Monthly Archives: September 2021

With American troops hurried withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden finally admitted what millions of Americans have known for years: there would be no triumphant fanfare to mark the end of the War on Terror that is finally, mercifully, ending on his watch.

But who will lead the charge to wind down Americas domestic national security panopticon that, after decades of taxpayer funding and expansions of its opaque surveillance powers, still failed to anticipate critical developments like the rise of ISIS or Afghanistans swift collapse to the Taliban?

Over the past 20 years, our failures in Afghanistan have become synonymous with the overreach and blind arrogance of the War on Terror. But that didnt just unfold on some distant desert battlefield. An equally treacherous surveillance state was built by American lawmakers right here at home.

Just three weeks after President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, a Senate supermajority voted 98-1 to enact a bundle of emergency counterterrorism measures known as the USA PATRIOT Act. Among a slew of authoritarian nightmares, the Patriot Act vastly expanded the federal governments authority to spy on its own citizens without oversight, indefinitely detain immigrants even vaguely suspected of terrorism, wiretap Americans without probable cause and compile incomparably massive databases of Americans internet activities and cell-phone metadata.

The Act answered many Americans post-9/11 desire for ever increasing layers of domestic security theater. It also paved the way for the paranoia and authoritarianism that gradually consumed the Republican Party.

The Patriot Act helped Republicans cloak their growing antidemocratic tendencies in the language of urgent national security imperatives, a trend that continues unbroken in Donald Trumps migrant caravan fearmongering and the FBIs Trump-era efforts to treat Black Lives Matter activists as a national security threat.

By 2002, driven by the Bush administrations dire warnings of future attacks, Republicans had already constructed most of what we now consider Americas post-9/11 national security apparatus. The new focus on domestic and foreign surveillance was given physical form by the creation of an imposing new Department of Homeland Security. 18 years later, DHS is now the third-largest Cabinet department behind Defense and Veterans Affairs. Homelands sway over Washington remains so powerful that Bidens recent proposal togaspstop increasing the DHS budget led to heated bipartisan outcry on Capitol Hill.

For many of the lawmakers compromised by an influx of surveillance industry lobbying cash, Americas future is one where you are always being watched.

Anyone who lived through the early years of surveillance gone wild remembers the emergence of a new popular vocabulary designed to mask our new realities: torture became enhanced interrogation, government disappearings extraordinary rendition and torture facilities black sites. Guantanamo Bay, a strip of land on the Cuban coast, became both a prison into which Muslims disappeared and an international symbol of Americas abandonment of the rule of law.

As a senator, Biden enthusiastically supported the construction and gluttonous overfeeding of our domestic surveillance state. At $1.25 trillion, building the American surveillance state was roughly equivalent to funding more than a decade of war in Afghanistan. As president, the task of deconstructing the leviathan now falls in Bidens lap. Its a topic he and his administration have been conspicuously silent about even as they tout the end of the war in Afghanistan. Theres no end to Americas forever wars without dismantling the surveillance state here.

The Patriot Act expired in bits and pieces over the past 20 years, but key provisions still remainand stripping them away must be a priority as Biden seeks to wind down the War on Terror. Any effort to end the federal governments cataloging of its citizens will face opposition: just last year, lawmakers fought a pitched battle to extend key surveillance provisions.

Far from winding down along with the War on Terror, the surveillance state is expanding like never before.

When PATRIOTs controversial Section 215 governing bulk collection of telephone metadata from U.S. citizens expired in 2015, Senate Republicans quickly passed nearly identical provisions with a fresh new facethis time called the USA FREEDOM Act. That the metadata-tracking program harms civil liberties, cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and provided practically no useful information didnt seem to matter to lawmakers. And while USA Freedom includes several important limits on domestic spying not included in Patriot, it represents nothing less than Patriots survival into its fourth presidential administration.

Far from winding down along with the War on Terror, the surveillance state is expanding like never before. Private companies like Palantir now pledge to empower organizations to effectively integrate their data, decisions, and operations. If youre a state or federal law enforcement agency, that empowerment means utilizing powerful new facial recognition and crowd surveillance technologies to track nonviolent protesters and other troublesome Americans.

The technologies supposedly created to track a vague, undefined foreign threat have been turned against Americans with startling effectiveness.

