I wanted to.”
In his salad days, Adams was Steph Curry before Steph, 5-foot-10 with a funky release, cold-blooded to the core, a shooter ahead of his time. Especially once ex-Nuggets coach Doug Moe gave him the green light.
“I’m a big fan of Murray — obviously, him and Nikola (Jokic) are just out-of-this-world players,” said Adams, who averaged 18.2 points and 7.2 dimes over four seasons with Denver. “I love watching him play. I was just telling my son, ‘If I was backing up Jamal Murray, and he just went out of the game, I’d be happy to be on the floor with the rest of those guys right now.’”
He’d be happier still to see Murray rest that ankle until the Arrow’s closer to 100%. And like Malone, he’d rather have the Nuggets healthy come mid-April than exhaust their stars in a seeding chase.
“You want (those starters) on the floor, but health is No. 1,” Adams said. “I think the Nuggets can beat anybody on the road (in the playoffs) if they had to.”
Black. It is the color that absorbs all colors, the shade that holds the sun’s warmth as it moves east to west. It is the color of a people, not just African but Caribbean, Middle Eastern, American, and more. But it is also music: the color at the center of the trumpet’s brass ring, the shadow that fills the club when the lights get low and the party begins. Over the decades, Latin music has built a reputation for being wildly popular, no doubt in part due to its danceable nature. But what often gets lost in the conversation is the contribution that Black Latines had in cultivating the sound that, today, many of us regard as uniquely “Latin.”
As a kid, I was guilty of just that. It wasn’t until years later that I came to understand the importance of claiming my Afro-Puerto Rican heritage and how it shaped not only my identity but also the rhythms that moved me. Yes, that’s rhythms, plural. From salsa to cumbia to reggaetón, an undeniable Africanía drives these genres. And it’s just as much a part of our music’s DNA as the language we sing it in.
The Rise of Machito, Afro-Cuban Jazz, and La Clave
These instruments are staples of traditional African music and provide Latin jazz with signature percussive elements and rhythmic structure. These elements would later become the foundation of salsa music, which evolved from son montuno and Latin jazz; it upped the tempo but kept the African fundamentals, especially “la clave.”
Growing up, my mother used to tell me that la clave was the heartbeat of salsa and, therefore, it was our heartbeat as well. However, while I thought of the clave as something uniquely Latino, the origins of the iconic “ta, ta, ta . . . ta, ta” began in Africa; la clave is an essential part of traditional African music. And even as the first slaves were ripped from their homes and crossed the Caribbean Sea with nothing but a lifetime of servitude awaiting them, la clave came with them. It was as simple as taking two sticks and knocking them together in rhythm, and it would become a staple of the music they produced. It would also eventually embed itself in Latin Caribbean music — not just salsa and son montuno, but other genres as well like danza, rumba, and mambo.
Similarly to jazz in the US, these musical genres would become an avenue to success for Black Latines worldwide and give rise to artists that would forever change the game, like Cheo Feliciano, Celia Cruz, Roberto Roena, Mongo Santamaría, and “El Sonero Mayor” Ismael Rivera.
The African Origins of Merengue, Cumbia, y Más
But it’s not just salsa and its predecessors that are heavily influenced by our African ancestry. Merengue, as we know it today, has its roots in the leisure time given to slaves, during which they would imitate the balls and ballroom dances of their European masters, creating something entirely new in the process. This music would remain mostly confined to the Dominican Republic until the 1930s when pioneer Eduardo Brito brought the music to New York. During the 1960s, merengue would experience another surge in popularity as Dominicans migrated en masse to the city, and Afro-Latino merengueros like Joseíto Mateo would help bring the art form to new heights.
Cumbia music, like merengue, has its origins in dances practiced by the slaves brought to Colombia. Over the years, it evolved to incorporate traditional European instruments and became popular across Latin America. While the sound became extremely popular during the ’90s thanks to pop artists like the late Selena Quintanilla and others, it’s important to remember that the first person to record a cumbia song was the Afro-Colombian artist Luis Carlos Meyer.
Yet another example of this fusion of African and European is the Mexican folk genre of son jarocho. It’s a staple of the Caribbean town of Veracruz, and I first heard of it when I interviewed singer-songwriter Silvana Estrada. When asked about her unique style and influences, the Veracruzan songstress spoke at length about the town’s African history and how it led to the creation of son jarocho’s unique sound.
Before Reggaeton, It Was “La Música Negra”
Before it was known by its current name, reggaetón went through a series of names and transformations. Reggae en español, melaza, underground, rap y reggae —the list goes on. But maybe the most fitting name for it was “La Música Negra.” Not only did this name epitomize the status of the underground movement that was burgeoning in the barrios, but it also identified it as a product of the Black Latines and Afro-descendientes that lived in them.
From El General and Nando Boom in Panama to DJ Negro and Tego Calderón in Puerto Rico, many of the genre’s pioneers in the ’90s and early 2000s were Black Latines. But beyond just the faces that flashed across the television during the music videos, the music itself was inherently African. Pulling from American hip-hop and Jamaican dancehall, reggaetón saw the European elements of Latin music scaled back in favor of an emphasis on heavy percussion. The dembow itself, though taken directly from riddims created by Jamaican producers, correlates with rhythms already found in traditional African music and Caribbean genres (such as Puerto Rican bomba).
The Issue of “Blanqueamiento” and the Invisibility of Black Latines
African influence has been a part of Latin culture since the very beginning, and that’s not even bringing Spain’s mixed African heritage into the mix. And yet today, if we look at all the genres mentioned above, we see that what started as Black music sung by Black artists has become progressively lighter. Reggaetón is a prime example of this, with artists like Karol G, J Balvin, and Bad Bunny all being lighter skinned. For this reason, remembering the African contribution to our music and our culture in its entirety is incredibly important. We must pay homage to the pioneers of these genres and also make space for today’s Black Latine artists to grow alongside their lighter-skinned counterparts.
Because at the end of the day, from the lightest to the darkest of us, our African heritage is something that we share; it connects us. And as we see when we take a closer look at our music, Latin music IS Black music. It’s high time we recognize it as such.
Paleki Ayang, Gender Advisor for the Middle East and North Africa, Equality Now
Opinion by Paleki Ayang (juba)
Inter Press Service
JUBA, Feb 27 (IPS) – Female genital mutilation (FGM) stands as one of the most egregious violations of human rights, particularly affecting women and girls worldwide. However, when conflict and forced displacement enter the equation, the horrors of FGM are exacerbated, creating a dire situation that demands urgent attention and action. Where instability and insecurity prevail, the prevalence of FGM often intensifies, exacerbated by factors such as displacement, poverty, and the breakdown of social systems.
On April 15, 2023, war erupted in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), plunging the country into an intense political and humanitarian crisis with unprecedented emerging needs. As of December 2023, over 7.4 million people were uprooted from their homes by the 9-month conflict, of which about half a million fled to neighboring Egypt, a country that also has similarly high records of FGM cases.
Equality Now and the Tadwein Center for Gender Studies are currently commissioning a study in Egypt among select Sudanese families in Cairo and Giza to understand the particularities of cross-border FGM, to analyze the attitude of Sudanese families in Egypt towards FGM and to assess possible changes in the practice, such as the type of cutting, and the age of girls when they are cut.
Nexus between conflict, displacement, and FGM
Although Sudan legally banned the practice of FGM in 2020, women and girls continue to face heightened risks of violence, exploitation, and abuse, including FGM. Ongoing conflict has led to the breakdown of the rule of law and governance structures in Khartoum and a few other states.
Declaring a state of emergency permits the government to prioritize security and stability over individual rights and the rule of law. In some locations with relative stability, there is selective enforcement of laws driven by social polarization, exacerbating discriminatory practices and inequalities.
Additionally, in the chaos of displacement, traditional practices may persist, perpetuating the cycle of FGM and denying women and girls agency over their bodies and futures.
The nexus between conflict, displacement, and FGM underscores the urgent need for holistic, multi-sectoral approaches that address the root causes of the practice and provide comprehensive support to affected populations.
However, it is critical to redefine how the multi-sectoral approach could roll out within the context of conflict, specifically where legal protections for women and girls are minimal or non-existent.
The usual activities undertaken by activists and civil society organizations—such as advocacy campaigns, community outreach programs, and legal reforms—may be hampered by the chaotic and unpredictable nature of conflict environments, making it challenging to mobilize support and raise awareness about the harms of FGM.
Strengthening responses to FGM during conflict and displacement
Conversations about new and innovative ways where legal frameworks and policy measures need to be strengthened to prohibit FGM must happen, and perpetrators must be held accountable for their actions, even amid conflict and displacement.
This is critical, as the prevention and response to FGM are not prioritized in humanitarian settings due to lack of funding and political will. The report underscores the importance of culturally sensitive approaches, community engagement, capacity building, and partnerships to combat FGM and support survivors in humanitarian settings effectively.
Medicalization of FGM requires urgent attention. Prior to the start of the current conflict, Sudan had the highest rate of medicalized FGM globally, accounting for 67% of cases in the country.
The collapse of healthcare systems and infrastructure brought about a different reality that necessitated changing health priorities. It could be argued that the medicalization of FGM diverts already strained resources, attention, and expertise in-country away from essential healthcare services, especially sexual and reproductive health services, including responding to conflict-related sexual violence and maternal and child health.
Women’s rights groups in Khartoum and other towns have established Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) and other community-driven mutual aid efforts that could be used to mainstream FGM-related interventions as they respond to emerging humanitarian needs. Additionally, efforts to integrate FGM prevention and response into broader humanitarian assistance programs are essential in reaching displaced populations with life-saving interventions and support.
Engaging communities, religious leaders, and key stakeholders in the ‘new social structures’ shaped by conflict and displacement can foster much-needed dialogue, dispel myths, and promote alternative rites of passage that celebrate womanhood without resorting to harmful practices.
Despite having different priorities as displaced women and girls—such as humanitarian, livelihood, and other urgent needs— empowering them with knowledge and agency is essential in enabling them to assert their rights and resist pressures to undergo FGM.
Community-led initiatives to end FGM among Sudanese communities displaced from Khartoum into neighboring states or neighboring countries must take into consideration the diverse ethnic groups in Sudan—each with their distinct cultural traditions and practices relating to FGM, with some communities practicing different types of FGM. This requires an in-depth understanding of the sociocultural factors that drive it.
Although wealthier households in Sudan and people in urban areas were previously less likely to support FGM’s continuation, conflict highlights the intersectional impacts on different groups of women and girls, and forced displacement could result in the practice being carried to host countries that may lack effective legal frameworks or enforcement mechanisms to address cross-border FGM.
Considering anti-FGM interventions transcend geographical boundaries and ethnicities, they must be carefully tailored to community needs. Cross-border FGM could also be driven by a sense of struggling to maintain a cultural identity and uphold perceived social status in a new society.
Reaffirming commitments to end FGM
At the international level, concerted action is needed to address the intersecting challenges of FGM, conflict, and forced displacement. The United Nations and other multilateral organizations must prioritize the issue on the global agenda, mobilizing resources and political will to further research, support affected populations, and strengthen efforts to eradicate FGM in conflict-affected areas.
Moreover, partnerships between governments, civil society organizations, and grassroots activists remain essential in driving a collective response that transcends borders and builds solidarity among diverse stakeholders.
