WITH his slick navy suit, silver watch and non-stop smoking, Yu Feng is an unlikely ambassador for Chinese family values. The office from which he operates, in Chongqing in western China, looks more like a sitting room, with grey sofas, cream curtains and large windows looking out on the city’s skyscrapers. Women visit him here and plead for help. They want him to persuade their husbands to dump their mistresses.
Mr Yu worked in family law and then marriage counselling before starting his business in 2007. He charges scorned wives 100,000-500,000 yuan ($15,000-75,000); cases usually take 7-8 months. He befriends both the two-timing husband and the mistress, encouraging them to find fault with each other, and gradually reveals that he has messed up his own life by being unfaithful. Most clients are in their 30s and early 40s. “This is the want, buy, get generation,” he says; sex is a part of China’s new materialism. But changing sexual mores and a rocketing divorce rate have prompted soul-searching about the decline of family ties. He claims a 90% success rate.
The ernai, literally meaning “second wife”, is increasingly...Continue reading
Source: China http://ift.tt/2gGHxZR
WITH his slick navy suit, silver watch and non-stop smoking, Yu Feng is an unlikely ambassador for Chinese family values. The office from which he operates, in Chongqing in western China, looks more like a sitting room, with grey sofas, cream curtains and large windows looking out on the city’s skyscrapers. Women visit him here and plead for help. They want him to persuade their husbands to dump their mistresses.
Mr Yu worked in family law and then marriage counselling before starting his business in 2007. He charges scorned wives 100,000-500,000 yuan ($15,000-75,000); cases usually take 7-8 months. He befriends both the two-timing husband and the mistress, encouraging them to find fault with each other, and gradually reveals that he has messed up his own life by being unfaithful. Most clients are in their 30s and early 40s. “This is the want, buy, get generation,” he says; sex is a part of China’s new materialism. But changing sexual mores and a rocketing divorce rate have prompted soul-searching about the decline of family ties. He claims a 90% success rate.
The ernai, literally meaning “second wife”, is increasingly...Continue reading
from Asia http://ift.tt/2gGHxZR
MOTIVATED reasoning—ignoring inconvenient truths on a cognitive path toward conclusions that match our pre-existing beliefs or commitments—afflicts all of us from time to time. The phenomenon has been demonstrated in abundance in the wake of the election of 2016, an event that has provoked unusually strong emotions in just about everybody. So it is perhaps not surprising that even an illustrious intellectual aghast at the prospect of Donald Trump assuming the presidency might talk himself into an ill-advised proposal.
That is what happened last week when Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor, proposed in the Washington Post that members of the electoral college should ignore the November 8th vote in their home states and choose Hillary Clinton when they meet on December 19th to officially elect America’s 45th president. Mr Lessig’s main argument proceeds in two steps. First, he says, there is no rule in the constitution compelling electors to vote for the candidate who received the most votes in their respective states. In fact, nothing in the document suggests “that electors’ freedom should be constrained in any way”. True...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2fMmZum
SINCE the morning of November 9th, Americans have known who would occupy 99 of the 100 seats in the Senate when the 115th Congress is seated in January. The only wild card left is in Louisiana. The state’s unusual system features a “jungle primary”—in which candidates from all parties square off in a sort of mad steeplechase—on November 8th. Assuming no one gets 50% or more of the vote, the two top finishers then meet a month later, when few voters are usually paying attention.
The December 10th run-off might have had high stakes had Democrats captured two more Senate seats in November. But with Republicans already assured of at least a 51-49 majority in the upper chamber, the drama will be muted. Given Louisiana’s deep-red leanings—Hillary Clinton captured just 38% of the vote in the state—it is difficult to picture a happy outcome for Foster Campbell, a Democrat, over John Kennedy. In the jungle primary, Mr Kennedy took 25% of the vote to Mr Campbell’s 17%. It wasn’t a runaway, but Republicans taken together outpolled Democrats by a nearly 2-1 ratio.
What is interesting about the race this year is the way in which Mr Campbell is setting...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2g7fO0X
IN JUNE, a few months after Donald Trump, then a candidate for the Republican nomination, called for a ban on Muslim immigration, Turkey’s Islamist leader objected. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded that Mr Trump’s name be removed from Trump Towers in Istanbul. “The ones who put that brand on their building should remove it immediately,” he said.
Mr Erdogan appears to have changed his mind, both about the towers and about the man whose name appears on them. Although polls show that most Turks would have preferred to see Hillary Clinton as America’s new president, Mr Trump’s election has been greeted in Ankara with a mix of schadenfreude and hope. “We were suffering from [American] policies towards the Middle East and Turkey under the Democrats and Obama,” says Yasin Aktay, a deputy chairman of the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party. “This opens a new page.” The Turkish president has been even more emphatic, calling protests against Mr Trump’s election in America and Europe “a disrespect to democracy”.
Flattery may have gotten Mr Trump somewhere: he reportedly told Mr Erdogan over the phone that his...Continue reading
Souce: Europe http://ift.tt/2gxo0YG
WHEN African National Congress (ANC) bigwigs met last weekend, the debate was reportedly so heated that it almost came to blows. In an unprecedented show of defiance against Jacob Zuma, some cabinet ministers asked the scandal-plagued president to step down. The intense reaction among the ANC’s 104-member executive committee saw the meeting drag on for an extra day. But in the end Mr Zuma stayed. Unpopular even among ANC supporters, he has nonetheless proved adept at remaining in office by corralling support from a majority of the ANC executive. These people have the power to order Mr Zuma to step down as president of South Africa. But despite near-constant accusations of corruption, Mr Zuma has survived the latest mutiny, just as he has survived previous ones.
The ANC is divided, and this attempt to oust Mr Zuma has exposed its divisions anew. At a press briefing on November 28th the ANC secretary-general, Gwede Mantashe, said the party had rejected a request that Mr Zuma step down after “robust” debate. According to reports, Derek Hanekom, the tourism minister, led the call for the president to go, supported by other cabinet ministers. Other...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2fQDclE
WHEN the Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that “mentally retarded” persons’ diminished powers of reasoning and culpability made them ineligible for the death penalty, a dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that his six colleagues’ “newest invention” would turn “capital trial[s] into a game”. Fourteen years later, that prediction in Atkins v Virginia looks about right. But the game is a grim one, and its main players—contrary to Mr Scalia’s impression—are not prisoners “feign[ing]” retardation but die-hard supporters of capital punishment who resist the principle that executing people with intellectual disabilities amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment” under the 8th Amendment.
On November 29th, justices heard the case of Bobby Moore, a man of limited intelligence who was sentenced to die 36 years ago for killing a store clerk during a robbery. In 2014, Mr Moore had his death sentence revoked after successfully making a claim under Atkins, but a year later the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) sent him back to death row. The question in Moore v Texas is whether the CCA used the right standard when it decided Mr...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2gtXtvC