LONDON (AP) – A United Kingdom (UK) ferry operator owned by the government of Dubai faces a deadline to explain why it fired 800 workers without notice, while British authorities say they may seek criminal penalties if the company is found to have acted illegally.
P&O Ferries fired the crew members over a Zoom call last week and then sent security teams onto ships to evict workers, touching off protests at ports around the UK Unions allege their members have been replaced by foreign workers who were hired through a third-party agency and are being paid USD2.38 an hour.
The British government has notified P&O that the company appears to have violated rules requiring employers to consult with unions and notify authorities before laying off large numbers of workers. The government wants to know why the company believes the rules don’t apply to P&O.
“It’s important that we get the exact detail … and we need to collect it in one place, because there are criminal sanctions involved in this, including an unlimited fine,” Business Minister Paul Scully, who is responsible for labour issues, told Sky News.
British law requires employers to consult with labour unions and pay the legal minimum wage, now GBP8.91 (USD11.75) an hour for workers 23 and older. But maritime companies that sail in international waters can avoid these rules by registering their ships in other countries.
P&O Ferries serves ports in the UK, Ireland, France and the Netherlands. It’s owned by worldwide logistics company DP World, a unit of government-owned Dubai World.
People protest in solidarity with 800 P&O Ferries workers fired last week, opposite the Houses of Parliament, in London. PHOTO: AP
THE WASHINGTON POST – “Are we in the metaverse right now?” I ask the man in line behind me. We’ve been waiting about 30 minutes to be outfitted with holographic glasses that will make 3D digital images appear in rooms that, to the naked eye, look empty.
Once we have on our glasses, a whimsical forest with falling origami-shaped leaves appears in one room, the skull of Abraham Lincoln in another. A horse neighs down the hall. As we wait, a child twirls around a virtual ballerina as his parent cautions him to look out for the flesh-and-blood humans.
We’re at Verse, an art exhibit where nothing is nailed to the walls and visitors can walk right through the digital images before them. It’s held at the Mint, a stately building in downtown San Francisco. In the 1870s, the Mint was said to have housed nearly one-third of the nation’s wealth. The vaults that once held gold are now bare, and the brick-walled space is a backdrop for weddings, haunted houses and tonight’s display of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.
Peter, who’s waiting patiently in line behind me, says that yes, we’re in a version of the metaverse. He declines to use his full name because he works at Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, which is working hard to convince the world that this next version of the Internet will be awesome.
The term metaverse was coined 30 years ago by novelist Neal Stephenson, who imagined a science fictional universe where avatars inhabit a virtual world similar to our physical one.
Hrishi Rajasekar takes a screen image of Tamer Rasamny while viewing augmented reality artwork at Verse, an immersive NFT exhibit at the San Francisco Mint in San Francisco. PHOTO: THE WASHINGTON POST
Peter’s boss, Meta co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, called the metaverse “an embodied Internet where you’re in an experience, not just looking at it.” Like walking through an exhibit of 3D art, going to virtual concerts or conferences.
In the metaverse, paper money is replaced by cryptocurrency, which you need to buy the art dancing before your eyes at the Mint. Each NFT costs between USD25 and USD250,000, though they’re priced in various cryptocurrencies.
The NFT craze has already ensnared Melania Trump (she is selling 10,000 NFTs for USD50 each to celebrate moments during her husband’s presidency), Paris Hilton and the descendants of Pablo Picasso (who created a digital spinoff of the Spanish artist’s work). An NFT of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden sold for more than USD5 million last year.
But wandering through the Mint, Sari Stenfors is skeptical.
Everyone is talking about the metaverse, Stenfors said, “but not so many people are actually visiting it”. A self-described “futurist” from Berkeley, California, she stands in front of a television screen that projects fiery wings off her back. Stenfors thinks she resembles a heavenly creature or something from hell – she’s not sure which.
“I keep feeling like I’m at Burning Man, but I want to touch and interact more,” Stenfors said.
“Touch is needed. I’m sure it’s going to come. Smells. We’re going to get it all.”
Later she straps on a HoloLens2 – a bulky USD3,500 pair of glasses from Microsoft – and tries not to bump into anyone. Being transported to another world is uncomfortable. For my maiden voyage, the HoloLens is screwed on too tight and leaves a mark on my forehead that’s visible hours later.
Before a Verse attendant sends me to explore on my own, she asks whether I can see the ballerina pirouetting down the hallway. When I reach my hand out in front of me, its shape is rendered in multicoloured polygons, twisting as I turn my hand this way and that. Instead of a traditional art exhibit with plaques on the walls, at Verse, attendees point the cursor in their HoloLens toward a square icon to reveal who made the NFT, its price and a little about the artist’s intention in creating it. This is about commerce, after all.