As Sudanese women bear the brunt of violence and displacement, women-led organizations are instrumental in fostering resilience and actively rebuilding their communities. Supporting and financing these organizations should be prioritized, as it is not only a matter of promoting rights but also a pathway to peace and stability.
As we confront the grim reality of FGM amidst conflict and forced displacement, we must reaffirm our commitment to the fundamental rights and dignity of every woman and girl. We cannot stand idly by as generations continue to suffer the devastating consequences of this harmful practice.
Now is the time for bold and decisive action guided by principles of justice, equality, and compassion. Together, we can break the chains of FGM, offering hope and healing to those who have endured untold suffering and paving the way for a future free from violence and discrimination for all.
Note:Paleki Ayang is Equality Now’s Gender Advisor for the Middle East and North Africa
Samantha, 11, asks her seventh grade teacher’s permission to leave the classroom each time the subject of climate change comes up.
Samantha, from a small town in Massachusetts, sees stories about climate change on social media and in the news. She has asked her family about it, and while not wanting to scare her, they acknowledge the disastrous impact that climate change is increasingly having on our planet, including the connection between Earth’s rising temperatures and the increase in extreme storms and wildfires.
It is because Samantha knows all of this that the mere mention of climate change triggers her anxiety. Samantha’s parents are at a loss about how to help her. Unfortunately, a growing number of children and their parents are grappling with similar emotions.
Mental health clinicians and researchers have begun to notice and document what they call climate anxiety or eco-anxiety, which is defined as chronic stress caused by concern over the effects of climate change. According to an international group of researchers, specific symptoms of this phenomenon among children and young adults include intense feelings of sadness, anger, powerlessness, helplessness and guilt — all of which can fuel more general and severe anxiety or depression. Therefore, while combatting climate change itself, we must also address the anxiety that it is causing.
Another study confirms the finding that depression, general and severe anxiety and “extreme emotions such as sadness, anger and fear” are all mental health outcomes associated with eco-anxiety. These mental health challenges are not pathological, but considered to be normal human responses to a rapidly changing world.
Meanwhile, they can contribute to inaction: A national survey found that nearly 50 percent of Americans age 18 and over are fatalistic when it comes to climate change, believing that individual actions make no difference in changing its course. Yet actions are, of course, vital.
Is the solution to climate change to hide its harms from children to protect their mental health? Of course not. Climate change is a real threat, one that needs immediate solutions involving people across the globe working together. In fact, the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change cites climate educationas a key component of the global campaign to address this issue.
One solution is to teach about climate change by focusing on strategies to address its consequences. The goal of climate education should not only be to teach students the scientific basis of climate change but also to empower them to address it — not thrust them into a state of despair.
To this end, we need a climate education framework that provides facts about the problem, describes mitigation and adaptation strategies and fosters the resilience youth need to navigate their changing world and act. Below, we sketch out what this framework looks like.
Solution-focused instructional design
The framework’s academic content must include science classes that encourage students to explore the science of climate restoration and environmental protection — not just the impact of climate change. It must also include civics lessons about the role students can play, now and in the future, in influencing government policy related to climate adaptation and mitigation. Project-based learning, citizen science learning — such as NASA’s GLOBE program — and service-learning are positive, solution-oriented approaches that can be drawn on to inspire youth and prepare them to be tomorrow’s environmental stewards.
Deeply integrated social and emotional learning
But such academic content alone is not enough, even when focused on solutions. It is also essential to include social and emotional learning (SEL) in all aspects of climate change education.
SEL is a much-discussed, research-based approach to helping students build emotional intelligence, acquire emotional agility and foster meaningful relationships. These emotional skills are key to young people’s success in school and in a rapidly changing world and include nonacademic skills such as regulating emotions, perspective-taking and setting and achieving goals.
Some of SEL’s core social-emotional competencies can help students manage their climate change-related stress and prepare them to act. For example, SEL helps build capacity to manage emotions amid adversity; fosters social awareness skills, such as understanding group behaviors and influences; develops relationship skills, such as communicating effectively and collaborating with others; and nurtures self-management skills, such as channeling strong emotions into productive behaviors. Weaving SEL approaches into instruction could help bring a sense of agency to the many young people who are feeling anxiety and concern.
We need to develop this climate education framework today, and we need to roll out curricula quickly and widely. There is no time to waste.
Around the world, kids like Samantha are sitting in class, haunted by images of a disintegrating planet. We can and must provide them with a sense of purpose — a known driver of positive youth development and a protective factor against mental health struggles. We can and must prepare them to be capable climate restoration champions who know how to preserve both our planet and their own mental health.
Shai Fuxman is a behavioral health expert and senior research scientist at Education Development Center, where he leads initiatives promoting the positive development of youth.
Chelsey Goddard is an expert in prevention science and vice president at Education Development Center, where she leads the organization’s U.S.-based health, mental health and behavioral health work.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
If you had a hard time understanding Jennifer Lopez’s recent music video project “This Is Me… Now: A Love Story,” her documentary “The Greatest Love Story Never Told” might answer some of your questions. In the doc, Lopez shares that the inspiration behind both “This Is Me… Now: A Love Story” and her ninth studio album, “This Is Me… Now” (both of which released on Feb. 16), was to finally set the record straight about her love life.
“I’ve been married four times now. I’m sure people watching from the outside were like, ‘What is this girl’s fucking problem?’ You saw kind of a compulsive behavior,” Lopez says in the documentary’s introduction. “What I portrayed to the world was, ‘Oh this didn’t work out and it’s fine and I’m good and they’re good.’ And all of that was kind of bullshit.”
The documentary goes behind the scenes in the making of both the film and the album, and Lopez also walks viewers down the last two decades of her personal life. She admits all those back-to-back marriages and relationships were a result of not being good with herself.
“I didn’t think much of myself. So the world didn’t think much of me. That lined up,” she says in tears.
Amazon MGM Studios
She also reveals that part of the inspiration behind her self-financed multimedia project was getting back with the love of her life and now-husband, Ben Affleck, who appears in both the musical (as an incognito character) and the documentary. Lopez shares that she was completely devastated after their 2004 breakup because she felt like she didn’t just lose the love of her life but also the best friend she’d ever had. The public scrutiny that followed only made things worse.
Similarly to the musical film, the documentary touches on Lopez’s love life for the past 20 years, the reason she was in constant search for love, and her love story with Affleck. But more importantly, it highlights her self-love journey and explores why it took her so long to get to a better relationship with herself.
“‘This Is Me… Now’ is about truth and facing the truth of who you really are and embracing that, and the truth is I’m not the same as I was 20 years ago,” she says.
In the documentary, Lopez shares how being the middle child made her constantly feel a need to show her parents and family that she had value and worth. She felt ignored by her dad, who was always working, and her mom, whom she claims was always the center of attention. Feeling emotionally neglected forced her to become hardworking and disciplined, she says, and somewhere down the line she started seeking the love she didn’t feel she received growing up from men.
Amazon MGM Studios
At first, it was hard for me to believe that Lopez isn’t the same person she was 20 years ago — at least when it comes to her love life and her need to constantly be in a romantic relationship. When have we ever seen her single? Very shortly after her breakup with baseball star Alex Rodriguez in 2021, she was already being publicly seen with Affleck. Can someone really get over their fear of being alone and their need to constantly be in partnership without ever taking a significant break from dating? I’d argue no. But in the doc, Lopez admits there was a period when she did finally embrace singlehood.
In the musical, there’s a scene where Fat Joe, who plays her fictional therapist, asks her if she has “ever considered being alone for a minute.” Her incognito character begins to break down in tears. Lopez admits in the documentary that the scene with Fat Joe parallels an actual conversation she had with a therapist.
“I used to be terrified to be alone,” Lopez shares. “I didn’t know what I was going to do by myself. Who was going to take care of me? Who was going to protect me? This one therapist said to me, ‘Can you be alone?’ And I was like, ‘I can do it. I can be alone. I can be alone. I’ll be alone until Christmas.’”
Lopez’s therapist suggested she erase everyone from her phone who might pose temptation. According to Lopez, she listened and took some significant time to be alone and address whatever it was she needed to heal — like feeling emotionally abandoned as a child.
It’s been easy for some fans to dismiss Lopez’s recent projects — the film, the album, and the doc — as silly or unnecessary. But I couldn’t help but empathize with her after having more insight into her journey and the things she’s struggled with when it comes to love and relationships. I now believe Lopez when she says she took the time to be alone and heal — whenever that was.
Ultimately, it’s clear that investing $20 million in this project was for herself, not for fans or viewers. Documenting her own journey was more a therapeutic act of self-love than anything else. Lopez likely didn’t put out these projects to be nominated for awards or because she believes they’ll be major hits; she put them out because they were the final process in her healing journey.
If these projects do anything, I hope they inspire viewers struggling with self-worth to take the time to reflect, heal, and give themselves the self-love they’ve always deserved. Because at the end of the day, the only love that we can guarantee in this life is the love we can give ourselves.
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 23 (IPS) – At the start of 2024, we stand at a critical juncture: Geopolitical tensions are escalating, economic integration is unravelling, and multilateral cooperation is faltering. This global fragmentation threatens to undermine decades of progress made for children worldwide.
The choices we make today – whether to continue on this path or whether we should bolster global cooperation – will have a profound impact on generations to come.
Children are always the most vulnerable in times of crisis – a reality highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, when school closures, economic hardship and disrupted health services jeopardized children’s rights and wellbeing.
Tensions among major powers are rising and the threat of new conflicts emerging is high. Beyond the immediate physical dangers, children can experience lasting psychological trauma and violations of their basic rights.
If military spending continues increasing at the expense of investments in healthcare, education and social protections, children’s development will be further compromised.
Meanwhile, economic fragmentation is widening disparities between countries. Restrictive trade policies and supply chain disruptions are leading to rising energy and food prices, reducing access to essential goods and negatively impacting child nutrition and household incomes.
Competition for critical minerals essential for the green economy is increasing the risks of trade fragmentation while threatening the pace of the green energy transition. At the same time, the drive to expand mining for minerals puts mining communities and children at risk of exploitative practices.
Despite continued global economic growth, the lukewarm and uneven recovery is diminishing prospects for reducing child poverty. From now until 2030, 15 million more children a year will be living in poverty than would have otherwise, due to the unequal post-COVID recovery.
This gloomy picture is compounded by the weakening of multilateral institutions, which is further undermining the potential for progress for children. Why?
Because a fragmented multilateral system that is hamstrung by competing interests will struggle to deliver on conflict prevention, climate change, effective digital governance, debt relief and enforcing child rights standards, fuelling dissatisfaction in the Global South with rising inequalities.
Children in the poorest nations also face continued barriers to financing for basic services. Crippling debt, high remittance fees and lack of voice in global economic governance restrict investments in healthcare, education and social protections – investments vital to children’s survival and development.
But amid all these concerning trends, we see still signs of hope. Alternative alliances are emerging in the developing world to advance cooperation, bringing novel policy solutions, more nimble policymaking and effective results.
Despite expressing discontent with current democratic political structures, young people remain optimistic that opportunities exist to reform and resolve deficiencies in the political system, whether at the national or international level. They are engaging as change-makers, breathing new life into civic participation and democratic renewal.
In addition, technological innovations are unlocking new opportunities to empower children and enhance their rights. Green transition, if carried out in a just and sustainable way – one that prioritizes young people’s needs, skills and access to jobs in emerging sectors (such as the digital and green economy) – can benefit younger generations.
