동료 성폭행 한 포항시 공무원의 최후

www.huffingtonpost.kr/entry/rape_kr_5a77c686e4b0905433b5af3f

名護市長に政府派新人が当選。「基地反対」で敗れた稲嶺陣営で垣間見た沖縄の現状

2月4日、任期満了に伴う名護市長選挙がありました。無所属新人の渡具知武豊（とぐち・たけとよ）氏が2万389票を得て当選しました。

対する稲嶺進（いなみね・すすむ）氏は、1万6931票を獲得しましたが、3458票差で落選しました。

投票率は76・9％でした。

自民、公明、維新が渡具知氏を推薦していました。自民党は、選挙期間中、小泉進次郎筆頭副幹事長を名護市に2度送り込むなど「全力」で応援していました。

また、公明党も総動員で渡具知氏支援に回りました。南城市長選（1月22日）で自公推薦の現職候補が敗れた一因は、既に名護市長選に総力を挙げていた公明党の応援が南城市で手薄になっていたからとも言われています。

（関連記事　65票差で翁長派の新人が制す。沖縄・南城市長選に行ってみた。）

政府は現在、市民らが反対する中、名護市辺野古で米軍新基地建設を進めています。

渡具知氏は「裁判の結果に従う」として基地建設を「容認」する構えです。ところが、選挙期間中は辺野古問題に触れませんでした。代わりに、無料Wi-Fi拡充やスターバックス誘致などを含む地域振興を前面に訴えました。

小泉氏は応援演説で「新市長に求められているのは（辺野古問題を巡る名護市民の）対立に終止符を打つこと」と強調し、争点を「基地問題」から「町の発展」にそらせました。

選挙結果は、より多くの名護市民が地域振興に期待を寄せる現実を示したといえます。

2月3日の渡具知陣営の街頭演説で、渡具知派の市民らは小泉氏に夢中でした。期待の実態を表しているようで印象的でした。

「進次郎さんが今、すき家の前を通過しました」

到着までの動向が拡声器で紹介されると、歓声が上がり、高揚感が漂い始めました。会場は、選挙車両の壇上だけがスポットライトで輝き、コンサートのようでした。

一方、稲嶺陣営の街頭演説は、淡々と語る稲嶺氏に耳をすませる支持者らの姿が印象的でした。総決起大会（1月23日）から続く静かな熱気が、支持者同士のつながりをさらに深めているように見えました。

（参考記事　3850人の圧倒的な熱気。稲嶺進氏の総決起大会に行ってみた。）

地元の若者らが普段着で登壇し「戦争につながる基地建設を止めて、未来に進みたい」と真正面から訴える姿が新鮮でした。

選挙結果を受け、稲嶺氏は「争点をずらされた」と話しています。稲嶺陣営では、渡具知氏が基地問題を論じず当選したことについて「基地建設についての民意が出たとは言えない」とする声が聞こえてきます。

また、新基地反対の支持者らが「諦めず頑張ろう」と翁長知事に拍手を続け、新たな決意を感じさせる場面もありました。

基地問題を巡り、沖縄の対立は一歩深まったように見えます。政府はどう終止符を打つのか。まだ何も見えていません。

www.huffingtonpost.jp/lee-jinhee-masahiro/nago-mayor-election_a_23352485/

Well-Educated Mums Still Suffer ‘Pay Penalty’ If They Choose Part-Time Work, Says IFS
Well educated mums who choose to work part-time still suffer a “pay penalty” over time, a new report has found.

Calls have been made for power-holders to “redesign the jobs market” after the IFS study the gender pay gap accelerates even more rapidly for mothers opt for part-time jobs.

Overall gender wage gap has fallen from 28% to 18% since the early 1990s for the less well educated, but has remained stubbornly at 22% for the highest educated, the study reveals.

Mums tend to spend more time in part-time employment and therefore don’t reap the pay rises associated with more experience, research found.

But by the time a first child reaches the age of 20, mothers earn around 30% less on average than similarly educated fathers, said the report funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Some of the gap is explained by mothers in part-time jobs or taking a break from work altogether, said the report.

Even before they have children, women earn around 10% less than men, but the gap widens for many after they have children.

Monica Costa Dias, IFS associate director, said: “There are many likely reasons for persistent gaps in the wages of men and women which research is still investigating, but the fact that working part-time has a long-term depressing effect is an important contributing factor.

“It is remarkable that periods spent in part-time work lead to virtually no wage progression at all. It should be a priority for governments and others to understand the reasons for this.

“Addressing it would have the potential to narrow the gender wage gap significantly.”