If that seems like a far cry from monitoring the foreign-based communications of possible terrorists, thats because it is. The technologies supposedly created to track a vague, undefined foreign threat have been turned against Americans with startling effectiveness. Atlantas Flock Safety recently raised a $150 million investment round on the promise that it could capture and analyze vehicles and license plates better than anyone else. For many of the lawmakers compromised by an influx of surveillance industry lobbying cash, Americas future is one where you are always being watched.

It might be a different story if this eye-wateringly expensive, rights-eroding proto-Skynet actually improved American safety. In fact, its actively jeopardizing national security. Take Palantir, the private surveillance technology firm that last year wrapped up a high-profile $500 million funding round. According to new reports first published in the New York Post, a massive glitch in Palantirs confidential systems allowed unauthorized individuals to access sensitive FBI employee data for more than a year. But the FBI is small potatoes: the vast trove of private information Palantir helps the government scoop up is only as secure as Palantirs least-interested programmer.

But Americas surveillance hell isnt all high-minded data-mining by the boys at Langley and hunkered down in Silicon Valley. As citizens, weve been conditioned over the course of two decades to accept ever-greater incursions into our privacy. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the pernicious security theater produced and directed by the Transportation Security Administration.

A Congress eager to show Americans it would do anything necessary to protect them foisted the TSA on travelers in November 2001. Since then, airport security has become one of the nations greatest running jokes: according to research by Voxs Dylan Matthews, there isnt any solid evidence that TSA has made air travelor Americansany safer. But it has accustomed citizens to accept gradually more intrusive government requests on our freedoms.

As a frequent (until recent global health events) air traveler, I can barely imagine a world before TSA PreCheck, Global Entry, Clear, and a host of other services designed to ease the all-consuming inconvenience of War on Terror airport security measures. And thats whats so wrong. By placing theatrical but ineffective security roadblocks in front of Americans and then introducing a program like PreCheck, which required me to provide TSA with scans of my retinas, a full set of my fingerprints, and enough information to conduct a deep background check, TSA effectively inconvenienced me and most Americans into filling a database with our most personal data. And they charge 85 bucks for the privilege.

Sure, PreCheck is a choice you are free to declinebut by treating our privacy as a negotiable token to be traded off for a little convenience, we forfeit the chance to decide whether our government should even have the terrifying power to warehouse our eyes in the first place. Its past time our elected officials had that conversation and accounted for the failure of our intrusive security apparatus to actually deliver better intelligence outcomes and a safer country for Americans. Its time to restore our civil liberties to a pre-PreCheck world.

Only congressional Democrats and the Biden administration have the power to fully dismantle 20 years of deeply entrenched intrusion by the federal government into our private data and personal lives. That will be more difficult than withdrawing from Afghanistan, but inaction will do further damage to the already frayed relationship between our government and its people.

Democrats can begin our great national de-spyification process by revoking the sweeping surveillance powers successive Congresses have bestowed on organizations like the NSA and FBI. The past 20 years have demonstrated that our surveillance state is woefully ineffective at improving American national security.

Democrats can lead an overdue rethinking of the entire operational theory behind Americas use of surveillance. We must apply what weve learned from the past two decades of surveillance overreach to build a system that respects our most cherished rights.

A generation later, the War on Terror is drawing to an ignominious close. Americas surveillance state must not outlive it.

Read more:

Forever Wars Won't End if the Surveillance State's Still Here - Daily Beast

Women represent a massive pool of untapped human capital in South Africa. With 38% of all households in the country headed by women rising to over 45% in some rural areas they face the double burden of raising children and securing an income to provide for their families. To successfully accomplish this, women require access to affordable childcare that allows them to go out and find jobs. The early learning sector could hold the key to providing both to the benefit of women, children, and the countrys economy.

Without easy access to affordable childcare, women are more likely to have to stay at home. This means that they are unable to present themselves for interviews or engage in meaningful employment opportunities. The result is that a significant part of the existing workforce is constrained which has a knock-on effect in terms of being able to build a better life for themselves, and access to opportunities for their children, says Samantha Maasdorp, Network Strategist at early learning social franchise SmartStart.

By creating childcare venues for women who want to go out and work, early learning programmes help to stimulate the economy by giving agency back to mothers and caregivers. These programmes also have the potential to provide direct employment and social enterprise opportunities, while setting children up for future personal and economic success.

Through the SmartStart programme, I have seen my life change and become so much more than I had planned. I believe in myself more now and know the power that I have inside me. I know that I am making a difference in my community, and I make sure that I teach this to my children. Our community has a lot of opportunities, and all we have to do is find how we fit into the solution, says Thobisa Gatu, one of SmartStarts practitioners, who has been providing early learning in her community since 2017.

