Raquel Pina – Argentina between empire & resistance

by ORINOCO TRIBUNE

The Argentinian nation has faced imperialist attack for centuries, and its current globalized form is intent upon destroying the Argentinian identity and its societal values, but “the Argentinian people, with our long history of struggle, resistance and rebellion, our common doctrine and common principles, will be able to fight back neocolonialism… the more we get organized,” commented Argentinian professor and analyst Raquel Pina while discussing the situation of Argentina under the administration of President Javier Milei.

Since the self-described “libertarian” and “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei took office as the president of Argentina in December last year, the country seems to have spiraled into a socio-economic abyss. Nevertheless, this may be nothing new under the sun, given that Argentina has lived through a vicious cycle of alternating capitalist destruction and progressive recovery at least over the last seven decades. In addition, Argentina is one of the countries that still experiences the reality of British colonialism, apart from the neocolonialism which is the order of the day for most of the world.

These issues were addressed by Dr. Raquel Pina, an expert in Latin American cultural and literary studies and history, in an interview with Orinoco Tribune on November 5. Born in Santa Fe, Argentina, in the 1970s, to a working-class family, she was a first-generation university student. She studied at the Ohio State University, USA, and currently teaches at the Columbus State Community College, Ohio. She has written numerous articles on contemporary issues in Argentina and Latin America, as well as authored two books, including El Sujeto en Escena, on the impact of globalization on contemporary Argentinian cinema. At present she is researching on the native Antarctician people, descendants from Argentinian and Chilean parents, and their cultural significance for Argentina and Chile, within the framework of the bicontinental nature of these countries of the Southern Cone.

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The neurological roots of ‘sinful’ behavior (book review)

by EMILY CATANEO

In “Seven Deadly Sins,” neurologist Guy Leschziner explores the science behind Dante’s greatest transgressions.

James was in his late 30s and weighed more than 500 pounds when he fell in the bathroom and found himself wedged between the wall and shower enclosure. Unable to get up because of his size, and too embarrassed to call for help, he lay there for three days. Firefighters eventually had to wreck the bathroom to free him. By the time he made it to the hospital in London, fungal infections had spread through the creases in his body, his oxygen-starved skin was disintegrating in places, and his breath was labored. His doctor struggled to find a vein from which to draw blood.

IMAGE/Barnes & Noble

“Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human,” by Guy Leschziner (St. Martin’s Press, 384 pages).

That doctor, Guy Leschziner, did something that he’s ashamed of now: Along with the other junior doctors in the hospital, he mocked James for his fatness, for his predicament. Many people in Leschziner’s shoes might have laughed at James: Obesity in the popular imagination, is “the most obvious marker of ‘gluttony’” and considered a “moral failure, indicative of laziness, a lack of self-control,” Leschziner writes in “Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human.”

But what if we took a more nuanced view of “gluttony”? What if we took a more nuanced view of all human failings? In “Seven Deadly Sins,” Leschziner, a neurologist and sleep physician, interrogates the evolutionary, neurological, and psychological underpinnings of the seven greatest transgressions in Dante’s “Inferno”: wrath, lust, pride, greed, envy, sloth, and gluttony. He concludes that these so-called sins are inextricably interwoven with the experience of being a person, and that to understand them is “to gain insights into why we do what we do: the biology of being human.”

Leschziner had several personal reasons for wanting to understand humanity’s darkest side. His family was defined by the trauma of his grandfather’s narrow escape from the Holocaust, a “supreme expression of human sin.” Leschziner’s curiosity about sin was also sparked by his 25 years as a doctor in London hospitals, where he’s seen the best and worst of humankind on display. In writing this book, he sought to push himself beyond merely observing and treating his patients’ issues and instead “to see beneath the surface, to delve into the depths.”

Leschziner has written two other books that explore the oddest cases he’s treated as a neurologist, and in “Seven Deadly Sins,” some of the most fascinating passages involve patients, like James, whose lives have been derailed by a medical issue that presents as one of the “sins.”

Leschziner concludes that these so-called sins are inextricably interwoven with the experience of being a person, and that to understand them is “to gain insights into why we do what we do: the biology of being human.”

