ECHO

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1 2 3 Student life

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Crime and criminal

- The inner- city prep school experience

- Give Obama Credit for Government Transparency

- Taking summer school to get ahead, not catch up

- Nailing a job with a single click

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The Inner-City Prep School

Experience I

n the Southeast section of Washington, a public boarding school sits on four compact acres, enclosed by an eight-foot-high black metal fence. Behind the fence, the modern buildings of the SEED School are well scrubbed and soaked in prep-school culture. Pennants from Dartmouth, Swarthmore and Spelman decorate the hallways. Words that might appear on the next SAT — “daedal,” “holus-bolus,” “calamari” — are taped to bathroom and dorm walls.

And inside the cafeteria hang 11-by-15-inch framed photos of SEED grads in caps and gowns, laughing, clutching diplomas.

Beyond the fence, the scene is a different one. Despite some recent development, Southeast’s Ward 7, where SEED is located, and neighboring Ward 8, remain the most impoverished parts of the city, with more than their share of tired liquor stores and low-slung public housing. In all of Ward 7, the 70,000 residents have just one sit-down restaurant, a Denny’s.

Every Sunday night, 325 students in grades 6 through 12, most of them African-American, most from single-parent, lower-income families in Southeast and Northeast, pass through the gates of SEED — the first inner-city public boarding school in the country, with admission by lottery. And for the next five days they do what other prep-school kids do: in uniforms of pressed khaki pants and polo shirts, they take classes in Spanish, precalculus, U.S. history and other subjects. They meet with staff members at the school’s College Café to talk about college applications. They spend their afternoons in chess clubs, on the basketball court or in poetry workshops.

Then, after school on Friday, they head back home, lugging duffel bags, suitcases and garbage bags serving as suitcases. For 48 hours, they leave SEED’s protected, grassy campus to return to their neighborhoods — the ones that created the need for charter schools like SEED in the first place. That ongoing transition, from school to home and back again, symbolizes the school’s unwritten requirement of its students: to juggle and to navigate two different and often conflicting worlds.

At 7:20 on a Friday morning in a bathroom in the girls’ dorm at SEED, Reneka Blackmone, who is 17, was standing in front of a mirror, surrounded by posters of Queen Latifah, Beyoncé and Naomi Campbell, brushing her teeth. Witty and self-deprecating, Reneka often performs her way through her day, dabbing beauty marks on her soft, dimpled cheeks with a mascara wand, imitating models on catwalks and freestyle rapping. But this morning she was preoccupied with the busy day ahead: Spanish class, an oral presentation on Charles Darwin for world history, classes in business management and music. Then there was the weekend to think about. At 3:30, the last bell of the week would ring and Reneka would be freed from the beige brick dorms, the study halls, the uniforms, the dining-hall food, the no-MySpace, no-Facebook, no-TV rules. She would also be freed from the reminders that teachers, administrators, counselors and resident assistants rain

on her and other students 15-plus hours a day: tuck in your shirt, raise your hand, talk with respect, get to class on time, be nice to your classmates, study for your test, turn the lights out, get some sleep.

“Come on, baby, it’s late,” said a resident assistant, hands on her hips and old enough to be Reneka’s mother, as she stood in the doorway. Like all SEED students, Reneka belongs to a cluster of 12 to 15 students that is named after a college or university. The Howard House room Reneka and Quadidra Taylor shared was small and spare, with a desk, dresser and bed for each girl and a shared computer.

At 7:35, five minutes past the deadline to go to the dining hall for French toast, orange juice, apples and boxes of Golden Grahams, Reneka pulled on her uniform of khaki pants and a pale blue polo shirt. No plunging neckline, no huge hoop earrings, which are violations of the dress code. SEED’s 116-page Student-Parent Handbook, however, did say it “is not the intention of the school to regulate every aspect of a student’s individuality.” So Reneka put on her faux Chanel rhinestone earrings, slipped on a chunky chain bracelet and spritzed her body with perfume, from her neck to her ankles. She was ready for the school day.

The night before, I asked the girls about their weekend plans. “Chillin’, talkin’, walkin’,” Quadidra said. For Reneka, Friday nights were often catch-up time on all she missed during the school week: four- to five-hour stretches of MTV, VH1 and cable-TV karaoke, her favorite steak-and-cheese sandwich and 11 or 12 hours of sleep a night. By Saturday morning, she would be at her aunt’s apartment in Northeast, in jeans, strappy sandals and tidy cornrows, before heading out again, past the drug dealer in the stairwell on his cellphone, down the street lined with two- and three-story brick apartment complexes, including the one where a man killed his girlfriend and her children, until she landed at her friend’s house. There, she would sit on the front porch as her friend, who graduated from high school last year, braided

her 1-year-old son’s hair. Reneka and her friend would talk about, among other things, the kinds of girls they were not: “rollers — skates with no brakes,” hopping from one boy’s bed to another.

Other SEED students stuck closer to home on weekends. They drifted away from the old friends who didn’t want to hear about their SAT scores or the eight college campuses they visited with SEED staff members. Those friends probably faced a different future: Maybe they would graduate from high school or get a G.E.D. They might land a cashier job at CVS or Safeway or find something more lucrative in the drug business. v Reneka’s boyfriend last year was that kind of neighborhood boy — a low-life, in Reneka’s estimation, who skipped school too much, smoked too much weed and would never amount to anything. I asked if he had ever visited her at SEED. Never, she said. SEED was her refuge from the drama of the neighborhood, the bridge between home and the bigger world, the place that would help her be the first in her family to go to college. “I know what I gotta do when I’m at SEED,” she told me. She could move between worlds. But, she said, “I don’t mix my worlds.”

By the time she was 12 and her number was picked from the annual SEED admissions lottery, Reneka had moved several times, including into foster care for a year, while her mother struggled with a drug addiction. Once, she was playing double Dutch when a guy began shooting up the street.

Another time, she was washing her mother’s hair when they heard the pop-pop of gunfire and dropped to the floor. Three of her half-brothers have been killed in gun violence.

When Eric Adler and Rajiv Vinnakota, both former management consultants, opened the SEED School

of Washington, D.C., in 1998, they had students like Reneka in mind: students who contended not only with failing schools but also with the risks of their neighborhood during the nonschool hours. Last year, the SEED School’s foundation opened a Baltimore school, and plans to expand into other cities.

Some critics, though, have balked at the expenditure — $35,000 per student, most from the city’s public funds — which, in theory, could be used to help more public schools and serve a greater number of students in nonboarding settings. And, of course, the ultimate goal should be to improve homes

and neighborhoods enough so kids don’t need to leave.

While SEED enrolls plenty of at-risk students, critics argue that SEED and other charter schools skim the cream of inner-city youth, attracting the families who are motivated to fill out the paperwork to apply to the school. Meanwhile, some of the most high-risk kids, whose parents are barely functional and place more value on their child’s being home every day to baby-sit or do housework than they do on education, are left behind.

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ut SEED’s statistics have impressed fans of the school, including President Barack Obama, who called the school “a true success story”: at least 97 percent of SEED graduates are accepted to colleges, including Princeton, Alabama A&M and Connecticut College. And 90 percent of SEED graduates immediately enroll in college, compared with 56 percent of African-American highschool graduates nationally. (About 70 percent of SEED graduates are currently in or graduated from college, although the program is new enough that the sample size is small.) Though SEED also outpaces D.C. public schools in reading and math, reading is still a weakness for many SEED students and, not coincidentally, the school’s SAT scores have been unimpressive. Part of the blame, according to Charles Barrett Adams, the head of the school, lies with the public elementary schools: students arrive at SEED typically two to three grade levels behind and spend much of the next years playing catch-up.

Reneka was 12 the first night she stayed in SEED’s four-story, 77-bedroom girls’ dorm. She kept her door wide open and barely slept. She wasn’t worried about the neighborhood. She had lived in worse. She didn’t even miss home much — as the oldest child of a single working mother, she was relieved not to be caring for her four siblings. Instead, she feared being behind the gates with kids who were bigger than those at her elementary school, where she held her own in fights. In neighborhoods like hers, being sent away was for delinquents, not kids with college ambitions.

