How Montaigne Viewed the "Savages" of South America and Europe

How to Diffuse Egypt’s Population Time Bomb

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Dr. Simon Ourian: Meet the Kardashian’s Cosmetic Dermatologist Who Became Instagram’s King of Beauty

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Zhou Qunfei: The Entrepreneur Who’s Behind the Touch Screen Technology We Use Everyday

Issue 1787- February - 14/02/2020

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How Montaigne Viewed the «Savages« »of South America and Europe« www.majalla.com

Editorial

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Michel de Montaigne’s essay Of Cannibals is one of the most read classical essays in medieval literature. The subject matter of the essay is quite fascinating as he wrote extensively about a tribe from Brazil called the Tupinambe Indians. While the Frenchman never went to Brazil himself, he happened to meet a group of people from this tribe in the French city of Rouen. It was conventional at the time to view people from non-European societies as savage, and European societies as civilized Montaigne actually disagreed with such sentiments. In his essay he points out that the Tupinambe Indians were intelligent and civil, he also said that it was the Europeans with their constant religious wars who were acting uncivilized. This week’s cover story by Bryn Haworth focuses on Montaigne’s essay as he discusses how the essayist compared the “savages” of South America to those of Europe.

Egypt’s population crisis has hit another breaking point as the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) has said that the North African country has hit 100 million inhabitants. Egypt has been battling overpopulation ever since the Mubarak era, but events such as the Arab Spring and the lack of funding from foreign agencies have dwindled family planning programs. However, ever since 2018, the El Sisi government has been hard at work with the “Two is Enough” campaign which has been pulling government aid from families that exceed the two-child cap. Yasmine El-Geressi writes on these initiatives as she also writes on Bangladesh’s experience with overpopulation and how it tackled the crisis.

The Egyptian Grand Museum is slated to open in late 2020. For the first time in history, all of King Tutankhamun’s treasures will be put on display in one setting. The opening of the museum is going to be a huge event, as the Ministry of Tourism is planning an eight-day grand opening to mark the occasion. Ahmed Salem recently went on an exclusive tour of the museum as he spoke with Dr. El Tayeb Abbas, the General Director of Archeology at the Grand Egyptian Museum who talked about the preparations the museum is undertaking before for its grand opening and Dr. Eissa Zidan, the Director-General of Executive Affairs for Restoration and Transportation of Antiquities of the Grand Egyptian Museum, who talked about the restoration efforts of various antiquities.

Dr. Simon Ourian is arguably the most famous cosmetic surgeon in the world, his clients include megastars such as Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian. As a result of his fame, he receives clients from all over the world. Yasmine El-Geressi interviews Ourian who spoke about the beauty standards of Arabs and the importance of body positivity.

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44 Majalla Goes on an Exclusive Tour of the

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Issue 1787- February - 14/02/2020

08 First Coronavirus Case Hits London

22 Collision Course: Idlib Tests Russia-Turkey Relations

26 The Precarious Foundations of Indian Democracy

30 When It Comes to Markets, Europe Is No Fading Power

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Quick-start Guide to Mental Health Professionals 3

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Just ‘Discovered’ South Korea, Which has 40 Oscar Cranked Out Great Movies for Years

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Thousands of pilgrims crowd Piazza Duomo to witness the beginning of the third day of celebrations in honour of the patron saint of Catania as devotees with the traditional white ÂŤsackÂť pull the fercolo with the reliquary bust of the Saint martyr while the candelabras honor the passage of the procession on February 2020 ,5 in Catania, Italy. (Getty)

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Thousands of couples attend a mass wedding held by the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, aka Unification Church despite the spread of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus also known as Wuhan Coronavirus on February 2020 ,7 in Gapyeong-gun, South Korea. Some 4,000 ‚Moonies›, believers of Unification Church, which was named after the founder Moon Sun Myung, attend the mass wedding which began in the early 1960s. (Getty)

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and was subsequently replaced by Rishi Sunak. The reason why Javid resigned was because Johnson told him that he could keep his post under the condition that he fires all his advisors, a condition that Javid said no minister would accept.

New Emergency Terror Law Passes in UK House of Commons

In response to the latest terror attack in Streatham, south London, the House of Commons have debated and passed a new emergency terror law which would stop the release of those accused of terrorist offences from being released

Boris Johnson Undertakes Major Cabinet Reshuffle, Sajid Javid Resigns from Treasury Post

tary and Brandon Lewis replaces Julian Smith as Northern Ireland Secretary.

Some familiar faces have remained in their posts, Matt Hancock is still the For the first time since winning the De- Health Secretary, Michael Gove is still cember 2019 general election, Prime the Chancellor of the Duchy of LancasMinister Boris Johnson has conducted ter, Dominic Raab is still the Foreign a major cabinet reshuffle. New faces in Secretary, and Priti Patel is still the the government include Anne-Marie Home Secretary. The most surprising Trevelyan who replaces Alok Sharma change happened after Sajid Javid reas International Development Secre- signed as Chancellor of the Exchequer

halfway through their sentences. The law passed unopposed and will apply to England, Wales and Scotland, it has now moved on to the House of Lords for debate. Under the new law, those convicted of terror attacks would only be released if they served at least twothirds of their prison sentence and with the agreement of the Parole Board.

First Coronavirus Case Hits London

A GP surgery in Islington, London has been closed this week as it being disinfected after a woman who contracted the coronavirus came to seek treatment. This follows two similar closures in Brighton and one in Taunton, Somerset. The woman arrived at the practice in an Uber, however the driver is not considered to be at risk of having the virus since the journey only lasted 15 minutes.

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EU Health Officials Hold Emergency Meeting on Coronavirus

Health Ministers from the EU 27 met this week to discuss meaures that need to be taken to prevent the spread of the coronavirus throughout the continent.

While speaking to DW, German Health Minister Jens Spahn was pleased with the steps EU countries have taken to stop the virus from moving further: “So far, in Europe and the European Union, detection and containment is working,” How did warn, however, that the situation might easily grow worse if preventative measures falter in China: “But we have to admit, that’s today. It could get worse before it gets better, because as long as it’s not under control in China, these regional epidemics can transform into a worldwide pandemic.” One of the major objectives of the meeting was to safeguard the free movement of people while simultaneously contain-

ing the virus.

Turkish and Russian Backed Forces Clash in Idlib

Northwestern Idlib remains one of the last rebel strongholds in Syria, and Russian backed Assad regime forces have been advancing to recapture the region for the past few months. However, this week Turkish backed forces have been

clashing with Russian forces, causing many civilians to be displaced in the process. Turkey and Russia have had continued talks in an attempt to halt further escalation, but no ceasefire has been negotiated by both sides. Turkey accuses the Russians of targeting civilians, something Moscow denies. If no ceasefire is negotiated soon, then only further civilian displacement will occur.

Bernie Sanders Wins New Hampshire Primary, Pete Buttigieg Narrowly Comes in Second

Progressive Democrat candidate Bernie Sanders scores another major victory in the race for the party’s pres-

idential nomination, as he won the New Hampshire primary by gaining 25.7 percent of the vote share. Pete Buttigieg could also be pleased with the results as he gained 24.4 percent of the vote share. As it stands it seems that the Democrat nomination race will be a two horse race between the progressive wing of the party represented by Sanders, and the establishment wing of the party represented by Buttigieg. Furthermore, it was a bad night for former Vice President Joe Biden, in spite of him showing early promise in polls he came in fifth in the primary scoring a mere 8.4 percent of the vote share.

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Part Two

Of Cannibals

by Bryn Haworth

I’ve always had a lot of time for sceptics.

In some cases, you had to have a lot of time.

There was the one who landed up in a ditch and refused to come out till someone could prove he was actually in it. Mind you, I may have made this particular sceptic up; when I enter the words ‘sceptic’ and ‘ditch’, Google is convinced I’m interested in septic tanks.

The man had one of those polysyllabic Greek names. I may have to drop a line to the prime minister on the subject, as the man uniquely qualified to discuss classical thinkers and ditches.

Suffice to say that from an early age, perhaps thirteen, I was trained in the art of scepticism.

This is a blatant fib. What I mean is that certain teachers, some of whom were considered subversive for their pains, introduced me to the art. The fact that they kept getting the sack did nothing to deter me. The authorities in my secondary school were so dodgy, I took the idea of scepticism and ran with it.

In some of the classes we had what they

called ‘balloon debates.’ I was never sure about the balloon bit – my attention must have wandered momentarily when that was explained – but the principle of the thing was that you were selected to defend or attack a controversial view, such as the pros and cons of fox hunting. If that sounds hackneyed, it was a rural school; there were far worse subjects of controversy to be had. You then displayed your oratorical skills with equal pertinacity, whether you took the namby-pamby view that foxes ought to be treated in a humane fashion, or else you advocated that they be taken to a place of execution and ripped into as many pieces as a famished pack of beagles could contrive. With a skill like that, I might have gone on to become a lawyer or a politician.

Sadly, I lacked the gift for dispassionate eloquence. We can’t all be bastards. For one thing, it would obviate the concept of bastardy. The only bastards left would be actual bastards, like William the Bastard, though he complicated things by more than living up to his birth certificate.

After cultivating my scepticism in an

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Not ma belle

environment (my school) that positively obliged any thinking person to doubt the legitimacy of anything, I arrived at a kind of climax in my thinking with the discovery of solipsism. I became convinced that I was the centre of the universe. Worse, that I was the only reality in the universe. I know, it sounds demented, but consider the rigours of my environment. Of course, it was not the most original conclusion for a sixteen-year-old to have reached, that my centre was nowhere and my circumference everywhere, but how many sixteen-year-olds really think it through the way I did? They mostly content themselves with being egocentric. Child’s play. Me, I thought, therefore I was. Besides, having the advantage over Descartes of possessing a youthful body pumped full of hormones, I also felt, therefore I was. In the end, as any life coach will tell you, it all comes down to self-belief.

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All this trawling of my past to say this: though I hadn’t heard of him back then, I was already primed to fall in love with Michel de Montaigne, and I don’t mean by mistaking him for a girl.

Anyone whose motto was ‘What do I know?’ would have fully equipped me to survive a Norfolk grammar school in the 1970s. What a pity he wasn’t there to hold my hand in the manner of Virgil guiding Dante through the inferno, I might actually have emerged half sane.