Reforms and modernization of global governance and financing arrangements could still deliver greater justice for developing countries. This more hopeful path will not unfold on its own. It requires global leaders to make an active choice – to double down on solidarity, inclusion and cooperation despite tensions and instability.
Prioritizing children and their rights must be at the centre of this choice.
Jasmina Byrne is Chief, Foresight & Policy, UNICEF Innocenti – Global Office of Research and Foresight.
On Feb. 17 at 9 a.m., we encountered significantly long security lines at Denver International Airport’s west side, leading to delays and frustrations for hundreds if not thousands of passengers. Lines snaked through common areas, adding to the inconvenience. Certainly not an upgraded experience.
While millions of dollars were supposedly invested in security upgrades, the recent experience suggests further improvements are needed. Are there staffing limitations contributing to the issue?
I urge the airport authorities and Denver City Council to investigate the root cause of these long lines. The city spent millions of dollars and obviously didn’t improve the security process. This makes our airport look like a third-rate facility. If the City of Denver can’t run the airport, hire professionals to do the job.
I am filled with gladness at the hiring of Troy Renck as a sports columnist and especially happy with the departure of Mark Kiszla, who was, in my opinion, a journalistic hack, a peddler of negativity, and a troll who unnecessarily attacked and demeaned the character and personality of Denver sports personalities. Most recently, his remarks about Broncos coach Sean Payton were odious, and he was unkind to quarterback Russell Wilson before he ever stepped on the field. This represents a move toward more balanced and positive reporting by The Post and I hope it continues.
Republicans in the U.S. House have abandoned the freedom fighters in Ukraine. When Ronald Reagan built the strongest military force in the world and stoutly supported freedom, Ukraine and other states were able to throw off Russian domination. Vladimir Putin is determined to rebuild that “evil empire,” and today’s Republican appeasers are happy to open the door for him.
Ukraine will not be the last country Putin enslaves. We can stop him now by supplying ammunition, or we can retreat and imperil our future.
Ray Harlan, Denver
Ronald Reagan would turn in his grave if he knew Donald Trump’s puppet, House Speaker Mike Johnson, is sitting on Ukraine aid. If Trump’s buddy, Putin, succeeds in ensnaring the Ukrainian people, who is next? We need to help Ukraine for their sake and for our own sake.
If Johnson continues to deny more weapons for Ukraine’s self-defense, then the next best thing is the Lend-Lease process we used in WWII, with the hope that someday Ukraine could pay us back.
I am so glad to hear the Rockies are going to stream their games this year at the low price of $99.99 for the entire season. That’s less than a dollar a loss!
Africa has huge renewable energy potential – it has 60% of the world’s best solar resources, but the continent receives less than 3% of global energy investment. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS
Opinion by Sylvie Djacbou Deugoue (yaounde)
Inter Press Service
YAOUNDE, Feb 20 (IPS) – Climate change made 2023 the warmest year on record. As urgency mounts to address this worldwide crisis, phasing out the use of fossil fuels is a necessary step that all nations must take. This is because fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas — are the primary drivers of the climate crisis accounting for over 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90% of all carbon dioxide emissions.
Fossil fuels can be linked to severe human rights harm. According to the International Energy Agency, there cannot be any new fossil fuel projects if countries are to meet existing climate targets and avoid the worst consequences for frontline communities. Not addressing these issues can create a human rights crisis of unprecedented scale.
Another ethical imperative for phasing out from fossil fuels is our responsibility to communities facing loss and damage. Fossil fuel projects and infrastructure often expose fence line and frontline communities to toxic substances, environmental degradation, and increased vulnerability to climate disasters.
Fossil fuel extraction and production often violate the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities, and environmental defenders, who face land grabbing, displacement, violence, intimidation, and criminalization. This must change.
When we look at the African continent, the current increase in investment in fossil fuels will increase Africa’s carbon emissions and raise Africa’s share of global climate change.
In 2021, Africa contributed 3.9% (1.45 billion tonnes of CO2 eq.) of global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry. Continuing with this energy policy would be very suicidal for their future in the face of the consequences of climate change.
There is also an economic impact of fossil fuel production too, especially in Africa. Fossil fuel subsidies and investments divert resources from addressing the needs and rights of people living in poverty.
It is well known that Africa has contributed the least to climate change but still suffers the most from its consequences. Since rich countries have historically emitted the most greenhouse gases, the goal of transitioning to renewable energy sources is an act of responsibility and justice, providing support to those most in need.
Fossil fuel extraction leads to deforestation, habitat destruction, and water pollution, which have contributed to 1.2 million deaths in 2020, leading to biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation.
In the DRC for instance, if the peatland is destroyed by the construction of roads, pipelines and other infrastructure needed to extract the oil, up to 6 billion tonnes of CO? could be released, which is the equivalent of 14 years’ worth of current UK greenhouse gas emissions.
Through a transition to renewable energies such as wind power and solar energy, we can take control of the effects of climate change and support future generation’s sustainability moving forward.
As a region that has had the smallest impact on the climate crisis but suffers significant impacts now and in the future, the international community must work with Africa to invest in its clean energy future.
For instance, Kenya is home to the Lake Turkana Wind Project, currently the largest wind farm in Africa. Output exceeds 310 MW—enough to power 1 million homes.
The project also attracted the largest private investment in Kenya’s history, amounting to US$650 million. For Africa to achieve its energy and climate goals, Africa needs $190 billion of investment a year between 2026 to 2030, with two-thirds of this going to clean energy.
Fortunately, some progress has been made toward ending use of fossil fuels on a global scale. During the recent COP28 in Dubai, nearly 130 nations approved a roadmap for “transitioning away from fossil fuels“—a first for a UN climate conference—but the deal still stopped short of a long-demanded call for a “phaseout” of oil, coal, and gas.
This is what is needed to transition away and help keep us from reaching the 1.5°C degree limit. Another shortcoming of COP28 is that there was neither a clear commitment nor a well-funded phaseout of all fossil fuels, nor was there clear funding for countries to transition to renewables and cope with escalating climate impacts.
We have a responsibility to protect future generations and support vulnerable communities. The countries, businesses, civil society, and leaders who came together during COP28 and made this first step deal should now walk the talk.
I can’t agree more with UN Secretary-General António Guterres who said during COP28: ‘’that a fossil fuel phaseout is inevitable, whether they like it or not. Let’s hope it doesn’t come too late.”
Being the custodians of the planet, it is our moral duty to leave a world that is habitable for our children and our grandchildren.
Sylvie Djacbou Deugoue is a Senior Aspen New Voices Fellow, a Policy Advocate & campaigns Builder.
As schools and educators grapple with using artificial intelligence, or AI, in the classroom, I find myself excited by the possibilities for students with dyslexia.
Technology can finally give students with learning differences the personalized lessons needed to help them work with — instead of work around — their disabilities. Used strategically, AI can help teachers design assignments for students’ many different learning styles rather than trying to “fix” their brains with one-size-fits-all approaches to learning. We can figure out how our students process information and then use AI to maximize that — all while saving much-needed time for educators. (As a parent of two children with dyslexia, I’m also worried, but my excitement is currently winning.)
AI is already predicting complex protein structures, helping doctors diagnose patients and building functioning websites. It’s time to put this groundbreaking technology to work for our teachers, many of whom have too many students to have the time to differentiate lessons based on learning differences. To be clear, AI should never replace a teacher. Instead, it can empower them with new time- and cost-saving tools that can improve instruction for all students.
I lead Landmark School, an independent school in the Boston area for students with learning disabilities. Our students are brilliant, creative, hard-working and driven learners, and yet their brains simply don’t intake or output information in the same ways as other students. Some of our teachers are already using AI to create individualized, decodable reading passages of varying complexities about topics that get the kids excited and engaged — basketball, space, race cars and Pokémon. And, using AI, our teachers can generate these passages in seconds, not hours and days. Some tech leaders are predicting that, given enough data, AI will soon be able to teach students with dyslexia to read — with teachers at the helm guiding the process.
School leaders, especially those who are advocates for students who learn differently, must begin having more strategic conversations about AI now. The traditional education system has never worked for students with disabilities, and we could redesign it. Schools must also update how we assess learning and knowledge so that AI is an assistive tool rather than a way to cheat. If we can use this opportunity to transform how we serve students, it will revolutionize schools.
Teacher-led AI could provide every student with the individualized, explicit, structured, sequential instruction and expertise that is presently only available to the privileged few who can afford independent schools like mine. For public schools with scant resources, a 30-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio might finally make sense when every student is given an individualized, responsive curriculum powered by their teachers and AI.
AI can be invaluable for the more than a dozen states that have revamped their reading curriculum in the last couple of years to better align with brain science. It can generate word lists, decodable texts and basic lesson plans. It can produce lists of real and nonsense words with specific features — vowel teams, syllable types, spelling patterns, prefixes, etc. — and then incorporate the words into a text about any topic. The benefits are endless for students like my two children, who present their learning differences in very distinct ways.
We are entering an era in which the very skills and talents often associated with dyslexia — creativity, problem-solving, out-of-the-box thinking — are going to be critical to navigating this new and complex technological world.
Research shows that every child — whether they have dyslexia or not — would benefit from learning to read the way we teach students with learning differences. With AI, that is feasible.
In fact, students are leading the way on AI literacy in some places because they understand the importance of this new tool. They know that AI is also going to revolutionize the world of work. If our job as educators is to prepare students for what comes next, we need to start reckoning with the “new next” now. Today’s students will decide the ethical questions that guide our new AI-infused world.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
It can be easy to think of school closures, remote learning and masked classrooms as part of the pandemic past.
But educators across the country know better. They see the learning loss that persists, despite their best efforts to provide some measure of consistency amid all the disruption.
While new data suggest students are making a “ ‘surprising’ rebound,” findings also show math and reading levels for elementary and middle school students are nowhere near pre-pandemic levels.
Worse yet, systemic inequality has actually worsened, with students in the poorest communities falling even further behind their more affluent peers.
Recognizing near the start of the pandemic that U.S. public schools required vast support, federal and state government officials appropriated historic levels of help via elementary and secondary school emergency relief funds.
As a recently retired superintendent of schools, I’ve watched, with immense frustration, as state and federal officials followed up their initial funding with blindly conceived appropriations tied to inflexible and short-sighted deadlines.
Now that funding is drying up at precisely the wrong time; districts will be left trying to fund nascent positions and programs on top of their normal operational costs.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, educators have been switching focus from acute short-term challenges to the chronic and stubborn ones poised to become generational pain points. Novel educational impacts of the pandemic are still emerging while others persist.
Classroom teachers and school administrators are seeing more challenging student behaviors and family distress on top of the learning gaps.
That’s why federal funding must not end. We would never ask doctors to treat their patients before they began exhibiting symptoms. So why would we ask our educators to essentially do the same?
As deadlines for the expenditure of federal dollars loom and intersect with next year’s budget development, school districts once again face the uncertainty of not having sufficient resources for challenges that they do not yet fully understand.
Short-term funding will not be sufficient for navigating out of a once-in-a-century global public health problem that fundamentally changed the way the U.S. educates our youth.
We need a more logical, reasonable and, most importantly, sustainable approach to combat pandemic-induced learning loss, in whatever form it appears. Although federal and state funding is typically allocated yearly, future funding should be targeted and guaranteed for multiple years.
