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the decision is of course political and has been informed, but not dictated, by science. Expert opinion on safety is one, but only one, factor in the HHS decision. Setting a legal age-threshold for buying the morning-after pill is no different than setting a legal age threshold for buying alcohol.

The problem with corruption is often not so much the amount of money that changes hands corruptly, but that inexperienced contractors may win business at the expense of capable ones. They may also be allowed to produce sub-standard work, cut back on health and safety and delay completion. This is particularly prevalent in the construction industry: road surfaces break up prematurely, bridges collapse and lives are lost. These issues often occur when contractors fraudulently take advantage of inadequate contracts management. Were such problems to occur in Andhra Pradesh, it would not only be an enormous setback to construction plans, but would do collateral damage to Singapore's reputation. Success will therefore require excellent project and programme management, contracting and contracts management and a resilient anti-fraud and corruption plan. The procurement and contracting team must be independent from the operational teams, and have its own reporting lines both to the programme manager and a very competent board. A strong, independent audit team is a must. This project does carry some risks for Singapore. However, in undertaking the project, Singapore shows a focus and vision which is arguably unmatched in developed countries. It has built a powerful economy despite having virtually no natural resources. Successful delivery of such a major project in India should further strengthen its brand and reputation as a global business leader.

"Canada will accept only whole families, lone women or children in its mass resettlement of Syrian refugees while unaccompanied men -- considered a security risk -- will be turned away, it emerged Monday. Related Stories Canada to fly in 900 Syrian refugees a day: reports AFP Pressure rises on Canada to delay bringing in Syria refugees AFP Canada To Exclude Single Men From Syrian Refugee Plan Huffington Post Canada's new 'lifeboat' refugee policy: Women, children, and families only Christian Science Monitor Canada provinces balk at Trudeau's Syrian refugee goal Reuters The Nearest Grocery Store Is A Click Away Qoo10 Sponsored  Since the Paris attacks launched by Syria-linked jihadists, a plan by new leader Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to fast-track the intake of 25,000 refugees by year's end has faced growing criticism in Canada."

onomists Zarek Brot-Goldberg, Amitabh Chandra, Benjamin Handel, and Jonathan Kolstad studied a firm that, in 2013, shifted tens of thousands of workers into high-deductible insurance plans. This was a perfect moment to look at how their patterns of care changed - whether they did, in fact, use the new shopping tools their employer gave them to compare prices. Turns out they didn't. The new paper shows that when faced with a higher deductible, patients did not price shop for a better deal. Instead, both healthy and sick patients simply used way less health care. "I am a little bit surprised at just how poorly patients were able to do when looking at very similar products, like MRI scans, and with a shopping tool," says Kolstad, an economist at University of California Berkeley and one of the study's co-author. "Two years in, and there's still no evidence they're price shopping." This raises a scary possibility: Perhaps higher deductibles don't lead to smarter shoppers but rather, in the long run, sicker patients.

The UBI is to be financed by getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare. As of 2014, the annual cost of a UBI would have been about $200 billion cheaper than the current system. By 2020, it would be nearly a trillion dollars cheaper. Finally, an acknowledgment: Yes, some people will idle away their lives under my UBI plan. But that is already a problem. As of 2015, the Current Population Survey tells us that 18% of unmarried males and 23% of unmarried women ages 25 through 54-people of prime working age-weren't even in the labor force. Just about all of them were already living off other people's money. The question isn't whether a UBI will discourage work, but whether it will make the existing problem significantly worse.

Whenever any animal population gets out of control, whether it be an overrun of deer or geese, humans usually step in and make plans to curb it through hunting or damaging nests. It seems cruel, but without natural predators to bring the population down, overpopulation could have devastating effects on the local environment. Yet, humans have shown themselves to be far more destructive than any other animal on this planet, so why don't we offer ourselves the same consideration? I'm talking about anti-natalism here, the philosophical position that opposes procreation.

