Category Archives: Entrepreneurs

Iran Opening?

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US officials said they can see a “path forward” to reaching a political agreement with Iran on the major elements of a final nuclear deal by the end of the month, in just six days’ time.

“We very much believe we can get this done by March 31,” a State Department official said.

“I don’t think we saw that before the last round,” the official added, referring to talks between Kerry and Iran Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif held in Lausanne March 15-20.

Kerry is due to resume talks with Zarif at a Swiss lakeside hotel here the morning of March 26. The schedule after that, including the possibility of other foreign ministers from the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) joining the talks remains for now very fluid, officials said. Kerry’s schedule after March 26 simply says “negotiations,” the US official said.

Ahead of Kerry’s arrival late March 25, lead US negotiator, Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, held talks with her Iranian counterpart, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, to set up the Kerry-Zarif meeting. As in the last several meetings, US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran Ali Akbar Salehi are also due to attend the Lausanne talks. It is unclear if Iranian President Rouhani’s brother Hossein Fereydoun will attend, after the death of his mother last week.

“We are focused on getting a political framework that addresses all the major elements [of a comprehensive Iran nuclear deal],” the senior State Department official said.

If a political agreement is able to be reached, it is not yet clear exactly what form it might be released at least publicly, officials said.

“The goal is to have an agreement with Iran on as many specifics as possible,” the US official said.

Negotiators have given themselves an additional three months — til the end of June — to complete highly technical annexes that would accompany any comprehensive deal reached.

In the face of criticism from Israel and some members of Congress, the White House has fiercely defended the merits of a solid nuclear deal as the best way to ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.

“The bottom line is this — compared to the alternatives, diplomacy offers the best and most effective way to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and this is our best shot at diplomacy,” White House chief of staff Denis McDonough told the J Street conference March 23.

Iran deal

Women Alert: Nursing, Worthwhile and Lucrative

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Bureau of Labor Statistics:  The occupations with the largest employment in May 2014 were retail salespersons and cashiers. These two occupations combined made up nearly 6 percent of total U.S. employment, with employment levels of 4.6 million and 3.4 million, respectively. Of the 10 largest occupations, only registered nurses with an annual mean wage of $69,790, had an average wage above the U.S. all-occupations mean of $47,230. The highest paying occupations overall included several physician and dentist occupations, chief executives, nurse anesthetists, and petroleum engineers. Jobs and Wages

Wiomen out number men 10 to 1 in the profession in the US, but still get paid less than male nurses.

Nurses

 

Metabook, the Future of Publishing?

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Ken Siman, who has a deep history as a publisher in the traditional houses has founded not only a new publishing company, but one with a totally new approach to books.  His partners Christianand Benjamin Alfonsi provide business and artistic guidance.

Pubication starts with an app which includes not only the book but art and music related to it.  What could be a better choice for launch than John Berendt’s classic “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”

The app includes dramatic readings featuring Jonathan Davis, Robin Miles and Laverne Cox.  Berendt himself is on camera for delicious new insights.  Albert Uhry who adapted the book for theatre talks about its essence.  An audio tape of the summary from the courtroom trial has been unearthed.  Original music has been created.

The next two books on Metabook’s list are a collection of stories by the devlish Kathleen L. Sanders and an as yet unrevealed New York Times-bestselledlist fiction writer.  Breaking the ranks with tratiional pubishers seems like the better part of wisdom today.  No one knows quite what they’re doing.  Floundering in a world that has run away from them, yet aware that books are still being read, most publishers don’t know what to do to reach their -mobile-device-devoted audience.

People read.  How do you reach them?  The Metabook concept is to provide not only the book to taste, but tantalizing appetizers and side dishes.  Hook the reader on her smart phone.  If all she does is delve into the app you have made some money.  If she downloads original music from itunes, you make a bit more.  If she orders a poster of one of the marvellous images you show, you make a bit more.

What if she is so pleased, she actaully buys a book.  Well, there you have it.  A book is sold.  The bonanca.  Yet the process is step by step satisfying to the modern reading audience.  An invitation to read.

Berendt

Women Inherit Their Fathers’ Businesses in the Middle East

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Melissa Tabeek writes:  In the workshop of the Barchini family, science and art collide. Dana Barchini, 26, and her father Joseph Barchini, 80, both potters and sculptors, work alongside each other, whether it be in the family workspace or testing clay in the Bekaa Valley to be used for their pieces. Joseph, educated in France at the Ecole des Metiers d’art, returned to Lebanon after also receiving his doctorate at the Sorbonne, where he studied the technical aspects of the ceramics the potters created in his native country, as well as their socio-economic situation. He returned to Lebanon to use his knowledge to improve the potters’ situation and to help modernize their work process. Joseph opened his first workshop in 1965 in his parents’ home in Beirut, but when the civil war began, he had to move north. Now he spends nearly every day in his second workshop he built in Ain Saade in 1980, a village eight miles north of Beirut, testing different aspects of the pottery craft and creating new glazes through chemical reactions.