Using a social franchise model, SmartStart taps into the experience of existing civil society organisations who recruit, train, and license women to launch and run early learning social enterprises, for children aged three to five. To date, SmartStart has trained over 8 800 people to fill the gap in early learning service provision to the benefit of over 98 000 children across the country.

Childcare and early learning is frequently deemed to be the work that a mother should be doing within the home. It would be a huge step forward, both socially and economically, for South Africa to recognise the importance of this professional career pathway. Through the setup of these social enterprises, we are supporting women to become early learning professionals and for the caregivers in their community to see them in this way as well, says Maasdorp.

SmartStart operates in all nine provinces and has built a network of over 90 000 parents and caregivers, whose children are enrolled and active in one of SmartStarts programme formats. By 2030, SmartStart aims to reach 750 000 children between the ages of three and five annually. For more information, visit http://www.smartstart.org.za.

See more here:

Women find economic empowerment in early learning - Yiba

Little Simz has previously objected to being described as the best female rapper in Britain. And quite rightly too. Her magnificent fourth album demonstrates that she is one of the best rappers in the world, period.

Its title, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, is a phrase formed from the letters in Simbi, the family nickname of Simbiata Ajikawo. A British woman of Nigerian heritage, Simz has established herself over 10 years as both an actress (with roles in BBC series Spirit Warriors and Netflix drama Top Boy) and hip-hop artist, whose 2019 album Grey Area was nominated for a Mercury Prize.

Her new albums opening track, Introvert, sees the bravura lyricist come riding in on a six-minute cinematic orchestral funk epic that sounds like Wagner doing battle with Isaac Hayes. A massed choir towers above strings and horns amid percussive timpani booms, while the 27-year-old Londoner wrestles with her inner demons and sharply articulates her personal, social and political imperatives, the track reaching a pitch of excitement as she declares Im a black woman and Im a proud one. It is a position she reasserts from a different angle as the groove shifts seamlessly into the sweet soul of the sisterhood anthem Woman, on which she mischievously declares When you have beauty and brains, they find it astounding.

To be fair, this album is kind of astounding. Regular collaborator Inflo (Dean Josiah Cover) is the producer behind elusive collective SAULT, who have won praise for a powerful series of albums addressing black British identity (to which Little Simz contributed). Many of the same pliant funk, soul, jazz and gospel elements manifest here (the dazzling use of choral voices evoking such greats as Sly Stone and Curtis Mayfield), fused with atmospheric trip hop, grime-flecked electro and a joyously percussive twist of Afrobeat, all set to monumental orchestrations and given dramatic focus by the fierce intent of Simz herself.

Although she puts herself across with armour-plated confidence, Introvert wrestles with private feelings of insecurity: I bottle it up and spill it in verses / One day Im wordless next day Im a wordsmith. Admired by such leading rap exponents as Stormzy and Kendrick Lamar, her skills are fantastic, essaying a rat-a-tat-tat delivery that enables her to fire off lines of different lengths and locate the rhythm in anything (All we see is broken homes here and poverty / Corrupt government officials, lies and atrocities you try saying that quickly).

She rarely resorts to profanity or obscures her meaning with inscrutable slang, enunciating every phrase with clarity and purpose whilst conjuring up constantly interesting rhymes (one sequence in the soulful Two Worlds rhymes drama / marijuana / Bahamas / karma / calmer / charters / koalas and, stretching it a little, gives a little nod back to Kendrick Lamar).

An overarching narrative entangles her family background and artistic struggles with issues of political and personal empowerment. Lending a touch of fantasy, actress Emma Corrin (who played Diana in The Crown) appears amid rippling harps to offer encouragement like an aristocratic fairy godmother. Its a gift and a curse to be this pretty and blessed, Little Simz mischievously declares on the storming black pride anthem Standing Ovation. This is an album that deserves one.

Out now on AWAL

Originally posted here:

Little Simz, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, review: an album that deserves a standing ovation - Telegraph.co.uk

Gohar Petrosyan, mother of two young children-Vahe, 7 and Hayk, 5-had a problem that is not unfamiliar to most parents. How could she and her husband manage their jobs and get their young children to kindergarten or school safely at the same time? In Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia, parents or grandparents usually take children to school themselves. That's because the transport on offer is unreliable and-with children packed into vans and buses with just a driver and nobody to look after them-can even be dangerous.