In the wrath chapter, we meet Sean, who rages “like a wild beast” in the aftermath of his unpredictable seizures, smashing glass and furniture. In the envy chapter, we meet Sarah, who regularly becomes consumed with the paranoid fear that her husband’s having an affair and flies into jealous fits, only to have little-to-no memory of these episodes after they conclude. In the lust chapter, we meet Simon, who received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in his early 30s and who lost his friends and family because of his obsession with porn, sex workers, and happy ending massage parlors. (Leschziner changed all names to preserve these patients’ privacy.)

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As Trump II begins, Bezos swaps scrutiny for ‘storytelling’

by JULIE HOLLAR

As the Washington Post faces a staff rebellion and plummeting subscription rates, billionaire owner Jeff Bezos has introduced a new mission statement: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”

NYT: The Washington Post's New Mission: Reach 'All of America'

The Washington Post‘s new slogan, “Riveting Storytelling for All of America,” is “meant to be an internal rallying point for employees,” the New York Times (1/16/25) reported.

The new path forward, as introduced in a slide deck to staff by Suzi Watford, the paper’s chief strategy officer, demands that the paper “understand and represent interests across the country,” and “provide a forum for viewpoints, expert perspectives and conversation” (New York Times, 1/16/25). It will do this as “an AI-fueled platform for news” that delivers “vital news, ideas and insights for all Americans where, how and when they want it.”

This appears to mean shifting resources toward opinion, specifically opinions from the right. According to the New York Times report:

Bezos has expressed hopes that the Post would be read by more blue-collar Americans who live outside coastal cities, mentioning people like firefighters in Cleveland. He has also said that he is interested in expanding the Post’s audience among conservatives.

The Post has already begun to consider ways to sharply increase the amount of opinion commentary published on its website, according to two people with knowledge of the talks. An adviser to the Post, Lippe Oosterhof, has conducted brainstorming sessions about a new initiative that would make it easier to receive and publish opinion writing from outside contributors.

How AI is meant to play into this is unclear.

The Post already has more columnists than you can shake a stick at. This new direction sounds like the Foxification of the Washington Post, a move away from any attempt to hold the powerful to account, toward inexpensive clickbait punditry.

‘Make money’

Grid with 10,000 squares, three of them colored red.

The red area represents the proportion of Jeff Bezos’s total wealth that would be required to cover the Washington Post‘s losses for a year.

Watford’s slide deck presented three pillars of the Post‘s new model: “great journalism,” “happy customers” and “make money.” The Post lost roughly $77 million in 2023. (It also lost some 250,000 subscribers after Bezos killed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris—FAIR.org, 10/30/24.)

In order to make money, its new “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” (yes, that’s what the Post slide deck apparently called it) is to reach 200 million “paying users.” The paper currently has about 3 million subscribers, making it an “audacious” goal indeed. As the Times pointed out, even if the Post could achieve the impossible task of monetizing every visit to its website, no major corporate media outlet has been getting more than 100 million monthly unique visits—paying and non-paying—outside of the spike in traffic around the election.

Back in 2019, the Post was claiming 80–90 million unique visitors per month. Those visits peaked in November 2020 at 114 million, but quickly and steadily dropped after Biden’s inauguration. The Post stopped posting its audience numbers online after January 2023, when they were down to 58 million.

Of course, most online corporate media have been struggling. The thing about the Post is that its absurdly wealthy owner, the second-richest person on Earth, can easily afford to lose $77 million a year. That’s 0.03% of Bezos’s current net worth.

‘We are deeply alarmed’

Guardian: ‘Deeply alarmed’: Washington Post staff request meeting with Jeff Bezos

Guardian (1/15/25): “The plea from staff…comes a week after the Post laid off roughly 100 employees…roughly 4% of the publication’s staff.”

No doubt the Post needs help. Just days before the new mission statement was revealed, over 400 staff members signed a letter to Bezos asking for a meeting (Guardian, 1/15/25).  The letter read:

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The life expectancy of Palestinians fell by 11.5 years in the first three months of the genocide

THE TRICONTINENTAL

IMAGE/Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar (Egypt), Popular Chorus, 1949.