Without taking a different funding approach, we will only guarantee that the impacts linger or worsen. Right now, well-intentioned federal funding may actually be widening the achievement gap. We are seeing economically disadvantaged communities starting to lag in their rate of learning as measured by standardized testing.
Leaders holding the power of the purse will need to recognize that the new playing field is still unequal, and that economic disparities among communities will continue to yield different learning outcomes. Leveling the playing field means better distribution of funds.
The federal funding that is set to expire in 2024 cannot wipe away the adverse learning impacts of the pandemic. While it can be tempting and politically expedient to declare the pandemic over, turning the page prematurely leaves students and teachers behind and potentially exacerbates existing challenges.
We can and must do better.
Hamlet Michael Hernandez is an assistant teaching professor of education and director of the Educational Leadership program at Quinnipiac University.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
LOS ANGELES — It was all going to be so perfect. It had stars. It had records. It had one of the most beautiful stages in all of sports in prime time. It was supposed to be the PGA Tour’s big day.
Two weeks ago up in Pebble Beach, Wyndham Clark shot a third-round 60 to break the historic course’s record and take the lead at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. The tour couldn’t have drawn up a better Sunday — in theory. It was the off week before the Super Bowl, meaning it practically had the sports calendar to itself. It made the tournament a signature event, meaning one of golf’s most iconic venues had all the best players on tour competing. And suddenly it had the reigning U.S. Open champ — the star of the new season of golf’s Netflix show, “Full Swing” — Clark going into a Sunday duel with the most exciting young player in the sport, Ludvig Åberg.
And it simply never happened.
Instead, extreme weather halted play Sunday with flooding and knocked down trees all over California. The course took so much water over five days that the tournament couldn’t even be finished Monday. Instead of a thrilling, star-studded prime-time finish with everyone talking about PGA Tour golf, the tournament ended with Clark’s Saturday 60 and a whimper.
This has been a strange six weeks for the tour. It’s in the thick of the best part of its calendar before the majors, and there’s an ongoing discussion about whether the PGA Tour season is lacking juice.
But it might just have the Sunday it’s been waiting for. At the Genesis Invitational at Riviera Country Club — which many consider the best non-major on tour — the final round is setting up to get interesting. It has No. 7 player in the world Patrick Cantlay with a two-shot lead. It has his good friend and No. 5 golfer Xander Schauffele in second, tied with rising star Will Zalatoris back in the mix after missing 2023 due to back surgery. Throw in major-winner Jason Day and Ryder Cupper Harris English four back at an elite course, and this could be the Sunday that brings that juice.
About that juice, though.
It’s not really anyone’s fault. It’s not even clear whether it’s true. But something strange has been happening. All six tournaments thus far have been won by a long shot. Literally. They’ve been won by the so-called randoms, the “mules,” as some in the golf world like to refer to them. Chris Kirk. Grayson Murray. Nick Dunlap. Matthieu Pavon. Wyndham Clark. Nick Taylor. All six have entered the tournament at odds of 100-1 or greater. Five of the six entered the week outside of the Official World Golf Ranking top 50. The only winner inside that top 50, Clark, won without a final round.
PGA Tour Winners and pre-tournament starting prices to begin 2024:
Chris Kirk 100/1 Sentry Grayson Murray 300/1 Sony Nick Dunlap (a) 400/1 Amex Matthieu Pavon 150/1 Farmers Wyndham Clark 100/1 AT&T Pebble Nick Taylor 100/1 WM Phoenix
It’s not even been bad. Much of the golf has been exciting. One tournament was won by a 20-year-old amateur who staked his claim as the potential future of the sport. Two have involved heartwarming stories of overcoming adversity. Two have gone to a playoff! And last week in Phoenix turned into national news due to the drunken crowds overrunning security.
But, for better or worse, this sport has become a business run on bottom lines. As wars go on between leagues and private equity firms buy in and all we hear about is ratings, Player Impact Programs and stars, there’s that debate over whether these results have been a problem.
To recap: Chris Kirk (100-1) won the signature event The Sentry in a low-scoring battle with stars like Sahith Theegala and Jordan Spieth. It wasn’t the greatest tournament, but Kirk’s win after taking time off to deal with alcoholism and depression was an awesome storyline. A week later was more of the same. Grayson Murray (300-1) also had issues with alcohol and mental health, even facing punishment from the PGA Tour years earlier, and won in a thrilling playoff thanks to two incredible shots in the clutch. These weren’t stars, but most agreed these were really cool finishes.
Then, at the American Express, which is by no means a big tournament expecting huge fanfare, the 20-year-old defending U.S. Amateur champ Nick Dunlap (400-1) took over the golf world by becoming the first amateur to win a PGA Tour event since Phil Mickelson 33 years earlier. This was gold.
Next was 31-year-old Frenchman Matthieu Pavon (150-1) winning at Torrey Pines. Then came the weather mess of Pebble Beach with the tour being robbed of its exciting final round, which also led to more of the golf world watching LIV’s final round in Mexico. And last week at the Waste Management Open in Phoenix — known for its loud, booze-filled atmosphere — it had a thrilling playoff finish between Nick Taylor and 47-year-old Charley Hoffman. And even that was drowned out by the news of the fans breaking containment and weather delays pushing that exciting finish into the first half of the Super Bowl.
The tour couldn’t quite get a win.
A subsection of people turned this into a conversation about LIV departures and a sign the tour wasn’t a great product anymore. This offseason, the PGA Tour lost one major star, Jon Rahm, and another top-20 player, Tyrell Hatton. Losing them stung. No doubt about it. But it’s likely misguided to act like the results of these tournaments were because those two weren’t there. Kirk and Clark beat loaded fields with most of the best players in the world. Even Sony, AmEx and Phoenix all had a good chunk of top-10 and top-20 players. Those players just beat them.
It’s likely more about the personality component. No matter your thoughts on LIV, it’s at least fair to say it took many of the biggest personas from the PGA Tour. Few are bigger than Mickelson. Brooks Koepka is a star. Bryson DeChambeau is a pariah. Dustin Johnson might not be a huge “personality,” but he’s been one of the most talked about golfers for a decade plus. Rahm and Hatton are two hot-blooded, emotional players who bring flair. Cameron Smith is a fishing-loving Aussie with a mullet who was on his way to becoming a bigger star. And everybody has opinions on Patrick Reed.
Even if you want to criticize the quality of some of these players, the truth is LIV has plenty of the golfers who attract the most eyeballs.
And though it’s nobody’s fault, the PGA Tour players playing the best aren’t exactly their eyeball winners. As Garrett Morrison of The Fried Egg pointed out, only one of the six winners ranked in the top 20 of the PGA Tour’s Player Impact Program rewarding players for bringing business to the tour (tickets, sponsorships, media consumption and fan engagement). And that one was Clark in a rain-shortened event.
If my data collection is right (it might not be?): – No one from the 2023 PIP top 10 has done better than third place this season – One player in the PIP top 20 (Wyndham Clark) has won, and it was a rain-shortened event
The biggest name brands for the tour right now are Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spieth and Tiger Woods. Well, Riviera is just McIlroy’s second event in the United States this year. Spieth is playing solid golf but not quite winning. And Woods is a 48-year-old legend averaging more surgeries per year than top-10s. Then, just to throw gasoline on the market share fire, Woods withdrew from the Genesis, the event he hosts, Friday due to the flu, and Spieth was disqualified Friday for submitting an incorrect scorecard. That’s two huge draws out of the equation.
Its next wave of young stars like Scottie Scheffler, Viktor Hovland and Collin Morikawa aren’t quite at the publicity level of those names, and even they haven’t quite played to their exceptional levels (yet) this season.
None of this is actually a problem, really. The tournaments are still good. Many have included cool storylines. Anybody acting like this is a huge issue is probably trying to make it one. But it is a thing. A thing worth keeping an eye on.
“It’s important, obviously,” Schauffele said Saturday, “but I was talking to the CEO of AmEx and he was talking about the ratings when Nick (Dunlap) won. People love the Cinderella story. I’m not sure what the ratings were for Waste Management, but Charley being — I’m biased, obviously, being from San Diego — but him being one of the older guys trying to win out here, being a younger crowd. It’s sort of the beautiful thing about the PGA Tour. Anyone can win any week, and there’s a lot of stories that go around.”
It’s just enough of a thing that it makes this Sunday somewhat important. Riviera is arguably the best course the tour plays at all year. Cantlay and Schauffele are year-in, year-out top-10 players, and Zalatoris is somebody the golf world is pulling for. But even this win of a leaderboard comes with a caveat.
Cantlay isn’t exactly a popular player. He’s only No. 19 in last year’s PIP rankings and has lost points with the masses at times for accusations of slow play and a heavily reputed report that he didn’t wear a hat at the 2023 Ryder Cup to protest players not being paid for the event. Schauffele is world No. 5 and one of the most consistent players of his era, but his career is primarily known for being consistent without winning many big events. Basically, even the PGA Tour’s big Sunday is coming via some of its more ho-hum stars.
But here’s where we need to pull away from PIP and popularity. Let’s just talk about golf. This final round is going to be awesome. It’s going to be the best course with the best players and something golf fans should be watching.
We’re six weeks into an eight-month season. Shut up and enjoy.
(Photo of Patrick Cantlay: Harry How / Getty Images)
NAIROBI, Kenya, Feb 14 (IPS) – Often referred to as the “Sun continent,” Africa receives more hours of bright sunlight than any other continent. But even with 60 per cent of the world’s solar resources, Africa has only one per cent of solar generation capacity, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Due to energy production and infrastructure challenges, many African countries regularly deal with blackouts, brownouts and poor electricity supply. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit the global economy hard, and commodity prices surged after the invasion of Ukraine, making energy even more difficult for poorer Africans to buy.
Increasingly, start-ups rather than established corporations are offering access to advanced solar energy solutions to the majority of people across Africa. By harnessing the sun’s power and transitioning to clean energy, Africans can expect major economic and social developments across the continent.
Solar energy brightens other industries
Headquartered in Nairobi, SunCulture has raised over $40 million to equip rural farmers with solar-powered irrigation systems. Instead of counting on rainfall or revving up diesel or petrol pumps, farmers can now rely on solar-powered systems that are cheaper, use renewable energy and need minimal maintenance.
Once the company installs a solar panel on top of a farmer’s house and connects it to a battery-powered water pump, the irrigation system can cover up to three acres.
“Solar is particularly attractive because of its positive environmental impact, job creation potential, and economic development potential,” said Mikayla Czajkowski, chief of staff at SunCulture.
“African nations have immense potential to benefit from utilizing solar energy – especially in remote and under-served regions where energy access is limited – and facilitates a reduction in the continent’s carbon footprint, making a valuable contribution to global efforts to combat climate change,” Ms. Czajkowski added.
In an impact survey of SunCulture’s customers, measurement company 60 Decibels found that SunCulture brought about significant improvements: 89 per cent of smallholder farmers experienced a boost in their quality of life, 90 per cent increased their production, and 87 per cent enhanced their earnings.
Ambitious start-ups
From GridX Africa, a firm that offers off-grid solar power to farms, safari lodges for tourists and construction projects in Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania, to the pay-as-you-go solar company Bboxx and the Egypt-based solar power developer and electricity distributor KarmSolar, Africa has no shortage of original solar energy start-ups.