It wasn’t so different across the campus in the boys’ dorm. During his first months, Triston Elliott, now a senior, wondered who would take care of him if he got hurt; he also longed to get bags of chips from his mother’s kitchen. The boys’ dorm was unadorned and felt forlorn, like an airport terminal: “It’s like you’re supposed to sit and wait for something to happen,” he said. His brother Parry, older by 16 months and handsome, with angular features and an intense approach to

everything from his basketball game to his A.P. classes, struggled to find his place at SEED, too.

Older kids bullied him, and Parry pushed back.

Both boys phoned their mother regularly those first months, often asking to come home.

“So you’re giving up?” their mother asked them.

Tolya Elliott-Chandler was in the minority of SEED parents who had graduated from college, and she pushed her sons academically, but she was not convinced that she could outweigh the forces at a traditional public high school and the neighborhood. She knew there were worse fates for her sons than feeling homesick.

Some kids don’t last beyond the first year or two at SEED. Until recently, the school lost about 20 percent of the student body each year — mostly in middle school and mostly boys. The incoming class of 70 students slowly dissipated each year so that by senior year, the remaining students barely filled a gym bleacher. The high attrition made the school’s much-lauded college acceptance rate less impressive: If a class of 70 seventh graders fell to 20 students by the time

of graduation, those remaining 20 students were arguably among the best — at least in terms of self-discipline and a willingness to stick it out — of the original class. Adams, who became the head of SEED two years ago, has been improving the attrition rate by reducing the number of staff members with authority to dismiss students and taking a more nuanced view of dismissal-worthy offenses. During this past school year, the attrition rate dropped by more than 50 percent.

Though SEED students get in trouble for the usual teenage reasons, in some cases breaking rules reflects their ambivalence about prep-school culture. Black inner-city boys particularly have to wrestle with the question of whether it is O.K. to be smart. And if it is, then they have to figure out how to wear that — or not wear it — when they return to their neighborhoods each weekend.

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How to Remake Education SEPT. 25, 2009

o survive that back and forth, many SEED students learn to code switch. A SEED student knows he can’t swagger through the hallways in baggy jeans, the rapper Ludacris blaring out of his iPod, while he avoids eye contact and a handshake with Mr. Adams. But if he takes too much of SEED back to the neighborhood basketball court — the big words and pressed shirts — he could have troubles of a different sort. Rather than try to erase students’ street culture, Adams, who is 39 and biracial and was raised by a single African-American mother, talks to students about the particular value of it. “Someone who can navigate a dangerous neighborhood has a skill set that others lack,” he told me. “Why would I want to rid him of that?”

Some parents argued that students’ lives would be easier if they were at SEED seven days a week. The five-day plan was primarily a financial decision — it was too expensive to staff the program on weekends. But Elliott-Chandler was one mother who chose SEED, in part, because she could still see her boys regularly. As it is, weekends fly by with family visits, errands, church and pilgrimages to Sam’s Club, where Triston and Parry stock up for the school week — bags of chips, SunnyD drinks, packs of Winterfresh gum and Gatorade.

And on Sunday, when other families have the entire evening in front of them, Parry and Triston are finishing laundry at home and packing their uniforms. Around 8 p.m., they and their mother pile in her car and soon they are driving through the SEED gates for another school week.

Last year, when Reneka was considering having sex with her boyfriend, she confided in Carmen Brown, her life-skills counselor. Like many of the counselors, who are on duty from 3 p.m. to midnight, Brown is African-American, in her 20s and a college graduate. She is also the adult on campus to whom Reneka feels the closest.

Brown suggested that Reneka slow things down. Then, she brought her Howard House girls together to talk about relationships and sex. Later, she created a panel of men, including a student-life coordinator, Matthew Carothers, who lives in the boys’ dorm, as well as a senior male student, and asked them to answer questions the girls submitted in advance: “What’s on the mind of the 16- to 18-year-old boy?” “Why is it hard for boys to be faithful?” It was a key part of SEED’s after-school curriculum called Halls, Habits for Achieving Life Long Success, with more than 200 lesson plans run by life-skills counselors, including “What Do Those Food Labels Mean?”; “Hip Hop: Is It Bad?”; “Dining Etiquette”; and “Mean Girls.”

In the boys’ dorm, the teenagers were just as much in need of life skills and relationship advice. A few years ago, Triston liked a girl but wasn’t sure how to get her attention. He wasn’t going to ask his friends, and he doesn’t know his father. So he talked to his life-skills counselor, Nathaniel Goodwin, who had worked with Parry and Triston since they started at SEED five years ago. Triston told Goodwin that many of his ideas about romantic relationships came from the 1997 film “Def Jam’s How to Be a Player,” about a playboy. “Mr. Goodwin was like: ‘No, no, no. That’s not it,’ ” Triston told me, as we sat on a bench outside the girls’ dorm one afternoon.

Goodwin told Triston to be himself.

“And he told me,” Triston said with a small smile, “to shower more than twice a week.”

Like the Halls lessons, other efforts at SEED are intended not only to broaden students’ experiences but also to ease the transition to colleges, where there would be plenty of middle-class and upper-middle-class students who had summered in Paris and interned at law firms. To that end, SEED, with the aid of scholarships, sends students off in the summer to study creative writing at the Putney School in Vermont, to wilderness trips in Wyoming and to other programs in places like Zambia, Guatemala and Scotland. For Parry, the school’s annual two-week trip to Greece for a select group of upper-schoolers was a turning point. Imagining a broader world outside Washington was one thing. Being abroad, with food, music, history and a language far different from his own, made him hungry to see and to learn more.

Around 11:30 on a Saturday morning, during their 48-hour break from SEED, I met Parry and Triston at their family’s tidy two-story row house in Northeast before we

headed out into the neighborhood.

A couple of blocks away was the basketball court where Parry has clocked countless hours. He still plays there most weekends, though he has grown weary of the neighborhood boys’ talk about SEED as “D Block.” He no longer tries to set them straight and avoids telling them about his plans for college.

Instead, at the end of each game, Parry heads in one direction, the boys in another. “You feel bad when you are different from people in your own neighborhood,” Triston said.

Those neighborhood streets may become more alienating when Parry and Triston leave for college next year. Parry hopes to go to Morehouse for business law. Triston wants to study film at Oberlin. In both cases, they will be hundreds of miles from home. But among the lessons SEED instilled in Triston and Parry was that to move ahead, they had to keep moving beyond home. .

Main content Education and Economics The SEED School “The Inner-City Prep School Experience”: More About the SEED School -- first inner--city public boarding school in the country -- charter school with admission by lottery -- 48 hours not in school financial decision due to limited budget juggling two worlds Why Choose SEED? small classes, counselors, teachers who put an emphasis on learning and attending college visits, summer programs, travel abroad about 97% of SEED graduates get into college “Equal Opportunity?” -- cost of SEED: approximately $35,000 per student and most of it comes from the city’s public funds money that could be used for helping public schools, all students, and the neighborhoods 25% of all students and almost 40% of black and Hispanic students don’t graduate on time every 26 seconds a stu-

dent drops out of high school What is the Government Doing About It? -- president Obama supports the expansion of charter schools -- “Race to the Top” innitiative $4.35 billion in grants for states with the best solutions fostering innovation and competition -- money that has to be earned by states -- schools have to fulfill certain requirements How is this Benefitial? --competition created improved quality of education in states 46 states and DC applied for the money -- made changes in laws and strenghtened reform efforts -- similar to tickle down economics A government investment on a large level cause an aggressive reform agenda at the local level Teacher Education Assistance and Higher Education -- national campaign by the Department of Education -- purpose: to have more children stay in school and particularly encourage the teaching profession How do you make teaching more attractive? reducing loan repayment, and after 10 years of public service...loan forgiven! Higher salaries for teachers? currently starting salary is only $8,000 higher than what a garbage collector earns NOT POSSIBLE -education is so broadly accessed, watered-down you can’t highly pay 1,000s of teachers What Should be Done About Charter Schools? “We can talk to people about education policy. We should not fund schools through property taxes, because we automatically have inequality when we do that.” -- Julianne Malveaux, president of Bennett College Education as an Investment for the Future -- Long-term repercussions of a bad education system as US Secretary of Education stated: “it is economically unsustainable” economy will suffer because more innovations, more businesses and more power will go to other countries.