Sure, it’s cool to be immersed in a forest or walk past glowing lotus flowers, but navigating it is difficult. The glasses call for precise movements, and most Verse attendees are still learning. I aim my HoloLens at a specific icon, and if I move my head just a smidge, the display vanishes. There’s so much to absorb that it’s easy to forget to blink or to feel nauseated.
A banner in LED lights beckons attendees to ponder “What Is Real?” as they wander from one hologram to the next, potentially missing a huge artefact in plain sight: A stamp mill from the late 1800s, used to pulverize quartz so that gold could be extracted. Advanced technology for its time that’s now obsolete. At one point, I reach out and touch an empty brick wall to remind myself that the physical world exists not just as a container or a backdrop. Tiny grains of brick dust fall to the floor.
Wandering through Verse reminds me of the thrill and disorientation that came with the early days of smartphones.
Accessing email while out and about instead of seated at a desktop at home, looking up maps while en route from point A to point B, sharing pictures of your lunch on social media before you’d taken a single bite, or Googling facts about an old building as you were sitting on its steps.
That was the information overload circa 2007.
The newer version on display at the Mint is even more dizzying. It’s like having a million tabs open in your brain and walking right through them splayed out in front of you.
Learning to use a HoloLens is akin to learning to use a mouse and cursor for the first time, explained Ray Kallmeyer, the start-up founder behind Verse. “We find usually, after 30 to 60 minutes, that people are pretty solid with it,” Kallmeyer said.
THE WASHINGTON POST – On a good day in 2016, WeWork, the office-share chain, would only lose USD1.2 million in a 24-hour period.
That figure would soon double, though, as co-founder and CEO Adam Neumann, its shoe-shunning master salesman, sought to “elevate the world’s consciousness” – his company’s official mission – by out-franchising Starbucks. But what does it mean to lose USD400 million in a single year? Or more than USD2 billion in 2018, shortly before Neumann would be forced to resign from a position that he and his wife, Rebekah Paltrow Neumann (of, yes, those Paltrows), had decided only she could name a successor for?
Recent tech-centric shows such as Hulu’s The Dropout and Showtime’s Super Pumped, about Theranos and Uber, respectively, have taken care to illustrate the real damage caused by reckless leadership: patients given wrong diagnoses, riders having their assaults ignored or dismissed, employees browbeaten into silence or complicity.
In contrast, Neumann charmed, then squandered, billions from investors – by definition, people with money to spare. So why are we supposed to care again?
WeCrashed, the new eight-part miniseries starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway as the pair of narcissists who oversaw the breathtaking rise of WeWork and practically engineered its fall, never really figures out how to answer that question satisfyingly.
Previous versions of this story, like the 2021 Hulu documentary WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, have used Neumann as a poster child for the now banal (if no less correct) observation of how thin the line in Silicon Valley can be between visionary and fraudster.
Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway as Adam and Rebekah Neumann in ‘WeCrashed’. PHOTO: APPLE TV PLUS
But perhaps because it’s from Apple TV Plus, the drama, based on the podcast of the same name, retreats from any larger critique of the tech industry (in one of the first, and certainly most prominent, instances of Silicon Valley putting forth a narrative about itself through television).
So we’re back to square one, wondering why, other than the very big numbers being thrown around, ordinary people are supposed to give a hoot about demigods pilfering from one another’s Scrooge McDuck-like vaults.
The best that creators Drew Crevello and Lee Eisenberg come up with is the delusion-fuelled marriage between Adam (Leto) and Rebekah (Hathaway), an amoral striver and a coddled dilettante who bring out the best and worst in each other.
Of the two, Rebekah, a vegan yoga teacher haunted by the kind of existential aimlessness that only those with no bills to pay can afford, is the slightly more sympathetic character; not a one of her several therapists can disabuse her of what she knows deep down to be true: There’s absolutely nothing special about her.
WeCrashed never lets us – or failed actress Rebekah – forget she is a cousin of Gwyneth’s. But the show never leans fully into camp or cattiness, frustratingly stuck instead somewhere between dishy and humanising (not unlike Leto’s House of Gucci).
The New York-set miniseries spans roughly a decade, with the couple meeting-cute at a party Adam throws trying to gin up cash for he and his pushover business partner Miguel McKelvey’s (Kyle Marvin) first iteration of WeWork.
As previewed in the pilot, Adam will become in just a few years the company’s most toxic asset. It’s easy enough to see how they get there. “Fear is a choice,” Rebekah tells her husband, as his ousting looms closer.
