The Conversation: In Australia, land of the ‘fair go’, not everyone gets an equal slice of the pie

How does Australian society match up against these goals? For a start, there is an ongoing problem with poverty in Australia, with recent research suggesting that the relative poverty rate has been between 10% and 14% of households since 2000 (where the poverty rate is set at 50% of median income).

Around 5% of households were suffering from what is known as “deep exclusion”. Australians with a long-term medical condition or disability were particularly vulnerable, as were indigenous people. People lacking a year 12 qualification and those in public housing also had higher levels of deep exclusion. [...]

However, a 2007 study by Andrew Leigh found that Australia had a higher level of mobility than the US. As he put it in his 2013 book, “in the United States, the heritability of income is similar to the heritability of height. But in Australia, income is only about half as heritable as height”. A 2016 study reached broadly similar conclusions to Leigh, finding that Australia has “a relatively large amount of income mobility”. [...]

In 2011, the OECD reported that according to 2008 figures, “the average income of the top 10% of Australians was … nearly 10 times higher than that of the bottom 10%”. Australia is once again more equal than the US, but more unequal than the OECD average.

read the article 

The Intercept: Suspect in Quebec Mosque Attack Quickly Depicted as a Moroccan Muslim. He’s a White Nationalist.

A MASS SHOOTING at a Quebec City mosque last night left six people dead and eight wounded. The targeted mosque, the Cultural Islamic Center of Quebec, was the same one at which a severed pig’s head was left during Ramadan last June. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the episode a “terrorist attack on Muslims.” [...]

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer exploited the attack to justify President Trump’s ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries. “It’s a terrible reminder of why we must remain vigilant and why the President is taking steps to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to our nation’s safety and security,” Spicer said at this afternoon’s briefing when speaking of the Quebec City attack. [...]

The actual shooting suspect is 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette, a white French Canadian who is, by all appearances, a rabid anti-immigrant nationalist. A leader of a local immigration rights groups, François Deschamps, told a local paper he recognized his photo as an anti-immigrant far-right “troll” who has been hostile to the group online. And Bisonnette’s Facebook page – now taken down but still archived – lists among its “likes” the far right French nationalist Marine Le Pen, Islam critics Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the Israeli Defense Forces, and Donald J. Trump (he also “likes” the liberal Canadian Party NDP along with more neutral “likes” such as Tom Hanks, the Sopranos and Katy Perry).

read the article 

Al Jazeera: Mehdi Hasan on the rise of "fake" populists

Reality Check: The rise of ‘fake’ populism.

Mehdi Hasan on right-wing elitists who masquerade as ordinary folk.

watch the clip

CityLab: Barcelona Bans New Hotels in the City Center

For Barcelona’s tourism industry, the past week may have marked the end of an era. While Spain’s second city has seen galloping, almost uncontrollable growth in tourism since the millennium, the city voted Friday to adopt the most drastic ban on new vacation accommodations yet seen in any European city.

In the city center, all new hotel beds are banned, period. In a small area encircling the city center, new hotel beds will be permitted, but only to replace those in hotels that have closed. In Barcelona’s suburbs, new hotel beds will be permitted, but only under strictly limited conditions—land that has previously been earmarked for housing, for example, will be completely off limits. [...]

If these measures seem extreme, it’s because local frustration at the excesses of the tourist industry has been bubbling over for some time. A city of 1.6 million inhabitants, Barcelona received 32 million visitors last year, most of them concentrated in late spring and summer. These tourists are of course a cash cow, but they have pushed up the price of rents and reduced the number of available apartments for locals while providing jobs that are often poorly paid and merely seasonal. They have also squeezed businesses catering to locals out of the downtown, leaving a trail of tourist stores that are dull, generic, and sell goods with little real connection to the city’s culture. This has given some overburdened parts of the city the air of a theme park—one where you wait in line a lot and don’t have that much fun.

read the article 

Quartz: If nutrition labels looked like this, your attempts to quit sugar might actually work

This image, which resurfaced on Reddit earlier this month, is part of an ad campaign from the German consumer interest group Verbraucherzentrale Hamburg.

The images (seen here, with ingredients in German) make the easily misread or overlooked information on nutrition labels hard to ignore. Slim-Fast is full of sugar. A brand of cereal called “Fitness” is full of sugar.

Yes, nutrition information is right there on the label. But those grams are hard to conceptualize, and food marketers can easily take advantage of that confusion. For example, the kid-friendly drink Capri-Sonne (or Capri Sun, as it’s known in North America) looks a lot healthier in this ad…

read the article