WA should be on your watchlist, too. An AB5-like bill was just re-introduced in the Senate there, even though it had been defeated last year. It, too, requires writers and other freelancers and independent contractors be hired as employees when their works contribute to the normal business of their clients. The bill ignores a study of independent contractors that was prepared by the Dept of Commerce after the bill's defeat. The study documents that 3/4 of the independent contractors in WA don't need or want the employee benefits touted by the bill's advocates. Between their own efforts and those of their families and friends, they're doing fine. Read the study yourself then write to Sen. Karen Keiser about your opposition to being made employees against your will.A similar law may be in the works in Illinois.
The study: https://app.leg.wa.gov/committeeschedules/Home/Documents/26113?//20902
Senator Keiser: karen.keiser@leg.wa.gov
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I’m back from my doctor’s visit! It was nothing but good news. The outside walls of the clinic are covered with swarms of chironomid midges! Everywhere I looked, there they were, clinging to the brickwork. This is one big buffet for spiders that I’ll have to check again later, but I didn’t see many today […]
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The CEO of a social care firm says there is a surge in demand for live-in carers due to coronavirus.
Like all responsible parents, Aastha Pashte, 28, took her two-day-old baby to a clinic for vaccinations, never imagining that the life-saving injections could turn life-threatening. It was only three weeks later, when the infant developed a mysterious fever, that Aastha discovered that the clinic had forgotten a 2-cm needle inside her child's bottom.
It took a two-hour surgery to remove the foreign body at the Bai Jerbai Wadia Hospital for Children. Once the child is discharged, the family is planning to sue the clinic that forgot the needle.
X-ray shows the needle dangerously close to the hip joint
Scans show needle
The baby boy, who is Aastha's first child, was born in perfect health on June 17. A couple of days later, the Chembur resident's family took the child to a local clinic for vaccination. Everything was normal until the 21st day after birth, when the infant became feverish. "When we took him to a private doctor, she thought it was the flu and prescribed some medicines. But when the baby didn't show any relief, we took him to Wadia hospital, where we were shocked to learn that there was a needle inside his buttock. Suddenly we realised why he cried every time we massaged oil on his buttocks," recalled Aastha, while talking to mid-day from the NICU.
Dr Minnie B
At first, the baby was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone. But X-rays and CT scan showed a persistent shadow, indicating a foreign body. The parents then realised that it was the vaccination needle still stuck in their child's bottom, almost deep enough to graze the hip joint. On July 10, a surgery was performed to remove the needle. The baby is now stable and recovering in the neo-natal intensive care unit (NICU) at Wadia hospital.
Rare case
This was a first-of-its-kind case for the hospital. Dr Pradnya Bendre, paediatric surgeon at Bai Jerbai Wadia Hospital, Parel, said, "The baby was taken for intra-operative surgery for removal of the foreign body. It was difficult to find the exact location; hence, multiple X-rays were taken. It took two hours to remove the needle under C-arm guidance localisations. The 2-cm needle was found embedded in the capsule of the left hip joint and the baby has recovered uneventfully without any complications."
"The needle had gone deep inside, and it was extremely challenging to perform the surgery on a newborn without making a big incision. Thankfully, the child was diagnosed without much delay. We want to highlight the issue so that such a blunder is not repeated in the future," said Dr Minnie Bodhanwala CEO Wadia Hospitals.
Also read: Mumbai: 1-month-old baby has narrow escape as maternity ward ceiling crumbles
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Instagram has introduced a feature that allows users to make payments. The Facebook-owned photo-sharing app will now allow users to add their credit or debit card with their profile and set up a security pin. They can make purchases within the photo-sharing service and make payments without having to leave the site, Cnet reported.
Payments is the next big thing for tech giants who are looking at retaining users in the form of customers by offering them a one-stop destination for all their needs, including social, photos, and now e-commerce. The new native payments feature is currently available through limited partners and businesses on Instagram.