Dana is one of the many female artisans in Lebanon who are continuing a patriarchal family tradition from their fathers or grandfathers as their full-time job, despite the growing difficulties of maintaining craftsmanship traditions. The number of potters in the mountains that Joseph works with, for one, has greatly declined since he began when he was 25. He talks about a time when there were more than 100 — a number that has dwindled to fewer than 30 in the past few years.

Fatima Tartoussi, 37, is a woman working in a man’s world of metal in Lebanon’s northern city of Tripoli. From stalls in Tripoli’s market to a multiple-room workshop in Bab al-Rmeil, Tartoussi works with metal as well as manages the family business. She learned this craft from her father, who despite not having sons to pass the business onto did not initially want her going into this type of work because of the physical demands of the job.
“I was 7 years old when after going to school I would see my father and his workers doing this. I wanted to do the same, but my father would not allow it. So after school, I would steal wood, copper and iron, anything I could find,” Tartoussi told Al-Monitor, as she skillfully makes a stainless steel nameplate, the smell of iron hanging heavy in the air in her workshop. When her father saw her talent, he eventually relented.

Maya Hassun shares this concern in passing the soap-making tradition in her family to her two children. Hassun, 34, has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in law, but the pull of soap proved too strong. Her grandfather used to cook olive oil and bay leaf soap in Kfarhata, a village north of the southern city of Sidon. Before he died, he left his notebook of recipes and instructions from his lifetime of work with soap to Hassun, who had spent much time in his atelier as a child. Since then, she has come far from experimenting in her kitchen 18 years ago, now operating a thriving business, Sabbouna, with her husband, which includes a showroom in Sidon and a large workshop in the Chouf region.

There are many obstacles to overcome, Dana conceded, including a lack of government support, technical schools, an easy market and an availability of cheaper goods. But she is still hopeful for the future.
“It is good that I was persistent and that I didn’t give up because look what I’m trying to continue. Imagine I did not do this and those were left behind,” Dana said, pointing to her father’s ceramic pieces on a shelf behind her, “I am carrying on something very beautiful to show people something extraordinary.”

RTR43E02

Integrating Muslim Neighbors?

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Is Islam Bashing a Lucrative Industry?

The US-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life predicts that over the next two decades, Muslims will make up 26.4% of the world’s population of 8.3 billion people. This means that the worldwide Muslim population will have grown by 25% at the end of 2030.

However, while the population of Muslims in the West is growing, a fear of Islam as an ideology is increasing. This has sometimes resulted in aggressive and discriminatory measures against Muslims, which compels some scholars and thinkers to warn against the rise of “Islamophobia.” The belittling and mocking of Islamic beliefs, the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad — often in popular culture and the media — indicate that Muslims face a serious challenge: How to continue living in Western societies peacefully, while being on the receiving end of hate crimes, the denigration of their faith and the restriction of social freedoms.

Nathan Lean is an American scholar and writer, who has investigated Islamophobia extensively.  Lean believes that Islamophobia is a lucrative “industry” that wins skyrocketing salaries for those who promote and contribute to it.

Nathan Lean: An unfortunate consequence of the War on Terror was that it operated on the premise of a “foreign enemy, domestic threat.” While the Bush and Obama administrations went to great rhetorical lengths to avoid conflating the actions of extremists with the peaceful majority, the policies they put in place reinforced the notion that the religion of Islam, and by extension all Muslims, deserved special scrutiny.

Thus, we see a plethora of examples of religious discrimination in the name of national security: The NYPD collaborated with the CIA to spy on Muslim communities in New York, in some cases designating entire mosques as “terrorist organizations”; the FBI paid informants to infiltrate mosques and entrap Muslim worshippers — in one California case, the informant was instructed to sleep with Muslim women; the State Department, in concert with federal immigration offices, delayed or denied visa, passport and citizenship applications based on nothing more than the applicant’s name or country of origin; Congress held a series of McCarthy-esque hearings on “radicalization” of American Muslim communities that produced no evidence such a thing was occurring; and more recently, the White House announced its “Countering Violent Extremism” program, which unlike its broad name, has a narrow focus on the Muslim American community.