I think I first heard about Montaigne somewhat later, in relation to a translation of his essays by John Florio, a contemporary of Shakespeare. There is a strong possibility that the bard actually read the particular essay whose title I have stolen: a passage of The Tempest is lifted, virtually word for word, from Of Cannibals. I also wonder if Hamlet was one of Montaigne’s avid readers, given how closely the soliloquy resembles an essay.

The very word ‘essay’ appears to have been Montaigne’s idea, derived from the French verb to try, and the soliloquys are clearly attempts to make sense of things, as well as being very inward. That inner musing, along with the open-mindedness that came from reading sceptics of the classical age, gives the essays their distinctive freshness. It’s the intellectual equivalent of that draught of beer after the trek across the desert in ‘Ice Cold in Alex’ (1958).

Yup, that is what you need after reading most philosophers. Try any of them if you don’t believe me. Try Heidegger, with the added bonus of being able to read his liberal apologists bending over backwards to excuse his politics. There is nothing pretentious or tendentious or obscurantist about Michel. He writes, somewhere, that you can put a man on the highest throne in the world, he still has to sit on his arse. With attitudes like that, it’s obvious what a dim view Heidegger would have taken of him.

It helps that Montaigne was not an academic.

He had far too strange an upbringing (having to speak Latin with his own parents, par

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exemple) to wish that on himself. But he was studious, as well as unafraid of his own company. The tower where he worked still survives. Overhead, on the ceiling of his study, tags and mottos were painted along the beams. According to the Wikipedia entry on his room the walls were once decorated with paintings of mythical scenes, like Venus with Adonis, Venus discovered by Vulcan having it away with Mars, Venus in the Judgement of Paris, Venus… You get the picture. I can almost hear the estate agent: “Here we have the study. Of course, nowadays a more neutral look is in favour.” The Wikipedia entry rather coyly attempts to explain this wall-to-wall sauciness: ‘One of the central themes of the paintings gathered in the space seems to have been nudity, a question metaphorically at the heart of the writing project of the Essays’ Yeah right. I don’t know, was the man made of flesh and blood? Because if you surrounded me with this kind of thing, it would definitely not be calculated to keep my mind on my homework. I suppose it accounts for his lack of apparent prudishness when it came to the nakedness of the Brazilian natives. For all I know, he sat at his desk in his birthday suit.

Somehow, despite these adverse conditions, Montaigne managed to keep his mind on his work, thus demonstrating that not all Renaissance types were as bad as Raphael.

In fact, so fond was the Frenchman of his solitary studies that he retired from the world in his late thirties to pursue knowledge. Unlike a similarly sequestered genius of our age, he did not emerge to wreak havoc in the civil service. He did his public duty when called upon, and otherwise he enjoyed his own company. Despite being a devout Catholic, he would skip mass when he was busy, though he made sure he was able to hear it through ‘conduits’ connecting his study to a nearby chapel.

At least, this is what I’ve been able to glean from my own extensive and largely solitary reading, hidden from the world and living on a diet of ready-made M&S chicken curries. This modest lifestyle makes Montaigne look like Boy George on a Friday night. But conduits?

Maybe. In all candour, what do I know?

On a visit to Rome in later years, this (fairly) good Catholic would present his collected essays to Sisto Fabri, who served as Master of the Sacred Palace under Pope Gregory XIII. Montaigne asked to be forgiven for referring to the pagan notion of Fortuna quite so much.

Oh, and for being far too soft on Julian the Apostate. Now Fabri was acquainted with Giordano Bruno, a man who would not have known he was awake unless he’d referred to Fortuna and been soft on Julian the Apostate several times before breakfast. Perhaps mildly disappointed, Fabri sent the essayist away with the instruction to follow his own conscience.

This was not particularly helpful advice and certainly didn’t justify the long journey to Rome. Montaigne had a natural inclination to follow his own conscience. It was this same inclination that had led him to write the book in the first place. Still, he could console himself that he hadn’t been excommunicated for heresy. In those days, you wouldn’t want to upset the Master of the Sacred Palace.

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Ice Cold in Alex

Michel’s tower

I say ‘in those days’ because these were turbulent times by any standards. For most of the essayist’s adult life, the country was caught up in what came to be known as the religious wars. The seventh of these was raging at the time of his book’s publication. Three million people are believed to have perished, through violence, famine, or disease in the struggle between Catholics and the Huguenots (who were Calvinists), and atrocities were committed by both sides. However, just eight years before the essays became available, the St Bartholomew’s Massacre had shaken Paris and other French cities. For three days, anarchy reigned in the capital as Protestants were rounded up and butchered – men, women and children – and their bodies dumped in the Seine. Christopher Marlowe found the events so shocking he wrote a play. Even Ivan the Terrible deplored the violence. Philip II of Spain, on the other hand, ‘laughed, for almost the only time on record.’

Whenever he (Montaigne) makes explicit comparisons between the so-called ‘savages’ and the violence of his ‘civilised’ countrymen, the latter appear more barbaric One can easily imagine Montaigne’s reaction.

He was as humane temperamentally as he was humanist intellectually. Equally respected by the heads of the warring factions, King Henry III (Catholic) and Henry of Navarre (Protestant), he was unimpressed by the ‘passionate intensity’ around him, but the retiring philosopher was in a potentially compromising position. With Jewish grandparents on both sides and a mother who had converted to the Protestant cause, a desire for compromise must have come naturally to him, but there was more to this than a healthy instinct for self-preservation. In the essay Of Cannibals, he notes how ‘everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.’ Whenever he makes explicit comparisons between the so-called ‘savages’ and the violence of his ‘civilised’ countrymen, the latter appear more barbaric: ‘I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead; in tearing a body limb from limb in racks and torments, that is yet in perfect sense; in roasting it by degrees; in causing it to be bitten and worried by dogs and swine (as we have not only read, but lately seen, not amongst inveterate and mortal enemies, but among neighbours and fellow citizens, and, which is worse, under colour of piety and religion), than to roast and eat him after he is dead.’

He takes eating in a wider sense here, as a form of killing by increments. In a further aspersion on his own times, he wishes that the ‘savages’ in the New World had been discovered long ago, when people like Lycurgus and Plato were still around, since the happy simplicity of their lives far exceeded the Golden Age of the ancient poets and the best attempts of

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philosophers to imagine a perfect society.

The implication is that no one now living in Europe could have the intellect, or perhaps the decency, to see this perfection for what it is, let alone emulate it, so far had civilisation degenerated.

Of Cannibals is not a neutral ethnographic essay. It is a bitter satire on Montaigne’s supposedly Christian contemporaries who, despite a professed love of God, are nonetheless ready to treat each other so cruelly.

In a sign of the divisions that prevailed, the Frenchmen who wrote about the tribes they had encountered on the shores of Brazil came from opposite sides of France’s religious war.

André Thevet, whose book ‘The New Found World’ came out in 1572, was a Franciscan priest. Jean de Léry, who published his ‘History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil’ in 1578, was a Protestant Huguenot. The religious conflict had followed Léry across the Atlantic, forcing him to take refuge with the Tupinambá and thus perfectly illustrating Montaigne’s point about the relative barbarism of Europeans. Thevet may have been the first European to describe the peanut, but he also had personal experience of the Tupinambá tribe and spoke of the way they treated their captives before tucking into them: ‘On the final day before his or her execution, the prisoner is chained to a bed and is the

Of Cannibals is not a neutral ethnographic essay. It is a bitter satire on Montaigne’s supposedly Christian contemporaries who, despite a professed love of God, are nonetheless ready to treat each other so cruelly.

subject of a ceremony in which community members gather and sing of their death.

Finally, the condemned man or woman is brought to a public place, tied up, hacked to pieces, and consumed by the local populace.’

The same thing happens to any children these prisoners had sired in the meantime. Montaigne mentions the prisoner being despatched with swords, but, apparently, he preferred to pass over the issue of his offspring. Insufficiently Arcadian, perhaps, or else he was just more sceptical than his fellow Catholic.

In the midst of a vicious civil war, it is hardly surprising that the attitude of the natives to violence of this sort fascinates Montaigne. He clearly admires their valour. They are fearless in battle: ‘The obstinacy of their battles is wonderful, and they never end without great effusion of blood: for as to running away, they know not what it is. Every one for a trophy brings home the head of an enemy he has killed, which he fixes over the door of his house.’

If they are captured, however, it is entirely beneath them to entreat or beg for forgiveness.

They would far rather be killed and eaten than show any cowardice in the face of death. This

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St Bartholomew›s Day Massacre

valour of the Tupinambá relates, crucially, to their motives for making war: ‘If their neighbours pass over the mountains to assault them, and obtain a victory, all the victors gain by it is glory only, and the advantage of having proved themselves the better in valour and virtue: for they never meddle with the goods of the conquered, but presently return into their own country, where they have no want of anything necessary, nor of this greatest of all goods, to know happily how to enjoy their condition and to be content.’

The essay is very insistent on this, as if its writer knows the reader will scarcely be able to get their head around the idea:

Cannibal feast, as witnessed by Hans Staden, 1557

‘Their disputes are not for the conquest of new lands, for these they already possess are so fruitful by nature, as to supply them without labour or concern, with all things necessary, in such abundance that they have no need to enlarge their borders. And they are, moreover, so happy in this, that they only covet so much as their natural necessities require.’

This lack of any concept of gaining territory or booty by war, owing to the complete sufficiency of their existing resources, means there is a moral purity to their aggression.

It is based entirely on a desire for glory. In keeping with the polemical thrust of his essay, Montaigne insists on such ideal qualities.

They do a lot of dancing and singing, and not a great deal of labour. They are artless because they have no need of ingenuity. This is crucial to the argument, as Montaigne sees little value in European expertise: ‘Our utmost endeavours cannot arrive at so much as to imitate the nest of the least of birds, its contexture, beauty, and convenience: not so much as the web of a poor spider.’

His disdain for art is founded on a satirical contrast with ‘mother nature,’ and this leads to an upturning of the usual dichotomies, so that ‘…they are savages at the same rate that we say fruits are wild, which nature produces of herself… whereas, in truth, we ought rather to call those wild whose natures we have changed by our artifice and diverted from the common order.’

