Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Friday, March 10, 2017
William Okpo, the Black Women-Owned Line You Need to Know
After seven years, the sisters behind the NY-based label continue to thrive.
After just a few minutes of talking with Darlene and Lizzy Okpo — co-founders of the New York-based womenswear line William Okpo — it becomes abundantly clear that failure isn’t, and has never been, an option. That’s why seven years after starting their label, the sisters are still turning out fresh ideas that feel prescient and thriving creatively in an industry that’s not known to be friendly to upstarts — nor overtly welcoming to women of color.
Founded in 2010 when Darlene and Lizzy were just 23 and 19 years old, respectively, the brand takes its name from the girls’ father, William Okpo, who immigrated from Nigeria to New York in 1976. The sisters embraced his strong, unwavering work ethic and unique style — ideas that ultimately inspired them to launch a label despite limited resources, limited experience, and youth all working against them.
The two had interned and worked all over retail — most notably at Opening Ceremony, where the line was picked up early on — but neither, funny enough, knew how to actuallysew a garment when they decided to start a clothing label. “I just researched how to start a line, and I Googled pattern and garment makers,” says Darlene of their very DIY start.
The aesthetic of the brand has matured consistently since its launch, but the sharp tailoring, rich colors, and mixed fabrications and hardware — combining materials like neoprene and silk chiffon in one garment — have stayed at the core of William Okpo’s look. It’s with this approach that the brand pushes the boundaries and expectations of designers of the African diaspora — if you’re looking for traditional African prints pumped out for mass consumption, you won’t find them here.
“Just because we're coming from a Nigerian background, that's not what we're about. We were born here also, so we wanted to break that stigma of black designers and African print,” says Darlene. “This is why the brand is named after my dad, William Okpo. When he came here, he didn't fit into that stereotype. He came here, in our opinion, influencing people with style. There are pictures of him in three-piece suits, bell bottoms, and ‘fro, with a Members Only jacket, all white. My dad is the most stylish man you'll ever meet.”
Tanisha Pina
Panama ex-dictator Noriega remains in critical state after surgery
Panama City (AFP) - Panama's former dictator, Manuel Noriega, remained in a critical condition on Wednesday following surgery to remove a benign brain tumor, one of his daughters told AFP.
"We have no news. Everything remains the same from last night's bulletin," said Thays Noriega.
Manuel Noriega, 83, was in an induced coma in the intensive care unit of the public Santo Tomas Hospital in Panama City. He was under observation and not receiving visitors.
Noriega's lawyer, Ezra Angel, confirmed to AFP that there have been no changes to 83-year-old's state since late Tuesday.
Noriega underwent two operations on Tuesday: one to remove a benign meningioma -- a tumor on membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord just inside the skull -- and another to stop a brain hemorrhage.
Angel said doctors had managed to stop the cerebral bleeding, but that Noriega remained in a "delicate" condition.
Noriega in January received a temporary medical release from El Renacer prison -- where he was serving three 20-year sentences for the forced disappearances of opponents during his 1983-1989 rule -- to have the surgery.
He is expected to return to that penitentiary if he recovers.
Panama's media gave front-page coverage of the ex-dictator's health emergency, but offered no editorials on it. Major television stations maintained regular programming.
Manuel Noriega was a military intelligence officer who long worked for the CIA and ruled his Central American country with increasing brutality until US forces invaded in 1989 to topple and capture him.
Relations between Noriega and the United States had deteriorated as he defied pressure to stand down, and as he appeared to shift allegiance to the then-Soviet Union in the waning years of the Cold War.
After his ouster, Noriega was taken to the United States, where he was tried and imprisoned on drug trafficking and money laundering charges.
In 2010, Noriega was sent to France, where he was convicted on money laundering charges, then extradited to Panama in 2011, where he was sentenced for the disappearance of political opponents during his time in power.
A researcher who interviewed hundreds of married women found the happiest "never bought into" a "dangerous fantasy"
The most confusing piece of advice in "The Real Thing," Ellen McCarthy's 2015 book about love and relationships, is also the sagest.
Summarizing the findings of a researcher who interviewed hundreds of married women, McCarthy writes: "The collective wisdom seems to be: 'Sometimes you will be miserable. This is the reality of long-term intimacy. Carry on.'"
It's confusing because, well, sometimes you will be miserable? Like, how often? And how often is too often?! Kind of leaves us hanging.
