Month: April 2018

PEOPLE – Katy Perry is a follower of meditation, to such an extent that she came to speak about it to Pope Francis, this Saturday, April 28, during an international conference on health at the Vatican. And she did not go there alone: ​​her “darling” Orlando Bloom was also by her side.

“Hello everyone, I’m here in Rome at the Vatican, to talk about meditation, I’m with my mom, my darling and my manager, Steve, it’s a beautiful day!” She announced to her fans on his Instagram story. She also shared a photo of herself shaking hands with the pontiff.

“Honored to be in the presence of His Holiness,” she wrote, adding that this meeting was organized by the David Lynch Foundation on Transcendental Meditation as part of the conference on health and health disparities, “To unite to heal”.

During this three-day conference, the Pope was able to meet with nearly 500 people and discuss the impact of science and new technologies on society, culture and especially health, according to Vatican News.

As required by protocol, the singer was dressed in black with a minimalist black veil.

Katy Perry was raised in the Catholic Christian tradition, and Orlando Bloom has been a Buddhist since he was 16. It seems that the two lovebirds are patched up after deciding on a “break” in 2017.

The couple took advantage of this visit to Rome to play tourists, admire the Colosseum and take photos, posted on the singer’s Instagram story.

See also on The HuffPost:

Everything about season 2 and the universe of the series on thehandmaidstale.allocine.fr

After almost 30 years of career, Ann Dowd has an impressive career to her credit. The actress is best known for her role as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid’s Tale, the adaptation of the novel. “The Scarlet Maid”. In this dystopian and totalitarian version of the United States, we follow the journey of June, a woman who became a servant under the name “Offred”, after a politico-religious sect took power. Ann Dowd plays the leader of this sect, a somewhat manipulative woman, indoctrinating maids with the beliefs of the new society and forcing them to accept their fate. His performance in the show earned him a Emmy Award in September 2017. So let’s come back to the journey of this incredible woman.

Hulu

SES DEBUTS

Ann Dowd discovered a passion for the theater at a young age and performed for several years in Chicago. She moved to New York in 1988 to pursue her dream. The actress must first be content to make simple appearances, especially in The Baby-Sitters Club. Based on the children’s book series of the same name, this show follows the ups and downs of a teenage-run babysitting club. She then plays in the trilogy Shiloh in 1997, as Louise Preston, and appeared in Alex Sichel’s cult film All Over Me. For a while, Ann Dowd made minor appearances in series like The X-Files, NYPD Blue, and Freaks and Geeks as well as in several episodes of CSI, but his career does not really take off.

AT THE SIDE OF STARS

In 1993, the actress was chosen to play Jill Beckett, the sister of Tom Hanks’ character, in Philadelphia. We then find her in 2004, alongside Meryl Streep, in The Manchurian Candidate, directed by Jonathan Demme. Also in 2004, Ann played Natalie Portman’s mother in Garden State and appeared in The Forgotten alongside Julianne Moore. She later landed the role of Mrs. Strank in Clint Eastwood’s feature film: Flags of Our Fathers. Despite her growing notoriety, the actress decides to refocus on the theater and therefore appears on Broadway in 2008 in The Seagull, where she gives the answer to Carey Mulligan and Kristin Scott Thomas. In 2007, she played Sister Aloysius in the play Doubt, and the New York Times describes her performance as “terrifying” and then describes her as “masterful in this role”. She therefore begins to make a name for herself, which will allow her to land new projects.

THE CONSECRATION

Ann Dowd has long been seen as a second-rate actress that everyone knows. She nevertheless reveals herself in 2012, in the film Compliance, in which she plays Sandra, team leader of a fast food restaurant, caught in a mysterious ethical nightmare. Directed by Craig Zobel, this absurd and anxiety-provoking drama about submission to authority is inspired by a series of news items that took place in the United States between 2002 and 2004. Ann Dowd receives rave reviews for her work and along footage is shown at Sundance Film Festival. Thanks to this project, the actress gains even more notoriety.