Thus, according to this reasoning, cultivation has created aberrant phenomena, and a countryside that has little of nature left in it. Human intervention has upset the order of nature. This is a radical rejection of civilisation in all its smugness. And then we get this – the passage that may well have caught Shakespeare’s eye and which still has the power to arrest us now. He is describing the life of the Tupinambá in negative terms here, according to what they do not have: ‘there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine;

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the very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard of’ This idealism is not only familiar from The Tempest. It smacks of a long tradition.

Voltaire’s utopia will also be set in the Americas, as will Samuel Johnson’s, but the one utopian writer who might be said to have beaten everybody to it was Thomas More.

In his book, which gave us the very word ‘utopia’, people live the simple life and gold is employed to fetter criminals, or even to make chamber pots, thus instilling a proper contempt for the material. In Candide, the citizens of El Dorado use precious jewels to pave their streets. The purpose of the ideal of a society in harmony with nature was to counter the moral decline of a civilisation where amassing great wealth had become the sole motivation. Even as the Europeans were pillaging the newly-discovered continents, their moralists were questioning the fundamentals of colonialism.

But to this day, the descendants of those first European visitors have not had their fill

of gold. Tens of thousands of ‘garimpeiros’ (artisanal gold miners) are threatening the lands of the Yanomani tribe whose territory straddles the borders of Brazil and Venezuela.

Gold mining is a filthy and destructive business.

Clearings are cut into forests, mining ponds are carved into the earth, and the mercury used in extraction is dumped in rivers, poisoning fish stocks and water supplies. Almost all this mining is illegal, but Bolsonaro, the new Brazilian president, has expressed far more support for this group than previous state leaders. It is to some extent a personal issue – Bolsonaro’s father was a part-time gold miner, and the president has said he himself panned for gold while serving in the army.

“Bolsonaro is a garimpeiro,” says Davi Kopenawa, shaman and leader of the Yanomami tribe. “It explains the way he thinks, always trying to explore more land.

He has a sickness in his head. He doesn’t think about others, or about the future.”

Kopenawa is arguably the most prominent

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Davi Kopenawa surrounded by children in Demini, Brazil. Photograph: Survival International

voice of the more than three hundred different indigenous groups in Brazil. He has been to the West and seen for himself some of what Montaigne was describing, hundreds of years before. Here, for instance, is the shaman’s verdict on New York: ‘Multitudes of people move very fast […]

They look at the ground all the time and never see the sky. Yet while the houses in the centre of the city are tall and beautiful, those on its edges are in ruins. The people there have no food and their clothes are dirty and torn.

They looked at me with sad eyes. These white men are greedy and do not take care of those among them who have nothing. How can they think they are so smart? They do not want to know anything about these needy people.

They reject them, and let them suffer alone.

They are happy to keep their distance and call them “the poor”.’

It is almost as hard to imagine Montaigne in modern New York. He would have had no difficulty empathising with the sentiments of a visiting forest-dweller. Apparently, there

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still lingers – in some remote places, peopled with ignorant idealists! – the assumption that property should be held in common. The French sceptic was one of the first, and one of the very few, people in the West who could hear the voice of a happier past, before his species was split in half and estranged from its fellow humans, not just over religious differences, but existentially, as if occupying two different planets: ‘…they have a way of speaking in their language to call men the half of one another [and they] observed that there were amongst us men full and crammed with all manner of commodities, whilst, in the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors, lean and half-starved with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange that these necessitous halves were able to suffer so great an inequality and injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throats, or set fire to their houses.’

There, in one long-dead cannibal’s words, is the rationale behind gated accommodation.

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How to Diffuse Egypt’s Population Time Bomb Lessons from Bangladesh

by Yasmine El-Geressi Egypt’s population reached 100 million on Tuesday as a counter installed atop the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS) ticked over into nine digits for the first time, highlighting the threat of overpopulation in a poverty-stricken country where many live in crowded megacities.

The North African country retains its position as the most populous Arab nation and Africa’s most populous country behind Ethiopia and Nigeria.

Already plagued with energy, water and wheat shortages, overcrowded schools and hospitals, as well as dwindling foreign currency reserves and high unemployment, a population growth rate of at 2.5 million people per year is a crisis of potentially epic proportions. At the current rate, Egypt’s population will increase by 70 million by 2050, adding pressure to an economy already reeling from the political and security turmoil since the 2011 uprising that toppled former president Hosni

Mubarak. The government sees the population boom as a threat to its economic reform plans.

Every year, 800,000 young Egyptians enter the labour market, where unemployment is officially 10 percent. To create enough jobs, this would require 7.5 percent growth in gross domestic product (GDP), compared with the government’s forecast of up to 5.9 percent for the current fiscal year.

While many countries are struggling with rising populations, in Egypt the pressures are compounded by the fact that 97 percent of its people live on just 8 percent of its territory, crowded along the Nile valley and Nile Delta, with smaller numbers along the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts. In Cairo, a megalopolis of nearly 20 million inhabitants, a population density is around 50,000 inhabitants per square kilometer, or nearly times that of London. President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi even regards the population crisis “a challenge as critical as that of terrorism.”

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An Egyptian family prepares a cabbage meal for lunch in the province of Fayoum.

(Reuters)

Last month, the government ceased to provide financial support to a family after their second child as part of the government’s first familyplanning campaign aiming to challenge traditions of large families in rural Egypt. The programme, which began in 2018, targets more than 1.1 million poor families with up to three children and comprises a poster campaign as well as growing a network of mobile and fixed family planning clinics across Egypt handing out contraceptives.

Posters covering the walls of Egypt’s metro show an Egyptian 50-pound note, worth about £2.20, torn into five. “Would you rather divide this into five, or into two?” is asks. Mothers are invited to seminars with preachers who say that Islam allows family planning, and doctors who answer questions. The aim is to reduce the fertility rate from 3.5 children per woman to 2.4 by 2030. Meeting that target would mean 8 million fewer births over

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Bangladesh is particularly interesting for Egypt because of a similar religious context and a history of the same societal and health services challenges. the next decade.

Decades ago, Egypt had a family-planning programme supported by the US. The fertility rate fell from 5.6 children per woman in 1976 to 3.0 in 2008 while the use of contraceptives went up from 18.8 percent to 60.3 percent. Large amounts of contraceptives were made available and ad-

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vertisements increased demand for birth control.

But because Egypt was relying on donor support, when that assistance went away, family planning was neglected. In the six years between Mubarak’s forced departure during the Arab Spring and alSissi’s initiative, family planning projects were not well funded, and the birthrate started rising.

By 2014, the fertility rate had gone back up to 3.5. The US is supporting family planning again, providing more than $19 million for the five-year project ending in 2022 and $4 million for a smaller private sector project ending in 2020. Those amounts are significantly lower than the $371 million the US spent on family planning in Egypt between 1976 and 2008.

LESSONS FROM BANGLADESH Bangladesh is particularly interesting for Egypt because of a similar religious context and a history of the same societal and health services challenges. A specter of doom was created around Bangladesh at its birth in 1971, when it earned the epithet of “basket case” from Henry Kissinger.

But the Muslim-majority country – home to over 160 million people - made remarkable strides in reducing its fertility rate over the past five decades. By halving its fertility rate from a high of 6.3 children per woman between 1971 and 2004,

Already plagued with energy, water and wheat shortages, overcrowded schools and hospitals, as well as dwindling foreign currency reserves and high unemployment, a population growth rate of at 2.5 million people per year is a crisis of potentially epic proportions.

Bangladesh holds lessons for both high fertility countries and for those who foretell a bleak future for those countries.

“Bangladesh has well-developed practices of pluralism, community engagement and multi-sectoral collaboration, which have helped make its Family Planning program and its Population Policy a success. The country has experienced a dramatic decline in fertility and mortality rates. The government has placed women at the center of the development agenda. It worked with local nongovernmental organizations that helped the country achieve success in family planning and address population challenges,” said World Bank Country Director Qimiao Fan. Since it became an independent nation in the early 70s, Bangladesh has been implementing family planning programs, in an attempt to keep a check on rapid population growth. With the help of foreign and domestic donors, the poor South Asian country adopted a program that involved reaching out to village women at the grassroots level. This included a door-step delivery of contraceptives to women who had traditionally been in seclusion.

Female health workers, specifically recruited and trained for the purpose, went house to house, educating women on the benefits of having a smaller

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View of the Old Cairo, its minarets and historical sites.

(Getty)

family and distributing contraceptives. Although social and economic improvements have played a major role in increasing demand for contraception, the provision of services and information has been shown to have had an independent effect on attitudes and behavior. As a result, the use of contraception in Bangladesh rose from a mere 8 percent in 1975 to over 61 percent in 2011, according to the World Bank. The control over childbearing also improved both women’s health and the health of their children.

Furthermore, improved basic healthcare services also reduced the child mortality rate. This decline has contributed to a drop in the fertility rate, as if people think some of their children will die, they want to have several to make sure that some survive. However, if they expect them to live, they are more inclined to invest in their education to maximise their potential in life.

For example, Bangladesh introduced a successful immunisation program kept children healthier and their mothers freer. A total sanitation drive had salutary impact on health, hygiene and privacy.

A drive against diarrhea was undertaken partly to control epidemics that followed extreme weather events like floods and cyclones.

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Decades ago, Egypt had a familyplanning programme supported by the US. The fertility rate fell from 5.6 children per woman in 1976 to 3.0 in 2008 while the use of contraceptives went up from 18.8 percent to 60.3 percent.

And an increase in girls’ education meant that younger mothers were better able to care for themselves and their children, compared to previous generations. Education gives women more decision-making power about how many children to bear – and girls who go to school tend to get married later, which statistics show means that they are likely to have less children.

Experts believe that Bangladesh’s media, particularly public broadcasters, also played an important role in raising public awareness of the benefits of having fewer children, by highlighting that it helps parents to take better care of their children as well as causes less of a financial burden.

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Collision Course: Idlib Tests Russia-Turkey Relations Recent Critical Escalations Threaten to Damage Delicate Relations Between Moscow and Ankara 22

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Turkish officials have long claimed that the rapport with Moscow protected their country’s interests in a troubled neighbourhood.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (R) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) during the welcoming ceremony prior to the G20 Summit›s Plenary Meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina, November, 2018 ,30.