By that point, they’ve spent years mutually supporting each other’s divorces from reality.
Leto is almost always a capable actor, but the Israeli cadences he sports in the role mostly calls to mind the global tour of accents he currently seems to be on.
With his signature azure eyes covered up by brown contacts, it’s notable how much less striking he appears than the actual Neumann, whose long-haired, boyish mien somehow complements his six-foot-five height.
(The Hulu doc focussed extensively on how much the entrepreneur’s youthful but authoritative bearing contributed to the messianic pull he had over his employees – a quality barely explored and rather difficult to see here.)
Hathaway gives a much more memorable performance as a woman made of equal parts woo-woo froth and Ayn Rand hardness; she’s Adam’s biggest fan, and also the closest thing he has to an effective disciplinarian. (When he’s about to lose their company, Rebekah gives him a few moments to process the news, then chides, “Are we done pouting?”)
A perpetually underrated actor despite her Oscar, Hathaway – perfectly mimicking the real-life Paltrow Neumann’s patronising noblesse-oblige contralto – brings coherence to a character who desperately wishes she had a core.
The series’ strengths also include lavish production values and a diverting escalation in Adam and Rebekah’s ambitions and self-regard, which culminate in her starting a private school called WeGrow that’ll “feed our children’s souls”.
But if you’re wondering whether you should just learn about the Neumanns’ outrageously expensive and extravagantly silly antics through the Hulu doc or one of the countless exposés about the couple, well, maybe you should.
WeCrashed is the umpteenth series to stretch out to four or eight or 12 hours what movies used to do in two. Episodically structured with plenty of eyebrow-raising details, the show’s dramatisations are eminently watchable, but ultimately weightless.
Much of that sense of inconsequentiality stems from the minimal stakes of WeWork’s decline.
Yes, some young employees were disillusioned that their party-obsessed boss didn’t live up to his rhetoric of changing the world, and some 20-somethings weren’t able to become the multimillionaires they thought they would once the company went public.
But at least in this retelling, whatever happens on Olympus stays on Olympus: Some mega-rich people become slightly less rich, and then the world moves on.
We can mock their foibles and understand their vulnerabilities, but in declining to conjecture what WeWork’s nosedive meant for the rest of us, it’s got even less of a purpose than a co-working space during a pandemic.
MILAN (AFP) – Italy are aiming for World Cup glory despite having to navigate a treacherous play-off path to get the 2022 tournament, with North Macedonia the first barrier standing in their way.
The European champions begin a potential two-match mini campaign in Palermo tomorrow with missing a second straight World Cup a real possibility, as a trip to either Turkey or Portugal awaits should they get through their semi-final.
However, coach Roberto Mancini said he is looking past the playoffs and at Qatar, where the tournament kicks off in November.
“Our goal is to win the World Cup, and to win the World Cup we have to win these two matches. There’s nothing else to say,” Mancini told reporters on Monday.
After so-called ‘Notte Magiche’ (‘Magical Nights’) of Euro 2020, Italy looked certain to banish the ghosts of the disastrous qualifying campaign for 2018 as Mancini’s team not only won, but won playing an expansive style of football rarely associated with the Azzurri.
Those balmy summer evenings soon gave way to a frosty autumn in which Italy drew four of their final five World Cup qualifiers and two missed Jorginho penalties in their two matches with Switzerland cost them an automatic spot.
Italy’s displays in those matches did not live up to the swaggering style which characterised their play right up to their Euro quarter-final win over Belgium.
“I’m confident. I have good players, professionals who from nothing built a victory that nobody believed in beforehand,” added Mancini.
“They managed to form themselves into an extraordinary team. We need to build our confidence from that, from what we have accomplished.”
Although the manner in which top spot in Group C was handed to the Swiss has caused alarm, Mancini is sticking with the blueprint which brought him triumph at Wembley.
“We don’t have much time to try out new things in training. The basis will be the same as in the Euro,” he said.
Italy will likely be missing their entire first-choice back four, with Giorgio Chiellini, Leonardo Bonucci, Leonardo Spinazzola and Giovanni Di Lorenzo expected to be out of the semi.
Right-back Di Lorenzo was taken out of the picture at the last moment when he limped out of Napoli’s 2-1 win over Udinese last Saturday, while on the other flank Spinazzola hasn’t played since injuring his Achilles tendon against Belgium in July.
The last time Bonucci played was early March while on Sunday Juve teammate Chiellini made his first appearance for the best part of two months, in the first half of his team’s 2-0 win over Salernitana.
Mancini said he probably would not risk as important a figure as Chiellini for a home match against a team they would expect to dominate, given the tough nature of the final should they get through.
