Friday, October 21, 2022
An "ex" gets Royal approval
Meaning that "exes" are now respectable. Many marriages these days have a third party: the former husband or wife of one member of the couple, the "ex". It's particularly common in Australia for former partners to remain friendly and continue to have some role in one-another's lives.
I am myself in that position. I regularly see an ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend. And I value both friendships greatly. My present girfriend grumbles about it, though. She says it does not happen in her home country in Southern Europe
As Harry and Meghan are 5,000 miles away in California, and Prince Andrew is banned from polite society, the King's vision of a 'slimmed-down' monarchy is looking too skinny.
So step forward a new member of 'The Firm'.
I can reveal that Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles carried out his first royal duty on behalf of the Queen Consort on Tuesday.
He formally represented his ex-wife at a funeral — and friends claim it could be the first engagement of many. '
Andrew is happy to do anything he is asked,' one of his friends tells me. 'He still enjoys a warm relationship with Camilla.'
The news was recorded in the Court Circular, the official record of royal engagements.
'The Queen Consort was represented by Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles,' it says of his attendance at the funeral of John Bowes-Lyon at the London Oratory. Bowes-Lyon, who died last month aged 80, was a second cousin of the late Queen.
Formally representing Camilla meant Parker Bowles, 82, was given a prominent pew at the Roman Catholic church.
He and Camilla, who married in 1973, have two children. They separated in the 1980s, finally divorcing in 1995, with a royal biographer once remarking: 'It is said that an English gentleman will always lay down his wife for his country and this was certainly true in the case of Andrew Parker Bowles.'
Camilla married Prince Charles in 2005, while Parker Bowles exchanged vows with Rosemary Pitman in 1996. She died in 2010.
Parker Bowles and Bowes-Lyon were cousins. Their great-uncle was the legendary roué Raymund de Trafford
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Texas family fights at Supreme Court to keep adopted Native American child due to law that favors tribes
Chad and Jennifer Brackeen almost had their Native American adopted son taken away from them because of a federal law that codifies what their lawyers say is "racial discrimination."
Now, the family is fighting to keep custody of his half-sister through a Supreme Court case that could gut a major part of that law but which Native tribes warn could strike a far-reaching blow to their sovereignty.
The case, Haaland v. Brackeen, combines cases from a handful of other families and multiple interested states, including Texas, where the Brackeens live. At the center of the controversy is the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a 1970s law meant to protect Native American children in state child custody proceedings.
The law was a reaction to high rates of Native children being adopted by non-tribal members – often with little process and unjustly. It prioritizes placing Native children with extended family members, members of their tribe, and if that's not possible, with another Native family. Exceptions for "good cause" are allowed but not specifically defined.
"Congress’s racial discrimination is ‘most evident’ in ICWA’s third placement preference … which bluntly favors any ‘Indian famil[y]’ from any of 574 tribes over any non-Indian family," a brief from the Brackeens' lawyers says.
"The placement preferences ‘operate individually and jointly’ to disadvantage non-Indian parents seeking to adopt an Indian child," reads the court filing.
The Brackeens' lawyers also argued that Congress overstepped its bounds by trying to regulate state child custody proceedings.
The Brackeens began fostering their adopted son, referred to in court documents as A.L.M., in 2016, after his mother, a member of Navajo Nation, was unable to care for him. Navajo Nation eventually identified A.L.M. as a member of its tribe more than a year later, according to the Brackeens, and sought to place him with other tribal members who were not related to him and lived in a different state.
"They had decided that we were not a suitable home for him. And so we decided to pursue adoption through the court system," Jennifer Brackeen told Fox News Digital.
The family to whom the Navajo Nation wished to send A.L.M. stepped back from the proceedings, and the Brackeens won custody. But their adoption saga continued after A.L.M.'s mother gave birth to his half-sister, known as Y.R.J.
The biological mother supported placement with the Brackeens. But Navajo Nation sought to place Y.R.J., according to the Brackeens' lawyers, "in another state hundreds of miles away with either a great-aunt or an unrelated Navajo couple."
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Sweden’s conservative government abandons ‘feminist’ foreign policy
Sweden will abandon its signature “feminist” foreign policy to pursue its national interests more assertively, the country’s new top diplomat has said.
For eight years successive centre-left governments have put gender equality and women’s rights at the centre of their approach to international relations, reinventing the notion of Sweden as a “moral superpower”.
This has involved lobbying for measures to promote girls’ education, encouraging more women into the workforce and positions of influence and tackling violence against girls and women.