But in reality, it's impossible to quantify the health of a romantic relationship. Ultimately, it's up to you to decide how much and what sort of misery is tolerable — and whether there's enough joy involved to balance it out.
McCarthy is a Washington Post feature writer who spent four years covering weddings, love, and relationships for The Post. "The Real Thing" is a collection of the lessons she learned on the love beat.
The researcher who interviewed hundreds of married women is Iris Krasnow, author of the 2011 book "The Secret Lives of Wives." She told McCarthy that the No. 1 thing women who were satisfied with their marriages had in common was that they "never bought into the dangerous fantasy — the myth — of Happily Ever After."
In other words, maybe the important thing is not knowing exactly how many moments of misery qualify you for a divorce, but accepting that total happiness is hard to come by.
McCarthy also interviewed Diane Sollee, a marriage educator who explained that too many people have delusional expectations for marriage. They buy into the myth "that if you find your soul mate, everything will be fine."
Yet even if you believe in soul mates and believe that you've found yours, that hardly ensures a blissful union. McCarthy writes:
"[Sollee] wants couples who are getting ready to walk down the aisle to know — really know— that it will be hard. That there will be times when one or both of them want out and can barely stand the sight of each other. That they'll be bored, then frustrated, angry, and perhaps resentful."
She adds: "Diane also wants them to know that all of these things are normal."
Bottom line: Uncomfortable emotions and experiences are an inevitable part of a romantic relationship (and of life in general). Don't expect perfection, and you'll free yourself up to find something close to it.
BOKO HARAM PAID WOULD-BE TEENAGE SUICIDE BOMBER ‘LESS THAN $1’
The 14-year-old girl said she was told to blow herself up in a city center.
BY CONOR GAFFEY ON 3/8/17 AT 2:11 PM
A would-be teenage suicide bomber has said Boko Haram militants paid her just 200 naira ($0.64) to blow herself up in a city in northeast Nigeria.
In footage obtained by Sky News, the 14-year-old girl said the militants had told her and a friend to detonate their explosive vests in a “crowded place” in Maiduguri, the northeastern city that has been at the epicenter of Boko Haram’s eight-year insurgency.
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The girl added that she and her friend had worn the vests for three days before going into the city center. The girl removed her vest after being ordered to by police, but officers shot her friend dead after she refused to do the same.
A 2016 UNICEF report found that a fifth of the suicide bombers deployed by Boko Haram were children, and that girls made up 75 percent of the child bombers.
Boko Haram began launching attacks against Nigerian government and civilian targets in 2009, with the aim of establishing a militant Islamist caliphate in northeast Nigeria. The group, which has since split into two factions, has perpetrated widespread violence in Nigeria and neighboring countries, killing thousands and displacing millions. The United Nations has warned that northern Nigeria is at risk of famine, largely due to the impact of the insurgency.
The commander of Nigeria’s counter-insurgency operations, Major General Lucky Irabor, told Sky News that young people like the would-be bomber “are very unfortunate children, little girls, who have been involved, who have been engaged to be the couriers of these dastardly acts of the Boko Haram terrorists.”
A Nigerian military offensive, coupled with that of a regional joint task force, has pinned Boko Haram back and reclaimed much of the territory it once controlled in Nigeria, which was comparable to the size of Belgium at the group’s violent peak in early 2015.
But Boko Haram militants continue to carry out guerrilla-style suicide attacks, and the group is still holding the vast majority of the Chibok girls in captivity. Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from their school in northeast Nigeria, 2014, sparking the global #BringBackOurGirls campaign. But despite the international attention, 195 of the girls remain in captivity.
Here's the terrible reason even married people are having less sex
You might think the current flood of dating apps would mean people are having more sex than ever, but in fact for many, the exact opposite seems to be true. Gasp!
A new study published by the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior and reported by the Washington Post found that people are having less sex overall than they were in the 1990s.
The study, which used data from the giant General Social Survey, found that on the whole American adults in the early 2010s had sex nine fewer times per year than they did in the 1990s. When you spread that over 12 months, that’s not exactly a heinous dry spell, thank goodness. Still, more sex is usually better than less.
The decrease was seen across gender, race, region, education, and employment status. One reason for the drop? There are now more people without partners, who typically tend to have half the sex that those with partners do. But even married people (and those living with partners) aren’t doing it as much.
Celebrity Couples Who Swore Off Sex Before Marriage
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There used to be what was called the “marriage advantage,” meaning that those who were partnered up had more sex because they had a ready and willing partner at hand. But that has sadly disappeared. In 1990, married people had sex around 73 times per year, according to reports. By 2014, that was down to 55.