(Getty)

by Yasmine El-Geressi The final stretch of Syria’s nine-year-old civil war in the northwestern province of Idlib is experiencing a deepening humanitarian crisis as government troops have been pushing to take control of two strategic roads linking the government-controlled Aleppo to Damascus and Latakia. As the Russia-backed Syrian regime battles to retake this last major enclave from the Syrian opposition, a mass exodus of 700,000 refugees have fled towards Turkey’s borders since December 1, according to the United Nations. Turkey, the main backer of the opposition in Syria, has desperately tried to convince Moscow to halt Syrian regime’s

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offensive, but to little avail. Ankara wants to push back against the Syrian offensive and prevent a new wave of Syrians that could force it to open its borders once again, which would be economically difficult and politically catastrophic, and if possible, protect Turkishbacked Sunni militias until a final settlement in Syria is reached. Over the past two weeks, the Turkish military has been mobilising in large numbers in northern Idlib and is now actively fighting the Syrian army, aiming to recapture key towns along the M4 and M5 highways that cut across the province. But the offensive took a dramatic turn when forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad killed eight Turkish military and civil personnel in air and artillery attacks.

The same day, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan paid a significant visit to Ukraine to sign a deal assisting the Ukrainian army with funding. In a clear rebuke to President Vladimir Putin, Erdogan raised an anti-Russian nationalist slogan there, “Glory to Ukraine,” referring to the country’s independence fight following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and denounced the Russian annexation of Crimea. These potentially critical escalations raised the possibility of open confrontation between Moscow and Ankara, threatening to damage the delicate relations between Moscow and Ankara.

Tensions escalated further on Wednesday.

In one of the strongest signs yet that Syria is placing relations between Moscow and Ankara under increasing strain, the Kremlin, the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian Defence Ministry all accused Turkey of bad faith. The Kremlin said Turkey had failed to deliver on a promise to neutralise militants in Idlib, something it called unacceptable. Ankara was supposed to eradicate the Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham

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(HTS). Instead, HTS made inroads into strategic areas near Syria’s main M4 and M5 highways.

The same day, the Russian Foreign Ministry reminded Ankara its forces were in Syria without the blessing of the Syrian government, and the Defence Ministry said Turkish troops were seriously aggravating the situation on the ground in Idlib. The Defence Ministry also flatly rejected an allegation made by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan who said Russian forces and Iran-backed militias were «constantly attacking the civilian people, carrying out massacres, spilling blood».

Despite supporting opposite sides in the conflicts in Syria, the two countries have up until now put their differences aside to collaborate for a political solution to the war. Frustrated with US cooperation with Syrian Kurds, who Turkey considers terrorists, Ankara stuck a deal with Russia and Iran in 2017, called the Astana process, to create a new order in Syria. Along with Sochi, these Syria-focused processes also helped reshape Turkish-Russian relations. Signed almost three years ago, they aimed to de-escalate the fighting in rebel-held northwestern province of Syria to prevent any assault from the regime forces in the region. Turkey set up observation posts to monitor them under a demilitarized zone. Turkey and Russia also struck a cease-fire have a shared interest in defying U.S. influence earlier in January for Syria. Both countries also in Syria.

Despite supporting opposite sides in the conflicts in Syria, the two countries have up until now put their differences aside to collaborate for a political solution to the war.

Edrogan and Putin are also said to have a close relationship, often referring to other another as “a dear friend” when they meet. Turkey depends on Russia to prevent an even larger wave of refugees from heading towards the Turkish border, to limit the role of Kurdish militias and their political affiliates in talks on Syria’s future, and to meet its reliance on imported gas. Turkish officials have long claimed that the rapport with Moscow protected their country’s interests in a troubled neighbourhood. Yusuf Erim, a foreignpolicy analyst for the state-owned broadcaster

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A Syrian walks on the rubble of a building following a regime air strike on Ariha town in Syria›s last major opposition bastion of Idlib on January ,15 2020. (Getty)

TRT World, said that it was important for Turkey to “diversify [its] relations with superpowers” in a shifting global order.

Ankara “really cannot afford to alienate Russia,” said Asli Aydintasbas, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations told the Financial Times. Ayintasbas predicted that the two countries’ ties would survive the latest tensions over Idlib. “Turkey is not a Russian vassal,” she added. “But it has become too beholden to Moscow to snap out of this relationship at the first crisis.”

That view was echoed last week by Erdogan

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“Turkey is not a Russian vassal, but it has become too beholden to Moscow to snap out of this relationship at the first crisis.” himself, who said that Turkey had “many serious strategic initiatives” with Russia and promised to “sit down and talk everything through, without anger”. Citing a Turkish proverb, he added: “Because he who stands up with anger will sit down with regret.”

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The Precarious Foundations of Indian Democracy Can India’s Constitution Stave Off a Rigid Turn?

by Madhav Khosla In the last two months, widespread protests over a controversial new citizenship law in India have raised the prospect of a constitutional crisis. Those protesting the law—which for the first time determines Indian citizenship on the basis of religion—see it as emblematic of growing authoritarianism and Hindu majoritarianism. They claim

that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government threatens the founding secular vision of India by bullying and marginalizing minority Muslims. At demonstrations, they brandish copies of the constitution.

India’s constitution, which turned 70 years old in January, promised that the state would treat all Indians as individuals with inalienable rights, not group them into communal categories. Though religious identity has played

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an important role in Indian politics since independence, the constitution’s universal guarantees have protected minority groups. This past week, the trustees of a Sufi shrine in Mumbai commemorated the 607th anniversary of the death of their revered saint by unveiling a plaque engraved with the preamble of the constitution.

It remains to be seen if the growing civil unrest can be channeled into a viable political challenge to the government, but the dispute has opened up a larger conversation about the origins and character of Indian democracy. The constitution that the protesters seek to defend grants universal suffrage to a people that had, for centuries, been seen as too poor, diverse, and fractious for self-rule. Its current travails are a reminder of the unique— and precarious—foundations on which Indian democracy rests.

India is, as the political theorist John Dunn recently put it, “the most surprising democracy there has ever been.”

The country has achieved self-government in the face of daunting poverty, sustained relative peace amid diversity, and managed the persistence of regular elections despite abuses of power. But the conditions of its birth make Indian democracy unlikely and unprecedented. The struggles and movements that brought democracy to India in the twentieth century weren’t echoes of the great revolutions of late-eighteenth-century Europe, as many scholars have assumed. Instead, the writing of India’s constitution represented a singular event, a moment when democracy had to create the conditions for its own existence.

NEW TRADITIONS A protester holds a placard featuring Indian independence icon Mahatma Gandhi at a demonstration against India›s new citizenship law and against an attack on the students and teachers at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus, in New Delhi on January 2020 ,9.

(Getty)

Few Westerners around the time of India’s independence in 1947 thought democracy was advisable or even possible for the country. “The general tradition in Asia,” British Prime Minister Clement Attlee wrote to his Indian counterpart, Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1949, “is in favor of monarchy.” Attlee’s sweeping generalization of Asian political culture was not an offhand note of condescension.

The belief that democracy was suited only to certain parts of the world—the countries of the advanced and “civilized” West—endured from the nineteenth century well into the twentieth century and even, in some quarters, into this one.

Many Europeans shared Attlee’s concern in one form or another. When the University of Cambridge scholar and lawyer Ivor Jennings traveled across South Asia after India and Pakistan won independence, he advised the makers of the new nations to limit the electoral franchise in the interest of maintaining political stability; instead of opening the vote to all, Jennings recommended a “narrow franchise, indirect elections, [and] tribal representation.”

In the eyes of Jennings and others, the inhabitants of India were not like the citizens of Western nation-states where democracy flourished. India was a poor and illiterate nation, torn apart by caste and religion and encumbered

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India’s constitution, which turned 70 years old in January, promised that the state would treat all Indians as individuals with inalienable rights, not group them into communal categories. by centuries of custom and tradition. In western European countries, democratic institutions and practices had evolved gradually over centuries as wealth and income rose, and the franchise was slowly extended to all. But in the postcolonial world, already deemed inhospitable to liberal self-government, independence and democracy arrived at once.

Nehru, India’s first prime minister and one of its founders, called the question of democracy’s suitability to the country “the Indian problem”—and his answer met colonial assumptions head-on. In Nehru’s view, the British had put the cart before the horse. Democratic citizens weren’t needed to produce democratic politics. Instead, democratic politics could produce democratic citizens.

Nehru believed that installing the right political structures would give rise to the practices of self-rule that sustain a democratic system. This rejection of the imperial vision of governance in India affirmed that one’s world could be made and remade through politics.

Nehru and other framers of India’s constitution took up the difficult task of creating a process through which Indians would become democratic constituents. Their vision had several defining features. The first was an explanation of the rules that could make collective political life possible. In a land with little shared understanding of democracy, Indians needed to learn a new language. A constitutional text could provide common meaning— laying out the definition of rights, for example, or setting the responsibilities of the state, it instructed the grammar of self-governance. The founding document, the world’s longest constitution with nearly 400 provisions, also cataloged the norms underlying democracy. Many scholars at the time noticed the constitution’s remarkable length and felt that it represented something different.

The German theorist Carl Schmitt, for instance, noted that the text was a far cry from “the type of constitution on whose foundation past European constitutional law and . . . the separation of powers were formed.” In the West, constitutions assumed the presence of ingrained norms and laid out a map for navigating them. In India, by contrast, the constitution had to create those norms from scratch.

India’s constitution couldn’t simply be a rulebook—it also

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had to be a textbook.

In addition to laying out the rules, India’s constitution enshrined the centrality of the state. For B. R. Ambedkar, a central figure in the drafting process, India’s villages had led to “the ruination of India.” They were “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness, and communalism.” Only a strong, centralized state could counter the negative effects of Indian social traditions and place all Indians in a new, equal relationship with one authority. Both Nehru and Ambedkar agreed that Indian society lacked the civic spirit that enabled democratic government elsewhere. Where they differed from British imperialists was in believing that this democratic deficit was only contingent; a new politics could usher in a new kind of people.