While the ambitions of these solar businesses are laudable, achieving high levels of growth is not easy.
Emily McAteer, founder and chief executive officer, of Odyssey Energy Solutions spent more than a decade working to finance and build distributed solar projects across Africa and India.
Her firm provides technology and finance solutions for distributed renewable energy businesses. At every stage of project development, she hit key bottlenecks that make it hard for solar companies like hers to scale.
By offering tools for solar developers to aggregate and pitch portfolios of projects to financiers, firms can access capital more effectively. To procure equipment more effectively, Odyssey streamlined the procurement process by negotiating directly with original equipment manufacturers for better prices and warranties and by working with developers for supply chain support.
“Operations and maintenance, especially in remote areas, can be a big hurdle,” Ms. McAteer said. “We offer hardware and software that sits on top of solar assets so that operators and investors can get deep insight into performance and optimize performance of their systems.”
Global initiatives need catalytic capital
More than 500 million people living in Africa have no access to electricity, according the IEA Africa Energy Outlook 2022. Governments and non-governmental organizations have launched many high-profile schemes to boost the solar energy sector in African countries, with mixed success. The continent needs a global response to address a challenge of this immense scale.
Launched in 2012, the US-Africa Clean Energy Finance (US-ACEF) initiative attempted to offset the costs of the early-stage development of clean energy projects, in a bid to draw investment to these ventures.
Solar is particularly attractive because of its positive environmental and economic impacts.
For Ms. McAteer, the US-ACEF model proved effective. Now innovators need higher levels of catalytic capital to continue scaling so that they can meet the UN Sustainable Development Goal 7, “Ensuring access to Clean and Affordable Energy.”
“Annual capital investment in renewables in emerging markets needs to reach $1 trillion per year if the world is to achieve the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. US-ACEF set the model for how the industry can achieve that,” Ms. McAteer said. “Now the missing piece is continued investment from both public and private financiers.”
Innovation underway across Africa
So far, the US-ACEF has supported 32 projects, with country-specific investments in Ethiopia, Kenya, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda.
Nijhad Jamal, managing partner of Equator, an early-stage venture capital firm focusing on climate technology in sub-Saharan Africa, agrees that Africa’s solar energy sector has benefited greatly from US-ACEF.
“There is a lot more impact to come from US-ACEF with projects like the Health Electrification Alliance, which aims to electrify over 10,000 health facilities in Africa,” Mr. Jamal said. “Most of the US-ACEF projects emphasize sustainability. In our opinion, this will have a lasting impact on the solar energy sector.”
Source: Africa Renewal– a United Nations digital magazine that covers Africa’s economic, social and political developments—and the challenges the continent faces and the solutions to these by Africans themselves, including with the support of the United Nations and international community.
If you live in Arizona, school choice may be coming to your neighborhood soon. As someone who has had more school choice than I know what to do with, I can tell you what may feel like a shocking surprise: Private schools have the power to choose, not parents.
I live inPhoenix, where the nearby town of Paradise Valley is getting ready to offer the privatization movement’s brand of choice to families. The district has indicated that it will likely vote to close four public schools due to insufficient funds. If this happens, other districts will probably follow: The state’s recent universal voucher expansion has predictably accelerated the diversion of money from public to private schools.
Arizona approved use of school choice vouchers, called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, or ESAs, in 2011 on the promise that they were strictly for children with special needs who were not being adequately served in the public school system. The amount of funds awarded to qualified students was based on a tiered system, according to type of disability.
Over the years, the state incrementally made more students eligible, until full expansion was finally achieved in 2022. For some students, the amount of voucher money they qualify for is only a few thousand dollars, nowhere near enough to cover tuition at a private school. Often, their parents can’t afford to supplement the balance. However, my son, who is autistic, qualified for enough to cover full tuition.
I took him out of public school in 4th grade. Every school I applied to seemed to have the capability to accommodate his intellectual disability needs but lacked the willingness. Eventually, I found a special education school willing to accept him. It was over an hour from our home, but I hoped for the best. Unfortunately, it ultimately was not a good fit.
I then thought Catholic schools would welcome my son, but none of them did. One Catholic school principal who did admit him quickly rescinded the offer after a teacher objected to having him in her class.
The long list of general, special-ed, Catholic and charter schools that turned my son away indicate how little choice actually exists, despite the marketing of ESA proponents.
There was a two-year period where I gave up and he was home without social opportunities. I was not able to homeschool, so a reading tutor and his iPad became his only access to education.
I then tried to enroll him in private schools for students with disabilities.
These schools were almost always located in former office suites in strip malls with no outdoor access. My son’s current school shares space with a dialysis center in a medical building, while a former school was located in a small second-floor suite in a Target plaza.
Once a private school admits your child, they can rescind admission without cause. Private schools are at leisure to act as virtual dictatorships, and special-ed schools in particular are notorious for keeping parents at a distance.
My son’s current school grew tired of my requests for reasonable communication about his school day or even his general progress and made his continued enrollment subject to my acceptance of their decision not to speak to me at all.
With few other choices, I acquiesced to the school’s ultimatum and am keeping my son there while I search for a better option once again — even as he gets closer to aging out of K-12 education. As of now, he has nowhere else to go. There has never been a moment when I couldn’t accept my son for who he is; why can’t private schools do the same — especially those that market themselves to the special needs demographic?
Education is a human right, and public schools, open to all, are the guardians of this right. What privatizers call choice does not really exist.
As ESAs and private schools siphon off money and public schools start closing down, parents will be horrified to discover that nothing can defeat the closely held advantages of a private system designed to keep them out, and no amount of vouchers will make a difference.
When all the public schools are closed, and you can’t get a private school to accept your child, what will you do?
Vouchers gave my son social opportunities that he wouldn’t have had otherwise, along with tutors to help mitigate private education deficits. But he would rather attend a local school, with kids in his neighborhood, or at least the kind of private school ESA marketing promised him.
I hope that as more families experience the exclusion and powerlessness that we have lived with, they’ll realize that a balance between public and private is necessary and an excess of either at the expense of the other is disastrous.
Every day on our way to my son’s special education school, we drive by an elegant, sprawling private school campus. He waves at the children and pretends they’re his friends. He still asks to go there.
Pam Lang is a writer and graduate student at ASU pursuing master’s degrees in comparative literature and social work, and an advocate for public education and healthcare equality.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
At the beginning of the school year, each of my 11th grade teachers stated that they would not tolerate students using AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, to complete assignments. They explained that any use of AI would be considered plagiarism and could result in a failing grade.
Despite these warnings, I regularly hear my classmates laugh about how they used ChatGPT for the prior night’s homework. Their gloats are often accompanied by comments along the lines of “Work smarter, not harder” and “Teachers literally make it so easy to use AI.”
My classmates at the public high school I attend in New York City are not unusual: In a recent survey, 89 percent of students who responded said they had used ChatGPT for homework.
It’s easy for teachers to admonish students not to use ChatGPT and then blame them when they do. But educators must realize that the work they are assigning, which largely relies on rote memorization, is a perfect fit for artificial intelligence.
Rather than browbeat students for using AI, maybe educators should outsmart AI by reimagining education so that it requires more creativity and critical thought, the aspects that separate people from robots.
Since third grade, I have been taking standardized tests. Now that I’m older, these include Regents exams, New York State tests and Advanced Placement assessments. My teachers say that our scores on these tests are a reflection of our academic proficiency, as well as a predictor of our future academic and professional success.
Yet, in my experience, all standardized tests do is reduce nearly every class, even the most interesting, to regurgitation.
Take AP Psychology. I signed up for this class because I am fascinated by the subject, especially the philosophical and open-ended aspects that require thoughtful discussion and analysis. But rather than encouraging us to engage with psychology’s intellectual premises, the class requires us to memorize roughly 400 terms.
If I can remember each term and its definition, I will have set myself up for success in the class and on the final AP exam.
Sounds fascinating and enlightening, right? Not to me. Unfortunately, this is the current state of education. Exams and teaching to the test have become so ingrained in education that little to no room is left for creative learning, rich discussion, critical thought or the development of emotional intelligence.
These are the very skills and activities that separate people from robots, yet instead of developing them, students are told to act like robots and simply spit back information on exams.
Ironically, AI is, of course, much better at being a robot than a typical student is; systems like ChatGPT can access and spit back large swaths of information better than any person.
Thus, it is no surprise that GPT-4 clocks high scores on the bar exam, SAT and multiple AP exams, including a 5 (the highest possible score) on AP Psychology.
These results show that the modern student is susceptible to AI takeover. If educators wish to effectively prevent AI from entering classrooms, they must reimagine the way students are taught.
Rethinking education in America should include a move away from teaching to the test and a push toward project-based learning, which encourages students to collaborate, examine and analyze real-world issues and apply scientific research to solve problems.
This approach might even drive test scores higher. A 2021 study estimated that students whose curricula included KIA, a project-based learning approach, would be 8 percent more likely to earn a passing score on AP exams.
While project-based learning may help lift standardized test scores, its real power lies in improving problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. These skills are vital for current students who are preparing for a world with AI.
According to one report, AI could eventually replace 300 million full-time jobs worldwide. The jobs that AI is currently unlikely to be able to replace are the ones that require problem-solving and critical thinking, as well as those that require complex communication, decision-making, creativity and emotional intelligence.
Education is a means to getting a job and being successful. Simply put, for my generation and future generations to succeed, we are going to need much more than rote memorization skills. The good news is that the skills we need are the ones that make learning fun, challenging and exciting.
We are at a crossroads. Educators, policymakers and everyone with an interest in the future of work has a decision to make: They can either continue supporting an education system that teaches students to think in ways that AI can clearly do better, or they can decide to reform education to prepare students for the not-to-distant world of the future.
Benjamin Weiss is a junior at Midwood High School in Brooklyn, N.Y.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
When Tony Romo became the biggest sensation in NFL broadcasting, it was because he was a gunslinger as an analyst, predicting plays with an unconventional style that eventually led to a 10-year, $180 million contract, then the richest known deal in sports media history.
These days, four years into that deal, after all the criticism of Romo, CBS clearly went into his third Super Bowl as a TV analyst looking for a game manager instead of a game changer. But old habits die hard.
At first, Romo did a fine job with the Chiefs down three points and inside the 5-yard line late in overtime, explaining that it did not matter as viewers watched the clock wind down toward zero — the game would not end and would just roll into a second quarter of OT. But Romo kept talking too long.
This blocked Nantz from properly setting up the final play. As the winning touchdown was scored, Nantz said, “First and goal, Mahomes flings it! It’s there! Hardman! Jackpot! Kansas City!”
Romo first muttered in the background of Nantz’s call as if he were a yahoo on local radio. After Nantz finished, Romo started in, “This was the Andy Reid special. …” And then on and on.
For 30 seconds, as CBS showed reaction, Romo talked about the play when the best analysis would’ve been silence, which would have allowed the crowd and pictures to tell the story. It should have been Nantz’s broadcast moment, if anyone’s.
Nantz and Romo were once supposed to be the next Pat Summerall and John Madden but have fallen so far that their disjointed performance Sunday was one CBS will likely take. Before the final play, the broadcast was far from perfect, but it was mostly manageable. Maybe not one to overnight to the Sports Emmys, but, on the production side, it had its moments.