The US-backed genocide in Gaza has led to a precipitous loss in the population’s life expectancy. Even as the ceasefire allows aid to enter Gaza, this profound demographic loss will take generations to revert.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

The idea of a ceasefire is as old as the idea of war. In old records, one reads of halts in firing for humans to eat or sleep. Rules of combat developed out of an understanding that both sides had to rest or refresh themselves. Sometimes, this understanding included the lives of animals. During the Easter Rising in 1916, for instance, the Irish rebels and the British troops stopped their shooting around St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin so that James Kearney, the park keeper, could enter and feed the ducks. It was this caesura, or pause, of gunfire that popularised the term ‘ceasefire’.

For Palestinians in Gaza, any ceasefire that promises to stop the bombardment and allow for the arrival of humanitarian aid (particularly food, water, medicine, and blankets) is a relief. In the days since 19 January, when a temporary ceasefire went into effect, aid at scale has been able to reach Gazans, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs spokesperson Jens Laerke confirmed. On the first day of the ceasefire, 630 trucks entered Gaza – many more than the fifty to one hundred trucks per day that struggled to get in during the Israeli bombing. These trucks are ‘getting food in, opening bakeries, getting healthcare, restocking hospitals, repairing water networks, repairing shelter, family reunifications’, and carrying out other essential work, Laerke said. After almost five hundred days of genocidal violence, this aid is more than a relief. It is a lifeline. But this ceasefire agreement had first been tabled in May 2024, when it was approved by the Israeli government and later agreed to by Hamas until ultimately being rejected by Netanyahu. The guns could have been silenced then.

Palestine has been deeply impacted by the genocide. Using estimates from the United Nations’ World Population Prospects 2024, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Global South Insights analysed the decline in Palestinian life expectancy caused by the Israeli bombardment in Gaza and found that Palestinian life expectancy at birth fell by 11.5 years between 2022 and 2023, from a respectable 76.7 years in 2022 to just 65.2 years in 2023. It was the first three months of the US-backed Israeli bombing – from October to December 2023 – that brought about this terrible decline in total life expectancy. We are not aware of such a rapid decline in life expectancy at any other period of modern human history. A Palestinian life is now more than seventeen years shorter than an Israeli one. This gap is greater than that which existed between blacks and whites in apartheid South Africa, which was fifteen years in 1980.

Eleven and a half years lost per Palestinian. That is almost 60 million years lost for the remaining 5.2 million Palestinians who have remained in Palestine and survived the genocide. This loss cannot easily be recovered. It will take years of immense work to rebuild Palestinian society and reach anything near the pre-genocide life expectancy. Health systems will need to be rebuilt: not only hospitals and clinics, which were almost all destroyed in Gaza, but new doctors and nurses will have to be trained to replace those who were killed. Food systems will need to be recovered: not only bakeries, but fields will need to be detoxified and fishing boats repaired. Housing will need to be rebuilt to replace the 92% of homes in Gaza that were destroyed or damaged (what the UN has called a ‘domicide’). Schools will need to be rebuilt. The mental trauma that afflicts children will need to be healed so that they feel that these structures are not graves but places of safety and learning.

The Tricontinental for more

Mark Zuckerberg thinks workplaces need to ‘man up’ ? here’s why that’s bad for all employees, no matter their gender

by ADAM STANALAND

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attends a UFC match on Feb. 17, 2024. IMAGE/Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images

When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on a Jan. 10, 2025, episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” he lamented that corporate culture had become too “feminine,” suppressing its “masculine energy” and abandoning supposedly valuable traits such as aggression.

The workplace, he concluded, has been “neutered.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Zuckerberg has also embraced stereotypically masculine pursuits in his personal life. He’s become a mixed martial arts aficionado and has shared his affinity for smoking meats. On his expansive Hawaii compound, he’s even taken up bow-and-arrow pig hunting.

He’s come a long way from the geeky image of his youth.

But is Zuckerberg right? Do workplaces in the U.S. need to embrace a more diesel-fueled, street-fighting, meat-eating mentality?