MAKING THE CITIZEN The final, crucial element of the constitutional architecture was its concept of the citizen. In the years leading up to the partition of British India and the end of colonial rule in 1947, several competing proposals emerged for how to imagine citizenship. Few centered on the individual. Both Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the eventual founder of Pakistan, and Hindu nationalists sought to mediate citizenship through membership in religious groups. Their emphasis on communal attachment was inherited, in large part, from a century of British colonial politics that imagined India as an amalgam of groups with permanent identities rather than a land peopled by individuals with agency. For decades leading up to partition, colonial authorities had experimented with a variety of constitutional schemes that assumed religious identity was the primary category of political belonging. From the Morley-Minto Reforms of

Mohandas Gandhi, Nehru, and Ambedkar shared a belief that Indians could make and remake their world— and the world that they wanted to create was one where individuals would be treated as free and equal.

1909 until the end of colonial rule in 1947, the British treated Hindus and Muslims differently, through arrangements ranging from separate electorates to reserved quotas to the principle of “weightage” (in which minority groups would receive representation in excess of their population). By contrast, Nehru and other secular nationalists minimized the importance of religious identity, arguing that economic concerns were the real drivers of social conflict.

Partition changed everything. The cleaving of British India into a Muslim Pakistan and a secular India not only forced the largest migration in human history (with around 15 million people displaced and over one million killed) but also drove home the failure of political arrangements centered around group identity. The division of territory had, after all, occurred after decades of trying to manage different communities through a variety of colonial administrative and legal frameworks. For India’s founders, the colonial model of representation had made certain religious differences politically salient—it had demonstrated how an emphasis on communal representation could create its own grisly reality.

Having witnessed the catastrophe of identity-based politics, the makers of India’s constitution sought a model of representation centered on the individual that could both

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Indian statesmen Mahatma Gandhi (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1948 - 1869) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1964 - 1869) (left), known as Pandit Nehru, in conversation at the All-India Congress committee meeting at Bombay. (Getty)

billion people have assumed an extraconstitutional form— through armed insurgency, for example. By and large, every major political conflict in modern India has taken on a constitutional character, waged within the bounds of the system erected by the constitution’s framers.

Whether this will remain true in the future is an open question. However influential, the constitution has not convinced all Indians; Hindu nationalists still aspire for a model of citizenship and belonging defined by religious identity. The erosion of democratic and constitutional norms under Modi’s government—from the curbing of freedoms in Kashmir to the growing silence of the nation’s Supreme Court, which has refused to hear even habeas corpus petitions, to the ongoing dispute over the citizenship law—may well result in fewer and fewer adherents to the constitutional project.

THE PROMISE OF POLITICS

ensure freedom and build a sustainable democratic political environment. Retaining group-based modes of citizenship, they believed, would condemn Indians to medieval forms of association and bondage. The constitution thus rejected the colonial model of citizenship, emphasizing the importance of the individual vote. It did away with separate electorates, weighted representation, and reserved quotas on the basis of religion. In doing so, it promised to allow Indians to exercise agency and perform deliberation.

It would make them modern in the sense that they could construct their political reality through free and conscious decisions. By subjecting Indians to a new world of rules, by locating them under a single authority, and by placing them in a framework where they encountered one another as individuals, the constitution would convert Indians from subjects into citizens.

For much of the past seven decades, Indian constitutionalism has succeeded. Barring a few exceptions—most famously, the -18month period between 1975 and 1977 known as “the Emergency,” when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi curbed civil liberties—India’s political elite and its people have remained committed to the principles of the constitutional text. The most revealing feature of India’s success has been the fact that few social conflicts in this country of over one

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As India’s democratic order faces numerous pressures, its founding moment is a reminder of what politics can achieve. In India today, there are real fears over changes to the country’s secular character, the collapse of public institutions, the elimination of checks and balances, and the emergence of unbound state authority. Nationwide protests since December suggest that the country is reckoning with challenges to its ideals of self-rule. This process will require recovering the sense of political possibility that India’s founders envisioned. Mohandas Gandhi, Nehru, and Ambedkar shared a belief that Indians could make and remake their world—and the world that they wanted to create was one where individuals would be treated as free and equal. For them, it was important to guard against not only authoritarianism but also cynicism.

The promise that modern India can be constructed and reconstructed is at once gratifying and terrifying. It led some such as Nehru—who cemented Indian democracy during its delicate early years—to believe that selfgovernment needed careful and constant tending, that it could go just as it had come. The making of the Indian republic was driven by an understanding that, for better or worse, one’s ideological vision can give rise to its own reality. Today’s protesters—the thousands who have assembled in streets and parks across India—understand that. They recognize the radicalism and substantive vision of India’s founders. For those demonstrating against the government, the constitution is a reminder both of the meaning of equality and freedom and of the possibility and dangers of political change. India was fashioned 70 years ago in a moment of startling originality, but it can be remade in ways that depart perilously from the original vision of its founders.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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When It Comes to Markets, Europe Is No Fading Power The EU Sets the Standards for the Rest of the World

by Anu Bradford

is fading”; lament “the coming erosion of the European Union”; and explain “why Europe no That Europe’s best days are over has become a longer matters.” common refrain. Journalists, analysts, and even world leaders observe that “the Continent’s grand Such pessimism can hardly come as a surprise. unity project is failing, and its global influence Crises loom well beyond the European horizon.

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China has arisen as a major economic power.

Russia is asserting its will across the globe.

Citizens of democratic countries have responded to the lure of economic populism. And with the United States in retreat from multilateralism, and the United Kingdom exiting the EU, even the union’s most ardent supporters have grown understandably convinced of the inevitability of its decline.

And yet an important dimension of the EU’s power remains unaffected by any of these trends, and that is the EU’s capacity to set high domestic standards, remaking global regulations in the process. EU regulations influence which products are built and how business is conducted, not just in Europe but everywhere in the world. Because it plays this role, the EU can transform global markets in multiple sectors—something it has done in setting the standards for the protection of privacy, for example. So long as the EU commands this essential regulatory authority, it will remain a major force in the global economy.

THE BRUSSELS EFFECT

An Avaaz activist attends an anti-Facebook demonstration with cardboard cutouts of Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, on which is written «Fix Fakebook», in front of the Berlaymont, the EU Commission headquarter on May 2018 ,22 in Brussels, Belgium. (Getty)

Europe’s regulatory power reaches across countries and industries. EU regulations determine the default privacy settings on the iPhone. They stipulate how timber is harvested in Indonesia, how honey is produced in Brazil, and what pesticides cocoa farmers use in Cameroon.

They decide what equipment is installed in dairy factories in China and how much privacy is afforded to Internet users in Latin America.

These are but a few examples of the EU’s power unilaterally to regulate global markets, which is known as the “Brussels Effect.”

Rather than divide their services or forgo the EU market entirely, several U.S. companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, Uber, and Airbnb, have amended their global privacy practices to fit the EU’s standards. benefits of market access outweigh the cost of adjusting to the EU’s stringent standards.

But market size alone does not explain Europe’s ability to project its regulatory preferences beyond its borders. The EU has also built an extensive institutional architecture and harnessed the political will to enforce its regulations.

Brussels has a far-reaching sanctioning authority and the ability to bar products or services from the EU market. The prospect of such exclusion effectively deters violations and induces compliance with EU regulations.

As a result of the Brussels Effect, the EU does not need to impose its standards coercively on anyone—market forces alone are often sufficient to convert the EU standard into the global standard as companies voluntarily extend the EU rule to govern their worldwide operations.

DATA DEMANDS

Europe has exerted its regulatory power to particular effect with regard to data privacy.

In 2016, the EU enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which limits the quantity of personal data that can be collected The Brussels Effect suggests that the bigger and and the purposes for which that data may be more affluent the consumer market, the more used; it also requires that any entity—private likely that exporting companies will comply with or governmental—that collects and processes its standards. Europe’s combination of size and such data must ensure its integrity, security, affluence makes its consumer market one that and accuracy. The GDPR stipulates a “right to few companies would choose to forgo. With a be forgotten,” by which people retain the right population of 516 million and GDP per capita to ask for certain personal data to be erased. of 40,900$, the EU has a larger market than the The law’s “privacy by design” provision United States and a more affluent one than China. requires manufacturers to design their products It is also the world’s second-largest importer and services with GDPR obligations in mind. of goods. As a result, for many companies, the Companies that fail to comply with the GDPR

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face fines of up to 20 million euros or up to four percent of the company’s total worldwide revenue from the preceding financial year.

Adopting the GDPR was a contentious process.

The United States government and leading U.S. companies—including Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, and NBCUniversal—opposed the regulation on the grounds that it would hinder national security cooperation and kill innovation and research.

The intensity of U.S. criticism was consistent with a profound divergence of views between the EU and the United States over the ability of markets to self-govern and the desirability of government intervention. U.S. data privacy laws are considerably weaker than those in the EU, and they are mostly restricted to the public sector, health care, and banking. The private sector in the United States is largely left to devise and enforce its own data privacy restrictions.

The politics underlying the international privacy debates have recently shifted in the EU’s favor, thanks in part to the revelation that a British political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, acquired private data obtained from Facebook users. These data were used in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the 2016 Brexit referendum. But the ultimate determinant of the

The Brussels Effect suggests that the bigger and more affluent the consumer market, the more likely that exporting companies will comply with its standards. Europe’s combination of size and affluence makes its consumer market one that few companies would choose to forgo.

GDPR’s fate will not be politics so much as the Brussels Effect.

The EU is an important market for many datadriven businesses, including Facebook and Google. Facebook has more than 250 million users in Europe, and they produce 25 percent of Facebook’s global revenue. Google’s share of the search market is more than 90 percent in most EU member states, which exceeds its 67 to 75 percent market share in the United States. Abandoning the EU market is not even remotely a commercially viable option for them.

These digital companies will be hard-pressed to circumvent the GDPR, because the regulation protects European data regardless of where the data are processed.

Companies may wish to divide products and services between markets in an attempt to circumvent the Brussels Effect. Instead of adhering to a uniform standard in their global conduct, corporations could customize their practices to suit different regulatory markets.

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Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg (L) is welcome by the President of the European Parliament Antonio Tajani (R) prior to their meeting on May 2018 ,22 in Brussels, Belgium.

(Getty)

reached its last frontier.

FEAR NO FALTERING EUROPE In a world of growing disenchantment with international cooperation, the Brussels Effect has produced impressive compliance, if not consensus, on critical cross-border matters such as data privacy. But the headwinds are strong.

A rising China, backlash to globalization, and a decline in international cooperation are just a few of the forces that countervail Europe’s regulatory standard setting.