The concept of intersectionality recognizes that people can be privileged in some ways and definitely not privileged in others. There are many different types of privilege, not just skin-color privilege, that impact the way people can move through the world or are discriminated against. These are all things you are born into, not things you earned, that afford you opportunities that others may not have. For example: Citizenship: Simply being born in this country affords you certain privileges that non-citizens will never access. Class: Being born into a financially stable family can help guarantee your health, happiness, safety, education, intelligence, and future opportunities. Sexual orientation: If you were born straight, every state in this country affords you privileges that non-straight folks have to fight the Supreme Court for. Sex: If you were born male, you can assume that you can walk through a parking garage without worrying that you'll be raped and then have to deal with a defense attorney blaming it on what you were wearing. Ability: If you were born able-bodied, you probably don't have to plan your life around handicap access, braille, or other special needs. Gender identity: If you were born cisgender (that is, your gender identity matches the sex you were assigned at birth), you don't have to worry that using the restroom or locker room will invoke public outrage. As you can see, belonging to one or more category of privilege, especially being a straight, white, middle-class, able-bodied male, can be like winning a lottery you didn't even know you were playing. But this is not to imply that any form of privilege is exactly the same as another, or that people lacking in one area of privilege understand what it's like to be lacking in other areas.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that "the market" delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning. Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

"Elliott's chief sin appears to have been that he dared to disagree with the two young feminists and political activists. He and Guthrie, for instance, initially fell out over his refusal to endorse her plan to "sic the Internet" upon a young man in Northern Ontario who had invented a violent video game, where users could punch an image of a feminist video blogger named Anita Sarkeesian until the screen turned red. Guthrie Tweeted at the time that she wanted the inventor's "hatred on the Internet to impact his real-life experience" and Tweeted to prospective employers to warn them off the young man and even sent the local newspaper in his town a link to the story about the game. Elliott disagreed with the tactic and Tweeted he thought the shaming "was every bit as vicious as the face-punch game". Until then, the two were collegial online, with Elliott offering to produce a free poster for Guthrie's witopoli (Women in Toronto Politics) group. As serious as the ramifications of a conviction could be for Elliott, so could they be dire for free speech online, Murphy suggested in his final arguments. He said the idea that all it takes to end up charged with criminal harassment is vigorous participation in online debate with those who will not brook dissent "will have a chilling effect on people's ability to communicate, and not just on Twitter". In fact, Murphy said that contrary to what Guthrie and Reilly testified to at trial, they weren't afraid of his client - as suggested by both their spirited demeanour in the witness box and their deliberate online campaign to call Elliott out as a troll. TwitterA screenshot of Gregory Elliott's Twitter page. Rather, Murphy said, they hated Elliott and were determined to silence him - not just by "blocking" his Tweets to them, but by demanding he cease even referring to them even in making comment about heated political issues. To all this, Guthrie pointed out once in cross-examination t

"How much say should an employer have over when - and whether - an employee gets pregnant? That's the question Chinese Internet users were debating Friday after a controversial notice from a company in central Henan province to employees went viral on China's social networks. According to the notice, a copy of which was published online by the Dahe Daily provincial newspaper, married women working at the Jiaozuo city credit cooperative must be on the job for one year before they are allowed to apply to have a child. They must also schedule their pregnancy in advance so as not to "unduly influence" the company's operations."

But as my daughters grow up I become more aware that vague generalisations about the one-child policy are not the same as concrete facts about where they were born, and when, and to whom - and the real reasons why their parents could not keep them. I was living in the US when I adopted, and that is where my daughters spent the first few years of their lives. Soon after we moved to China three years ago, we returned to the hometown orphanage of my oldest girl for the first time. She was eight then, and not long after our visit she challenged my version of her abandonment myth: "She could have paid the fine," she said to me one night. "Who could have paid what fine?" I replied, dissembling: I knew she meant that her mother could have chosen to pay the stiff penalty (sometimes as much as a year's income) imposed on those who break family-planning rules. She wanted me to stop making her abandonment story into a fairy tale about the good parent and the evil one-child policy: maybe her mother was a businesswoman who was just too busy to have a baby. Maybe she could have paid the fine.

"With their chiselled menfolk and swooning heroines, Mills & Boon novels are a guilty pleasure. They are also a cause of marital breakdown, adulterous affairs and unwanted pregnancies, according to a warning published by the British Medical Journal. Far from being a slice of innocent escapism for millions of female readers, romantic novels are a danger to relationships and sexual health. That is the verdict of an article in the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care, which said women struggle to distinguish between romantic fiction and real life.