Taking Summer School to Get Ahead, Not

From left, Samiyah Bryant, 16; Sekou Bolden, 16; and Chase Pelligrini de Paur, 15, were among students who took a six-week geometry class this summer at the Northfield Mount Hermon boarding school in Gill, Mass.CreditIlana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

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ILL, Mass. — Chase Pellegrini de Paur didn’t flunk math, and he is not trying to hone his study skills.

The 15-year-old honor-roll student nevertheless spent six weeks this summer studying geometry at the prestigious Northfield Mount Hermon boarding school here.

The goal was either to get credit for the class, which would let him skip ahead to higher-level courses earlier in his high school career, particularly Advanced Placement ones, or to take the course again in the fall and, already familiar with the underlying theorems, be all but guaranteed a top grade.

“It’s a win-win,” said Chase, a rising sophomore at New Canaan High School in Connecticut.

As the competition to get into the most selective

colleges intensifies, high-achieving students are attending academic summer schools to turbocharge grade-point averages or load up on the A.P. courses seen as gateways to top-tier schools.

The practice even has its own lexicon: Students who are planning to repeat a class at their regular high schools are “previewing”; those who are using summer classes to skip ahead and qualify for higher-level subjects are seeking “forward credit.”

Critics, however, say the summer classes only add to the inequities of the college admissions process, in which wealthy families can afford to hire expensive SAT tutors and consultants who help develop the perfect college essay, while poorer students must fend for themselves.

A student works on a paper during Northfield Mount Hermon’s summer session. With increasing competition to get into top colleges, students are using summer breaks to get ahead

At the Horace Mann School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, 154 students enrolled in the academic summer session. Forty-four of them were in a six-week physics class that covered a year’s worth of material at a rapid clip, one of several for-credit science and math classes offered at the school’s summer session.

“It’s so popular, we run it as a lottery,” said Caroline Bartels, the summer school director at Horace Mann.

Some high schoolers take classes through online programs like Indiana University High School, Stanford Online High School or the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. The online classes often cost less and allow for more flexibility than those that are in person.

The Mountain View Los Altos High School District in California runs a summer school for students who need to catch up or bolster their skills, but the district directs high school students who want to accelerate their studiesto two local community colleges.

And high schoolers in North Carolina are encouraged to take accelerated, for-credit classes through a statewidevirtual school.

The demand is driven, at least in part, by students’ belief that they need to accumulate Advanced Placement classes to impress top colleges. According to the College Board, which oversees the A.P. program and designs the exams, more than 90 percent of the about 2.5 million test takers in 2015 sat for three or fewer of the exams. But the percentage of students who took 10 exams, while very small, more than doubled over the decade between 2005 and 2015, to 0.7 percent, or 16,580 students over a four-year administration range.

Brian Taylor, the director of Ivy Coach, a college advising firm on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, said the belief was that college admission boards rewarded quantity when it came to A.P. exams. “When you have a kid who has taken 10 A.P.s and a kid who has taken three, all things equal, they’re going to take the kid with 10,” he said.

The campus of Northfield Mount Hermon. The school’s summer session enrolled 286 students this year, including 113 in the college-prep program. CreditIlana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

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ut Trevor Packer, a senior vice president at the College Board, said it did not support “a race towards more, more and more.”

“We want there to be balance,” Mr. Packer said.

He added that the College Board had worked hard to increase the number of students — particularly low-income ones — taking A.P. classes, but arecent report by the federal Government Accountability Office found a significant gap in participation across racial and economic lines. At schools that were high poverty and where 90 percent or more of students were black or Hispanic, only 12 percent took one or more A.P. classes. At wealthy schools that were predominantly white and Asian, 24 percent did.

Jill Tipograph, a summer educational consultant and career coach from Manhattan, said summer academics could “help maximize the student’s profile” and be part of the “pre-college plan.”

The programs are rigorous, with long days and hours of homework.

And they can be lucrative for schools: Northfield Mount Hermon’s program costs $8,200 for summer boarders. The Horace Mann summer physics class costs $4,175. The schools offer scholarships for some students.

Greg Leeds, who runs Northfield Mount Hermon’s summer session, which enrolled 286 students this year — 113 in the college prep program — said these programs gave parents “more bang for their buck” than enrichment classes that were not directly related to work being done during the school year, because students got something tangible in the end: credit or a shot at an A grade in the fall in a class they had previewed.

That was the case for Sarah Harte Taylor, 17, who previewed an Algebra 2 class last year at Wolfeboro: The Summer Boarding School — a summer-only school in eastern New Hampshire. Her mother, Lisa Harte, from Midtown Manhattan, said that when Sarah returned to her high school, she aced the class.

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unter Walker, 17, from the Upper West Side, who was studying American history at Northfield Mount Hermon, agreed that the programs could help improve a high school transcript. He was looking for credit so that he could skip the class in the fall and take A.P. computer science instead.

Madeline Levine, who has written extensively about the demands of adolescence, said focusing students too intensely on academic pursuits came at a cost. “Growing up has a whole bunch of developmental tasks, only one of which is getting into your first-choice school,” she said.

Even some of the educators offering the classes have their doubts.

Hunter, a rising senior at the boarding school, said the class was At Lawrenceville, administrators have debated the merits of its intense and sometimes stressful. accelerated math program. This is “But it’s worth it,” he said. “It largely because some faculty memwas a very efficient way of doing bers, like Hardy Gieske, a math things, very constructive.” teacher who serves as director of Not everyone thinks it is good for students for summer school, think the students. Psychologists like

that many students should avoid accelerating the learning process when it comes to math.

“They have to soak in it for a long enough time for it to take root,” he said.

Still, the school keeps the program open because there is a demand and it “helps the bottom line,” Mr. Gieske said.

And at Horace Mann, Ms. Bartels said she believed many students were better off getting a break from school. She said she told many of them: “If there is anything else you can do this summer, do it.”

Hunter Walker, 17, studied American history at Northfield Mount Hermon this summer in hopes of being able to skip the class this fall and take Advanced Placement computer science instead. “It was a very efficient way of doing things, very constructive,” he said.

Most of students in USA tend to study in summer classes to approach “the college access game”. They are spending their summer break to get ahead. With increasing competition to get into top colleges, the number of summer classes are on the rise. However, there are a distance between the rich and the poor. While wealthy families have more opportunities to take part in the academic summer session, lower –income people are much more likely to have to work in the summer, often full time, or take care of other family members. On the other hand, students need to accumulate Advanced Placement classes to impress top colleges because college admission boards rewarded quantity when it came to A.P. exams. As a result, the summer break seem to be a accelerating grade-point averages to open the gateways to

Nailing a job with a single click

JAKARTA (The Jakarta Post/ANN) - A professional’s career generally starts with a job application. It requires thorough effort to achieve the first goal; to be noticed by the recruiter. Browsing job ads and a company’s career website seeking a job title has been the routine.

Applicants nowadays do not only rely on those sites; they can also obtain vacancies from other sources such as LinkedIn, where employers can post vacancies and applicants can apply directly in the Jobs section.

Interestingly, vacancies can also be found in LinkedIn’s timeline via Update feature. You might notice updates such as “We have openings, please like this so I can review your profile” or “We are looking for qualified candidates, please leave comment and we will review your profile”.

These often come from human resources or a recruitment department. If we comply with these updates, it could mean; a single click of like or “please check out my profile” comment on this particular update can secure you a job interview.

Two methods are now available to post vacancies. Is using the Update feature still appropriate knowing that LinkedIn provides a Jobs section? My take is-yes, with conditions.

The Jobs section runs accordingly by far, containing adequate information as requested by LinkedIn. The other one, posting vacancies using the Update feature, seems to not. This method is tricky because update content is fully possessed by the account owner.

If we assess thoroughly, the core problem is communication, which lays on the content. The formula is simple; insufficient information will trigger misunderstanding and a not well-informed action from the applicants, hence communication problems.

To address that, employers can learn from headhunters who also use the Update feature.

They do not ask for comments and likes, instead, they provide details such as job title, descriptions, requirements and measures to apply.

What employers want to achieve by using this method is promote the vacancy and find the right candidates. Promoting is achievable as the Update feature gives users a direct view in their timeline. But finding the right candidate is another story.

The information is adequate, thus applicants will be well informed. It also cuts the hassle of reviewing based on likes and comments, which is not necessary.