FROM SERIES TO SERIES

Subsequently, she got a role in Masters of Sex in 2013, that of Estabrooks, the mother of Dr. William Masters. In fall 2014, Ann took part in the eight-award-winning Olive Kitteridge miniseries Emmy Awards, in the skin of Bonnie Newton, the wife of the tumultuous Harmon. It was not until 2014 that she obtained one of the main roles in a series: The Leftovers, in the skin of Patti Levin, leader of the group. The Guilty Remnant. At the end of June 2017, Ann Dowd joined the cast of The Handmaid’s Tale with her mythical character of Aunt Lydia, who can be found from this Thursday, April 26, for a second season, from 8:45 p.m. on OCS Max. In the meantime, here is the trailer to immerse yourself in the world of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Unemployment in the United States is well below 15% and there are not “a hundred million people who have nothing to eat” notwithstanding what our French media think.

By Philippe Lacoude, from the United States

In the United States, the harmonized unemployment rate within the meaning of the OECD is indeed 4.1% currently. If we go into detail, some unemployed people are discouraged from looking for a job, but they only represent 0.3% of the working population. Many people are underemployed – either working below what they think is their skills, or wanting to work in another occupation – but they make up only 0.7% of the workforce.

Unemployment is therefore well below 15% and there are not “a hundred million people who have nothing to eat” notwithstanding what our French media think.

But if this 4.1% figure is true, how is this possible? Does France have anything to learn from the United States? Should we go from raw figures to a little analysis?

In the United States, federal labor law establishes

• non-discrimination based on sex in terms of remuneration (via the Equal Pay Act from 1963)
• non-discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin (via Title VII of the Civil Rights Act from 1964)
• non-discrimination based on age (via the Age Discrimination in Employment Act from 1967)
• non-discrimination based on disability (via the Rehabilitation Act from 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990)
• the National Labor Relations Board, a sort of industrial tribunal (via the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, an avatar of the “red decade”) which President Obama has wrongly abused to punish his enemies and which President Trump has just overturned almost all recent decisions.
• minimum wage, overtime, and child labor standards that affect full-time and part-time workers in the private sector and federal, state and local governments (via the Fair Labor Standards Act from 1938, another avatar of the “red decade”!)
• labor law which requires employers to provide employees with protected and unpaid leave for medical and family reasons (via the Family and Medical Leave Act from 1993)

It is not perfect from a liberal point of view but all this is relatively benign compared to the huge French Labor Code. In any case, this right is partially supplementary and a non-negligible part of labor law depends on the law of the different States.

Nature of the employment contract

• In particular, states decide on the nature of the employment contract. For the vast majority of states, the employment contract is a kind of commercial law contract where one person sells a product (their work) and another buys it under certain conditions. And in the absence of a contract – the vast majority of cases – there is almost no obligation on both parties. The job is then called at will, that is to say at will of the protagonists: the employees come if they want and the employers keep them if they want. There are few exceptions to this freedom of the parties.

This may seem incredible to a French or a Belgian but is not very different from the Swiss or Singaporean diets. And it turns out that these two countries, like many American states, have had full employment for decades. In his book Overcoming Law, the famous judge Richard Posner explains precisely the full American employment by this “employment at will”: there is very little risk of making a mistake for an employer and there is therefore almost no reason not to hire. Likewise, for an employee, it is easy to change jobs at the slightest opportunity that presents itself.

Another aspect of state law is that some force employees to be unionized if they want to work (union shop) while others forbid taking employee payrolls for the benefit of unions (right-to-work, or right to work).

Obviously, the labor movement is very strongly opposed to right to work laws: unionization fell 15% after Idaho and Oklahoma passed right to work laws in 1985 and 2001. attempts to establish unions drop by 50% after the passage of such laws. This is politically important because unions contributed nearly a billion dollars to the campaigns of Barack Obama in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. They represent more than half of electoral donations. Democrats who have traditionally benefited from union money for their election campaigns lament the union’s loss of influence.

