Category: Greed

Canada (Conversation) – With recent news of the college cheating scandal in which parents allegedly paid for their children to gain entrance to the most prestigious post-secondary institutions in the United States, increased attention has been placed on the extreme and even illegal measures parents will take to ensure their children are successful. Parenting trends that protect children from negative experiences and failure are far from new. The concept of “helicopter parenting” emerged in the 1980s to describe overly anxious parents who hover over their children to keep them safe. A…

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United States (Conversation) – One night, a woman I’ll call Tonya got a compliment from a guy when she was out with her boyfriend. Tonya’s boyfriend cursed her because another man had complimented her. He said: “You give it to everybody, I want it too.” In anticipation of his physical abuse, she reasoned, “I could go off to Wonder World.” She then injected heroin, to be “in her own world,” she later told me. Tonya is only one of the hundreds of women I’ve interviewed for my research with similar…

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United States (Conversation) – Sixty years ago, Dwight Eisenhower signed legislation making Hawaii America’s 50th state. The Hawaii admission act followed a centuries-old tradition in which American territories –acquired through war, conquest and purchase – became fully integrated states of the union. But Hawaii was not an ordinary United States territory and would be unlike any other American state. For one, Hawaii was not actually in America, at least not physically. Its islands lay in the Pacific, some 2,000 miles from the U.S. west coast. And Hawaii would become the…

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United States (Conversation) – The traditional homelands of 36 federally recognized tribes – including the Kumeyaay, Pai, Cocopah, O’odham, Yaqui, Apache and Kickapoo peoples – were split in two by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and 1853 Gadsden Purchase, which carved modern-day California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas out of northern Mexico. Today, tens of thousands of people belonging to U.S. Native tribes live in the Mexican states of Baja California, Sonora, Coahuila and Chihuahua, my research estimates. The Mexican government does not recognize indigenous peoples in Mexico as…

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Spain (Conversation) – It was a crime that shocked all of Spain: Five men raped an 18-year-old woman at Pamplona’s running of the bulls in July 2016, in a brutal assault captured on tape by the attackers. The case – known as La Manada, which means “mob” – led to national outrage in Spain, both online and in the streets, and a nine-year jail sentence for the perpetrators. Taken together with the #MeToo movement, which began in the United States in 2017 and quickly spread around the globe, sexual assault…

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United States (Conversation) – In 2007, I gave someone a second chance. I was in Danbury Federal Correctional Institution recruiting women for a new program for people returning from prison that I was running in New York City. A woman approached me and handed me her portfolio. It was basically a detailed resume of her accomplishments, skills and goals for the future. Over a two-year period before this, I had visited at least six female facilities in New York and Connecticut and met hundreds of women looking to enter our…

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Australia (Conversation) – In the wake of comments about the Christchurch massacre, members of the public have raised the question of whether a senator can be expelled from the Senate for making offensive statements. It is now well known that members of parliament can have their seat vacated in the parliament due to their disqualification under section 44 of the Constitution for reasons including dual citizenship, bankruptcy, holding certain government offices or being convicted of offences punishable by imprisonment for one year or longer. But there is no ground of…

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United Kingdom (Conversation) – Even after 15 years serving as a police officer, Fay still vividly remembers the first rape investigation she took part in. The survivor, a 17-year-old girl, had been raped by a man in his twenties at a party. A video-recorded interview and a medical examination took place within six hours. The suspect was swiftly located and arrested. The next day, the survivor withdrew the allegation, traumatised and frightened of repercussions, feeling that she was not strong enough to see the case through. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the…

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United States (Conversation) – The first signs of a problem started to emerge around 2014: More young people said they felt overwhelmed and depressed. College counseling centers reported sharp increases in the number of students seeking treatment for mental health issues. Even as studies were showing increases in symptoms of depression and in suicide among adolescents since 2010, some researchers called the concerns overblown and claimed there simply isn’t enough good data to reach that conclusion. The idea that there’s an epidemic in anxiety or depression among youth “is simply…

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World Wide (Conversation) – The names of American-born Hoda Muthana and Brit Shamima Begum have appeared in countless headlines in the United States and Europe since these two female members of the Islamic State group were discovered in a large displaced persons camp weeks ago. The women were among the holdouts in Islamic State’s last stronghold in Baghouz, Syria. When they were found by journalists, one was pregnant and the other was caring for her young child. In the four years that these women lived as part of IS, they…

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