But doing so would be difficult and costly, making this tactic highly unlikely. Many digital companies store their data in overseas servers and must move them across borders. Since privacy regulations can differ across jurisdictions, and devising multiple compliance regimes is costly, business logic compels these digital companies to streamline: they apply the most stringent standards across the board so as to retain the ability to conduct business everywhere.

Nonetheless, there is reason to think that the Brussels Effect will prevail. Though China may soon possess the largest consumer market, its projected income per capita in 2050 will be 17,372$, far below that of EU member states.

Less wealthy consumers have a lower appetite for regulations that might compromise growth and economic development. And since importers set standards by regulating market access and China’s economy relies primarily on exports, a “Beijing Effect” is unlikely to replace the Brussels Effect anytime soon.

The fear of shrinking multilateralism is not a cause for alarm either. Countries may retreat from security and trade agreements or even leave the EU. But these antiglobalist stances will not undermine the global regulations that the EU produces. Take Brexit, for example: roughly half of British exports are destined for the EU, meaning that the United Kingdom will continue to need access to the EU’s large consumer market long after Brexit. While British companies could, in principle, adopt one set of standards for Europe and multiple other sets of standards for the rest of the world post-Brexit, the Brussels Effect makes this unlikely. The Brussels Effect therefore mitigates the decline of globalization and, if anything, fills the void left by waning multilateralism. The Brussels Effect will likely persist, extending the EU’s regulatory hegemony into the foreseeable future, thereby challenging the notion of Europe’s inevitable wholesale decline.

Rather than divide their services or forgo the EU market entirely, several U.S. companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, Uber, and Airbnb, have amended their global privacy practices to fit the EU’s standards. And as corporations have bowed to the Brussels Effect, governments have followed suit. To date, nearly 120 countries have adopted privacy laws, most of them resembling the EU data protection regime. The United States may not be able to hold out in perpetuity. If Washington concedes that the time has come for a robust federal data protection law, the Brussels Effect will have This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.

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Dr. Simon Ourian: Meet the Kardashian’s Cosmetic Dermatologist Who Became Instagram’s King of Beauty The Man Behind Some of the Most Famous Faces in the World Speaks to Majalla about the “Kardashian-Jenner Effect”, Arab Beauty Ideals and What Self-Love Really Mans

by Yasmine El-Geressi What do Kim Kardashian-West, Kylie Jenner, Lady Gaga, Salma Hayek, Victoria’s Secret models and Brad Pitt all have in common? Well, they all get their beauty treatments done by none other than Dr Simon Ourian. A sculptor by vocation, the Beverly-Hills based dermatologist is almost as famous as his fiercely loyal celebrity clients. With over 3.5 million followers on Instagram, he is the most followed cosmetic doctor on social media and is sought out by patients throughout the US and the world. From his Epione Beverly Hills clinic, Dr Ourian has been shaping the world of cosmetic surgery for over two decades through his pioneering procedures, products and philosophy regarding beauty. Despite his hectic schedule and long waiting list that includes the who›s who of the world, Dr Ourian kindly made the time for this special interview.

Q. What was your inspiration to get into this career and how would you describe your overall philosophy on beauty and cosmetic surgery?

My background was in art, aesthetics, and sculpting, so I had a very keen appreciation for beauty before I got into this field. Over the years I have fine-tuned my skills resting on my background and foundation of human anatomy, classic

science, and art of beauty. Beauty is universal and the universal language of beauty is something I love and appreciate.

Q. You have become the biggest cosmetic dermatologist on Instagram. To what do you attribute your success?

I have been doing this for a long time and I love what I do.

I think if you absolutely love what you do it comes through and everyone can see that. All my life I have been living and breathing about beauty. I started this when there were not too many doctors doing this in the world and I stayed true to my beliefs of enhancing the beauty of every woman in my chair and I want to make sure they are happier when they leave my office than when they arrived. I have been lucky that a lot of my clients are very well-known celebrities throughout the world and people have seen their changes on Instagram and they want to know who has helped them achieve these results.

Q. The Kardashians-Jenners, who you have worked very closely with over many years, have had an enormous cultural impact in the last decade and have redefined beauty standards.

What in your view is the ‘Kardashian-Jenner effect’?

I think it has been a very positive affect on beauty in many ways. It has given people who did not think they had an option

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Dr Simon Ourian with Kim Kardashian-West (Instagram)

option the idea that they do. A lot of women believe that you are either born beautiful or you have to accept what you have. Because beauty is such a powerful tool the secrets of our industry were very jealously guarded. The Kardashians and Jenner’s were amongst the first ones to demystify this and openly share their heavily guarded secrets with people.

This has allowed people to see and feel comfortable with the treatments and give people the knowledge that these treatments do exist.

Q. What are the most popular procedures among your celebrity clients?

Most people that come to my practice are interested in facial and body contouring, and skin perfecting. They want these treatments because they have seen that I can achieve very natural results without looking like they had work done, which takes a lot of skill, training, and experience. After 20 years I have developed these particular techniques and very unique technologies that help us achieve these results very easily for my patients. There are still many other reasons people come here. We have a very large center and we take care of all types of procedures with the latest and greatest technologies. If something can be done and the results can be achieved in a natural, effective and safe way, we have a way to have it done at Epione.

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A lot of women believe that you are either born beautiful or you have to accept what you have. The Kardashians and Jenner’s were amongst the first ones to demystify this and openly share their heavily guarded secrets with people.

Q. Which country is your largest client source in the Middle East Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the top two locations in the Middle East where procedures are in the greatest demand, and closely ranking as second would be Qatar.

Q. How would you describe your Arab clients?

They are informed, sophisticated, and knowledgeable.

They are very specific about what they want to have done.

They want their results to be subtle- but they only want the best and that is what they travel so far for. My clients travel from all over the world sometimes. 20 plus hours, to get here so they want to make sure their results are the absolute best.

Q. What and who represents the ideal Arab beauty today and which celebrity face is most referenced amongst your Arab patients?

Kim Kardashian, Haifa Wehbe, and Maya Diab are definitely the most referenced celebrities among my Arab patients.

Q. When a patient comes in from a certain ethnic background,

My Arab clients are informed, sophisticated, and knowledgeable. They are very specific about what they want to have done. They want their results to be subtle- but they only want the best and that is what they travel so far for

can you predict what they’re going to be looking for?

Not really, since beauty is very specific and each of us look at beauty in a certain way. I always want to keep an open mind about what people want to have done so I do not form any preconceived notions. I want my patients to tell me exactly what they want to have done and what bothers them/what they want to improve upon. I will make some recommendations but I want to make sure I gave them what they came here for.

Q. Are we moving towards globalization of beauty standards and homogenization of what is considered “beautiful”, and are ethnic features being watered down in the process?

I do not think so. We do not have the techniques or tools to achieve a certain look for everyone even if it was designed.

What has been considered to be beautiful for many centuries has not changed. Having clear skin, high cheekbones, nice jawline, beautiful lips, big eyes, etc. these are nothing new.

What is different, is that now we can achieve these things by the new technologies and tools that we have. And because of that, people would like to have these features as much as possible. But even if I tried to make two people look the same, I will never be able to, it is just not possible we all have such different features that no two people are going to look the same. My goal is not to homogenize beauty but to make a person look their absolute best, and look like themselves.

Q. Millennials and Gen Zers, or what’s largely been dubbed the “selfie generation” and are often described as narcissistic.

Have you noticed a change in the psychological mind-set of

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Dr Simon Ourian

Dr Simon Ourian

patients over the years? Do you think social media does more harm than good when it comes to self-love?

No, I think being alive means that you want to take care of yourself. If anything, there has been a very severe shortage of self-love amongst a lot of woman growing up. They are encouraged to sacrifice a lot and give up a lot. It is nice to see in this new generation that taking care of yourself and being kind to yourself is a priority. I believe that if you love yourself you become more of a loving person and in return you have more love to give to other people. So, taking care of yourself and being more appreciative of what you have is nothing but positive. Of course, everything can be taken to extremes but I do not see that in my patients. I believe that when they come to see me it is one of their first steps they are taking for self-love. It allows you to love the people around you and yourself.

Q. Body positivity is on the rise and has expanded societal definitions of beautiful, but it seems that little has really changed in our self-perception as the demand for surgical enhancement is continuing to explode around the world.

Do you believe that both these Instagram-born responses to societal messages and standards regarding one’s appearance can coexist?

Yes, body positivity means that appreciate what you have but enhancement means that you improve upon it. They are not mutually exclusive. For example, you can appreciate a nice car you have, and take care of it every day, that doesn’t mean you hate your car, but it means you love it even more. If you

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There has been a very severe shortage of self-love amongst a lot of woman growing up. It is nice to see in this new generation that taking care of yourself and being kind to yourself is a priority appreciate your body the way it is and you want to maintain it in a better way it shows that you have even more love for your body and your own appearance. Vanity is the essence of living. If you wake up every morning and put your best face forward, work your hardest it will allow you to move forward and up in life. To me that is the essence of life, that you keep improving and moving forward.

Q. Tell us the craziest request you’ve ever had from a client?

The craziest request I’ve had from a client is when the client requests to look exactly like somebody else. Luckily this only happens about 2-1 times a year. Usually, they request to look like a celebrity. I think this is the craziest request because it is not possible. I feel that these patients are not emotionally ready to make a choice on a cosmetic enhancement so I politely refuse to do any treatment for them.

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1787- February- 14/02/2020

Zhou Qunfei: The Entrepreneur Who’s Behind the Touch Screen Technology We Use Everyday

www.majalla.com

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Oscar Just ‘Discovered’ South Korea, Which has Cranked Out Great Movies for Years How the Korean Film Industry is Finally Getting the Recognition It Deserves

by Chris Hewitt Judging from the South Korean movies that make it to these shores, almost everyone in that country is a murderer.

South Korean excellence for the Oscars to finally take notice, with “Parasite” the first Korean nominee for the international film and best picture prizes. (Those awards will be handed out Sunday night on ABC.)

It probably says more about Americans’ taste than it does about South Korean movies because Korea does make other genres, but we hardly ever see them. (Rom-com “My Sassy Girl” is a rare nongrisly film that made it to the United States.)

Korea’s first big splash in America was Park Chanwook’s violent trilogy, “Oldboy,” “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and “Lady Vengeance,” and many others have followed that blood-spattered suit.