Nantz and Romo make the big money — a near $30 million a year between them — so, like quarterbacks, they receive the most credit and blame. Their quarterback rating was not high enough, missing obvious big themes.
The duo failed to ever explain why the defenses — especially the 49ers on Travis Kelce in the first half — were having their way for so long with the offenses. They also were very underwhelming when CBS’s production team expertly spotted Kelce bumping and screaming at his 65-year-old head coach. They rarely spoke about line play. And the overarching themes of the game were often missed. There were no threads.
The grading for the Super Bowl broadcast is the highest level because it is the most prestigious assignment in American sportscasting. Nantz has called the game six times, but his partners, first Phil Simms and now Romo, have regressed under his watch. A bad trend.
Meanwhile, Romo lacks consistency in his thoughts. With 10 seconds left in regulation and the Chiefs at the 49ers’ 11, Romo said, “If you have six seconds, you feel comfortable taking another crack at it.”
After an incomplete pass, there were six seconds left, and Romo opined, “If he had seven, I’d do it,” adding Kansas City should kick.
Umm, but, Tony, you just said …
Never mind.
The inconsistency happens too much with Romo, causing CBS Sports executives to put on a brave face publicly and privately, defending him, but actions are almost always where the truth lands, and their truest thoughts seemed evident in their approach.
Early, it was clear, CBS’s game plan was to simplify the offense. In the first half, it cut down on the overuse of too many voices, sticking mostly to Nantz and Romo. Romo seemed chilled. It wasn’t bad.
The production team came up big in the second quarter. After Chiefs running back Isiah Pacheco fumbled, it found a sideline shot in which Kelce accosted Reid.
“He goes, ‘Keep me in,’” Romo said, apparently lip-reading. “What happened is, on the fumble, he was not in the game. Noah Gray went in, and he had to block. Noah Gray, the tight end, had to block (Deommodore) Lenoir. Lenoir made him swim and actually created the fumble. And I think Kelce is like, ‘Just keep me in there, even if we are running the ball.’”
Let’s put to the side we needed to consult Google Translate to go from Romo to English to understand what, “(Deommodore) Lenoir made him swim and actually created the fumble” might mean, the story is Kelce nearly knocking down his coach.
It wasn’t Latrell Sprewell on P.J. Carlesimo, but it was Taylor Swift’s boyfriend in front of about, give or take, 115 million viewers. We kind of needed the former All-Pro Cowboys quarterback to weigh in if that was kosher or not.
The best part of Romo is his unscripted fun personality. Non-hardcore fans can like him because Romo comes across as — and from all first-hand reports is — a genuinely nice guy. He would be cool to have a beer with, a good quality in an announcer.
Sunday, the most personality Romo showed was when he sang Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” to break, channeling another Cowboys great turned broadcaster, Don Meredith. Romo would do it again in the third quarter, trying to entice Nantz — who is a broadcaster from a Peter Jennings/Tom Brokaw anchor era — for a singalong to Elvis’ “Viva Las Vegas.” Romo even did a little Beastie Boys late with “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party)!”
As for Nantz, he sounded extra amped to open the game, maybe overcompensating for some less-than-enthusiastic early calls in the playoffs. On the two Romo-isms of the first half, Nantz did correctly challenge him. Romo said a fumble might be a lateral in the second quarter, and then late in the period, with the scoreless Chiefs down 10, he said they might be in four-down territory. Nantz rightly threw the challenge flag on both.
In the end, the problem with the tandem is that despite all their “pal” and “buddy” talk, not to mention their over-the-top, on-air, “I love yous,” they don’t sound on the same page.
That disconnection shows up in the biggest spots, when the world is watching, when what you have done all season is on display.
Nantz and Romo should have the broadcast strategy of that last play down. Romo’s appeal may be that he is like a fan, but he’s doing the Super Bowl broadcast and being paid handsomely to do so.
He just needed to get out of the way to allow Nantz to make his complete call, then wait until after the pictures and sounds had their moment to note that Mahomes is Michael Jordan.
It wasn’t time for the gunslinger. CBS had the right plan, and Nantz and Romo executed at times. But, on the biggest play of the season, Romo freelanced and lost.
(Photo of Tony Romo and Jim Nantz: Rob Carr / Getty Images)
IOWA CITY, Iowa — It’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when it was determined in Iowa that any shot that left Caitlin Clark’s hands was not just a reasonable shot, but also a good shot. Because there are green lights, and then there are green lights. And Clark has matter-of-factly operated in the latter for much of her career.
But there’s a solid argument to be made that it was Feb. 6, 2022.
It was Clark’s sophomore season, and while she had been putting up big numbers, she wasn’t yet considered the one-woman wrecking crew that she has now become. To get to that level of lore, a player needs to not just throw the rocks but slay Goliath. And at that point, though she was a massive scorer, she was on a team that hadn’t yet taken down the best opponents. The Hawkeyes were 1-9 against top-25 teams in her career and they were on the road facing No. 6 Michigan.
She started the game with a step-back from the free throw line and followed up with a pull-up triple. She tossed in some drives and more mid-ranges, but the real treat came when she began hitting logo 3s during the fourth quarter as the Hawkeyes (read: Clark) attempted to pull off the upset. In one 92-second span she hit three transition 3s, the final while being swarmed by Michigan defenders who Clark put on skates. She finished with 46 points. Though Iowa still lost, something in that night shifted.
As the broadcasters shouted through their mics after yet another logo triple, “What did she do? What did she just do?” Iowa coach Lisa Bluder walked calmly along the sideline, not even surprised or elated enough to uncross her arms. Without context, she simply looks like a coach saying same old, same old as she turned to her bench.
“At first, when you’re coaching her, it’s kind of entertaining in practice when she takes some of those and makes some of those shots. But then in games as the coach, you’re thinking, ‘Oof, that’s not advised,’ ” Bluder said. “But there’s the point where you realize, ‘She’s different than everyone else and she can actually make these at a pretty alarming rate.’
“There was a shift in my mind,” she added. “At that point it was like, ‘OK, we’re going to go with this.’”
“This” as in: For Clark, anything goes.
And since Feb. 6, 2022, this has worked pretty well for both Clark and Iowa. The senior is now 39 points shy of the NCAA women’s basketball scoring record, and the Hawkeyes, who slayed South Carolina — the Goliath of women’s basketball — in last season’s Final Four, are now recognized nationally as a powerhouse and firmly nationally ranked No. 2 this season behind the Gamecocks.
Clark is a recognized name outside of the women’s basketball world, a player who is shadowed by security officers before and after games and at public events. She has NIL partnerships with Nike, State Farm and Gatorade. She is the presumptive No. 1 pick in the 2024 WNBA Draft if she declares, and the biggest headache for opposing coaches in women’s college hoops if she opts to return for her fifth year.
Ask coaches who’ve faced her (or who fear they could down the line), and they’ll all explain the same thing: You don’t stop her. You might slow her down, you might make her more inefficient, but there is no stopping Clark. When Clark dropped those 46 points on Michigan in 2022, Wolverine coach Kim Barnes Arico said after the game, “I didn’t even know what the heck was going on.”
That might be the most impressive part of her run toward the scoring record — Clark’s unwavering consistency. She has never missed a game. In 124 outings at Iowa, she has failed to score in double digits only once. As she has stretched her range over the past four seasons, her field goal percentages have steadily risen. “Her consistency is off the charts,” Bluder said Thursday night after Clark scored 27 points in a victory against Penn State. “For her to do this day after day, night after night, sold out arenas, chasing records, for her to be this consistent is incredible. Everybody has a bad night. We all have bad nights. Caitlin doesn’t have bad nights.”
As teams have thrown new and different defensive looks at her, she has continued to outpace whatever opponents can create. Double her, and she finds the angle. Crowd her, and she rises above to hit the shot. Throw the kitchen sink at her only to find out she can hit logo 3s and do dishes at the same time.
Of the top-10 scorers in Division I history, only two averaged more than 25 points during their entire college careers (current record-holder Kelsey Plum: 25.4; Elena Delle Donne: 26.7).
Clark has averaged 28.1.
This season, fans from across the Big Ten have shelled out hundreds of dollars to get their butts in conference arenas in the hopes that their “home” team might be met with a 46-point drubbing from the 6-foot guard just so they, too, can have The Caitlin Clark Experience.
Under the microscope, Clark hasn’t wavered either. Her worst game this season — a 24-point, six-rebound, three-assist night against Kansas State — would still be a career night for 99 percent of college basketball players.
Said Clark after the game: “I think it shows you’ve got to come in every single day and be ready to play basketball because no matter who it is, you can beat anybody, you can lose [to] anybody. That’s a great thing about women’s basketball. That’s what makes it so fun. I’m just disappointed we didn’t really put on a great performance for our fans who came out and supported us really well.”
GO DEEPER
When will Caitlin Clark break the women’s college basketball all-time scoring record?
Because when you’re watching Clark, it’s not just basketball, it’s a true performance that she’s putting on for the fans who show up with not just a hope but an expectation to be wowed and amazed. They don’t want 3s, they want logo 3s. They don’t want no-look passes, they want to see something they’ve never seen before. They want the show that Clark’s coaches and teammates have gotten in practice over the past four seasons. They don’t just want Bluder’s green light for Clark, they want her on the Autobahn for 40 minutes.
For all that attention, Clark has not just delivered, she has been consistently great, consistently leaving viewers asking, “What did she do? What did she just do?”
Now, she’s perhaps a few quarters away from cementing herself at the top of the NCAA women’s scoring record, a feat that for Clark — with that green light — seems as though it could be just one or two really good quarters away from becoming the scoring maestro.
While the Nuggets didn’t change their 18-man roster at the 2024 NBA trade deadline, other contenders around the league made a variety of moves — mostly on the margins — in an effort to steal the throne from Denver.
From the view at altitude, here are the winners and losers of the deadline:
Winner: New York Knicks
The leader of every other winners-and-losers think-piece is the leader of this one, too. New York landed Bojan Bogdanovic and Alec Burks on deadline day at relatively low cost, but the Nuggets already got a close-up view of the new Knicks when O.G. Anunoby registered six steals against them at MSG. With Milwaukee reeling and Philadelphia hedging after Joel Embiid’s injury (Buddy Hield was a solid middle-ground acquisition), New York suddenly transformed into the most proactive win-now team in the East this deadline.
Loser: Dallas Mavericks
In arguably the highest-profile trade on actual deadline day, Dallas overpaid for P.J. Washington, whose 13.6 points per game felt somewhat like empty calories in Charlotte. The trade was simultaneously an admission of failure in the Grant Williams Experiment and a brand-new roll of the dice. More importantly, the Mavericks did what the Knicks avoided: They traded a precious first-round pick (2027). Future: mortgaged. Draft assets are close to extinct now for Dallas, a franchise throwing darts at the wall and hoping one will stick before it’s too late to salvage and extend the Luka Doncic era.
Winner: Boston Celtics
Is Xavier Tillman going to be a significant role player in Joe Mazzulla’s playoff rotation? Probably not. Will the Celtics feel a lot more comfortable having an affordable, playable backup big ready to aid the injury-prone Kristaps Porzingis and aging Al Horford? Absolutely. Especially if they’re dealing with six or seven games of Nikola Jokic. This was a depth move that felt tailored to fit a Nuggets NBA Finals matchup, but it cost Boston only two second-round picks to add a salary under $2 million.