Comparatively, that number for unpartnered people stayed level—about 59 times per year. Even with Match and OKCupid and Tinder, singles aren't really hooking up more than when you had to meet people the old-fashioned way.
So why are the married among us failing to get busy with each other? The study suggests it may be because they’re too busy doing other things, like sending work emails or playing games on their phone. After all, how many nights have you sat in bed combing through your feeds, oblivious to the person next to you?
SEE ALSO: The best dating apps to get you laid
We’re also less happy overall, are more depressed, and are taking more antidepressants as a result. All of these things aren’t exactly known for putting people in the mood. We do know, based on the data, that the decline isn’t due to people working longer hours or consuming more porn.
Of course, just because this is happening on average doesn't mean it has to happen to you. You can put the phone down and look at your partner again. And if you're single, you can pick up the phone and try to find a match who makes you want to do more than just look at your phone.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/heres-terrible-reason-even-married-173835208.html
Cassie Murdoch
Thursday, March 9, 2017
Interview: Indian Immigration in the Time of Trump
What brought Indians to the United States, and what made Indian immigrants, as a whole, so successful once here?
That’s the question Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur, and Nirvikar Singh set out to answer in their The Other One Percent: Indians in America. They track the increase in Indian immigration to America, both after the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and again during the (still-ongoing, in some ways) tech boom. They use data and research to show how the Indians who come to America are “triple selected” through India’s socioeconomic hierarchy, highly competitive education system, and the U.S. immigration system. If the one percent of the U.S. population that is Indian has done particularly well, the authors argue, it is perhaps because selection factors were such that the Indian-born population is over three times more educated than the population of the United States.
The book was published shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump’s election, and written before changes to the visa system and increased violence against Indians in America. So Foreign Policy spoke with Chakravorty and Singh to ask how they think the story of the other one percent will change in the time of Trump.
To start with the big picture: Toward the end of the book, you say that it’s still to be seen whether the 2016 election is as big a shift in immigration as the 1965 immigration law or the tech boom. The election’s over, and we’re a month and a bit into Trump’s presidency. What do you think now?
SC: It’s clear that this administration has a pretty distinct view on immigration and immigrant labor. I think there is a pretty large thrust, in a sociological sense, toward creating an Other — a non-white, immigrant population of the U.S. — and marginalizing them. That’s a huge part of the political agenda. And the Other is part of the America First agenda — to kind of cut down on not only foreign workers, but relations with other countries, cutting down on trade. There are plenty of signals that the H-1B visa system is going to be changed. Exactly how is unclear at this point. But it’s very likely to be more restrictive, if not abandoned all together. And it will have pretty significant consequences, not just for immigrants but for the tech industry. I’m sure there are some Indian tech workers who are visibly replacing so-called American workers, but by and large the industry has grown massively in 30 years. And a lot of it through foreign labor. And it raises the question, to me at least, why the American education system, who raised some of the top people — in the middle level [of the tech sector], that labor market really has not been generated in this country. And if there is a squeeze in that labor market, there will be pretty serious consequences.
NS: It’s hard to tell exactly what will happen. The initial signs are not encouraging from what I read. I know we’ve gone through cycles in the past with the H-1B visa program … to me, this comes in the context with Steve Bannon being on record in an interview saying something like, “Oh, there are too many South Asian CEOs in the U.S.” Which seems pretty racist to me. One can be racist without using negative characterizations. Basically I think this is sort of what we point out in our book: there have been eras where the United States adopted a very closed and nativist approach to immigration. It’s possible we’re heading in that direction. At least this administration seems to be very comfortable with that approach. American immigration policy is not just shaped by high-minded ideals, but by domestic politics and geopolitics. It’s kind of a weird situation. I think we’d all gotten used to post-1965 immigration policy, and this administration seems to want to question the fundamentals of that approach. The initial signs to me are not at all encouraging. It’s not just America first — there’s also a racial element to it. That adds a layer of discomfort.
Fast processing of H-1B visas has been suspended, at least for now. Do you think this will change, at least in the short term, Indian immigration to the United States?
SC: Honestly, I’m not sure what that particular tweak is going to do. [Fast processing of H-1B visas] basically gives a leg up to the big firms. They’re able to pay the extra dollars needed to fast track. Normally it’s six to eight weeks, they do it in a couple of weeks. There are plenty of reports that this is biased toward the big firms, and startups are unable to take advantage. I’m honestly not sure what this tweak will mean.