Lean: Charlie Hebdo and Jyllands-Posten had the “right” to publish their cartoons. But having that right does not mean that what they did was right. In Western societies, free speech is fast becoming a weapon. We don’t fight for it as much as we fight with it.

Free speech is about as sacred to most people as are their religious values: When it works for them, they embrace it. When it doesn’t, they reject it.  Interview on Muslim Bashing

Muslim Bashing?

 

 

Women Entrepreneurs: Create Memory Forests?

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Women entrepreneurs.  Are memory forests the net graveyards:  Jeffrey Tousey writes: What if we could end up in a beautiful place like this?

Italian designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel have come up with an idea.

I think I might really be into it:

Capsula Mundi is a 100% biodegradable coffin.

It’s shaped like an egg and made from from starch plastic (which is made primarily from potato and corn plants).

For burial, the body is placed inside the capsule in the fetal position.

The egg is then planted in the soil, and a tree is planted on top of it.

There are a variety of trees you can pick from, and you can decide which one you want or let your family deal with the logistics.

Wouldn’t it be great to know that your body is helping provide oxygen, carbon dioxide, humidity, clean water and air, conserving energy, slowing down climate change, and protecting wildlife, among other things?

Unfortunately, this type of burial is not yet legal in the United States or Italy. But it’s certainly worth giving it some thought.

(Memory forests don’t exist yet, but this is what I imagine one would look like.)

When it’s my time to go six feet under, I would find a lot of comfort in knowing it’s so a tree can grow.

Google on Woman Alert

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Isis Madris writes:  The SPARK movement is aiming to put women on the map. After the non-profit noticed that Google’s daily doodles featured women only 17% of the time, they reached out to the tech giants. Google agreed with them, and the two have worked together to feature more history-making women. In addition, SPARK was invited to actively research and honor notable women through a mapping project powered by Gogle’s Field Trip app.

Now, when app users log into Field Trip and switch on the history notifications, they are alerted when they are approaching the exact location where a woman made history at one point in time, and can then read a bit about her and her achievements.

One of the most unique things about SPARK is that they are a movement by and for giirls ages 13-22. All of the research and work behind the On the Map project was performed by the girls, who hope to educate themselves on inspirational women in addition to spreading the word.

Some of the women on the Google powered map include:

The Arpilleristas in Santiago, Chile, a group of women who wove colorful tapestries documenting the turmoil and violence of Pinochet’s regime.

Mary Ellen Pleasant in San Francisco, CA, an activist and abolitionist who, among other things, would dress like a jockey to help slaves escape their plantations.

Mary Anning in Lyme, England, a renowned fossilist who discovered fossils of a Plesiosaurus, rocking the scientific community to its core.

The team has researched and mapped around 100 notable women on the app so far, and invite those who are interested to nominate  their favorite historical women to be featured.

Women Bursting into Podcasting

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Alex Madison writes:  For years, if you tuned into a podcast, the voice streaming through your headphones would most likely belong to a man.

Late last year a true crime podcast hsoted by  by Sarah Koenig, became the fastest-growing podcast ever, hitting five million downloads. Women now helm two of top three most popular shows. And it’s not just those heavy-hitters: throughout the world of radio, there’s a clear shift toward recognizing the importance of getting more women behind microphones and into producing positions.

Vice President for Programming  holds up the instant success of Invisibilia as a sign of a breakthrough for women. “A lot of things that people have embraced about Invisibilia would have been deal killers years ago: two young women, who kind of sound alike, talking about science. People would have asked, ‘Can two young women really talk about science?’ Now that would be a ridiculous question.”

Podcasting, with its low barriers to entry and opportunities for experimentation, has been a much-anticipated space for media democratization since the early 2000s. It has the ability to elevate the voices of people often left out of traditional print and broadcast journalism. So why are women finding more success in podcasting now than we were just a few years ago?

1. Women who have been behind the scenes at major organizations have gained the skills, confidence, and opportunities to start their own shows. 

Since the dawn of radio, women have worked behind the scenes as producers, editors, and researchers. But recently, women are finally becoming more visible (or, audible) in hosting roles.

 “We got the skills and then we just decided, fuck it, basically. We just decided, we can do this,” said Alix Spiegel, one of cohosts of Invisibilia on the recent “Broadscasting Edition” of Slate’s DoubleX Gabfest. Invisibilia is her first full-time hosting gig, but Spiegel has worked in radio for over a decade: she was a founding producer of This American Life and worked on NPR’s science desk for ten years. Her cohost Lulu Miller was a founding producer of Radiolab before joining NPR in 2013. The Third Coast Audio Festival brought them together.