In Petrosyan's case, she hired a babysitter and arranged for taxis to send her children safely to school. But there had to be a better way. She looked around for an alternative solution, but there was none. So, she came up with her own. 'It occurred to me that if someone could provide safe and reliable child transportation and combine it with babysitting care, hundreds of working parents with very young children would go for it,' she says.

She imagined it as a specialized ride-aggregator service that includes a babysitter in the car or van, in addition to the driver. The babysitter accompanies the child, and, at the end of the ride, hands over the child to a designated person inside the school. The ride between home and destination is streamed live for parents to monitor if they wish.

The production of the film was initiated and implemented under the leadership of the World Bank Yerevan office, Chair of the Women Economic Empowerment multi-stakeholder platform in Armenia.' The name of the film is: 'Dare to Succeed: Women in Small Business.

Petrosyan worked out the details. The transport would have appropriate child seats; it would have activities to keep the child occupied for longer rides; and the accompanying nanny could also feed or change the child's diapers or clothes if required. The service could be accessed through an app; parents could book rides in advance, choose their driver and nanny, and indicate all the services they would need from the latter. She came up with a name for her idea: HogaTAR, which loosely translates into 'Taking Care When Taking by Car'.

Then she hit a roadblock.

Petrosyan had no idea if this was a business that could work, or how it could work, and, more importantly, what she would need to start a company, run it, and grow it. She lacked business skills and had almost no access to finance. These are all problems that aspiring Armenian women entrepreneurs typically face. Due to various reasons, women have long been underrepresented in the Armenia's economy. A 2018 report found that only 53 percent of women were in the labor market, significantly lower than men at 71 percent. Their average wages were lower by 33 percent, and they were woefully behind in leadership positions. When the pandemic set in, women-owned businesses were being disrupted far more than male-owned firms.

This is why in 2020, IFC's Armenian Women's Entrepreneurship Project-in partnership with the UK's Good Governance Fund-launched its Empowering Females through Capacity Building program to promote business and tech skills among Armenian women entrepreneurs. The program included a series of bootcamp and accelerator trainings to help them identify their strengths, overcome weaknesses, and develop into successful businesswomen.

When Petrosyan heard about the program, she decided to join. She explains, 'I signed up, both because I was not sure that my idea was good and because I had no skills to start a business.' As it turned out, her idea caught the attention of her bootcamp trainers and she became one of 200 women selected for the more advanced accelerator program that followed. Along with other new women entrepreneurs, she received personal initiative training to help her develop a business mindset. She also learned about idea validation, marketing and sales, finance, pitching to investors, scaling of products, identifying markets, and incorporating technology into operations.

Her experience was quite transformational. 'It was an eye-opener for me,' she says. 'I gained confidence that my idea was worth turning into reality. I was able to build up a network; I met people who helped me believe in my own strength and overcome the fear of starting a business. And I acquired invaluable knowledge to help bring my idea to life.'

She noticed that other women too-who, like her, had ideas but did not know how to implement them-gained knowledge, experience, and connections that would be useful to them in the future. 'This shared journey with these women, who were all in the same boat as me, was very helpful,' she recalls.

'Personally, the training I received helped me plan better,' says Petrosyan. For instance, she has worked out several tariff plans-one-time, multiple, individual and group rides. Since attending the program, Petrosyan registered her business, created around eight jobs, has won prizes for her idea, and is about to sign a contract to receive money from a donor agency. She has already signed up a number of drivers and launched operations. She expects business to pick up as more children start going back to school.

Petrosyan already has ideas for the next phase of her new business: 'We aim to bring mother-drivers on board-mothers who take their children to school/kindergarten or any other group every day; they can become our drivers and earn extra money. Later, I plan to expand the service to include disabled children and the elderly.'

'Gohar's case is one of many,' says Gayane Mkrtchyan, Operations Officer at IFC and team leader for the Armenian Women's Entrepreneurship Project. In all, the Project-from July 2020 to June 2021-helped over 500 women acquire business skills and access networks that will empower them far into the future.

Many of the participating women already registered their firms, thus entering the formal economy, vital to access finance and government services. Some received funding from investors and many increased revenues and created new jobs. Mkrtchyan says, 'Entrepreneurs like Gohar-who entered the project with just an idea and turned into a potential success story-is what this is all about.'

Published in September 2021

Disclaimer

IFC - International Finance Corporation published this content on 03 September 2021 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 03 September 2021 18:21:08 UTC.

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The Road to Better Childcare in Armenia - Marketscreener.com