This act reaches out to the external audience. A recruiting team can work closely with corporate communications to properly utilize LinkedIn as a recruitment channel and deliver better quality posts.

It will be very challenging because of the limited information provided; therefore candidates might not know they are the right fit.

A guide for posting a vacancy is mandatory. At least, it must cover content flow, grammar, check list and, most importantly, who possesses the authority to post the vacancies on behalf of their company. Ideally, corporate communications reviews all content before it goes on the website.

Inappropriate LinkedIn updates from employers would somehow put a company’s reputation at risk because it indicates their standard in a recruitment process.

To be noticed by employers, they can directly message or connect with the respective person instead of liking and commenting.

Having done that, the last crucial act is updating their profile regularly so the interested recruiters have sufficient information of them. This helps not only in applying for a job but also in strengthening their profile to attract headhunters.

Indonesia has potential for this new method of recruitment shown by 4 million LinkedIn users — 40 Applicants also need to educate percent increment from 2014. themselves in encountering this Unfortunately, this is not balanced new method of recruitment. Should by the mastery of using the social they be interested in a vacancy network effectively. posted; read it thoroughly, assess Engagement with local stakeholdwhether they meet the requisites ers to educate users on using this and follow the advised next steps. as a new recruitment tool is need-

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ed. To reach out to human resources, it can hand-in-hand collaborate with corporate communications to conduct product familiarization.

While applicants are a wider audience, a bilingual guide for applying for a job consisting of checklist, tips on how to reach out to an employer and stand out from other applicants would be very useful for them.

Above all, this phenomenon proves that the Internet and social network have somehow changed the practice of recruitment. Education is imperative and communications is fundamental to anticipate the future development that will always continue in a recruitment practice.

The goal, however, will remain the same; to find the right candidate.

professional’s career generally starts with a job application. It requires thorough effort to achieve the first goal; to be noticed by the recruiter. Browsing job ads and a company’s career website seeking a job title has been the routine.

Applicants nowadays do not only rely on those sites; they can also obtain vacancies from other sources such as LinkedIn, where employers can post vacancies and applicants can apply directly in the

Earthquake kills four in Myanmar, damages over 180 pagodas

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magnitude 6.8 earthquake with an epicentre about 12 miles west of Chauk Township in Magway Region hit at 5pm on August 24, killing four people and injuring one, according to the Department of Meteorology and Hydrology (DMH).

Tremors were felt in Magway, Bago, Ayeyawady, Yangon, Mandalay, Nay Pyi Taw, Sagaing, Shan and Rakhine.

Dr Kyaw Tun from the Myanmar Earthquake Committee said: “There is a fault called ‘Gwaycho’ in Chauk Township, with the ‘Tuyintaung fault’ to the west. The 1975 Bagan earthquake shook Taungoo, Hinthada, Pyay and the delta. This earthquake was shallow. According to the records, the Bagan earthquake was due to the Tuyintaung fault.

“There may be aftershocks in Chauk, Magway or Rakhine. It may take several months, depending on the severity of the original earthquake. Taking a look at the Taungdwingyi and Thabeikkyin earthquakes, a series of aftershocks occurred for six consecutive months,” he added.

The Ministry of Religious and Cultural Affairs said over 185 Bagan pagodas and temples were damaged.

The Parliament in Nay Pyi Taw was apparently damaged, according to MPs. Pagodas and other buildings in Mandalay, Rakhine and Magway showed cracks.

“The epicentre was not in the fault zone but near the Tuyintaung fault. The quake occurred between the Mann segment and the Yenangyaung fault,” Dr Yin Myo Min Htwe, assistant director of the DMH earthquake division, said.

Aung Swe Win, deputy director of Myanmar Fire Services Department, said they are carrying out search and rescue operations in Magway and Mandalay, with 35 members for each township. He added that one person died after a building collapsed in Magway Region and a monastery was damaged.

In Yenangyaung and Pakokku townships, Ko Ko Naing, director-general of the Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, reported that four people have been reported dead.

YANGON - Experts predict aftershocks in some areas within the coming months, depending on the severity of the original earthquake.

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he articles said that Myanmar had a earthquake at 5pm on August 24-2016 with 6.8 hit. This killed 4 people and 180 pagodas in this country. According to expert, the reason of the earthquake is due to be aftershocks. Myanmar was carring out search and rescue operations with 35 members of each

Syria war :

Turkey kills 25 people in latest round of air strikes T

ens of people have been killed in continuing Turkish strikes on Kurdish-held areas in Syria near the border city of Jarablus.

A monitoring group said at least 35 civilians and four militants had been killed in the Turkish attacks.

The Turkish military said 25 people, all Kurdish militants, had been killed.

The strikes came on the fifth day of Turkey’s military operation to target so-called Islamic State (IS) militants and Kurdish militia inside Syria.

Speaking in Gaziantep, where IS militants killed 54 people at a Kurdish wedding last week, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said “operations against terrorist organisations will continue until the end”.

Turkish tanks and troops backed by Syrian rebels have captured territory from IS and clashed with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish militia supported by the United States, which is itself fighting IS. Analysis: Guney Yildiz, BBC News Turkey’s coming into conflict with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) or their Arab allies could further complicate its military campaign.

Ankara wants to force the Kurds to withdraw to the east of Euphrates River, stopping short of establishing a corridor to link two Kurdish-led areas in north-western Syria.

Turkey enjoys tacit support from Russia, the Assad government and Iran in acting to prevent further territorial gains by the Kurds and their allies. The US, on the other side, has said it will try to prevent Turkey coming into conflict with its allies in the region.

A possible Turkish campaign against the Kurds in Syria could also risk igniting further clashes with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) militants inside Turkey. The PKK recently upped its attacks significantly in correlation with the Turkish operation inside Syria.

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he UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 20 people died in strikes on Jeb el-Kussa and another 15 were killed in a separate bombardment near al-Amarneh.

Four local fighters were also killed, the Observatory reported.

Turkey’s military said in a statement that it had killed 25 members of the PYD, an offshoot of the PKK. Jeb el-Kussa is located 14km (9 miles) south of Jarablus and is controlled by local fighters with support from Kurdish forces.

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n Saturday Turkey’s military suffered its first fatality of the offensive, when a soldier died in a tank hit by a rocket. Turkish authorities blamed Kurdish militia for the death.

Complicated alliancesTurkey has been targeting Kurdish-controlled villages around Jarablus, which Turkish-led forces captured from IS on the first day of the offensive.

It fears Kurdish fighters gaining an unbroken strip of territory along its border, which would be a huge boost to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a banned Kurdish rebel group fighting for autonomy in Turkey.

Turkey’s operations further complicate the already protracted Syrian civil war. Both Turkey and Kurdish rebels are US allies.

The US has backed Turkey’s anti-IS operations in Syria, and both countries have demanded that Kurdish forces withdraw to the east bank of the Euphrates river.

Senior ISIS Strategist and Spokesman Is Reported Killed in

Syria

WASHINGTON

— The senior Islamic State strategist Abu Muhammad al-Adnani was killed in northern Syria, the group announced on Tuesday, signaling the death of one of the world’s most-wanted terrorists.

In Washington, the Pentagon spokesman, Peter Cook, confirmed that an American “precision strike” near Al Bab, Syria, on Tuesday night had targeted Mr. Adnani, but could not confirm his death. “We are still assessing the results of the strike,” he said in a statement.

Two American officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, said a United States military drone had hit a vehicle Mr. Adnani was thought to be traveling in, following a close collaboration between the Central Intelligence Agency and Special Operations forces to track him.

A founding member of the Islamic State, Mr. Adnani, a 39-year-old Syrian, was the group’s chief spokesman and propagandist, running an operation that put out slickly produced videos of beheadings and massacres that shocked the world and sent a rush of recruits running to join the group in Syria.

Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story Accounts from arrested members of the Islamic State confirmed Mr. Adnani’s role as an operational leader as well. He oversaw the group’s external operations division, responsible for recruiting operatives around the world and instigating or organizing them to carry out attacks that have included Paris, Brussels and Dhaka, Bangladesh.

In the context of recent territorial losses in Syria and Iraq by the Islamic State, Mr. Adnani’s death would be another in a series of serious setbacks. But even as the United States has focused much of its counterterrorism operations on targeted strikes against terrorist leaders, analysts say the jury is still out on whether such strikes have been truly effective at curbing groups as a whole.