The examples go on and on. Before setting off Serial mania, host Sarah Koenig and executive producer Julie Snyder worked for years producing This American Life.

2. Feminist allies have been taking explicit action to close the gender gap.   

This isn’t just about women in radio needing to “lean in.” Even with relatively low barriers to creating new podcasts, it typically takes money, marketing, and connections to reach a wide audience.

3. Women are getting into leadership and driving development themselves. 

Of course, when women gain power in the “the machine,” progress often follows even more quickly. Eisenberg said, “I remember talking with the head of WNYC, Laura Walker. She was like, ‘God, we need more female voices, because there’s just not a lot out there.’”

4. The audience for women-hosted podcasts is getting louder and more powerful.

 5. Hearing more women’s voices on podcasts leads to even more women starting podcasts. 

Broadening the sound of radio could also expand radio’s audience.

Women Podcasting

Can Entrepreneurs Revive the Saree?

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An Indian saree, six yards of utter simplicity and audacity, is the perfect garment. Folded, it looks severe and perplexing, like an extra-long bed sheet. Draped, it transforms itself and its wearer. No apparel so embodies the spirit of the region it represents. The saree suggests at once the minimalism of the ascetic and the sensuality of the tropics: lushness, sweat, sparkling white cotton, bare caramel-to-cocoa skin, loose folds of clothing that easily pull on and off.

No other garment is as antique and yet contemporary. The saree was worn by women of the Indian subcontinent thousands of years ago — and still is. No other civilization has spawned a garment that has survived so long, and yet even managed to thumb its nose at being embalmed in a museum.

The saree is worn at home and work by millions of Indian women from all walks of life. It is the perfect garment to be totally pregnant in or walk down a fashion ramp in; to transplant rice or to construct roads in; to take a presidential salute in; to get married in; to wash dishes in; to offer sports commentary in; to breastfeed a baby with total ease and modesty in; to wear to a board meeting in; to pray in or sleep in; to be covered from head to toe in; or to seduce a lover in.

No other garment is as versatile. In which other country could a nun like Mother Teresa and a Miss Universe winner wear exactly the same garment?

But the saree is becoming endangered. Pants or salwar kameez — a tunic with loose pants and a scarf — are becoming the daily clothing of choice for many urban Indian women. They are easier to wear and wash. They are seen as modern and more modest. They are more suited to the daily fight of throwing elbows in crowds and avoiding the lewd attentions of men. The saree is still a long way from being written off as a ceremonial and impractical garment like the kimono, but for increasing numbers of Indian women, sarees stay folded in wardrobes and are brought out for weddings and special occasions.

Can Entrepreneurs Revive the Saree?

Saree

 

Discussing Race Backfires at Starbucks

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Josephine Tovey writes: This week the coffee giant launched an initiative called “Race Together”, which aims to encourage discussions about race and racial equality over grande frappuccinos.

The move came about in response to what Starbucks refers to as the “racially charged tragedies” that have unfolded across America lately – namely the shooting deaths of unarmed young black men like Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the choking death of Eric Garner in New York, both by white police officers, sparking furious protest and public debate.

“Staying silent is not who we are”: Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. Photo: Bloomberg

In response, the organisation is encouraging its employees to write the words “Race Together” on their paper coffee cups and try to start a conversation with customers about race.

Adve

“We at Starbucks should be willing to talk about these issues in America. Not to point fingers or to place blame, and not because we have answers, but because staying silent is not who we are,” said Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks.

“What if our customers, as a result of that [discussion], had a renewed level of understanding and sensitivity about the issue? And they themselves would spread that to their own sphere of influence?”

Schultz’s professed concern about racial equality seems laudable on the surface and has received some support. But overwhelmingly the campaign has attracted a grande level of backlash and a feeding frenzy of mockery on Twitter about its execution, as well as scepticism about whose interests it actually serves.

As many customers have pointed out,  the set-up at Starbucks, which is essentially a fast-food cafe, is also hardly conducive for conversation at all, let alone one about race.

Transactions there are short and impersonal, despite their best attempts to write your name on your cup (“it’s Jo not Joan, but never mind”). You stand in line, give your order to one person who takes your money, move down the line and take your coffee off another person, and then either leave or go to a table.

Where in this process is a nuanced discussion about police brutality supposed to take place? The campaign apparently was born out of forums Starbucks held with its own employees where they discussed racism that they had faced, but the possibility of replicating this with customers seems remote.

Talking at Starbucks