Loser: Oklahoma City Thunder
The Thunder should have done what Boston did. Don’t get me wrong: Gordon Hayward seems like an outstanding veteran addition to a young team. A lot of teams would have pursued him if Charlotte had bought out his contract. But Oklahoma City’s biggest need still hasn’t been addressed. Back in October, I asked Michael Porter Jr. for his first impressions of Chet Holmgren after Denver won in OKC. “I think he’s very, very talented,” Porter said. “To me, he’s more of a four.” Holmgren, who has an even more injury-prone body type than Porzingis and already missed all of last season, is the Thunder’s starting five. Sophomore charge-taking specialist Jaylin Williams (6-foot-9) backs him up. The center position runs dry from there. For a team so small and with a rebounding weakness (No. 27 in the league), it seems neglectful not to dip into a horde of 10,000 picks and add a more traditional five to at least deploy in bench lineups. Without reinforcements, Holmgren is susceptible to getting worn down by Jokic in a long series.
Winner: Monte Morris
Congratulations to one former Nuggets backup point guard, who moved from the league’s most puzzling team (Detroit) to a Western Conference title contender. Smart trade for the Timberwolves, who needed more offense to support their top-rated defense. Minnesota’s two most common lineups involving point guard Mike Conley have net ratings of 9.6 and 7.6, respectively, in 635 combined minutes. The most common lineup without Conley on the floor is a minus-5.1 in 127 minutes (a lineup including Anthony Edwards and Karl-Anthony Towns), and second-most common without Conley is a modest 4.9 in 100 minutes (using all four starters except him). Morris supplies 3-point shooting and an upgrade in turnover prevention for an offense that’s third-worst in the NBA at protecting the ball in clutch time.
Loser: Bruce Brown
Pour one out for a different former Nuggets backup point guard. Brown did the Reverse Morris three weeks ago, getting traded from a young playoff-caliber core in Indianapolis to a losing team. But the league-wide expectation was that Toronto would flip Brown. There was a market for his versatility and recent championship experience. So he waited and waited, until the deadline passed Thursday, leaving him temporarily stranded in Canada. Brown was just one bullet point on a list of head-scratching decisions by the Raptors, also including their forfeiture of a 2024 first-round pick among other assets for Kelly Olynyk and Ochai Agbaji.
Winner: The NFL
The most lopsided final score of the 2024 sports calendar so far: Super Bowl week vs. NBA trade deadline week. The NFL needn’t worry about its biggest build-up of the season getting hijacked by the NBA thanks to the latter’s new collective bargaining agreement. This was the most boring trade deadline in recent memory. The two biggest deals occurred in January. The biggest surprises were the players who didn’t get traded. Football kept a firm grasp on media attention.
Loser: Hourglass emojis
Is nothing sacred? When LeBron James drops a cryptic social media post and his team doesn’t move heaven and earth for him, that’s when you know it’s an underwhelming trade deadline. The hourglass emoji turned out to be a symbol for NBA fans’ feelings as they refreshed Twitter on Thursday. Among the notable teams to stand pat: Nuggets, Clippers, Lakers, Warriors, Pelicans, Kings, Cavaliers, Magic and Hawks. That encompasses a decent chunk of the Western Conference playoff picture, perhaps an encouraging sign that the rest of the league isn’t catching up with Denver at an alarming pace. Nonetheless, LeBron’s hourglass emoji, and yours, was unfulfilled.
Etsy Inc., once known as a quirky marketplace for handmade, artisanal and vintage items, seems to be moving further away from its origins amid a much tougher e-commerce landscape and the impact of AI.
Etsy ETSY, +4.83%
will be marketing to a whole new audience on Sunday, when its first Super Bowl commercial will run. The 30-second ad is quirky; it depicts a generic 19th-century American leader who’s flummoxed over how to reciprocate France’s gift of the Statue of Liberty. With the help of an anachronistic smartphone, he and his team search on Etsy using its new Gift Mode option, and find its “Cheese Lover” category after determining that the French love cheese. Voilà — they decide to send the French some cheese.
The commercial is part of Etsy’s push of a new user interface featuring Gift Mode, which lets shoppers search for gifts for a specific type of person or occasion — combining generative AI and human curation to give gift buyers some unusual options.
But are these moves desperate and costly efforts to try to reach potential new buyers, coming on the heels of Etsy’s plans to lay off 11% of its staff?Or could running a TV ad at the most expensive time of the year actually lead to more sales on the once-fast growing marketplace?
Etsy believes these moves will help the company grow again, and its research shows the average American spends $1,600 a year on gifts. “There is no single market leader and Etsy sees a real opportunity to become the destination for gifting,” Etsy’s Chief Executive Josh Silverman said in a recent blog post.
Etsy is clearly under pressure after seeing its gross merchandise sales more than double in 2020 during the pandemic, when it became a go-to place to buy handmade masks and all kinds of items for the home, from vintage pieces to antiques to castoffs. From personal experience as an Etsy seller, I saw sales at my own small vintage-clothing shop more than double in 2020 and then fall back in 2021, while still remaining higher than in 2019. In the last two years, sales have slowed, and some other sellers have witnessed similar patterns, based on their comments in seller forums.
The number of sellers and buyers on the platform has increased on the same level as gross merchandise sales. But e-commerce competition has also gotten more fierce.
“Our main concern with Etsy is growing competition in the space from new players like Temu,” said Bernstein Research analyst Nikhil Devnani, in an email. Temu and fellow Chinese online retailer Shein have raised a lot of investor jitters, as Etsy’s gross merchandise sales have slipped over the last year and are forecast to fall again in its upcoming fourth-quarter earnings report later this month.
Devnani said a Super Bowl ad could potentially help the marketplace gain visibility, something it has always lacked.
“One dynamic they’ve talked about a lot is that brand awareness/recollection is still low, and this keeps frequency low,” he said, noting that Etsy buyers shop on the site about three times per year, on average. “They want to be more top-of-mind … Super Bowl ads are notoriously expensive of course, but can be impactful/get noticed.”
The company’s big focus on Gift Mode, however, could be a risky strategy. How many times a year do consumers look for gifts? And in a note Devnani wrote in October, before the company’s Gift Mode launch, he said that one of the concerns investors have is that Etsy is too niche. “’How often does someone need something special?’ is the rhetoric we hear most often,” he said. Etsy, then, is counting on buyers returning for other items for themselves.
Etsy CEO Silverman believes buyers will come back again and again to purchase gifts. Naved Khan, a B. Riley Securities analyst, said in a recent note to clients that he believes Gift Mode plays to Etsy’s core strengths, offering “unique goods at reasonable prices” versus the mass-produced products sold on Shein, Temu, Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +2.71%,
and other sites.
Consumer spending has changed, though. At an investor conference in December, Silverman said that consumers are spending on dining out and traveling, instead of buying things.
But while investors still view Etsy as a niche e-commerce site, some buyers and sellers see it overrun with repetitive, non-relevant ads. Complaints about a decline in search capabilities, reliance on email and chat for support, and constant tech changes are common on seller forums and Facebook groups. AI-generated art offered by newer sellers as a side hustle has also become a thought-provoking, debated issue. And there are complaints about mass-produced items making their way on the site.
Etsy said that in addition to its human and automated efforts, it also relies on community flags to help take down infringing products that are not allowed on its marketplace, and that community members should contact the company when if they see mass-produced items for sale on the site.
It also continues to work on search. On its last earnings call, Silverman said the company was moving beyond relevance to the next frontier of search, one “focused on better identifying the quality of each Etsy listing utilizing humans and [machine-learning] technology, so that from a highly relevant result set we bring the very best of Etsy to the top — personalized to what we understand of your tastes and preferences.”
The pressure could build on the company if its latest moves don’t generate growth. Etsy recently gave a seat on its board to a partner at activist investor Elliott Management, which bought a “sizable” stake in the company in the last few months. Marc Steinberg, who is responsible for public and private investments at Elliott, has also has been on the board at Pinterest PINS, -9.45%
since December 2022.
Elliott Management did not respond to questions. But in a statement last week, Steinberg said he was joining the board because he “believe[s] there is an opportunity for significant value creation.” Some sellers fear that the pressure from investors and Wall Street will lead to Etsy allowing mass-produced products onto the site. In its fall update, Etsy said the number of listings it removed for violating its handmade policy jumped 112% and that it was further accelerating such actions.
Etsy’s stock before the news of Elliott’s stake was down about 18% this year. Its shares are now off about 3.65% this year, after recently having their best day in seven years on the news that Steinberg joined the board.
Etsy is a unique marketplace that for many years had a much better reputation than some of its rivals, like eBay EBAY, +0.98%.
But since going public and answering to Wall Street, the need to provide growth and profits for investors has become much more of a driver. The Super Bowl ad and Gift Mode may bring a broader awareness to Etsy, but will it be the right kind of awareness? Sellers like me hope these new efforts will stave off the continuing fight with the likes of Temu and other vendors of mass-produced products, and help Etsy retain the remaining unique aspects of its marketplace.
In Gaza, every day is a struggle to find bread and water. Without safe water, many people will die from deprivation and disease. Credit: UNRWA
Opinion by Robert Misik (vienna, austria)
Inter Press Service
VIENNA, Austria, Feb 09 (IPS) – A bloodbath is taking place in the Middle East, and yet, the world is embroiled in absurd debates. One is tempted to say, paraphrasing Marx: here the tragedy, there the farce. The German-speaking world – and Germany in particular – takes a decidedly pro-Israeli stance, while in other societies, an equally dubious anti-Israeli position prevails.
At the beginning of October, Hamas and other Islamist groups not only launched an attack from the Gaza strip but also carried out a cruel massacre. Over 1 200 people were killed, most of them civilians, young party people, including many peace activists: the majority of the inhabitants of the affected kibbutzim belonged to the Israeli left.
Horrific war crimes were committed, which cannot be justified as ‘collateral damage’ of legitimate resistance. Nor can we ignore the fanatical ideology of radical Islamism, which eliminates empathy and justifies acts of bloodshed.
However, due to the bloody history of at least 75 years of conflict and the recent history of occupation policies and the irresponsible escalation strategies of Benjamin Netanyahu’s radical right-wing governments, the attack met much approval within the Palestinian population. Fatah and the Palestinian Authority have been weakened for years, and their support is dwindling.
Rights and obligations
The Israeli government responded with massive military action and retaliatory strikes. This, on the one hand, was to be expected – no nation in the world could not have reacted to such an attack – but, on the other hand, the war immediately escalated in a horrific manner, which was, unfortunately, also to be expected. Around 27 000 people have now lost their lives in Gaza. Entire families have been wiped out by the bombardments.
Under international law, Israel has the right to respond to such an attack, but every country also has the duty to act ‘proportionately’. What is proportionate – in relation to threats or to defined, legitimate war aims – is a complicated legal debate.
But it is largely undisputed that the shrugging acceptance of tens of thousands of civilian casualties cannot be justified, even in the fight against a ‘terrorist’ organisation. And excessive force that literally razes Gaza to the ground, which destroys the livelihoods of the civilian population, the supply of food and the medical-care system, is itself a war crime.
Put quite simply: to a bestial war crime by Hamas, Israel has itself responded with war crimes. And the matter is made worse by the fact that leading members of Israel’s government have engaged in appalling rhetoric, from Manichean religious-war language to vile fantasies of mass expulsions and ‘ethnic cleansing’.