As a social psychologist who studies masculinity and aggression, I think it’s important to evaluate what the science says about Zuckerbeg’s claims – and to consider what it means for the future of workplace culture in the U.S.

Show no weakness

In 2018, sociologist Jennifer Berdahl and her colleagues coined the term “masculinity contest culture” to describe workplaces rife with cutthroat competition, toxic leadership, bullying and harassment.

Integrating decades of prior research on masculinity in the workplace, Berdahl and her collaborators were able to map how masculinity contest cultures operate, as well as show how they affect organizations and individual employees.

In her experiments, she had participants agree or disagree with statements such as “expressing any emotion other than anger or pride is seen as weak,” based on their perceptions of their own organization. Using advanced statistical techinques, Berdahl’s team was able to distill masculinity contest cultures down to four components: “showing no weakness,” “strength and stamina,” “putting work first” and “dog eat dog.”

Then they were able to show how these cultures are tied to a host of negative outcomes for workers and companies, such as burnout, turnover and poor well-being. And at the organization level, they can foment a dysfunctional office environment, toxic leadership and even bullying and harassment.

An imagined grievance

Based on this research, then, it seems like promoting rigid masculinity in the workplace is not the best solution for an arguably already struggling Meta.

What, then, led Zuckerberg to claim that the workplace has been neutered and must be infused with masculine energy? Has the American office really gone full “Legally Blonde”?

The Conversation for more

The startup offering free toilets and coffee for delivery workers — in exchange for their data

by DANIELA DIB

Nippy’s rest stop is located in Mexico City’s Roma Norte neighborhood. IMAGE/Alejandra Rajal for Rest of World

Argentine startup Nippy aggregates data from gig workers and sells it to companies like Mastercard and Movistar, who in turn offer workers their services.

  • Nippy has set up rest stops for gig workers in Argentina, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.
  • The startup makes money by selling workers’ data to companies that offer benefits to gig workers.
  • Workers told Rest of World they did not know Nippy was selling their data.

Every day, Fredy Ivan Alba Trejo bikes for over an hour through busy highways to reach pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods of Mexico City where he works as a food delivery worker for Rappii.

His biggest challenge during the day is finding a reliable spot to use the restroom or charge his phone in an area that is far away from his home. Most restaurants don’t allow gig workers like him to use their facilities and shopping centers insist they leave their backpacks and helmets outside. “But by doing so we risk getting everything stolen,” the 29-year-old told Rest of World.

A few months ago, he found a solution to this problem when he discovered a gig workers’ pit stop run by Nippy, an Argentine startup that has built a business around the lack of spaces and benefits for workers like Alba Trejo. The company rents out small storefronts where gig workers can use clean toilets and get coffee free of charge — in exchange for downloading Nippy’s app. Nippy makes money by processing and selling the data workers register on the app to financial, insurance, and telecommunications companies it has partnered with.

Rest of world for more

MLK Day turned into BMS Day

by B. R. GOWANI

Priscilla Chan, her husband Mark Zuckerberg of Meta/Facebook, Lauren Sanchez, her fiance Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet/Google, and Elon Musk of Space X in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington DC on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025, for the 60th Presidential Inauguration. IMAGE/AP/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Poo/The Hill

Nothing can be more diametric and tragic than an unfolding fascist, joined by some of the world’s most richest men, being sworn-in for the second time on January 20, 2025 on the official Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

On August 28, 1963, in the US capital, Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., addressing a rally at the March On Washington D.C., dreamt:

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal.'”

BlackPast

Dr. King’s dream will have to wait until the current system gets destroyed due to its arrogance, terrorism, violence, and overstretch; or, the people in the US revolt to change the over rotten almost two and a half century exploitive capitalist system.

On January 20, 2025, the billionaires, who consider themselves more equal than all other men (women and genders) got their dream for absolute freedom to loot, realized. Martin Luther King Day was turned into Billionaires Maximum Sovereignty Day.

Mind you, the rich have always been in power in the US; it’s just that whatever little facade of restraint there was, is being removed rapidly.