The Islamic State, in particular, has seemed built around the premise of maximum flexibility in the face of attacks.

“In isolation, Adnani’s death represents the demise of an important strategic and operational leader of the Islamic State — though only one person,” said Seth G. Jones, a terrorism specialist at the RAND Corporation.

“Adnani is likely replaceable, and the Islamic State will replace him as they have with other operatives that have been killed.”

In an official statement, the Islamic State said Mr. Adnani had been killed while checking up on the group’s military operations in Aleppo Province. In the northern part of that province, near the Turkish border, the Islamic State is currently under attack by a long list of antagonists. It is facing airstrikes from Turkey, the United States and Russia. And it is under attack on the ground from several directions, by Syrian rebels backed by the United States and Turkey; and by Kurdish-led militias that are also backed by the United States.

Mr

. Adnani was prominent enough that he was frequently the subject of speculative reports about death and injury, including in January, when Iraqi officials announced that he had been critically injured in a strike in the Iraqi province of Anbar. That report was soon proved false.

But analysts said it would be highly unlikely for the Islamic State to put out false information about the death of a leader of Mr. Adnani’s significance through its official channels.

His death would be a shake-up within the group’s most senior ranks. Mr. Adnani has been in sights of American military and counterterrorism forces for more than two years, and the State Department put a $5 million bountyon him.

Intelligence officials in the United States and Europe, as well as arrested members of the group, say that the Islamic State’s external operations unit is a distinct body inside the group, with its command-and-control structure answering to Mr. Adnani, who in turn reports only to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State. Mr. Adnani was being groomed to succeed Mr. Baghdadi, analysts said.

The Islamic State regularly carries out attacks on civilians and security forces in Iraq and Syria, where it still holds territory. But Mr. Adnani’s unit has focused on attacks abroad. It identifies recruits, provides training, hands out cash and arranges for the delivery of weapons.

Although the unit’s main focus has been Europe, external attacks directed by ISIS or those acting in its name have been even more deadly elsewhere. At least 650 people have been killed in the group’s attacks on sites popular with Westerners, including in Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia, according to a New York Times analysis conducted this year.

Even as the group has lost much of its territory and operatives from its high-water mark in 2014 and 2015, the kinds of attacks abroad that Mr. Adnani’s division oversees have continued.

In May, Mr. Adnani declared: “Do you think, America, that defeat is by the loss of towns or territory?

Were we defeated when we lost the cities in Iraq and retreated to the desert without a city or a land?” He offered an answer: “No, true defeat is losing the will and desire to fight.”

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vital part of the group’s strategy has been to inspire, and in some cases direct, opportunistic attacks against Western interests. In September 2014, Mr. Adnani made an explicit call to Muslims in the West to strike out wherever and however they could.

“We will strike you in your homeland,” he warned foreign governments, calling on Muslims to kill Europeans, “especially the spiteful and filthy French.”

And he urged them to do it in any manner they could: “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car,” he said, according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist propaganda.

In the year after that speech, at least two dozen plots linked to the Islamic State were documented.

In some, there were no direct operational ties back to Syria, but there were clear signs that the attacker had, at the least, consumed the group’s propaganda online.

“During the past decade, when it comes to both orchestrating and inciting violence in the West, no other leadership figures in jihadist groups have proven as dedicated or effective as al-Adnani,” said

Michael S. Smith II of Kronos Advisory, a terrorism research and analysis firm, who is writing a book on the Islamic State’s external operations.

His blended roles of spokesman and terrorism director is a reflection of the Islamic State’s central strategy: So much of the group’s impact and innovation in the world of violent Islamist extremism came from its new brand of messaging — mixing social media reach and savvy with Hollywood-style presentations of its worst atrocities. That in turn gave the group an ability to franchise its terror and expand its reach farther than its military capacity would otherwise go.

Mr. Adnani’s real name was Taha Sobhi Falaha, and he was born in the town of Binnish in the northern Syrian province of Idlib.

One Binnish resident, Muhammad Najdat Haj Kadour, whose mother was a distant relative of Mr. Adnani, said the family was “super poor.” Mr. Adnani’s brothers had worked in the orchards of Mr. Kadour’s better-off grandfather, “watering the olive trees.”

Mr. Adnani was one of the few surviving, still active, founders of the ISIS precursor organization, Al Qaeda in Iraq. That group grew out of the armed Iraqi resistance to American occupation and forged an affiliation with Al Qaeda under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

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ack then, the Syrian government was accused of facilitating the flow of foreign fighters, Syrians and others, to Iraq to fight the Americans. Mr. Adnani was among the first foreign volunteers to fight in Iraq.

Mr. Adnani had already been arrested twice by the Syrian government when he went to fight in Iraq, according to Mr. Kadour, who is now a Syrian antigovernment activist who opposes the Islamic State.

There, Mr. Adnani is believed to have helped found Al Qaeda in Iraq, and to have spent time in the American prison at Camp Bucca — a site now seen as the crucible of the Islamic State’s future leadership.

Sometime in the first year or so after the Syrian uprising began against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, Mr. Kadour and several other Binnish residents recalled, Mr. Adnani reappeared in town.

Mr. Adnani and other members of Al Qaeda in Iraq, especially those with Syrian roots, were arriving in Syria to try to infiltrate the Syrian opposition. They eventually formed the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria.

Later, the Islamic State split off from Al Qaeda and established itself as a separate group bent on declaring its self-styled caliphate.

As it set about literal statebuilding work — making street signs telling drivers they were entering the Islamic State, and issuing tickets and tax bills in the northeastern province of Raqqa — Mr. Adnani worked to build a virtual state, to publicize the group’s cause as a kind of viral phenomenon.

The videos and publications he oversaw were a great success in driving recruitment, and in opening the door to attacks outside of Syria and Iraq. In that capacity, the virtual state he presided over may well outlive the physical one.

Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, a founding member of the Islamic State, oversaw the group’s external terrorist operations.

WASHINGTON — The senior Islamic State strategist Abu Muhammad al-Adnani was killed in northern Syria, the group announced on Tuesday, signaling the death of one of the world’s most-wanted terrorists.

And during the past decade, when it comes to both orchestrating and inciting violence in the West, no other leadership figures in jihadist groups have proven as dedicated or effective as al-Adnani.

The global T

diabetes epidemic

my hunch was wrong.

One of my first patients was a welve years ago, my husband woman in her mid-30s who came in and I packed up all of our belongwith a headache, vomiting and an ings and moved to Trivandrum unsteady gait. Her scan showed a — a steamy, tropical town at the brainstem stroke. Her blood sugars southern tip of India in Kerala. At were very high. The underlying the time, I was a medical student cause of her stroke was most likely interested in studying stroke. For the next six months I dressed in a untreated Type 2 diabetes. Here I was, halfway around the globe, sari and walked to work on jungle roads. At the hospital, I immediate- in a vastly foreign culture, but I ly began seeing a steady stream of was looking at a disease — and the young patients affected by strokes, lifestyle that fostered it — that was startlingly familiar. many of whom were so severely Today, I am an endocrinologist, disabled that they were unable and diabetes has become a fullto work. I initially suspected the blown epidemic in India, China, cause was tuberculosis or denand throughout many emerging gue fever — after all, this was the developing world, where infections economies. have long been primary culprits for In the United States, diabetes tends to be a disease that, while disease. But I soon learned that

certainly not benign, is eminently manageable. Just this month, federal researchers reported that health risks for the approximately 25 million Americans with diabetes had fallen sharply over the last two decades. Elsewhere on the globe, however, diabetes plays out in a dramatically different fashion.

Patients often lack access to care and can’t get insulin, blood pressure pills and other medicines that diminish the risk of complications.

As more and more people develop the disease, hospitals may soon be overrun with patients experiencing all of its worst outcomes: blindness, limb amputation, kidney failure (necessitating dialysis), coma and death.

Within the last few decades, South Asia has experienced a rapid economic transition paralleled by an epidemiological shift in disease patterns. Recently, when I returned to India for a yearlong fellowship, I saw this for myself. Indians are now living more sedentary lives, working in banks, labs and call centers; all the while, their diet is changing, as they eat out more and consume foods higher in calories and saturated fats.