Robert Joyce, IFS associate director, added: “It is now the highest-educated women whose wages are the furthest behind their male counterparts, and this is particularly related to the fact that they lose out so badly from working part-time.”

Sam Smethers, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, said: “What this study shows very clearly is that as a society we are not doing enough to value women’s talents. That is a blow to our productivity and a huge problem for the economy as a whole.

“We need to make it possible for part-time work to keep women on the career ladder.

“Employers should offer all roles, including more senior ones, as flexible working unless there is a good business case not to, and create more senior part-time roles.

“It is time to change our jobs market to one which helps parents, especially mothers, to get on.”

Helen Barnard, head of analysis at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, said: “It’s just not right that we treat part-time workers as if they are less valuable than full-timers.

“The majority of women working part-time are mothers, who often work part-time so that they can also take care of children or other adults.

“But they pay a heavy price for trying to balance these two roles. The poverty rate for part-time workers is double that for full-time workers.

“We can do something about this and redesign the jobs market so it works for everyone. Employers can make that happen by increasing the number and quality of jobs that are open to part-time workers – and hire flexibly rather than only allowing existing employees to negotiate part-time hours.

“In the meantime, as child poverty rises, the Chancellor should show he understands these pressures and ease the constraints facing low income part-time workers and their families by lifting the benefits freeze and fixing Universal Credit so families keep more of their earnings.”

Dawn Butler, Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities, said: “This report reiterates the Government’s consistent failure to adequately tackle the gender pay gap.

“This week, we will be celebrating the centenary of women’s suffrage.

“Ministers must get serious, we can now mark 100 years since women were allowed to vote, but despite this milestone, women still face unacceptable pay disparities.

“The IFS report highlights the need to address the unacceptable fact that motherhood means some women take a hit to their earnings.”

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/pay-penalyfs_uk_5a776484e4b0905433b56982

A Long History of Discrimination at Grocery Behemoth Publix

The Florida-based chain was recently criticized for denying PrEP coverage to employees. A new report says the decision is part of a pattern.

www.advocate.com/2018/2/04/long-history-discrimination-grocery-behemoth-publix

Britain Must End ‘Obsession’ With University Degrees, Says Influential Tory MP

Britain should end its “obsession” with academic degrees and concentrate more on technical training, influential Tory MP Robert Halfon says.

The chairman of the Commons Education Committee sees many graduates getting “paltry returns” for university study, while the country is grappling with a skills shortage ahead of Brexit.

In a speech to the Centre for Social Justice think tank on Monday, he will call for a radical “rebalancing” of the whole system to address the needs of students and employers.

“We have become obsessed with full academic degrees in this country,” he will say.

“We are creating a higher education system that overwhelmingly favours academic degrees, while intermediate and higher technical offerings are comparatively tiny.

“The labour market does not need an ever-growing supply of academic degrees.”

Halfon will point out that currently between a fifth and a third of graduates end up taking non-graduate jobs with the “graduate premium” varying “wildly” according to course and institution.

He will call for a major expansion of degree apprenticeships, where students earn as they learn without incurring “mountains of debt”, while arguing that those universities which do not provide a good return on academic courses should reinvent themselves as centres of technical excellence.

He will say that if the country is to continue to “lavishly furnish universities with taxpayers’ money”, there needs to be greater transparency about the returns that students can expect.

“The way we recognise universities is all wrong. We place far too much emphasis on research excellence, and not enough on teaching quality and employability,” he will say.

“Universities are an integral part of the machinery that feeds into the jobs market. It is reasonable to hold them accountable for the extent to which they prepare students for the world of work.”

Of the 59 higher education providers that received a gold standard in the Government’s teaching excellence framework, he will point out that 51 were not in the “elite” Russell Group of universities.

When it came to The Economist’s “value-added” university rankings, which compares graduates’ wages with what they would have been expected to earn if they had not gone to that university, the list was topped by Portsmouth University followed by Aston University, neither of which are in the Russell Group.

“While some Russell Group universities deserve their recognition as elite institutions, others appear to trade well on their brands, while their less reputable counterparts remain unrecognised,” Halfon will add.

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/halonuniversity-obsession_uk_5a776df6e4b0905433b570ba

15 große GroKo-Projekte, über die sich Union und SPD schon jetzt einig sind

www.huffingtonpost.de/entry/groko-projekte_de_5a776411e4b01ce33eb3fc2f

Are We Missing The Bigger Picture?
The plastic-free debate that has been gaining momentum in the UK is hugely encouraging. Not only since Blue Planet do we know that plastic pollution is a massive problem for our environment. We see plastic bags on beaches, mountains of plastic in landfill and are reading horror stories on micro-plastics in fish.