(Edited by mid-day online desk, with inputs from ANI)
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Of India's 31 chief ministers at this point, 11 have criminal cases against them, and eight have 'serious' cases that include rioting and murder. Illustration/Ravi Jadhav
I urge you to spend a few minutes on Google and look for Indian politicians convicted of crimes. I don't recommend you search for politicians 'accused' of crimes, because that may leave you with very little time to do anything else for the rest of the week. I also warn you against looking for politicians convicted of corruption, or politicians disqualified from office, because both those lists are incredibly short and may depress you.
Also, read a little about the Association for Democratic Reforms, established in 1999 by a group of professors from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, to examine the criminal, financial and educational background of candidates contesting elections. To spend a little time at its website, where it publishes reports analysing elections and their contestants, is to expose oneself to just how awful the people claiming to represent us really are.
A week ago, for instance, the ADR published an analysis of MPs and MLAs with declared cases related to crimes against women. Apparently, out of 1,580 (that's 33 per cent) of MPs/MLAs analysed with declared criminal cases, 45 MPs and 3 MLAs have declared cases related to crimes against women. 327 candidates who had declared cases related to crimes against women were given tickets by recognised political parties. A number of candidates even contested in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha elections, and Maharashtra had the highest number of these gifted representatives. The website also carries a preliminary analysis of candidates announced by major political parties for the Karnataka 2018 Assembly elections, and shows that these parties continue to give tickets to candidates with serious cases.
Here's another thing that ought to concern us but no longer does, presumably because we are inured to information of this sort: Of India's 31 chief ministers at this point, 11 have criminal cases registered against them, and eight have 'serious' criminal cases that include 'voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons or means', 'rioting', and even murder.
It's easy to see why politicians with a criminal record are more likely to be elected than those who haven't seen the inside of a jail, of course. People who don't commit crimes don't have access to illicit funds, which means they simply can't afford to bribe voters. It's also why the government of our country overturned a Supreme Court ruling demanding the disqualification of any politician convicted for crimes punishable with more than two years in jail. According to the men and women who supposedly represent us, it is more important to maintain political alliances and stay in power than it is to prevent criminals from taking charge of our collective future.
We live in an era where transparency does not exist, where we have no access to information about why some men and women are mysteriously chosen to represent a majority, and where politicians are encouraged to avoid being answerable to their countrymen. We are kept in the dark about why some projects are initiated and others ignored, why deals that don't make sense to anyone with common sense are approved at our expense, and even why our streets are named after people none of us have ever heard of. It's also why no political party has taken concrete steps to encourage the brightest and best among us to run for office. It's also why qualified government officials are often shunted out, because our leaders need minions, not people capable of independent thought. This is why we live in a time where it is always the worst that rise to power the fastest, then dictate terms for the rest of us.
Children ought to aspire to a life of public service because ours is a country that has, at least on paper, always placed the common good above all. Our forefathers sacrificed everything they had to create a country that no longer works for its poorest citizens. The reason why these statistics ought to matter is the kind of message the world's largest democracy is sending to its youngest members. In America, young people are encouraged to nurture the belief that they can be President some day. We probably don't encourage our children to aim for those high offices because we recognise that they may need to have a criminal bent of mind in order to make it.
When he isn't ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
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The lull in incidents involving doctors and relatives of patients has been broken once again. An indefinite strike called by resident doctors of the civic-run JJ Hospital entered its second day on the weekend. The doctors held a candlelight march to protest the attack on their colleagues and to pressure the management to take action to ensure their safety.
Doctors from other hospitals were supporting the protest as well. It started with over 400 resident doctors from JJ Hospital going on strike over the weekend after two were attacked by the family of a deceased patient.
We had seen these flare ups and thought that a long lull may spell the end of the doc-patients' fracas, which has been a very worrisome aspect of the health service sector in the country. It was not to be and the latest incident shows that measures have to be in place to tackle these incidents before they spiral out of control.
Doctors must have adequate security at hospitals. Fears for safety can inadvertently crop up in medical decisions or diagnosis, where sometimes a professional's judgement may be compromised if they think that their workplace does not care enough to protect them.