What’s more, evidence suggests that Indians may be especially predisposed to diabetes, so even those who are slightly overweight are more likely to be at risk. India also has a high malnutrition rate among children, and poor nutrition in early life appears to trigger metabolic changes that lead to diabetes in adulthood. The result is a perfect storm of commerce, lifestyle and genetics.

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ccording to the International Diabetes Federation, there are now an estimated 65 million adults with diabetes in India. That number is projected to increase to 109 million by 2035. China also has a diabetes epidemic — with an estimated 98 million people affected. Indonesia has nearly 9 million, and Pakistan early 7 million. All told, 382 million people worldwide are living with diabetes, a vast majority in low- and middle-income countries — places where many cases go undiagnosed and untreated.

A Disease on the Rise United States 24.4 The portion of the population with diabetes is higher in the United States than in India or China. But the number of people with the disease in India or China is much greater — and expected to increase.

Source: International Diabetes Federation The costs associated with diabetes are enormous; they include expenses related to acute and chronic complications, the costs of therapies to prevent them, and the fact that those affected may be unable to work and support their families. Many patients are pushed into bankruptcy. In India, only 10 percent of people have medical insurance, and patients cover most expenses out of pocket. In some low- and middle-income countries, diabetes patients living on $1 or $2 per day would need to spend as much as 50 percent of their monthly income to buy just one vial of insulin. Additional materials such as syringes, needles and glucose monitoring tests push costs even higher.

There is much to be done to prepare for this global epidemic. The sheer size of it means that strategies focused solely on treatment will be far too costly. If nothing changes in the next two decades, India will need to provide chronic care for more than 100 million people with diabetes — close to the entire adult population of Russia.

The solution in India and other developing countries has to include prevention, which means promoting healthy eating and physical activity. It’s not easy: We have by no means succeeded in the United States. In India, it will require better policies that favor fruits and vegetables over refined-food products. One opportunity involves India’s Mid Day Meal Scheme, a program that provides lunches to 120 million children. The program has been tainted by corruption and deadly contamination problems, but as the Indian government addresses these issues, it also has a chance to reshape the dietary habits of many young people. Exercise is the other crucial element. long way.

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he second step is providing diabetes patients with medicines that are effective, safe and affordable. On the bright side, for at least a decade, India has manufactured affordable generic insulin.

But in recent years, pharmaceutical companies, sensing the potential for profits, have begun to market their products aggressively.

In one major government hospital, I saw lines of pharmaceutical representatives with glossy pamphlets and drug samples waiting to speak with clinicians. Some classes of drugs they’re pushing, such as incretin mimetics — which are injected to lower blood sugars — are very costly, and though they are approved for use in both the United States and India, we don’t know enough about their safety in the long run. They don’t appear to lower blood sugar levels any better than cheaper alternatives like metformin, which comes as a pill and is considered the best first choice for many people with diabetes. In America, expenditures on diabetes medications have soared as newer drugs have been rapidly adopted. India desperately needs to create evidence-based guidelines that take into account cost-effectiveness so that marketing doesn’t drive treatment.

But even the best medicines will not work without a well-functioning health care system. Diabetes care is not a quick fix. You can’t take a pill for 10 days and be cured. It means working with a clinical team to control the disease month after month, year after year. This requires a system that is geared toward chronic care, which in many countries simply doesn’t exist. In India, there is now a call for universal health care. This is encouraging but is a long way from being realized.

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n order for policy makers and health officials to bring about these changes, we must change how we think about the disease. Most of us in the West assume we know what the risks and burdens of diabetes are. And if we’re talking about a patient in Kansas City or Tokyo, we’re probably right. But when it comes to diabetes, location is everything, and much of the world is now vulnerable to the most devastating consequences of this disease. If we’re going to be any help at all, we need to make a conceptual shift. We think we know diabetes — and that’s the problem.

The global diabete rate has risen by nearly half over the past two decades, according to a new study, as obesity and the health problems it spawns have taken hold across the developing world.

The prevalence of diabetes has been rising in rich countries for several decades, largely driven by increases in the rate of obesity. More recently, poorer countries have begun to follow the trend, with major increases in countries like China and India.

According to the International Diabetes Federation, there are now an estimated 65 million adults with diabetes in India. That number is projected to increase to 109 million by 2035. China also has a diabetes epidemic — with an estimated 98 million people affected. Indonesia has nearly 9 million, and Pakistan nearly 7 million. All told, 382 million people worldwide are living with diabetes, a vast majority in low- and middle-income countries — places where many cases go undiagnosed and untreated.

Why

the Italy Quake Was So Severe

The rubble in Amatrice, Italy, on Wednesday. Amatrice, whose mayor lamented that “half the town no longer exists,” has stone churches and other buildings that were constructed centuries ago, when little if anything was known about earthquakes.

The combination of a shallow fault and old, unreinforced masonry buildings led to widespread devastation in the earthquake that struck central Italyearly Wednesday.

The magnitude-6.2 quake killed at least 241 people and left hundreds more injured. Many people were trapped in the rubble of collapsed buildings.

Key Facts Like other villages and towns in the mountainous area, Amatrice, where the mayor lamented that “half the town no longer exists,” has stone churches and other buildings that were constructed centuries ago, when little if anything was known about earthquakes.

Unless they have been reinforced in recent years, such structures are easily damaged or destroyed by shaking.

“Even 100 years ago, they didn’t know how to build structures to withstand earthquakes,” said David A. Rothery, professor of planetary geosciences at the Open University in Milton Keynes, England.

The earthquake was less powerful than many recent deadly quakes. The magnitude-7.8

earthquake that struck Nepal in April 2015, for instance, killing 8,000 people, released roughly 250 times more energy.

Video Powerful Earthquake Strikes Central Italy But the Italian quake was very shallow: According to the United States Geological Survey, it occurred about six miles below the surface. “Shallow earthquakes cause more destruction than deep earthquakes because the shallowness of the source makes the ground-shaking at the surface worse,” Professor Rothery said.

Video from Amatrice and other towns near the quake center showed heaps of masonry rubble from buildings that had been shaken apart.

Earthquakes are set off by the movement of the earth’s crust, which is divided into large sections called tectonic plates. The Apennine Mountains, where the quake occurred on Wednesday, are in an area where one plate, the African, is moving under another, the Eurasian.

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ecause of the complex interaction between the plates, the basin of the Tyrrhenian Sea, off Italy’s west coast, is spreading. It is this spreading, and the tension it creates in the Apennines, that led to the quake.

The area of Wednesday’s temblor experienced significant earthquakes in the past, including one with a magnitude of 6.3 near the town of L’Aquila in 2009 that killed at least 295 people, injured more than 1,000 and left 55,000 homeless.

The two quakes had much in common in terms of genesis and depth,” said Massimo Cocco, a geologist with the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome.

After the 2009 quake, seven members of a national commission on risk prevention were arrested on charges of failing to adequately warn L’Aquila about the earthquake risk. They were found guilty of manslaughter in 2012 and sentenced to six years in prison, but they were cleared in 2014 by an appeals court.

Mr. Cocco said that Italy had anti-seismic construction laws for new buildings, but that little has been done to reinforce existing buildings.

“Resilience is just too low compared to the frequency and the high impact of natural phenomena,” he said.

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.

Get news and analysis from Europe and around the world delivered to your inbox every day with the Today’s Headlines: European Morning newsletter.

Shallow earthquakes cause more destruction than deep earthquakes because the shallowness of the source makes the ground-shaking at the surface worse. And the two quakes had much in common in terms of genesis and depth. Earthquakes are very dangerous for human life.

How Small-Scale Paintings Became

the Art World’s Big New Trend A

quiet revolution in painting is seeing artists reject large-scale, bombastic installations in favor of intimate subjects and techniques.

The worldwide reaction against globalism takes many forms, most of them less dramatic than Brexit. In the art world, a trend has been emerging toward personal, intimate, and sometimes (but not always) small-scale paintings. This new work has almost nothing in common with the overblown, space-filling, mixed-media installations that the critic Peter Schjeldahl described in 1999 as “festival art”—made for the commercial art fairs that have proliferated internationally for almost two decades. Museums and commercial galleries fell over themselves in the rush to follow suit, building huge new spaces to accommodate installation and performance art. Everything got bigger and more public, it seemed, and many artists were lured into producing the sort of work that would fill the new spaces and fit the appetites of ravenous new collectors. But art doesn’t move in one direction only, and a reaction was overdue.