Many pubs and bars are now avoiding plastic straws and there has been an outcry over increasingly ridiculous plastic packaging in supermarkets.

And with good reason. Conventional plastics are derived from petroleum and biodegrade extremely slowly – estimates range from 20 to 1,000 years for plastic bags.

The success of the bag charge in reducing plastic bag usage is encouraging – in only a few months after its introduction in October 2015, usage dropped by an estimated 85%. This bodes well for further, carefully considered regulation to nudge us as consumers to live more sustainably.

The ‘Latte Levy’ currently being considered would seem like a big step forward. Given the impact of the bag charge, could the levy help reduce our daily usage of seven million disposable, and often hard to recycle, coffee cups down to ‘just’ one million?

It would certainly be good news in terms of greenhouse gases. Number one sustainable lifestyle authority Lucy Siegle has a regular slot on reducing plastic on the One Show and an excellent column at the Observer – great resources if you need more ideas on how to reduce your carbon footprint without taking the fun out of life.

But, as useful as the debate around packaging is, two things stand out to me.

First – why only plastic bags and coffee cups? By all means, if you wait until you get to the office to make yourself a cup of coffee or shop with reusable bags, that’s fantastic and I applaud you. But why not think about waste and plastics more generally?

What about our wardrobes?

In the UK we discard around one million tonnes of clothing each year according to WRAP figures, so fashion is an important area of consumption to consider. According to government figures 2.5billion coffee cups are thrown away in the UK every year. Similarly, last year a study by Sainsburys and Oxfam estimated that consumers threw away 235million items of clothing in one month alone.

This would suggest that we are throwing away very roughly as many items of clothing a month as coffee cups.

Although some fashion brands have lowered their prices so radically over the past decade that the price of some garments are indeed within reaching distance of that of your morning coffee, on the whole this would strike most people as a staggering waste of money at the very least.

But on environmental grounds, this is also hugely problematic, not only because the amount of resources going into making a garment is most likely far larger than that of a disposable cup.

More importantly, so much of the clothing on the high street – ranging from cut price fast fashion all the way to the most premium labels – is made partly or completely of polyester, acrylic and the like, which is, you guessed it, essentially plastic. The majority of all sportswear is made of it, as is a lot of lingerie, and it is even sometimes mixed into premium price knitwear.

The issue is that so much of this ends up in landfill – an estimated 300,000 tonnes each year, or about a third of what we discard – and this plastic contained in clothing does not biodegrade easily either. Being petroleum-based, it is also highly flammable. Alex James demonstrates vividly with a blow torch in his insightful documentary ‘Slowing down fast fashion’.

Synthetic fabrics do have a place in clothing, such as in tights, sportswear, and it can also be nice in some other garments. But this need not mean new fabrics anymore. More and more fashion brands, such as those we stock at Sheer Apparel, use recycled synthetics in an intelligent way or use end of line fabric, if they don’t stay away from synthetics altogether.

If we are to take the plastic-free debate seriously, we must also look at our wardrobes. This includes considering fabric composition when we shop and buying quality that lasts.

Secondly – let’s consider the bigger picture of reducing waste overall.

As the owner of a growing business, I can’t help but feel for the poor team behind those unfortunately plastic-wrapped coconuts at Waitrose.

I am no expert on food waste in general, and coconut longevity in particular, but might it not be the case that, done sensibly, wrapping food in plastic (preferably recycled as well as recyclable) actually prevents food waste? And that the team behind those coconuts has thought this all through?

For most businesses, just like for households, plastic is not entirely avoidable, and should be used where it makes sense. For our business, for instance, that means using plastic to protect products that are of a high quality, are meant to last, and have taken a considerable amount of resources to make. And it means reusing as much of this plastic as is possible or recycling it. We share a video of a behind the scenes look at how we approach plastic packaging on our sustainability page.

Patagonia, the clothing company that places huge emphasis on sustainable practices, commissioned an interesting study into its own use of plastic in 2014. It concluded that using plastic wrapping in some areas of the business is essential, because, by protecting a garment, plastic can prevent the resources that went into making that garment from going to waste.

By all means let’s continue to talk about ridiculous plastic packaging.

But let’s also apply common sense and look at the overall aim – reducing waste across all areas of our daily lives.

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/plastic-free-are-we-missing-the-bigger-picture_uk_5a73439ce4b0cb405dd1fc0c