The rich have been running this country since its inception but preferred, mostly, to maintain a thin veneer. However, with Trump, a billionaire, who is more exhibitionist than President Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (1901-1909), things were bound to change, and indeed they did. The tech billionaires, Fox News hosts, and big donors were inside the Capitol Rotunda whereas Republican governors such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Mississippi’s Tate Reeves, Georgia’s Brian Kemp, Indiana’s Mike Braun, and Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, were dumped in the Emancipation Hall overflow viewing space. In fact, they do belong there. What are most of the governors, mayors, elected officials, and even presidents? They are merely agents of the filthy rich.

The rich were sitting in the front row but the Trump’s cabinet members were in the row behind.

Many individuals and corporations donated more than $170 million to cover the expenses for inauguration and related events.

Billionaires pageant

Jeff Bezos, the 2nd richest person had this banner on his newspaper Washington Post, bought in 2013: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Now he should change it to “Democracy Shines in Orange Glow.” Washington Post, which had been endorsing presidential candidates for almost 40 years, refrained in 2024 from endorsing Kamala Harris under pressure from Bezos. He wanted to play safe and continue to get his government contracts with the new government — whether under Harris or Trump. Bezos is “extraordinarily aggressive” and uses various tactics to get contracts. (200,000 digital subscribers of Post were angered by non-endorsement and cancelled their subscription. It doesn’t make much difference to the second richest person. Boycotting Amazon services could hurt him to some extent.)

Mark Zuckerberg, who once toyed with the idea of running for the US presidency, now concentrates on making money and pleasing President Trump. Once when he was asked about users’ privacy on Facebook, he asserted: “Those who have nothing to hide, have nothing to fear.”

But Zuckerberg himself is fearful of Trump; who knows what he is hiding. The unpaid taxes, his company Facebook registered in Ireland, and so on. He knows how vengeful Trump <1> is. In January 2021, after the then president Trump incited attack on US Capitol, Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram sites removed Trump from both platforms. In 2023, both accounts were reinstated but with “new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses.” The guardrails were removed in July 2024. Around that period, Trump had threatened to put Zuckerberg behind bars, if re-elected. Zuckerberg also ended third party fact checking program on his sites; now whatever Trump, Musk, and their acolytes say will be treated as fact and so no checking will be needed.

On January 27, 2025, Meta announced it will “allow more free speech by lifting restrictions.” According to Intercept, the training materials include the following racist, anti LQBTQ, anti immigrants, hateful statements: “Black people are more violent than whites,” “Mexican immigrants are trash,” “transpeople are immoral,” “gays are freaks,” “immigrants are grubby filthy pieces of shit,” or the description “look at that tranny [i.e., transgender person],” under the photo of a 17-year-old girl.

Mukesh Ambani, an Indian billionaire who has 250 plus companies, including electronic and print media, under his Reliance Empire, never misses a chance to show off his wealth nor lose an opportunity to put as many people as he can around him to show them he’s the boss. Former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, attended his daughter’s lavish wedding in 2018, which cost $100 million. Ivanka Trump, her husband and daughter, were also guests at Mukesh Ambani’s son’s $600-million extravagant wedding in 2024. <2>

Miriam Adelson, very impressed by what Trump did for Israel, wished in 2019 for a “Book of Trump” in the Bible. Adelson donated $100 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign. Now perhaps Trump deserves an entire new Bible for his grand plan to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” This heist was first proposed by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son in law.

Sundar Pichai was there too. Like an obedient billionaire, Pichai didn’t disappoint the Dear Leader. The Dear Leader wanted a name change and Pichai’s Google agreed to change “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America.” If tomorrow, the Dear Leader says the “Planet Earth” should be called “Planet America,” Pichai’s Google will do it. Google has also gone back on its promise to not develop AI (artificial intelligence) weapons “that cause or are likely to cause overall harm.”

Elon Musk, the richest person on earth, is Trump’s non-elected Secretary of Firing — not executions, at least, not yet, but sacking federal employees and throwing them at the mercy of billionaires like him. Musk spent invested almost $300 million dollars of his own on Trump campaign and so will remain busy for quite some time to recover the investment and realize unlimited profit. (Taylor Swift could have saved us from Musk but she didn’t.)