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n the late 1990s, many young artists who felt that the fields of painting and sculpture were too crowded found a way around this through video and performance work. “Younger artists are always looking for new paths, and often those paths are easier to find in areas that are not necessarily in the public eye,” says the Tate’s Sir Nicholas Serota, the most influential museum director of our time. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that people are sitting in studios making intimate, confessional, personal art at this moment.” As if to underscore the point, New York’s James Cohan Gallery recently put on a show called “Intimisms,” with mostly small figurative paintings by 26 artists, some old and some new.

Among those working in this vein are the painters Genieve Figgis, Shara Hughes, Sadie Laska, Anna Glantz, Katherine Bernhardt, and Ryan Nord Kitchen. A striking example is 33-year-old Nigerian-born Njideka Akynyili Crosby, winner of the Prix Canson, an annual award for works on paper by an artist under 50. The prize ceremony took place in June at the Drawing Center in SoHo, where work by the five finalists was on view. Njideka, tall, beautiful, warm, and a trifle nervous about the upcoming announcement, embodies the excitement and positive energy coming out of Nigeria these days, which is deeply present in her work.

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jideka moved to the United States in 1999, when she was sixteen. She graduated from Swarthmore, got her M.F.A. degree from Yale, was an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and now lives with her American-born husband (who often appears in her work) in Los Angeles. Her collage paintings (acrylic, colored pencils, charcoal, transfers) are realistic and highly personal—domestic interiors with family and friends, remembered scenes from her Nigerian childhood, portraits, and still lifes. Many include images taken from magazines, advertisements, her own photographs, and Lagos fashion look-books. The subtle interaction of human figures in her densely patterned tableaux reflects the work ofMalick Sidibé, the great, late Malian photographer.

Her images are compelling, decorative, and also deeply emotional. Njideka, who works slowly and produces very few paintings, does not have an American gallery and doesn’t want one right now. She has just joined the highly regarded Victoria Miro Gallery in London, where she will have her first European solo show in October. Her aim is not to fill large spaces or dazzle the public at art fairs but to paint quietly, alone in her Los Angeles studio.

Shara Hughes, who was born in Atlanta, is a 35-yearold graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design.

She paints in a small, windowless studio in Green-

point, Brooklyn. A visit there reveals a room chock-full of colorful, wildly idiosyncratic fantasy landscapes.

She’s wearing overalls and a white T-shirt and has several discreet tattoos—a sun and moon on her right wrist and a 3-D red cube on her left forearm. “I remember drawing that cube when I was a child, over and over, and realizing I could make a three-dimensional space,” she says.

Asked if she is noticing a recent move toward intimacy in painting, she says, “I’ve always worked this way, but it hasn’t been trendy until now. I think seeing someone’s hand in the process is coming back—that individual touch. Communication nowadays is all on the phone and the Internet, and there may be some kind of reaching out for something more personal.”

There are four large paintings (60 inches by 52 inches) and more than a dozen medium and small ones on the walls. A big canvas called Magic Hour is an exuberant, semiabstract landscape seen through a framework of loosely painted brushstrokes. It holds the viewer’s eye and sucks you right inside the picture, deeper and deeper. “I’ve been thinking about the time of day when the sun goes up or goes down over a couple of minutes, just melts in and out of the landscape, and the color is always changing. It’s about capturing that magic hour.”

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ike a lot of younger artists, Shara deeply admires the work of Dana Schutz—a painter who never succumbed to the siren call of “festival art.” (Others who come to mind are Carroll Dunham, Peter Doig, Chris Ofili, Cecily Brown, John Currin, and Elizabeth Peyton.) “Dana came and spoke to my class at RISD when I was there,” Shara remembers, “and it was the first time I felt it was OK to just paint whatever you wanted to, and own it.” Schutz, whose work helped open the way for much of the intimate and honest painting we’re seeing now, told me she is impressed by the way that “Shara is willing to take personal experiences and put them in the work.”

Dana also mentioned seeing a painting by the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. “It had that intimacy we’re talking about,” she said. “You can feel the person behind it, and the touch, and the closeness.

It’s great when you see work like that.”

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arold Ancart, a 36-year-old Belgian artist who lives in Brooklyn, has a show this month at the Menil Collection in Houston called “Road Trip.” It consists of 27 small works he made with oil stick on paper during a cross-country drive in his Jeep Grand Cherokee. The Jeep’s trunk was his studio—every now and then, he would stop on the roadside “in the middle of nowhere,” get out, and make a painting.

Harold remembers being told at La Cambre, the Brussels art school he attended, that “painting is dead, sculpture is dead, everything is dead,” he says by phone from Los Angeles, where he’s spending the summer working in an outdoor garden studio. “You were supposed to do some sort of strange political, post-Conceptual work, and it was terrible. I thought, Wait a minute; this can’t be true. One of the reasons I came to the U.S. was because I thought people here would embrace things less with the brain and more

with the chest.”

Harold shows at Clearing, a Brussels gallery that has a branch in Brooklyn. His paintings, which can also be very large—mural-size—are vivid and utterly unpredictable. They play with scale in odd ways, and most of them have a jagged, tough beauty that subjects natural forms to unnatural dislocations. “People try to bring meaning into what they do,” he tells me. “The problem is that we’re surrounded by meaning, maybe even overwhelmed by meaning. I think it’s more interesting to remove meaning, because not everything needs a reason.”

He continues: “Straight-on painting is back in the spotlight, and so is sculpture. And we no longer make that silly separation between figurative and abstraction. Artists from the previous generation prepared the ground for us, and you have the feeling now that everything is possible again.”

Akunyili Crosby’s paintings often include her relatives and domestic interiors.

Since 1900s, small- scale painting has been became a new trend of the art world.

When art doesn’t move in one direction only, and a reaction was overdue, younger artists are always looking for new path. Therefore, small- scale was born as a result while painting and sculpture were too old. One of the most striking artist is 33-year-old Nigerian-born Njideka Akynyili Crosby. Her painting are got high appreciation because they are compelling, decorative, and also deeply emotional.

Shara Hughes- the host of ““psychological landscapes” show is a potential artist in small- scale painting. Hughes’s work was described by The New York Times as “a bit like puppies: noisy, incautious, and frequently irresistible.” Harold Ancart, a 36-year-old Belgian, is continuing to hold the mainstream. His painting is commented that they are utterly unpredictable.

OPINION HK govt must do more to encourage people to have kids I n residential compounds of Hong Kong, it is not difficult to see parents walking together with their children – sometimes many kids. You may thus think the city is not short of babies. But don’t let this fool you – Hong Kong actually has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. According to statistics from 2014, a Hong Kong woman on average gives birth to 1.23 children, which is not only lower than in the United States (1.86) and Britain (1.81) but even lower than Japan’s 1.42, a country well-known for its low birth rate. Considering a fertility rate of replacement level is 2.1, Hong Kong’s birth rate of 1.23 is alarmingly low,

HONG KONG (China Daily/ANN) - Low maternity and paternity leaves are no doubt a deterrent for the city’s couples to have more children.

indicating the city will have fewer and fewer young people.

Young people are the source of the future labour force. With such a low birth rate, it’s only natural that Hong Kong will face a labour shortage in the coming years. According to the estimates made by the Census and Statistics Department, the city’s labour force will peak at 3.65 million in 2018 and then begin to shrink. Young people are also those who innovate and start up new enterprises. A rapidly aging society is likely to lose its creativity and hence its competitiveness.

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urrently the benefits for Hong Kong’s parents are not favorable compared with many other places. For instance, the statutory maternity leave in the city is only 10 weeks, a rather meager period that is even shorter than the minimum 98-day maternity leave on the mainland. In other developed economies, mothers in Germany and Japan have maternity leaves of 14 weeks, and their counterparts in Britain can enjoy a maximum of 52 weeks of maternity leave! The paternity leave for new fathers, which was only introduced in Hong Kong last year, is an outrageously low three days, while in Germany new fathers can enjoy paternity leave as long as that of the mothers.

Low maternity and paternity leaves are no doubt a deterrent for the city’s couples to have more children.