After Park opened up the U.S. for other offerings from his country — including the murder-filled, widely acclaimed, Oscar-nominated “Parasite” — a wave of great filmmakers arrived here.

That means a lot of great movies have failed to get Academy Awards attention. Maybe they’ve flown under your radar, too.

Astonishingly, if we date the start of the wave to 2003’s “Oldboy,” it took 17 years of consistent

“The Age of Shadows” (2016) — The two Kim Jee-woon movies on this list could not be more

So far, Park is the only Korean to make the transition from foreign to U.S. movies, directing Nicole Kidman in “Stoker” and Florence Pugh in the “Little Drummer Girl” miniseries. But judging from the acclaim for “Parasite,” Bong is on deck.

While we wait to see what a bunch of interesting Korean directors will do next, here are 10 great South Korean movies you may want to stream or rent:

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Jo Yeo-jeong in a scene from Bong Joon-ho›s provocative «Parasite.» (TNS)

different. This one is a nervy, remake (ish) of the classic “Army of Shadows,” a tale of the French Resistance during World War II, when it became impossible to tell the good guys from the bad (or if either makes sense in an era of complicated morality). Those themes recur in “Age,” a glamorous pulse-pounder about members of the Korean resistance scheming against their Japanese occupiers in the 1920s. “Age” proceeds from one exciting scene to the next, but the best is a raceagainst-time sequence set on a train loaded with explosives. Song Kang-ho, the lead in “Parasite,” stars in this movie, as well as a couple others on this list.

“Alone” (2015) — This one has the most obvious debt to director Alfred Hitchcock, specifically his classic “Rear Window”: Alone in his apartment

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in a crowded city, a man looks out his window and witnesses a murder. But “Rear Window” is nowhere near as bananas as “Alone,” in which the hero tries to report the crime and gets bashed in the head with a hammer for his troubles, beginning an increasingly harrowing series of adventures.

“Burning” (2018) — When a handsome drifter confesses to a new friend that he loves burning down greenhouses, is he really talking about greenhouses? Or is it code for something else, something that may have to do with the disappearance of a mutual friend? Lee Changdong’s creepy drama forces us to question the things we think we understand, whether it’s in scenes of a man agreeing to feed a cat he never lays eyes on or a budding actor confiding that the secret to pantomiming the eating of a tangerine is

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not to pretend it exists but to forget that it doesn’t.

“The Chaser” (2008) — Warner Bros. once planned to remake this pulse-pounding and oddly funny melodrama but who needs an English-language version when the original is so accomplished? It’s a bit like “Silence of the Lambs” in that it comes down to a battle of wits between a cop and a serial killer who seems to take delight in stringing along the cop. Most of the time, it’s hard to tell who’s chasing whom in Na Hong-jin’s gruesome movie, which gets bloodier and bloodier as its detectives follow one false lead after another.

“I Saw the Devil” (2010) — Of all the catand-mouse games on this list, this is the catand-mousiest: A detective keeps capturing and releasing a killer, just to mess with him. The elegant filmmaking of murder auteur Brian De Palma (“Carrie”) is all over Kim Jee-woon’s stylized movie, which is suspenseful, grisly and oddly beautiful. Even the beautiful, mournful score by Mowg recalls Pino Donaggio’s work for De Palma.

“The Handmaiden” (2016) — Park took Sarah Waters’ bestseller “Fingersmith,” about one

Astonishingly, if we date the start of the wave to 2003’s “Oldboy,” it took 17 years of consistent South Korean excellence for the Oscars to finally take notice, with “Parasite” the first Korean nominee for the international film and best picture prizes.

Englishwoman educating another in the art of picking pockets, shifted the action to Korea under Japanese occupation and made it way, way more perverted. When a pickpocket is hired to be a maid to a lady she pretends to worship, the women’s psychosexual battle of wits plays out in a setting that is both erotic and gasp-inducingly pretty.

“Memories of Murder” (2003) — One of the earliest in the recent wave of South Korean movies is also my favorite Bong movie — and, yes, I’ve seen “Parasite.” Surprise! It’s about a serial killer.

The maniac, who preys on young women in a rural area, eludes an in-over-his-head cop (Song Kang-ho again) who keeps finding new people to wrongly suspect. Sad and suspenseful, “Memories of Murder” is a puzzle that’s also about the difficulty of ever getting at the truth.

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Han Jin-won accepts the «Outstanding Original Screenplay» award for Parasite onstage during the 2020 Writers Guild Awards West Coast Ceremony at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on February ,01 2020 in Beverly Hills, California. (Getty)

“Oasis” (2002) — I’m only allowing myself two Lee Chang-dong movies on this list, but his “Poetry” and “Secret Sunshine” (the latter starring the ubiquitous Song Kang-ho) are almost as good as this devastating romance, which climaxes with a shivery scene in which a woman with cerebral palsy imagines herself into a world where her disease doesn’t confine her.

for years. After he finally escapes, he has some questions about why he was imprisoned and who he needs to slaughter in revenge.

“Train to Busan” (2016) — Trains figure in almost as many of the Korean movies that make their way to the U.S. as do serial killers (think of, for instance, Bong’s “Snowpiercer,” entirely set on a car in which the have-nots battle the haves).

This one’s a thrill-a-minute movie in which the “Oldboy” (2003) — Maybe you’ve seen Spike zombie apocalypse happens just as an absentee Lee’s not-terrible remake starring Josh Brolin? father is escorting his daughter home. “Busan” is Or maybe you’ve heard the original is a thriller endlessly inventive and full of macabre humor, in which a guy eats a live octopus in front of our but it’s also an emotionally satisfying drama eyes? This claustrophobic masterpiece, which about a man doing everything he can to keep his won the Grand Prix prize at the Cannes Film kid safe.

Festival, features a guy waking to find himself locked in a tiny room, where he’s held prisoner Originally published in Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

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Majalla Goes on an Exclusive Tour of the Grand Egyptian Museum The Museum Will Open in Late 2020 and Will Display All of Tutankhamun’s Treasures

by Ahmed Salem * The museum will display no less than 50 thousand antiquities by the time of its grand opening. * The museum will feature a seven-thousand-meter long section which, for the first time in history, will

showcase all of King Tutankhamun’s treasures. *The Archeology Restoration Center in the Grand Egyptian Museum has restored 46 thousand artifacts.

In a few short months, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism

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will have put the final touches to the Grand Egyptian Museum which is slated to be open to the public by the final quarter of 2020. The museum, which the ministry says is at 95 percent completion, will display no less than 50 thousand antiquities by the time of its grand opening. The museum will feature a seven-thousand-meter long chamber which, for the first time in history, will showcase all of King Tutankhamun’s treasures.

The museum’s opening ceremony is set to be one of the biggest events in the Middle East, the fact that it will be the world’s largest museum, both in terms of size and number of items, means that the opening ceremony might even prove to be one of biggest events in the world. As the grand scale of the museum reflects the grandiosity of Egyptian culture, the Egyptian Prime Minister wanted the opening ceremony to replicate such magnificence.

As such, the opening ceremony will be 12 days long and there are studies currently being conducted on which companies should participate in the event, and which ones would yield the highest returns to

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The General Director also said that many of the pieces on display at the Egyptian Museum in the Downtown Cairo area of Tahrir Square, will be transported to the Grand Museum. the event. Furthermore, a myriad of international institutions is set to sponsor the event.

The main entrance will feature a square where the world’s first hanging obelisk will be displayed. This hanging obelisk is not an ancient artifact, but rather a modern art piece that replicates ancient Egyptian artwork and architecture. According to Dr. El Tayeb Abbas, the General Director of Archeology at the Grand Egyptian Museum, this marks the first time that Egyptian artists and sculptors attempted

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to accurately imitate the intricate art styles of the ancient Egyptians. Dr. Abbas also confirmed that the process of transporting artifacts to the museum from various sites and other museums is still ongoing in order to accelerate the completion of the exhibitions.

have already made the Grand Museum their new home. Additionally, the museum will display Ramses II’s statue which stands at 11 meters tall and is 3200 years old.

Dr. Abbas was optimistic that the Egyptian tourism industry would surge this year, as an estimated 15 The General Director also said that many of the million tourists are expected to visit this year. The pieces on display at the Egyptian Museum in the last time Egypt saw such numbers was in 2010, the Downtown Cairo area of Tahrir Square, will be year preceding the Arab Spring which destabilized transported to the Grand Museum and, as a matter many countries and industries in the region. Such of fact, 50,000 ancient pieces from Tahrir Square great news comes as many cultural institutes around the world named Cairo as one of the top ten cities to visit this year. Factors such as the opening of the Grand Museum and plans to start building the Sphinx Airport near the Giza Pyramids have made Egypt such a hot tourist destination.

Egyptian archeologist Zahi Hawass said that the completion of the Grand Egyptian Museum was an extraordinary accomplishment and that it would serve as President Abdel Fatah El Sisi’s gift to the world.

Furthermore, two months from now all sections of the museum will start being showcased, according to Dr. Abbas. Even the major sections, such as the chamber dedicated to Tutankhamun’s treasures will be part of the showcase. To put into perspective how massive the King Tut section is, Dr. Abbas said that 105 vitrines will be used to store and display the Golden Pharaoh’s treasures.

Egyptian archeologist Zahi Hawass said that the

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completion of the Grand Egyptian Museum was an extraordinary accomplishment and that it would serve as President Abdel Fatah El Sisi’s gift to the world. At his side was Dr. Eissa Zidan, the Director-General of Executive Affairs for Restoration and Transportation of Antiquities of the Grand Egyptian Museum, who said that the Archeology Restoration Center in the Grand Egyptian Museum has restored 46 thousand artifacts. Additionally, 50 thousand pieces of King Tut’s treasures have arrived at the Archeology Restoration Center as restoration work is done on a weekly basis as to keep up with the established restoration timetable. This also ensures that the pieces will be on display during the preliminary showcase.

The museum’s exterior will have slabs that will have names of the Pharaohs written on them, resembling the cartouches that ancient Egyptians used to display the names of their kings. The cartouches will be hung at the main entrance of the museum and will display the names of the twenty-five dynasties that ruled over Egypt during the Old Kingdom. The family members making up the fourth dynasty will also be included as there will be cartouches for Khufu, Khafre Menkaure

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The museum’s exterior will have slabs that will have names of the Pharaohs written on them, resembling the cartouches that ancient Egyptians used to display the names of their kings. and Snefru.