“Giorgio is pretty good, we’ll see if he can play both matches, probably not, but we’ll talk about it together,” said Mancini.
Backing his team will be a sell-out crowd at the Stadio Renzo Barbera in the Sicilian capital, the first match in Italy to be played in front of a full-capacity stadium since the coronavirus pandemic first curbed attendances.
Stadiums in Italy are not due to fully open until April after fluctuating between 50 and 75 per cent since the start of the season but special permission has been granted for the play-off as Italy hope to not repeat the nightmare of just over four years ago.
The BruHealth app has now become synonymous with our daily life and we are now already accustomed to do our daily self-report without fail since it is a pre-requisite to scan before entering any public premises.
As a recently recovered COVID-19 patient, I found the Home Isolation feature very useful and handy while I was in self-isolation. Once you are confirmed positive after uploading your antigen rapid test (ART) result, your code will automatically turn to purple and BruHealth will automatically configure a 10-day Home Isolation End Date calendar to monitor your health condition on a daily basis. It even has a ‘swab icon’ as a reminder for you to conduct an ART test on the fifth day of home isolation.
Having COVID-19 is a no-fun experience but the latest Home Isolation feature helps to keep you on track in monitoring your health status until the 10-day isolation period is over.
Even with BruHealth experiencing technical glitches at certain times, we should give credit to the mobile app and to make allowance for further improvements for everyone’s convenience.
BEIJING (CNA) – China aims to increase renewable power, maintain crude oil output and boost natural gas production, as it seeks to balance energy security and achieve its climate change goals.
China, the world’s biggest greenhouse gases emitter, has said its carbon emission would peak by 2030, while it has said it would achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.
“We will accelerate the adjustment of the energy structure and promote energy supply security and low-carbon transformation at the same time,” the National Development and Reform Commission said in a statement yesterday.
China will keep annual crude oil output at 200 million tonnes and crank up annual natural gas production to more than 230 billion cubic metres (bcm) by 2025.
It said the country would “actively expand” exploration and development of resources such as shale oil and shale gas, and would seek to establish coalbed methane production bases in the Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Shanxi regions.
China also planned to achieve gas storage capacity of 55-60 bcm, or 13 per cent of total annual consumption by 2025, and complete a southern extension to the existing China-Russia gas pipeline, the commission said.
Beijing would encourage developing ethanol, biodiesel and bio-jet fuel, provided it did not affect food security, it said.
China suspended a nationwide plan for blending gasoline to have 10 per cent ethanol from 2020 after a sharp fall in the country’s corn stocks and limited production capacity of the biofuel.
China aims to make non-fossil fuels account for about a fifth of total energy consumption by 2025, up from 16 per cent in 2020, and to control coal use in heavy industry including steel, chemical and cement.
About 30 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired power capacity would be phased out during 2021-2025, while it aimed to raise hydropower capacity to 380 GW and nuclear power capacity to 70 GW by 2025, it said.
China plans to install at least 62 GW capacity of pumped hydropower, a system that involves pumping water to a higher reservoir during off peak times to generate power at peak times.
It also aims turn more than 200 GW of coal-fired power plants to peak-shaving facilities that are used to stabilise the grid operation as the use of intermittent renewable power rises.
ADEN (AFP) – Five-year-old Amina Nasser hugs her toys in a decrepit cancer ward in Yemen, her life in the hands of a healthcare system pushed to the brink of collapse by grinding conflict.
Rudimentary equipment, peeling paint and the stench of urine are constant reminders of how Yemen’s seven-year-old war has ravaged essential public services.
Amina, two months into her treatment for leukaemia at the Al-Sadaqa hospital in Yemen’s southern port city of Aden, is one of millions whose lives have been upended.
”We didn’t have any other choice,” her mother Anissa Nasser said, sitting with her daughter in the rundown paediatric oncology ward. Amina gets free chemotherapy, but her unemployed parents must find the cash to somehow pay for other medicines and tests.
”We wanted to send her for treatment abroad,” the mother said, but that was far beyond their reach.
The World Bank estimates just half of Yemen’s medical facilities are fully functional, and that 80 per cent of the population have problems accessing food, drinking water and health services.
Three-quarters of Yemen’s 30 million population depend on aid. It is the legacy of a war that started when Houthi rebels seized the capital Sanaa in 2014.
ABOVE & BELOW: People walk toward the entrance of the Al-Joumhouria hospital in the Khor Maksar area of Yemen’s southern city of den; and a battered bronze plaque in Arabic and English marking the year 1954, during British colonial rule, when Queen Elizabeth laid the founding stone, is fixed on a wall at the hospital. PHOTOS: AFP
ABOVE & BELOW: An amputee sits on a wheelchair near the battered bronze plaque at the hospital; and a patient lies in a bed
The internationally recognised government fled south to Aden, and a military coalition intervened in 2015.