Violence is not the answer even if the relatives think that the doctors have neglected them or are shocked by the death of their family member. Our civic hospitals have too many patients, but staff is small is comparison. Awareness campaigns, an intermediary between doctors and patients' family, security measures, counselling, and somehow bringing the sense that patients' relatives and doctors are on the same side, could defuse volatile situations. The time for talk, discussion and clucking in disappointment is over. This is a medical emergency at our hospitals. An antidote needs to be found.
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Accepting the futility of genres, of boxing songs into different compartments like stacked products in supermarket shelves, seems to be at the forefront of Rafiq Bhatia's musical endeavour. The 30-year-old American of Indian descent is the guitarist for a New York-based indie outfit called Son Lux. But it's his recent solo album, Breaking English, which makes the listener really question the need for musical boundaries, of sticking labels to a composition as if it's packaged meat.
The title track of the album, for instance, is not jazz, is not electronica, is not lounge, but all of these generic classifications rolled into one lush sound with a coherent narrative, where Bhatia's melancholic guitar plays the role of the protagonist. Each sonic detail in the track is well-defined, to the point where even though fellow Son Lux member Ian Chang's drum beats seem dissonant, they fit like a glove into the overall musical fabric. Bhatia describes this sensibility when he tells us over the phone from Berlin, where he's on tour, "Ryan (Lott, the vocalist for Son Lux) would say that instead of building a house, designing a room and then placing a chair in it, why don't we start with the chair first, and then design the room around it before building the house. There is a theory in poetry called organicism, where the poet lets each individual verse define the form that the poem will take. That is kind of similar to what I'm trying to do with my music."
He further explains his musical process when he narrates a story about one of his influences, Sam Rivers, the late American jazz great. "I've read that he would attend the concerts of all his peers, and purposely study their music to understand what they were trying to do. But this wasn't to replicate what they were playing. Instead, it was to consciously avoid it. Similarly, John Coltrane took the music of his predecessors and retooled the entire musical vocabulary keeping a similar underlying foundation, but with new pathways built on top of it," he says, giving us an indication of how he doesn't hesitate to flush rule books down the toilet.
Hybridity, in fact, lies at the core of Bhatia's creative evolution. The basis for this, he says, might well be his mixed identity. Born in North Carolina, he has never really fit in to any particular community. For, even though his parents are of Gujarati origin, they grew up in Tanzania, before moving to London and then finally to the US. So, while his brown skin stood out among the white kids in his school, he didn't feel completely at home among the Indian community either. "Everybody thinks that I am something else. So, my music is a result of a need to express my identity. It's a form of therapy at some level, because it's also a way of accepting who I am," he says.
He adds that this therapy started early. When he was about eight or nine, the older desi kids in Bhatia's neighbourhood would pick him up in a car and stop at a parking lot, listening to the hip-hop albums that became one of his earliest influences. Was he drawn to them because of the political overtones that such songs often embody? "Not really," he answers, adding, "I was only in the third grade at the time, and I couldn't even understand the words. So it was the musicality that I fell for. But the deeper question is, why were a bunch of brown kids sitting in a car in a parking lot and empathising with hip-hop music? What is it that was drawing them to the words? So you see, it's difficult to disentangle the politics from the music."
It follows thus that an intertwining of politics and music sometimes features in his own compositions. For example, Hoods Up, a complex instrumental piece, drew its inspiration from Trayvon Martin, a black teenager who was cruelly shot down because of a case of mistaken identity. The guitarist says, "I feel some amount of compulsion to express my [political] ideas. But sometimes, it's easy to get carried away with being overtly political because there is so much to be angry about, and often the responsibility falls on artistes to emphasise it. So I would say that politics is a general part of what inspires my music, because there are so many other facets of my personality that also make their way in."
Essentially, then, what Bhatia wants to keep doing is create genre-defying tracks where attention to detail is of paramount importance. "When you take the details and all the generalities of music for granted, that's when your songs start sounding more like other people's music. That doesn't mean you can't make great tracks. It's just that the less you consider those things, the less is the chance that you will make music that departs from convention. The flip side is that when you think actively about each decision, and each one comes from a place of individuality, it becomes hard to find a coherent logic that ties all those things together. And that ends up being the riddle that I am constantly trying to solve with my music."
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