Typically, wages fall by 3.2% on average in states where unionization is no longer compulsory. Employees are partly there for two reasons: payments to unions represent between 1% and 2% of the payslip – the pay cut is therefore only from 1.2% to 2.2% – and above all, states that recognize the “right to work” create more jobs.

In fact, as we can see below, out of the 24 states with higher unemployment low that the national average, 77% (weighted average of the number of workers) recognize the “right to work”. Conversely, out of the 23 states with higher unemployment high than the national average, 70% born recognize not the right to work!

A final legislative aspect that differs from state to state and affects employment is taxation. For $ 10 in income, the average American sends about $ 2.20 to the federal state and about $ 1.30 to their state. Some states do not have income tax (such as Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington State, and Wyoming). Others like California, Iowa, or New York have rates that exceed or reach almost 10% of income.

Not surprisingly, it is the states with the lowest taxes that create the most jobs. This translates into large-scale tax revenue gains or losses. Two simple maps illustrate our point very well: the very socialist California, on the way to become one of the worst states for doing business and the capital of the poor in the United States, is losing jobs in favor of its immediate neighbors, the Nevada and Arizona but also in favor of Texas. A similar phenomenon brought to light by the SOI database that we mentioned above shows that there is a migration that does not discontinue from the northeast to Florida.

New York has one of the highest tax burdens in the country. The state consumes on average 12.7% of household income. Since New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo was sworn in in January 2011, 577,286 people have left for other states, taking with them more than $ 27 billion in tax revenue. The top recipient of ex-New Yorkers last year was the state of Florida from Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who has no income tax.

Because the local tax deduction from the federal tax base disappears this year, this phenomenon will accelerate. It is now easy to earn 5% or even 10% of income: move!

Apart from the fact that it would be difficult to find “hundred million people with nothing to eat” in the United States notwithstanding the eccentric opinions of the French media, the rather fine analysis of the various American states therefore teaches us that it is high time that France abolished its labor law, its outdated unionism and made a major tax reform. A bit like President Macron’s program… But for real!

The city of Atlanta in the United States was the victim of a ransomware attack on March 22 which made many of its services inaccessible. Rarely, official documents from the city released in mid-April revealed the cost of the attack: $ 2.7 million, not counting lost work hours and legal costs.

Updated June 7 : The cost to restore services to the municipality will be much higher than expected. The city now estimates that it will have to spend an additional $ 9.5 million in addition to the $ 2.7 million already spent. And this is only a temporary estimate, which could be further increased. It has also been revealed that more than a third of the 424 programs operating in the city of Atlanta have been put out of use by malware, and that almost 30% of the programs in question are considered critical to their proper functioning. from the city. The city’s judicial center has notably lost 10 years of legal documents, and the police video archives have also been lost.

All services have not yet been restored

The 2.7 million spent so far breaks down this way: $ 650,000 has been paid to SecureWorks for its emergency response services to the incident, $ 600,000 has gone to Ernst & Young for consultancy in response to the incident, $ 60,000 to Cisco for security incident response services, $ 60,000 was allocated to Mosaic451 to reinforce the city’s emergency workforce to deal with the event, and $ 50,000 dollars were paid to the Edelman agency for a crisis communication service.

In addition, $ 730,000 was paid to Fyrsoft, $ 393,328 to Airnet Group and $ 124,000 to Pioneer Technology Group for an intervention on the city’s information system. Note, however, that the city’s services have not yet been fully restored, and that the sums committed could therefore continue to increase.

The criminals originally demanded a ransom of $ 51,000 which the city apparently did not pay. Paying a ransom is generally a bad idea, but we can especially regret that the city did not undertake to secure its network upstream of this attack, which would have cost it much less … An lesson to remember to avoid to be next?

San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York… The mere mention of these American metropolises nourishes the ambition of expatriation of many young French people, very many dreaming of settling in the United States. But contrary to appearances, it is not in these cities that one lives and works best in the country of Uncle Sam.