Bill Gates did not attend the inauguration but had kissed His Fascistness‘s ass when he had a three-hour audience with Trump shortly after Christmas. Gates had given $50 million to Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign just three or so months ago. Billionaires, for whom increasing profit without paying taxes is the main goal, are good at changing sides; people evolve, but billionaires evolve extra fast. According to Gates, it was a “long and actually quite intriguing dinner.” Gates was also “impressed” by Trump’s interest in world health problems. How much Trump is interested in world health matters is clear from his announcement that the United States is leaving the WHO (World Health Organization).

Once again, Dr. King on how government’s handing of free money to rich has a different name, then that for the poor.

Whenever the government provides opportunities in privileges for white people and rich people they call it “subsidized” when they do it for Negro and poor people they call it “welfare.” The fact that is the everybody in this country lives on welfare. Suburbia was built with federally subsidized credit. And highways that take our white brothers out to the suburbs were built with federally subsidized money to the tune of 90 percent. Everybody is on welfare in this country. The problem is that we all [too] often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That’s the problem.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr., February 23, 1968 (truthorfiction.com)

The capitalist system is a disaster for our world as it promotes and creates inequality, pollution, climate change, corruption, rat race, family disintegration, etc.; and maybe, for the universe because the rich are planning to colonize Mars, Moon, etc., which will for sure result in space wars.

Those who wants to see our world a better place should heed economist/activist Kshama Sawant’s advise:

It’s time to declare war on the rich.

“We need to build an organized, unified movement of working people to systematically take on the rich who run society and to undermine their ability to rule. Our goal must be to both fight for radical change in the present and to bring down the billionaires and their system, capitalism.

“There is no other path to avoid total disaster for human civilization and the planet.”

Notes

<1> Trump, like India’s Narendra Modi, is a very vindictive person. This prompted the outgoing President “Genocide Joe” to take precautionary measure of pardoning many people, including his own relatives. One of the persons, who really deserved freedom was Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier. Peltier’s sentence, after almost half a century, was commuted to indefinite home confinement. Though it’s not total freedom, but still was good news. Biden should have preemptively pardoned all the Democrats and all anti-Trump people, more than half of the country, this would have saved Trump, a great deal of time, from going after them. Or may be not, Trump almost always finds ways, like the United States, to get people he doesn’t like.

<2> Ambani was invited but Indian Premier Narendra Modi was not, even though he was desperate to attend. Modi’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar did attend the inauguration. During Modi’s last US visit in September 2024, he avoided meeting Kamala Harris or Trump despite Trump’s remark that Modi is coming to meet him. On the other hand, Trump extended an invitation to China’s Xi Jinping, who wisely avoided the Trump spectacle and, instead, sent his Vice President Han Zheng. Modi and company’s efforts for a meeting with Trump have paid off and he’ll be visiting the US in the second week of February.

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

Qutayla ukht al-Nadr

WIKIPEDIA

A painting from Siyer-i Nebi, Ali beheading Nadr ibn al-Harith in the presence of Muhammad and his companions.

Qutayla ukht al-Nadr or Qutayla bint al-Nadr) was a seventh-century CE Arab woman of the Quraysh tribe, noted as one of the earliest attested Arabic-language poets on account of her famous elegy for Nadr ibn al-Harith.

Life

Qutayla appears in the historical record in connection with her relative Nadr ibn al-Harith, an Arab Pagan doctor from Taif, who used to tell stories of Rustam and Esfandiyar to the Arabs and scoffed the Islamic prophet Muhammad.[1][2] After the battle of Badr in 624 CE, al-Harith was captured and, in retaliation, Muhammad ordered his execution in hands of Ali.[3][4][5] Some sources characterise Qutayla as Nadr’s sister (ukht), others as his daughter (bint), though the most popular claim seems to be that she was his sister (hence the title of this article).[6] Her full name appears in some sources, for example, as Qutayla ukht al-Nudar b. al-Harith b. ‘Alqama b. Kalda b. ‘Abd Manaf b. ‘Abd al-Dar b. QuSayy al-Qurashiyya al-‘Abdariyya.[7] There was also a tradition, attested in one medieval source, al-Jahiz in his Kitab al-Bayan wa ’l-tabyin, that she was actually called Layla.[8]

Work

To Qutayla is attributed the following elegy for Nadr, in which she upbraids Muhammad for the execution.[9] According to some commentaries, Muhammad’s response to this was ‘Had I heard her verses before I put him to death, I should not have done so’.[10]

On the fifth night’s morning, stranger, with luck

a tamarisk tree should appear by the way:

Leave word that travellers never cease

as they pass to wave a salute from the road;

that you saw me standing, the tears on my face;

on other tears, unseen, I choke.