NS: To the extent that people are having trouble getting H-1B visas, I think straightforwardly that will slow down the pipeline. If Indian IT companies undertake structural shifts in how they distribute work across locations, that may be a more permanent shift. A company cannot rely on a fickle immigration policy. I think the other factor — the really chilling effect is going to be from the killings of Indian Americans. Even me, I’m telling my children who were born in the U.S., please be extra careful.
You briefly touch on violence against Indians in America — and in particular against Sikhs — in the book. An Indian immigrant was fatally shot yesterday, and it was the third time in two weeks that there’s been an attack on an Indian in the United States. How does this fit into the story of Indians in the United States, and do you think that the fact that so many Indians in America live not in big cities but, for professional reasons, what you describe as ethno-techno bubbles, makes them particularly visible/vulnerable at present?
SC: Many communities have bemoaned the fact that they’re not taken into consideration. They don’t get political traction. And yet when communities do become visible, they can become targets. And this is not the first time Indians have become targets. In the late 80s, there was the “dot buster” phenomenon in Jersey City. So their visibility can provoke, and does, and has in the past and will in the future, probably, racial anxiety and racial violence. Are they more vulnerable where they’re more visible? I honestly don’t know … the genie [of racially motivated violence] is out of the bottle. It will be very hard to put it back.
NS: I think that’s a reasonable inference. The Kansas shooting was particularly striking. These were not even Sikhs, but they were brown-skinned. Obviously they were South Asian. I think the shooter knew that. It was just like, “Okay, you’re the wrong skin color.” Or, “Okay, you’re the wrong skin color, and you’re taking my job.” I think the current administration’s rhetoric — all those dog whistles really were dog whistles.
To what extent do you think the plight of Indians in the United States will impact U.S.-India relations under Trump?
SC: That’s a difficult question, because you know we have Mr. Trump’s equivalent as the prime minister of India. He uses very similar language. His people do violence on minorities, particularly Muslims. And he looks the other way, passively and sometimes openly encourages — uses coded language that kind of enables — this. So in a sense there’s a meeting of the minds there. But there is the contradiction of — but you can’t treat my people poorly when they’re over there, and we need to keep this transfer thing going, it’s good for your economy and my economy. So I honestly don’t know how those relations work. How does one have a stable relationship if the top is so unstable? Is that even feasible?
NS: On the one hand, the Indian government is very concerned. I think the Indian government views the Indian diaspora as a major asset and would want to speak up for that group. The irony is that the current government in India doesn’t have a great track record of inclusiveness itself. I don’t think that will really factor into it. It seems like Trump and Modi will get along. Maybe Modi can influence Trump to tone down some of his rhetoric and policies with respect to Indians in America They can say don’t do this with visas, or tone down your rhetoric, but there’s so much else going on in terms of Othering minorities.
You say at several points in the book that Indian success in America is not because of inherent traits, but rather the factors that led to Indian immigration. Were you consciously trying to stress that message?
SC: It’s for a number of reasons. It is almost the singular message of the book. We really wrote the book for an Indian audience, because there are many myths in Indians about themselves, and we needed to address that. The way we put it, we call it triple selection. Indians call it hierarchy. The caste system, the complete inequality with access to education formed over the past 150 years, and in that group you have this ultra-competitive exam system — and most people coming over here have come through that ultra-competitive system. And then the U.S. lets in certain people. The people who are here are extremely fortunate not to be here — they’ve been fortunate their entire lives. Of course they’re going to do well. America is really getting a lot of talent for relatively little money. This group is pretty innovative, all of them are rising to the tops of their professions. There’s a lot of talent here. And that talent is in service of America. But these people were bloody lucky. They’re lucky there, and they’re lucky here. And for us it was important to say that.
NS: Our goal in the book was to be data driven. That’s what actually comes out of the data. There’s no evidence for a secret sauce. Yes, you can identify some factors such as kinship ties and trust networks. I don’t want to say that sociological or cultural factors are irrelevant, but I think that even in those cases — they’re a relatively small part of the story. The biggest predictor is education, and Indians in America are really highly educated. We said, okay, let’s look at the data. And then that story emerged. I think it surprised us. I think there’s a huge lesson there for the United States as a whole — if you want to make America great again, you should really improve education for everyone.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Photo credit: ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images
Emily Tamkin
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