The American weekly U.S News & World Report has just ranked the most interesting cities to settle in among the 125 most populous American cities. The top 10 reveals some surprises.

The American newspaper used a methodology based on indices of the job market (unemployment rate + average salary), prices (annual median household income + annual cost of living), quality of life (crime + quality of health + quality of education + well-being + travel time), attractiveness, or even migration.

1. Austin, Texas

With an average of 7.7 out of 10, the metropolis of the southwest of the Texas state comes first in the cities where to settle. With nearly 2 million inhabitants and an unemployment rate of around 3.2%, the capital of Texas benefits from a strong cultural offer with numerous festivals, including the South by Southwest, whose influence now exceeds very far national borders. The job market is also dynamic, driven in part by the “Silicon Hills”, a tech hub where Google and a few investors are well established. The University of Texas campus, one of the largest in the country, has nearly 50,000 students.

2.Colorado Springs, Colorado

With a general average of 7.6 out of 10, Colorado Springs takes second place in the ranking. A medium-sized city in the United States, with just under 700,000 residents, it is also the second largest city in Colorado, behind Denver. Colorado Springs has a relatively low cost of living, combined with low unemployment and many cultural downsides.

3.Denver, Colorado

Colorado is definitely a good place to live since Denver occupies third place on the podium. The capital of Colorado, which has capitalized heavily on the aerospace and defense industries, is now being boosted by the booming recreational marijuana industry. Denver is known to be the epicenter of the green gold rush, and many jobs have been created as a result. The average annual salary capped at 55,910 dollars.

4. Des Moines, Iowa

If the study of US News & World Report recalls that the capital of the State of Iowa in the heart of Mid-West is not particularly popular with tourists, the fact remains that it is a city where the quality of life is excellent. The average annual salary is $ 49,420 and the unemployment rate is 2.9%. Finally, the cost of housing is significantly lower than the American national average.

5.Fayetteville, Arkansas

Again, the name Fayetteville probably doesn’t mean much to you. This city of the state of Arkansas and its 500,000 inhabitants is not in the guides of the tour operators. . Nevertheless, the quality of life as well as the price indices are generally advantageous, and the local economy is carried by large employers including Walmart, Tyson Foods or even J.B Hunt Transport which have their headquarters in the state.

6.Portland, Oregon

Oregon’s largest city is known for its NBA team, the Blazers. If the price indices are less advantageous than in the cities at the top of the ranking, the attractiveness of this city in the northwest of the United States cannot be denied. Nike, headquartered a few kilometers outside the city, and Intel are among the city’s largest employers, with 2.3 million residents.

7.Huntsville, Alabama

Head south with Huntsville and its 440,000 inhabitants. The attractiveness of the city of Alabama State is not the best, but the cost of living is particularly low. While the average annual salary is around 52,960 dollars.

8.Washington, D.C.

The capital of the United States is the largest metropolis in this top 10 with its 6 million inhabitants. As a result, it benefits from a large pool of employment, with qualified positions: the average annual salary explodes at 68,000 dollars. The unemployment rate is 3.7% of the workforce. The only downside is the cost of living, which is much higher than the national average.

9.Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota

The twin cities of the State of Minnesota benefit from a very dynamic biotech and science sector. The average annual salary of $ 55,000 makes it possible to live well in a city where the cost of living is only slightly higher than the national average.

10. Seattle

Capital of the State of Washington (3.6 million inhabitants), Seattle benefits from a very advantageous job market, especially in tech since two of the largest market capitalizations in the world have set up their headquarters there ( Microsoft and Amazon). The cost of living is high, but the average annual salary, $ 61,000, partially compensates for these expenses.

Note that San Francisco emerges in 20th place, especially because of its exorbitant cost of living. This is also the case for the cities of Los Angeles (101st) and New York (96th) or even Chicago (87th), whose prohibitive prices make them drop in this ranking.