1 Brazil to go ahead with impeachment of president (BBC)
Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff has suffered a blow to her hopes of staving
off impeachment proceedings, after a committee voted they should go ahead. The
65-member congressional committee voted 38 to 27 to recommend impeachment over
claims she manipulated government accounts to hide a growing deficit.
All eyes will now be on a full vote in the lower
house on 17 or 18 April. The issue has divided Brazil, with police preparing
for mass protests in the capital, Brasilia. The vote took place amid chaotic
scenes with supporters and opponents of President Rousseff shouting slogans and
waving placards.
The committee's vote, while largely symbolic, was
being watched as a measure of how much support there is for the impeachment
process ahead of the crucial vote in the full lower house of Congress. There,
342 votes in favour are needed to send the matter on to the Senate. The latest
opinion poll by the Estadao daily suggests 292 are in favour, 115 against and
106 undecided.
2 PC shipments fall to lowest since 2007 (Straits
Times) Worldwide personal-computer shipments have slid to their lowest
quarterly total since 2007, signalling another challenging year ahead for an
industry staggered by a sluggish economy and changing consumer tastes.
Dell dethroned HP as the top PC seller in the US for
the first quarter - something that hasn't happened this decade, according to
market researcher Gartner Inc. Dell's focus on business customers and HP's
refusal to chase business with just low prices switched the top two players.
Globally, shipments dropped 9.6 per cent in the
period, the sixth consecutive decline. IDC reported similar worldwide results. PC
makers, which have already weathered four straight years of falling shipments,
remain under pressure as potential customers delay - or skip - purchases of
desktops and laptops, opting for increasingly powerful smartphones.
"Because of the economy issues and other issues
it doesn't look like those people who purchased smartphones are going to buy
any other devices any time soon," said Ms Mikako Kitagawa, principal
analyst at Gartner.
Manufacturers shipped 64.8 million machines in the
period compared with about 71.7 million a year earlier, Gartner said. US
shipments declined 6.6 per cent to 13.1 million. Lenovo Group retained its hold
on the top spot in the global market with 19.3 per cent of first-quarter
shipments. Apple was No. 5 with 7.1 per cent - up from 6.4 per cent a year
earlier.
3 Women will thrive in the accelerated age (Robert
Colvile in The Guardian) We’ve all had the sense that life is speeding up, that
even as our computers get faster, our attention spans get shorter. For some,
this phenomenon – what I call “the great acceleration” – is a source of wonder.
For others, it’s closer to terror.
One of the best examples of the unbalanced nature of
acceleration comes in its different effects on men and women. For example,
there’s a wonderful experiment that shows how addicted we’ve become to
receiving a stream of information via our mobile phones. Researchers asked
people to spend just 15 minutes alone in a room with their thoughts: more than
half confessed to not enjoying the experience.
For a variety of biological and social reasons,
women appear to be more prone to suffering from stress, anxiety and depression
– conditions that have a huge impact on your physical as well as mental health,
and which can be promoted by an accelerated environment, with its ceaseless
demands.
It’s not just about biology. An accelerated economy
offers ever-increasing rewards to the highly skilled and highly educated. This
has contributed to the rise of ultra-intensive parenting in an effort to equip
our children with every tool they may need to compete – the burden of which, in
traditional families, often falls on the female partner.
Acceleration therefore tends to increase the pressures
and stresses on professional women more than on professional men. Among young
people, the pattern is the same. A new book by Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls,
sets out the part played in this by social media: for girls especially, life on
Instagram or other social networks is “like being a contestant in a
never-ending beauty pageant”.
Yet there’s a powerful argument that, over the
longer term, it’s women who will thrive in an accelerated age, and men who will
fall behind. For one thing, the confessional culture of the online age is also
one that privileges sharing and sympathy and emotional literacy – skills that
are not exactly associated with men in general, let alone teenagers.
For another, all the scare stories about robots
taking our jobs gloss over the fact that the jobs they will take are mostly
male. Overwhelmingly, it is the traditionally male positions – taxi drivers,
truckers, construction workers – that are likely to be lost. That’s because
computers are not so good at reading intentions or emotions, or coping with the
unpredictable, in the way required in female-dominated professions such as
nursing or teaching.
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