There will also be cartouches bearing the names of the kings that ruled during the 12th dynasty of the Middle Kingdom, as such there will be cartouches for King Senusret, and King Amenemhat. The kings of the New Kingdom will also be commemorated in the museum’s interior, which will have cartouches for King Ahmose, King Amenhotep II, King Akhenaton, King Tutankhamen, and King Rameses II. As a result, these cartouches would turn the museum into a hall of fame for the Pharaohs who reigned over Egypt during its rich ancient history.

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Zhou Qunfei: The Entrepreneur Who’s Behind the Touch Screen Technology We Use Everyday

by Majalla-London Early Struggles in the Chinese Countryside Zhou Qunfei was born in 1970 in Xiangxiang a city situated in the largely rural province of Hunan.

She was born to a poor working-class family.

Tragedy seemed to follow the family; her father who was a factory worker and the household’s main provider lost a finger in an industrial accident. He, nevertheless, still made ends meet by taking on a number of odd jobs such as repairing bicycles and weaving baskets. Her mother would soon die when she was just 5 years old, and her father had started to slowly lose his vision. All those tribulations meant that the young Zhou would have to start pulling her own weight to help her struggling family. As such, she would take on a job rearing pigs and ducks for a small wage.

The School Pupil turned Glass Artisan Eventually, she would become the only member of her family to attend secondary school, and she showed promise of becoming a bright student.

However, her circumstances forced her to quit school and move to her uncle’s house in Shenzhen in the more industrial province of Guangdong.

To make up for her lack of a diploma, she would work for companies close to Shenzhen University where she took a number of different courses, eventually became qualified in accounting and computer operations. At the age of 22, she would work a small company that made watch parts, making an equivalent of just one dollar a day. After a few short months, she wasn’t satisfied with her working conditions and gave her management a letter of resignation. Having proved herself as a hard worker and valuable asset to the company, upper management decided to give Zhou a promotion. Her work experience and independent course work made her into a highly qualified glass lens maker.

Opportunity Knocks the Glass Ceiling for Qunfei Eventually, the company she worked for went under and she suddenly found herself out of a job.

Rather than going on a job hunt, Zhou decided to take the entrepreneurial route and start a business venture. This was a risky decision since she would need ample funding (around 3,000 dollars) to jumpstart her business. Furthermore, as startup culture in China is a male dominated field, the odds were stacked against her. But, her family believed in her, and with their encouragement and financial cooperation, she founded her own watch lens business in 1993. The company had modest familial beginnings, as her brother, sister, their spouses, and two of her cousins were her first business partners as they turned their small -3bedroom flat into their workstation.

Quality that’s Affordable Zhou had a simple vision for her business, she wanted to make high-quality watch lenses at affordable prices. To ensure this quality, she took upon herself to oversee all the operations of the company, from repairs to creating improved designs of factory machinery. The quality of her company’s products caught the eye of TCL Corporation a large Chinese electronics corporation which, in 2001, contracted her company to make glass screens for their mobile phones.

important turning point not just in her own life, but in the mobile industry as a whole. Soon after her work on the Motorola Razr, she foresaw another transition in the mobile market: touch screens. As such, she started another company named Lens Technology to fulfill this growing demand. While touchscreens on phones were already becoming more commonplace in the early 2000s, most phones that sported this new technology had resistive touch screens, which needed pressure to function. This was a reason why many touch screen phones at the time came with a stylus, as the blunt end of this simple tool was effective in registering commands in such pressure-sensitive screens. However, in 2007, Apple introduced the first-ever iPhone to the public, a phone that popularized the capacitive touch screen in the mobile industry. Unlike, resistive screens, these glass capacitive screens were not pressuresensitive and would respond easily to the simple touch of the human fingers and surprise, surprise it was Qunfei’s Lens Technology which provided Apple with the screens for its first iPhone. After Apple popularized the capacitive touch screen, other mobile companies followed suit. Soon enough, Lens Technology provided touch screens for companies like Huawei, Samsung and, of course, Apple. It is highly likely that the touch screen you use every day on your smartphone was made by Qunfei’s company.

The transition from Plastic to Glass While the transition from plastic screens to glass screens would not take place in other electronics companies for another few years, it was Motorola which made this transition a bigger trend in the international market. Like TLC Corporation the American tech giant asked Qunfei’s company to make the glass screen for the Motorola Razr.

The Revolutionary Capacitive Touch Screen Qunfei’s work with Motorola proved to be an

Defying the Odds Zhou Qunfei is now the world’s richest self-made woman. Her company, Lens Technology, has become an integral part of the modern mobile industry. Her journey was not an easy one as she has had to overcome poverty, sexism and harsh working conditions. However, through her perseverance, she was able to change her life and, on a wider scale, helped make our big world feel a little bit closer.

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Quick-start Guide to Mental Health Professionals Learn About the Different Kinds of Experts and How They Can Help You

by Harvard Health Letter Where should you turn when you suspect that you have a mental health condition: a psychiatrist, a

psychologist, or some other type of mental health professional? It›s tough to figure out what kind of clinician can best help you sort out your problems and provide the care you need.

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Often a primary care visit is a good start. Your physician can assess your symptoms and refer you to a mental health professional for evaluation and appropriate treatment.

MENTAL ILLNESSES In the United States, at least one in five adults has a mental health disorder. «Mood and anxiety disorders are surprisingly common, as are stress disorders and personality disorders. A smaller but significant number of people have a major, disabling mental illness like schizophrenia,» says Dr. Michael Craig Miller, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

These conditions are just as real as physical disorders and should not be chalked up to older age. «Getting older presents challenges, but any increase in mental distress should not be considered normal,» Dr. Miller says.

WHO CAN HELP Mental health professionals have a range of training and expertise. You may be referred to any of the following.

A psychiatrist. Psychiatrists can provide medical and psychiatric evaluations, treat psychiatric disorders, provide psychotherapy, and prescribe and monitor medications. Training: An M.D. or D.O. (Doctor of Osteopathy) degree, plus at least four years of special training in psychiatry.

A psychologist. Psychologists do psychological evaluations and testing. They provide psychotherapy to treat mental disorders. They cannot prescribe medication. Training: A doctorate (Ph.D., Psy.D., or Ed.D) in clinical, educational, counseling, or research psychology.

A psychiatric/mental health nurse practitioner (PMHNP). PMHNPs can evaluate and diagnose mental health disorders, provide psychotherapy, and prescribe medicine (in some states under a psychiatrist›s supervision). Training: A master of science in nursing (M.S.N.) or doctor of nursing (D.N.P.) degree, with added mental health education.

Psychiatric/mental health nurse. Depending on

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The mental health professional you need depends on your condition, your preferences, and the availability of clinicians in your area. the education level and the state, psychiatric or mental health nurses may be able to assess mental illnesses, provide psychotherapy, or prescribe medication. Training: An associate›s degree (R.N.), bachelor›s degree (B.S.N.), master›s degree (M.S.N. or A.P.R.N.), or doctoral degree (D.N.Sc., Ph.D.).

Clinical social worker. Depending on their level of education, social workers can assess and treat mental illness and provide psychotherapy. They cannot prescribe medication. Training: A master›s degree (M.A., M.S., M.S.W., or M.S.S.W.) or doctoral degree (D.S.W. or Ph.D.).

Licensed professional counselor. Licensed professional counselors, who come from a variety of backgrounds, are licensed by individual states.

They can assess mental health conditions and provide individual, family, or group therapy. They cannot prescribe medication. Training: A master›s degree (M.A. or M.S.) in psychology, counseling, or another mental health-related field and typically two years of supervised postgraduate experience.

Other specialists. Members of the clergy (ministers, priests, rabbis, or imams) or peer counselors (people who›ve experienced mental health issues) can provide support and advice.

They cannot prescribe medication. Training: Certification varies by state for peer counselors.

Some states require clergy members to be licensed in order to provide counseling.

HELP FOR CHANGES IN MEMORY AND THINKING SKILLS You might assume that a mental health professional is the first expert to consult if you are having

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trouble with your memory or mental skills. But if such problems are interfering with your dayto-day functioning, a physician should evaluate you to check for neurological illnesses such as mild cognitive impairment, Parkinson›s disease, Alzheimer›s disease, or vascular dementia.

Your primary care physician can perform the initial assessment. He or she may then refer you for an examination by a neurologist or for a scan of your brain. Or you might need to see a neuropsychologist, who can conduct extensive testing to identify specific areas of difficulty.

Once the problems have been defined, you may be given treatment to either reverse or prevent further progression of the underlying illness. You may also be referred to a clinician who specializes in helping people manage problems. For example, if decision making has become difficult, the clinician may look for practical, achievable ways to make decisions simpler, such as reducing the amount of clothing in your closet or paring down pots and pans in your kitchen.

You may also benefit by seeing a team of experts who can suggest activities and lifestyle changes to improve brain fitness. Treatment usually integrates physical exercise, nutrition, sleep, meditation, and cognitive training. Cognitive training routines make use of games, sometimes on a computer, to help you improve mental skills, response times, and attention.

WHO’S RIGHT FOR YOU? The mental health professional you need

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depends on your condition, your preferences, and the availability of clinicians in your area.

If your doctor suspects that you›ll benefit from medication, you may be referred to a psychiatrist or a PMHNP. If your problems are milder or you›re coping with life stress or situational issues, any kind of professional who provides therapy may be able to help. Sometimes a number of mental health professionals will work together to get you feeling better, such as a psychiatrist for medication and another professional for psychotherapy.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT? Any evaluation will involve you describing the problems and stresses in your life, the important people in your support system, and your feelings about your situation. Mental health professionals who can prescribe medicine will ask about your medical history and any other medications you›re currently taking.

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Often a primary care visit is a good start. Your physician can assess your symptoms and refer you to a mental health professional for evaluation and appropriate treatment.

Psychotherapy involves talking about yourself, including some of your intimate thoughts and feelings. Your therapist will ask questions to guide you and will likely offer tips or tools to help you cope. He or she will keep all the information strictly confidential.

For more information, check out the Harvard Special Health Report Understanding Depression (www.health.harvard.edu/UD).