Since the idea was pioneered in 2014 by Margot Wallstrom, the former foreign affairs minister, it has caught on across the Western world. It gained particular traction in Germany, where Annalena Baerbock, the Foreign Minister, is drawing up an explicitly feminist strategy for diplomacy.
The new right-wing ruling coalition in Sweden, which relies on the hard-right Sweden Democrats for its parliamentary majority, said it would concentrate instead on “promoting Swedish interests in every domain”. It has already removed the feminist foreign policy mission statement from the Government’s website.
“Equality between men and women is a central value for both Sweden and this government, but no, we won’t pursue a feminist foreign policy,” Tobias Billstrom, the newly appointed Foreign Minister, told Aftonbladet.
“The label hasn’t served its purpose and above all it has obscured the fact that Swedish foreign policy must be based on the question of what Sweden’s values and interests are,” he said.
What the shift will mean in practice remains to be seen.
Ann Linde, Mr Billstrom’s predecessor, was an enthusiastic proponent of feminist diplomacy, combining it with other liberal causes.
However, critics dismissed the philosophy as platitudinous and ill-suited to an era of great-power rivalry, noting that Sweden had exported weapons to authoritarian regimes and introduced a tough asylum policy.
Swedish traditions of neutrality and avoiding armed conflicts have been diluted: it sent troops to a French-led military task force in Mali, delivered missiles to Ukraine and applied to join NATO.
Mr Billstrom said his main priorities would be NATO accession and European and Nordic-Baltic co-operation.
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New economic research has finally demolished the popular notion that the 23.3 per cent gender pay gap is primarily driven by employers paying women less for doing the same job as men
While sexism still impacts some private-sector professional salaries, the real issue is that men dominate highly paid sectors such as mining, while women take most of the low-paid jobs, such as in aged and child care.
And the research argues the pay gap could be cut by one third to 15.6 per cent if we could shift to a 40:40:20 gender concentration of workers – 40 per cent women, 40 per cent men and 20 per cent any gender – across all industries and occupations.
The Gender Equity Insights 2022 report from Curtin University’s specialist unit, the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, offers detailed evidence of how the composition of the workforce generates pay gaps.
Centre director Alan Duncan said it was the first time the centre was able to use postcodes of workplaces to get more accurate state and territory comparisons.
“This is quite a clear articulation of the different contributors to overall numbers that we often see discussed in debates around gender pay gaps,” Professor Duncan said.
“The debate is often dominated by the extent of what are commonly termed like-for-like pay gaps, and by that we mean that men and women are paid differently for performing the same role in the same organisation.”
Salary differences for the same occupations still existed, he said, but the bigger problem was that wages in some industries were much lower than in others and that women were concentrated in relatively low-paying sectors.
He said that even with a 40:40:20 split “there’s another two-thirds of the pay gap that remains to be explained”. Some was attributable to like-for-like salary differences, and some because the journey to a 50:50 split had some way to go.
“I think it’s important to understand all sides of the issue,” he said. “This shouldn’t come as a surprise – it’s something that’s been discussed for some time. But we’ve sought to really get some clarity and precision on it.”
Professor Duncan said it was important to question why some sectors were poorly paid and whether women’s contributions were adequately remunerated.
“It is important, I think, to reflect on whether or not we are rewarding the value of an aged care or a childcare worker or somebody in our health system in the manner that we should,” he said.
His team used the new WGEA location data to compare pay metrics, gender pay gaps and organisational practices across Australia. It found that in most states and territories, the main driver of the gap was the gender imbalance in industries, and this was especially so in Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory. Resource-rich WA was the worst in the nation at 32.1 per cent, but the gap would halve to 16.5 per cent under the 40:40:20 rule. Under that ratio, the gap in the NT would reduce by two thirds, from 25.3 per cent to 8.3 per cent; NSW and Victoria would see gender pay gaps fall by 7.4 and 6.5 percentage points; and Queensland by a larger margin of 8.8 percentage points, from 22.5 per cent down to 13.7 per cent.
It also found that for people working in major cities, the gender pay gap in base remuneration is about 19 per cent. However, the gender pay gap rises steadily to 28.2 per cent for those working in remote areas, and to 29.3 per cent for workers in very remote parts of the country,
The report said Australia needed more men in healthcare and social assistance, and education and training, and more women in construction, mining, manufacturing, information services, transport and wholesale.
“There also needs to be an increase in the share of women in leadership positions, technicians and trades workers and operators and drivers,” it said.
WGEA director Mary Wooldridge said Australia had one of the most highly gender-segregated industrial structures in the developed world.
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
1 comment:
The gender pay gap has been repeatedly disproven, but like the undead it keeps rising from grave. This seems appropriate given Halloween is just around the corner...
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