Bloomberg: Swedish Six-Hour Workday Runs Into Trouble: It’s Too Costly

That’s according to the preliminary results of a two-year experiment carried out in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, the home of Volvo. Working hours were shortened to 6 for the 68 nurses at the Svartedalen old people’s home, who got to keep the same salary level. To cover for the reduction, the city had to hire 17 extra staff at a cost of about 12 million kronor ($1.3 million) for the duration of the project.

The study showed that employees at Svartedalen residential home felt healthier, which reduced sick-leave absence, and that patient care improved. But the city won’t push ahead to make the plan permanent.

“It’s associated with higher costs, absolutely,” said Daniel Bernmar, a local left-wing politician responsible for running the municipality’s elderly care. “It’s far too expensive to carry out a general shortening of working hours within a reasonable time frame.”

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Katoikos: Europe’s identity problem: Tsipras, Greece and the undesired agreement

By 2015, the combination of various pernicious events made evident the structural shortcomings of the EU and prompted debate. Disputes such as those on the acceptance of refugees or Greek debt restructuring soon took on a clear moral character. But moralities across Europe are different – see, among others, the different trends of secularisation and the cultural gap between member states – and this constitutes a major problem in European relations, impairing decision-making.

The first Tsipras government rose to power in January 2015, backed by the Greek masses. Since then, it has concentrated its greatest efforts on the purpose it was elected for: negotiating more bearable conditions for public debt reduction. As early as its first public addresses and statements on the negotiations, the government tied its policy proposals to Greek national identity and pride.

Studies, such as Koumandaraki A.’s The Evolution of Greek National Identity, have recognised that Greek identity is very much reliant on ancient Greek achievements: philosophy, democracy, theatre, the arts. These components have a special significance in Greece (e.g. the invention of democracy and the special charge of the Greek roots of the word ‘democracy’) and foment a singular national pride for their history and culture that is unique in the EU. The cultural homogeneity of a country relatively untouched by stabilised mass immigration contributes to making Greek values quite uniform and, therefore, the Greek people particularly sensitive to appeals to their strong identity.

Prime Minister Tsipras often made clear that Greek pride and values, which he claimed to be the founding values of the EU, were at stake. The combination of cultural authority and economic expertise constituted the government’s strategy: Tsipras tried to compensate for the weak position of Greece and gain his country leverage by placing it in a position of primacy at the cultural-foundational level of the European Union. Take, for example, the victory speech of 25 January 2015 in Syntagma Square in Athens, and the peroration before the European Parliament of 8 July 2015.

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VICE: Rebel Rabbis

Meet the Ultra Orthodox Jewish group, Neturei Karta, who campaign against Zionism and for the immediate dismantling of the state of Israel.

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The Atlantic: Obama Leaves the Constitution Weaker Than he Found it

History will likely ponder long before rendering a clear verdict. The best we can say now is that, even for those like me who admire Barack Obama, the constitutional record is disturbingly mixed. Obama leaves the Constitution weaker than at the beginning of his terms. It now will pass into the hands of a chief executive who appears to have no respect for its limits. [...]

Compared with most presidents of the past half-century—and especially with his predecessor, George W. Bush—Barack Obama has in fact been quite reticent about asserting inherent “executive power” under the Constitution. Consider the use of “signing statements”—documents issued by a president when signing a bill, sometimes indicating that the executive branch will refuse to follow parts of the new law because it believes them unconstitutional. George W. Bush issued more than 160; Obama, in the same time period, 31. [...]

Obama has never formally subscribed to this strong-executive theory. On paper, at least, he has insisted that he is working hard to fulfill the intent of Congress as expressed in statutes. This is a strategy I call “aggressive compliance”—it pushes the language of a statute as far as it can go in order to avoid a constitutional claim. In practical terms, the result is often the same—the executive gets its way––but there’s no corresponding assertion that Congress has no power. If, by some bizarre series of events, Congress collected itself to change a statute, and managed to overcome a presidential veto of that change, then, Obama would say, of course he would change his actions. [...]

It’s better than simply proclaiming a president beyond the law. But it sometimes skates close to the edge of legality. Consider the administration’s claim that it could, without Congressional authorization, commit U.S. naval and air forces during the 2011 intervention in Libya. The action seemed to violate the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which requires a president to notify Congress before introducing U.S. forces into “hostilities,” and seek permission if that intervention lasts more than 60 days. Many presidents have claimed that the Resolution was an unconstitutional limit on their power. Obama instead issued a careful opinion admitting that the Resolution was valid—but suggesting that more than 100 cruise missile strikes, and dozens of air missions, were not, somehow, “hostilities.” It was too clever by half, and it is a lasting blot on Obama’s constitutional copybook.

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Motherboard: Alien Hunters Spent the Last Century Looking for the Black Knight Satellite

In 1899, Nikola Tesla heard from aliens.

The pioneer of radio had constructed a massive tower at his home/laboratory in Colorado Springs for the purpose of experimenting with wireless power, but instead may have accidentally become the first human being to receive a message from the cosmos.

“I have a deep conviction that highly intelligent beings exist on Mars,” Tesla told a reporter from the Albany Telegram in 1923. “While experimenting in Colorado...I obtained extraordinary experimental evidence of the existence of life on Mars. I had perfected a wireless receiver of extraordinary sensitiveness, far beyond anything known, and I caught signals which I interpreted as meaning 1--2--3--4. I believe the Martians used numbers for communication because numbers are universal." [...]

The history of the Black Knight is actually a conglomerate of several independent stories, all of which involve an unidentified object in orbit around Earth, but outside of a common moniker, share little else in common. No one is quite sure when the myth began or who started it, but its history spans from Tesla’s turn of the century experiments to the launch of the International Space Station, and the evidence in support of the Black Knight’s existence ranges from internet hearsay to photographic "proof."

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