Fighting continues. The United Nations (UN) has estimated the conflict has killed 377,000 people, both directly and through hunger and disease. Some parts of Al-Sadaqa hospital have funding; the malnutrition centre, backed by UN agencies, has polished floors and smells of detergent.
Tiny, emaciated children, shrunken by their hunger, lie hooked up to drips.
The UN, which has called Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, warned this week that the number of people in famine conditions is projected to increase five-fold this year to 161,000.
Some 2.2 million children are expected to be acutely malnourished in the coming months, with over half a million children already facing life-threatening starvation.
And the UN has itself warned of a dire funding shortfall ahead; a pledging conference raised less than a third of the money it said was needed to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe.
In the hospital, donor funding means that at least in the ward for malnourished children, there is electricity and the staff have been paid. But with medics stretched thin, funding for one area means other areas can be neglected.
If there is support for one section of the hospital, then ”everyone wants to work there, hoping to improve their living situation”, said the hospital’s Director-general Kafaya Al-Jazei.
In Aden, public hospitals lack basic equipment as well as staff – with doctors and nurses preferring the higher salaries at private clinics or international organisations.
In another Aden hospital, Al-Joumhouria, a battered bronze plaque in Arabic and English marks the year 1954, during British colonial rule, when Queen Elizabeth II laid the founding stone.
Today, the building is in a pitiful state, with shortages of staff, drugs and equipment.
”The hospital isn’t maintained or air-conditioned,” said nurse Zubeida Said. ”There are leaks in the bathrooms. The building is old and dilapidated.”
Hospital staff have protested the ”deplorable” conditions, said the hospital’s interim chief Salem Al-Shabhi who hires medical students to meet the staff shortfall, for YER10,000 (about USD9) a day.
Final-year medical students are under no illusions about what awaits them, with some hoping to leave Yemen when they graduate.
”We want a job with a good salary in a safe place,” said Eyad Khaled.
But classmate Heba Ebadi, who plans to specialise in gynaecology, is determined to help her country ”even if the health system gets worse”.
”We want to help the people here,” she said. ”Who else will help them? We have to stay here.”
DALLAS (AP) – A storm system that left widespread damage and some injuries in its wake in Texas drifted into Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama yesterday, possibly triggering “a regional severe weather outbreak”, the Storm Prediction Center said.
The affected areas, including the cities of Baton Rouge and Jackson, Mississippi, could see strong tornadoes, forecasters said.
Louisiana’s federal and state authorities reminded thousands of hurricane survivors living in government-provided mobile homes and recreational vehicle (RV) trailers to have an evacuation plan because the structures might not withstand the expected weather.
More than 8,000 households live in such temporary quarters spokesman for a joint information centre for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Louisiana Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness Bob Howard said on Monday.
In a joint statement, the agencies said floods might cause the most damage. “Repeated bouts of heavy rainfall can occur over the same areas, increasing the risk for flooding,” the statement said. “Move to higher ground if you hear of flood warnings.”
Nearly 1,800 households in trailers provided directly by FEMA are unable to return yet to homes damaged or destroyed by hurricanes Laura and Delta in 2020, according to a news release last week. Another 1,600 trailers were deployed for Hurricane Ida’s displaced households, Howard said, and Louisiana has set out more than 4,400 RV trailers for Ida’s victims under a test programme paid for by FEMA.
Anyone living in state or FEMA temporary housing needs to keep cellphones on and fully charged, with the volume high and severe weather alerts enabled, the agencies said.
“The danger is expected to be highest at night,” they added.
The release noted that the mobile homes and RV trailers are government property that cannot be moved.
PUTRAJAYA (BERNAMA) – There is no report of any Malaysian involved in the tragic crash of China Eastern Airlines MU5735 in Guangxi Province, China, said the Malaysian Foreign Ministry.
In a statement yesterday the ministry said, however, the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing as well as Consulates General of Malaysia in Kunming, Nanning and Guangzhou have been closely monitoring the developments since the accident.
The ministry, on behalf of the Malaysian government, also extended its condolences and sympathy to the Chinese government and the families of the victims who perished in
the accident.
A passenger plane with 132 people aboard crashed in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on Monday afternoon.
The China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 aircraft, which departed from Kunming and was bound for Guangzhou, crashed into a mountainous area near the Molang village in Tengxian County in the city of Wuzhou at 2.38pm, causing a mountain fire.