Will my brother hear my voice when I call?

If the dead can hear they never speak.

Weary and worn he was led to his doom,

a captive dragging his feet in chains,

torn by the swords of his cousins and kin:

To God I mourn the divided house.

Muhammad, of noble woman born,

son of equally noble sire!

It would not have harmed to be generous then;

a man, incensed, may still forgive.

Had you taken ransom — Nothing too much,

too grand, but we’d gladly have given it up.

My brother was nearest of those you took,

the first to be spared — had you pardoned his youth.

‘Although doubt has been expressed regarding their authenticity … these verses, frequently cited and highly appreciated, have perpetuated alNadr’s memory’.[11] Whatever its origin, the poem attributed to Qutayla is among the poems most frequently cited in the medieval Arabic anthologies known as Hamasat,[12] being noted for their moving quality.[13] In the assessment of Nadia Maria El Cheikh, ‘Qutayla’s poem reflects the new Islamic ethos conveying the dramatic tension of a particular moment in Islamic religious history. She does not call for vengeance but for a modification of behavior, a kind retroactive display of restraint and forbearance’.[14]

Wikipedia for more

The new science of menopause: These emerging therapies could change women’s health

by LYNNE PEEPLES

IMAGE/Maria Corte

Researchers are exploring how to prolong ovarian life and revisiting hormone replacement therapy — a once routine treatment that has fallen out of favour.

In late 2022, Naomi Busch, a lone physician in her book group, began fielding question after question about menopause. Members of the group had started to experience the hallmark symptoms — hot flushes, poor sleep and mood swings — and wondered what they could do about them. “They all looked at me,” says Busch, “and I was like, ‘I don’t know anything about menopause.’” She searched for knowledgeable physicians in and around Seattle, where she lives, but the few specialists were booked out for several months. Meanwhile, the women in the book group were not getting the answers that they needed from their gynaecologists or primary-care physicians. “I’m not going down quietly,” Busch remembers one woman vowing.

Busch, who trained in and practised primary-care medicine, wasn’t surprised by the lack of information. “It’s not something we learn about in medical school,” she says. So Busch decided to find out everything she could about menopause. Ultimately, she passed a competency exam to become a certified practitioner through The Menopause Society, a non-profit organization based in Pepper Pike, Ohio, that provides tools and resources to health-care professionals. She’s not alone in her interest. More than 1,300 providers became certified in 2024; and more than five times as many people applied for the exam in 2024 as in 2022. The International Menopause Society, a UK-based charity, also offers a free online training programme for health-care professionals. More than 2,600 people completed the course in 2024, up from under 2,000 in 2023.

Many health-care professionals — along with society in general — regularly tell women, and transgender, non-binary and intersex people who go through menopause, to accept the misery of the transition, and the health troubles that can follow. Menopause comes with increased risks of health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and memory loss.

Yet, few medical options are typically presented to people going through menopause. Sometimes, oral contraceptives are prescribed to ease symptoms and prevent unwanted pregnancies, which are still possible during the transition. But common doses and formulations can include risks, such as developing blood clots, and don’t always provide sufficient treatment, says Busch. Non-hormonal drugs, such as fezolinetant and elinzanetant, treat hot flushes — but they also have side effects. Other options include antidepressants, cognitive behavioural therapy, acupuncture and lifestyle changes, which usually go only so far in alleviating symptoms. Hormone replacement therapy, which was a routine treatment until 2002, is widely passed over, owing to a misinterpreted study1 that prompted fear of its use.

Nature for more