Considering the huge pressure from doing their jobs and baby-nursing at the same time, many potential moms have to postpone the date of bearing a child or even choose not to have babies at all. The SAR government should consider lengthening the minimum maternity leave to at least 14 weeks and offer new mothers the right to further extend the leave with partial pay.

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igh living costs are another factor negatively affecting Hong Kong’s fertility rate. Now the SAR has provided some benefits to parents to alleviate their financial burdens, but these are far from generous.

Tax-paying families may enjoy child allowance for HK$100,000 taxable income for each child – meaning maximum HK$17,000 tax rebate a year for each child.

The allowance is not totally adequate because richer families get more tax rebate while poorer families, who pay lower tax rates but need more financial help in raising children, get less. It also means families that have incomes lower than the taxable threshold cannot enjoy the allowance at all! In comparison, a German family may receive 190 to 221 euro (US$215-250) a month for each child they have, equaling HK$20,000 to HK$23,300 a year, regardless of whether they pay income tax or not.

The Hong Kong government should learn from Germany and set an across-the-board child allowance, which may stand at HK$20,000 a year for each child, for all families in the city. Only with vigorous financial and policy support from the government, will potential mothers and fathers in the city be more inclined to give birth to more babies.

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ong Kong actually has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Considering a fertility rate of replacement level is 2.1, Hong Kong’s birth rate of 1.23 is alarmingly low, indicating the city will have fewer and fewer young people.The SAR government has undertaken a slew of measures to attract talents from both the mainland and foreign countries to replenish Hong Kong’s labour force. Currently the benefits for Hong Kong’s parents are not favorable compared with many other places. Low maternity and paternity leaves are no doubt a deterrent for the city’s couples to have more children. Only with vigorous financial and policy support from the government, will potential mothers and fathers in the city be more inclined to give birth to more babies.

Seoul’s Itaewon

district sees rise of sidewalk drinking

SEOUL, South Korea (The Korea Herald/ANN) - As Itaewon, an area in central Seoul, becomes increasingly popular a new trend of alcohol consumption is taking root, bringing mixed reactions

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n a seasonably warm late summer evening after work, 27-year-old Choi Min-ji sat on the stoop of Magpie, a popular pub in the Gyeongnidan neighbourhood, with a glass of pale ale in her hands.

“It feels so carefree and exotic,” she said, gesturing at the clusters of people who, rather than sitting indoors, were enjoying their drinks while standing outside the establishment.

“It’s liberating to be outdoors after a long day at the office,” said Choi, who works in advertising. “And it would be a shame not to take advantage of the warm weather.”

Choi is not alone in her thinking, it seems.

One sight that is becoming more and more common in the Itaewon, Gyeongnidan and Haebangchon neighbourhoods -- which have risen in recent years as some of the liveliest nightlife spots in Seoul for expatriates and locals alike -- is people enjoying their drinks in the streets.

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ranted, drinking in tented “pojangmacha“ (outdoor eateries) and picnic tables laid out in front of convenience stores is a culture that is by no means unfamiliar to Korea, and one that foreign visitors find particularly “Korean.”

But recently, the Yongsan-gu based neighbourhoods have been seeing a different kind of outdoors drinking, where pub-goers bring their glasses outside even when no tables are available. Customers simply perch themselves on the ledges of adjacent sidewalks or stand in huddled groups, holding glasses of beer in their hands and lining the alleys in a vibrant, festival-like crowd.

According to Choi, outdoors drinking offers better prospects for socialising.

“I think in Korea, it’s still difficult to mingle with strangers. But when you’re outside and not sitting at your own table, it’s less inhibiting.”

As to the more macro-level social reasons behind this

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trend, one of the key factors driving people outdoors has been the recent smoking ban, says pub owner Michael Fisher. A new law, which took effect starting from January 2015, prohibits indoors smoking in all public places including restaurants, cafes and bars.

“Since then, people have no choice but to step outside if they want a smoke. And naturally, they take their beer glasses with them,” said Fisher, who is the owner of Phillies pub, a Haebangchon hot spot whose front doors are frequently lined with beer-swigging customers.

“It’s mostly the foreigners who drink outdoors,” Fisher observed. “I’m from Birmingham, England, and it’s a very commonplace thing there, as long as (the drinking) is done on the premises.”

So far, he has had no problems with the new fad.

“We make sure that customers don’t wander off beyond our pub’s stoops or balcony. And it’s only during a few months of the year anyway, when it’s warmer.”

ocals’ complaints filed to the Yongsan-gu District Office, however, tell a different story.

The noise from people either drinking outdoors or in openwalled beerhouses lining the upper hillside of Gyeongnidan has been stoking the ire of some neighbours, says Jung Eun-cheon, head of media relations at the office.

“When people are chatting outdoors or in the terrace area ... the noise really travels through the neighbourhood,” Jung said. “We don’t get as many complaints as we used to, because Gyeongnidan locals have now gotten used to this kind of atmosphere. But among those who do complain, some have been pretty furious and persistent.”

On the other hand, residents in Haebangchon -- a neighbourhood which has transformed into a trendy dining spot only in the past couple of years -- are still adjusting to their new cohabitants, said Baek Gyeong-ri, an official at Yongsan-gu Office’s health guidance division.

“It’s still a predominantly residential area,” said Baek.

“That, of course, is one of the reasons why there are so many visitors. People are attracted to the quaint eateries buried between houses. But the residents that file complaints say their home lives are being disrupted by the constant chatter of people, all through the night.”

Such commotion that results from outdoor drinking, however, is difficult to contain, control or sanction, Jung says.

“Loud music is something we can stop via administrative measures,” he said. “But the sound of people talking does not fall under the category of ‘noise’ according to current regulations, so there’s very little we can do.”

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rom an owner’s perspective as well, there is no real reason to prohibit outdoors drinking, says Park Sungjin, who owns and runs Heaven for a G, a Gyeongnidan bar with an open terrace and outdoor benches.

“It livens up the atmosphere, and it’s not illegal,” he said.

In Korea, there are currently no regulations against drinking outdoors, unlike in some other countries such as Australia, Canada, Ireland and most states in the US -- where such restrictive legislation is referred to as “open container laws.”

“There are clauses in Korea’s Minor Offenses Act that impose fines for causing alcohol-induced disturbances (such as violence or vandalism) in public places,” said attorney Lee Jong-soo. But drinking outdoors does not in itself constitute a crime or even a misdemeanor, he remarked.

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group of lawmakers are currently seeking to enact legislation that would prohibit drinking in outdoor areas including university campuses and parks. Some are in favor of heightened regulations; others fear such bans will excessively restrict both bar owners’ and bar hoppers’ freedoms.

Cho Na-young, a lawyer and avid traveller, cites cases of foreign backpackers’ unruliness in Southeast Asia when invoking the need for preventative measures in Korea.

“Some tourists seemed to really indulge in being free from the drinking bans of their own countries,” said Cho, recalling outdoor drinking scenes she saw in Laos -- another country that lacks in open container laws. “I hope unruly street drinking can be monitored in Korea,” she said.

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s Itaewon, an area in central Seoul, becomes increasingly popular a new trend of alcohol consumption is taking root, bringing mixed reactions. On a seasonably warm late summer evening after work, 27-year-old Choi Min-ji sat on the stoop of Magpie, a popular pub in the Gyeongnidan neighbourhood, with a glass of pale ale in her hands.Choi is not alone in her thinking, it seems. One sight that is becoming more and more common in the Itaewon, Gyeongnidan and Haebangchon neighbourhoods -- which have risen in recent years as some of the liveliest nightlife spots in Seoul for expatriates and locals alike -- is people enjoying their drinks in the streets. Granted, drinking in tented “pojangmacha“ (outdoor eateries) and picnic tables laid out in front of convenience stores is a culture that is by no means unfamiliar to Korea, and one that foreign visitors find particularly “Korean.” But recently, the Yongsan-gu based neighbourhoods have been seeing a different kind of outdoors drinking, where pub-goers bring their glasses outside even when no tables are available. The noise from people either drinking outdoors or in open-walled beerhouses lining the upper hillside of Gyeongnidan has been stoking the ire of some neighbours, says Jung Eun-cheon, head of media relations at the office. A group of lawmakers are currently seeking to enact legislation that would prohibit drinking in outdoor areas including university campuses and parks.