"eacehaven executive director Low Mui Lang said residents improved after some wards were converted to single and double rooms in Peacehaven in 2006. "They began taking pride in dressing up and initiating their own activities instead of being passive. Dementia patients also tend to get disoriented in a room with so many identical beds, or fight with their roommates due to the lack of personal space." Research has shown that there are benefits to staying in private rooms, compared to shared ones. A British National Health Service study found that such residents suffer fewer infections and need less hospitalisation. Dr Jeremy Lim, a partner in global consulting firm Oliver Wyman and former senior official at MOH, said: "Superficially, it may appear as if bureaucracy is rearing its ugly head and trying to force-fit innovative models into existing funding frameworks. However, this issue may be the symptom of a larger and more fundamental divergence on what is considered medically necessary and what is considered a 'luxury' or a 'frill' and, therefore, what degree of 'creature comforts' would be appropriate for residents funded by government subsidies.""

"Even in a unionized environment, where work tasks are similar, hourly wages are identical, and tenure dictates promotions, female workers earn $0.89 on the male-worker dollar (weekly earnings). We use confidential administrative data on bus and train operators from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) to show that the weekly earnings gap can be explained entirely by the workplace choices that women and men make. Women value time and flexibility more than men. Women take more unpaid time off using the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and work fewer overtime hours than men. Men and women plan to work similar overtime hours when they are scheduled three months in advance, but men actually work nearly 50% more overtime hours than women. Women with dependents value time away from work more than do men with dependents. When selecting work schedules, women try to avoid weekend, holiday, and split shifts more than men. To avoid unfavorable work times, women prioritize their schedules over route safety and select routes with a higher probability of accidents. Women are less likely than men to game the scheduling system by trading off work hours at regular wages for overtime hours at premium wages. Conditional on seniority, which dictates choice sets, the weekly earnings gap can be explained entirely by differences in operator choices of hours, schedules, and routes."

"But there's an important difference between that vision for a basic income and the experiment in Ontario. The Canadians are testing it as an efficient antipoverty mechanism, a way to give a relatively small segment of the population more flexibility to find work and to strengthen other strands of the safety net. That's not what Silicon Valley seems to imagine, which is a universal basic income that placates broad swaths of the population. The most obvious problem with that idea? Math. Many economists concluded long ago that it would be too expensive, especially when compared with the cost of programs to create new jobs and train people for them. That's why the idea didn't take off after tests in the 1960s and '70s. It's largely why Finland recently abandoned a basic-income plan after a small test."

But as Singapore continues to intensify its development, with land reclamation stretching far into the future, the question of who the space is for in such a land-starved country looms ever-larger. This will become more important for Marine Parade as an ironic hypothetical future brews on the horizon: the East Coast could become a site for land reclamation again. In this scenario, the future beachfront would become host to luxury waterside condominiums mirroring the preceding redevelopment of the Tanjong Pagar and Pasir Panjang port terminals into a sprawling 1,000 hectare waterfront destination. The legacy of land reclamation could then come full circle: private waterfront properties compulsorily purchased by the state to reclaim land for public housing; infrastructure and parks could be reclaimed again for high-value private accommodation. Though unlike the case of the colonial and local elites who used to own coastal properties or frequent the swimming clubs, it would be commons becoming dispossessed (and unlike those elites before them, the public would not be generously compensated for the loss of another coastline). All of this depends on what demands the State will need to satisfy in the future (as per the number of reserved sites specified in the Ministry of National Development's projected 2030 land use plan); but what is certain is that it will need more space to satisfy them.

"However, there are also risks to overreliance on irregular transfers. The first is that they have been extremely costly. In recent years, the spending on irregular transfers, including top-ups to endowment funds through which some of the transfers are financed, has frequently overtaken the total expenditure of the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF), as well as the Ministry of National Development (MND). From 2010, the annual spending on irregular transfers, including the Pioneer Generation Package, which is also not permanent, has ranged from $700 million to $8.7 billion. During the same period, the annual expenditure was $1.7 billion to $3.1 billion at MSF, and $1.6 billion to $4.4 billion at MND. Second, irregular transfers are not monitored in the way that regular policies are. Government ministries report their spending and achievement of policy goals annually as part of the Budget process. This promotes attention to policy impact and public accountability. One-off transfers, despite their cost, are not held to these standards. The third issue is that the repeated application of irregular transfers may create an implicit fiscal commitment in the form of public expectations, even if there are no actual fiscal commitments in principle. The questions about hongbao this year suggest that such expectations may already be taking root. Fourth, even though there is now a clear historical pattern of issuing irregular transfers almost yearly, the schemes vary in terms of eligibility, coverage and generosity across years. This provides an uncertain basis for individual financial planning and does not contribute to a sense of income security."