Just as the history of the conflict has for decades provided both sides with arguments for viewing the other as the perpetrator and their own side only as the victim, the same has been true in these recent months. Palestinian figures see Hamas’ actions as a justified reaction to oppression, while their Israeli counterparts see excessive (and criminal) military action as a legitimate response to terror.
Yet, that is precisely the problem. Those who paint a Manichean, black-and-white picture fall far short of the terrible complexities of this conflict. There are horrible pogroms in the West Bank by right-wing extremist settlers and members of the army, and violent expulsions of Palestinians and an expropriation of their land. And there are terrible acts of violence involving unspeakable cruelty by Palestinian militias.
But the world is increasingly sorting itself into vocal supporter groups of fans and followers. In many societies, this is obviously about their own history and identity. To be more precise: a complex reality is being accommodated to the apparent requirements of their domestic politics of remembrance — and if it doesn’t fit, it is being made to.
Manipulation strategies
Germany and Austria have adopted a decidedly pro-Israeli position. First, this can be explained by their own history, the fatal past of genocidal anti-Semitism which escalated under the Nazi regime into the Shoah against European Jews.
This is why Germany has been an ally of Israel for decades: the former chancellor, Angela Merkel, declared it an important element of the German Staatsräson (reason of state). This is why there is, properly, a strong sensitivity in Germany towards anti-Semitism and the threat to Jews and why the identity of Israel as a safe ‘home’ for all Jews is supported.
The extreme right in both Germany and Austria supports Israel today, on the one hand because Israel’s opponents are Muslims (whom it hates even more than contemporary Jews) and on the other because this is the best way to immunise itself against the accusation of being ‘Nazi’.
In addition, however, the Israeli right – above all the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his party, in alliance with right-wing Jewish lobby groups abroad – has sought in recent decades to denounce almost any criticism of Israeli policy as ‘anti-Semitic’ and thus morally eliminate it.
In German-speaking countries and some other societies with a very well-founded sense of guilt, this manipulation strategy has worked: nobody wants to expose themselves to the suspicion of being seen as a person with morally reprehensible opinions — in other words, as an anti-Semite.
Susan Neiman, a Jewish-German-American intellectual who is director of the Berlin Einstein Centre, recently wrote a major essay in the New York Review of Books in which she spoke of a ‘philosemitic McCarthyism’ that had taken on the characteristics of ‘hysteria’.
Things had gone so far that ‘non-Jewish Germans publicly accuse Jewish writers, artists and activists of anti-Semitism’. As in the early postwar campaign of denunciation of ‘anti-Americanism’ led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, dissenting views are silenced.
In extreme cases, this has had bizarre consequences. Conferences have been banned, at which large numbers of people with the most diverse views should have been exchanging them. In Kassel, an Indian art critic and curator lost his position because he had signed a (rather stupid) Israel boycott petition years ago, despite having unequivocally condemned ‘the terror unleashed by Hamas on 7 October’ as a ‘terrible massacre’.
A Berlin theatre removed from its programme a humorous play (The Situation) about the conflict of narratives by the Austro-Israeli playwright Yael Ronen — now that the situation ‘puts us on Israel’s side’.
‘Israel’ has become a ‘trigger point’ in the culture wars, as with ‘wokeness’ or similar themes elsewhere. ‘Part of a proper culture war is … to want to misunderstand the other side at all costs’, the critic Hanno Rautenberg wrote recently in the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit, about the German debates on Israel: ‘One wrong word or even just one unsaid word and you’re threatened with discursive excommunication.’
No doubt there are forms of criticism of specific Israeli policies that carry more than just anti-Semitic overtones, but in most cases, this is far from reality. As a result, German public opinion is oddly many times more ‘pro-Israeli’ than Israeli public opinion itself.
Good and evil, oppressor and oppressed
If there is one-sidedness in the discourse in the German-speaking world, this certainly exists in other parts of the world as well, and not only in Muslim or Arab countries such as Turkey, Iran, Jordan or Indonesia.
In the United States, Britain and other societies, significant sections of the public and the academic left cultivate their own one-sidedness. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is described in categories of imperialism and colonialism, into which it hardly fits.
The ‘post-colonial’ left has adopted theories, some of which are quite inspiring and have opened up productive new intellectual horizons, but it has radicalised them into Manichean delusions. The world is divided into oppressor and oppressed — and, in this simple-minded worldview, the person identified as the ‘oppressed’ is always right. Since oppressors can never even comprehend the experiences of the oppressed, the oppressed must always be proved right.
From there, it is only a small step to the final clicking into place: the Palestinians are black / ‘people of colour’, the Jews are white, and in Israel, they are beacons of ‘US imperialism’. Even if one cannot find everything Hamas does to be right, as an authentic expression of the resistance of the oppressed against the system of oppression it is ‘right’ in a higher way. Israel, on the other hand, is a ‘settler-colonialist’ project.
Since, in this perspective, the idea of free debate is a ‘bourgeois ideology’ only invented to support the ruling power, dissenting views should be delegitimised or, if necessary, shouted down, because what is deemed ‘sayable’ and what ‘non-sayable’ is merely an effect of power.
Just as in Germany, any criticism of Israel is labelled ‘anti-Semitic’ and thus compromised as morally culpable, so any defence of Israel’s right to exist is dismissed as an expression of ‘racism’.
Amid all this dogmatism, one gets the impression the whole world has gone mad. While Germany unconditionally supports Israel, as an imperative of its own guilt and exterminationist anti-Semitism, American, British and other discourses are also characterised by the imperatives of their own history: racism, the genocide of indigenous populations, the enslavement of black people, imperial exploitation, colonial oppression and exploitation. Fragments of the real are used arbitrarily and pressed into the scheme of one’s own politics of memory, for which ‘identity politics’ is then actually the opposite decryption.
Most of the time, all this has less to do with real Palestinians and real Israelis than who and what one wants to be — how one wants to see the world and oneself in it. One poses as a heroic fighter against anti-Semitism, or against racism and colonialism, while the external appurtenances of reality become at most the set for this show of the self, as props in a play— to whose script reality must be made to conform.
Source: Social Europe and International Politics and Society (IPS)-Journal, Brussels.
Robert Misik is a writer and essayist. He publishes in many German-language newspapers and magazines, including Die Zeit and Die Tageszeitung.
Opinion by Jomo Kwame Sundaram (kuala lumpur, malaysia)
Inter Press Service
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Feb 07 (IPS) – Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions in international trade and investment agreements – long abused by opportunists with means – are slowly being rejected by cautious governments.
Jomo Kwame SundaramDeveloping country governments need to be much more wary of ISDS and its implications, and should urgently withdraw from existing commitments. They should expunge ISDS clauses in existing trade and investment agreements and exclude them from new ones.
ISDS ripe for abuse
ISDS allows a foreign investor to sue a ‘host’ government for compensation by claiming new laws, regulations and policies adversely affect expected profits, even if changed in the public interest. It involves binding arbitration without going to court.
ISDS provisions are included in many free trade agreements (FTAs) and bilateral investment treaties (BITs). These were invoked in 84% of cases before the World Bank Group’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), the most used arbitration forum. Investment contracts and national investment laws are also invoked.
ISDS decisions are made by commercial ‘for-profit’ arbitrators prone to conflicts of interest. Foreign investors can thus seek compensation amounting to billions of dollars via a parallel legal system favouring them.
ISDS provisions in such agreements enable foreign investors to sue governments for billions of dollars in compensation by claiming changes in national law or policy will reduce profits for their investments.
Neocolonial ISDS
During the colonial era, imperial authorities often used concession contracts to grant private companies exclusive rights to extract resources, such as minerals and crops, or conduct other economic operations, including building infrastructure and operating utilities.
Investments were protected by (colonial) law, and sometimes by investment contracts after independence. Companies might negotiate contracts with governments to get better terms. A tenth of the claims before the ICSID involved such contracts.
Thus, ISDS perpetuates a colonial pattern of privileging the interests of foreign capital. The World Bank’s Foreign Investment Advisory Service (FIAS) has long promoted including ISDS in domestic investment laws. Thirty of the 65 countries it advised enacted new laws providing for such arbitration.
Investment treaty arbitration started as a post-colonial innovation to protect the assets of former colonial powers from newly independent states. Investment arbitration rules deliberately privilege foreign investment over national law.
ISDS abused, biased and corrupt
ISDS encourages abuse and corruption. As legal fees and arbitration awards tend to be very significant for developing countries, when invoked, ISDS has a chilling effect intimidating host governments, often forcing them to concede or compromise regardless of the merits of the claims.
Nigeria was ordered to pay US$11 billion to a British Virgin Islands company, Process & Industrial Developments (P&ID). P&ID had used ISDS to claim compensation from Nigeria for allegedly breaking gas supply and processing contract.
When P&ID initiated ISDS proceedings in August 2012, it had not even bought a site for the gas supply facility. Yet, it claimed to be ready to fulfil its contractual obligations.
Presiding English High Court Judge Knowles expressed “puzzlement over how the Tribunal failed to notice the serious irregularities” despite various “red flags” of fraud noted by others.
Elsewhere, Pacific Rim Mining Corp, a Canadian company, had proposed a massive gold mine in El Salvador using water-intensive cyanide ore processing. Later, it claimed the government had violated its domestic investment law by not issuing a permit for the mine.
The ICSID ultimately rejected the company’s claim, ordering it to pay two-thirds of the US$12 million El Salvador had spent on legal fees. But the company has refused to pay.
Wake-up call ‘down under’
The Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network (AFTINET) advocacy group has updated its brief supporting its call for the urgent review and removal of ISDS clauses in the country’s existing foreign trade and investment agreements.
AFTINET has specifically urged the Australian Joint Standing Committee on Treaties (JSCOT) to review and amend the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Area (AANZFTA).
The Australian Labor Party government, elected in May 2022, pledged not to include ISDS in new trade agreements, and to review such provisions in current agreements. Its brief focuses on ISDS provisions used by Australian mining billionaire Clive Palmer to sue Canberra.
Registering his Zeph Investments in Singapore, Palmer has used AANZFTA ISDS provisions to get compensation from Australia in two matters. The first is his application for an iron ore mining lease in Western Australia.
The second is against the authorities’ refusal of coal mining permits in Queensland for environmental reasons. Palmer has also made a third claim invoking the Singapore-Australia FTA, bringing his total claims to nearly A$410 billion.
Despite the government’s policy against ISDS, the provision was not reviewed in the amended AANZFTA. AFTINET is urging Canberra to urgently remove its exposure to ISDS cases as Palmer’s actions have made this all the more urgent.
ISDS abuses recognised
The Palmer case has increased concerns about ISDS, especially the abuse of lack of transparency. Arbitration processes are typically closed-door, preventing public, including forensic scrutiny of business transactions and practices.
AFTINET notes “excessive” ISDS claims have been growing, while Judge Knowles noted the “severe abuses” of ISDS in the Nigeria v. P&ID case “driven by greed”.
The huge compensations sought and awarded have encouraged even more “long-shot, speculative ISDS claims”. Such claims are typically based on “loose” book-keeping and dubious projections and other calculations, easily falsified by well-paid accomplices.
While the Australian government pledges no new ISDS commitments, but also wants to get rid of earlier ones, much more vulnerable developing country governments seem quite oblivious of the huge risks they are exposing their countries to!
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