China will allow three children

BEIJING (AP) — China will now allow couples to legally have a third child as it seeks to hold off a demographic crisis that could threaten its hopes of increased prosperity and global influence.

The ceremonial legislature on Friday amended the Population and Family Planning Law as part of a decades-long effort by the ruling Communist Party to dictate the size of families in keeping with political directives. It comes just six years after the last change.

From the 1980s, China strictly limited most couples to one child, a policy enforced with threats of fines or loss of jobs, leading to abuses including forced abortions. A preference for sons led parents to kill baby girls, leading to a massive imbalance in the sex ratio.

The rules were eased for the first time in 2015 to allow two children as officials acknowledged the looming consequences of the plummeting birthrate. The overwhelming fear is that China will grow old before it becomes wealthy.

China long touted its one-child policy as a success in preventing 400 million additional births in the world’s most populous country, thus saving resources and helping drive economic growth.

However, China’s birth rate, paralleling trends in South Korea, Thailand and other Asian economies, already was falling before the one-child rule. The average number of children per mother tumbled from above six in the 1960s to below three by 1980, according to the World Bank.

Meanwhile, the number of working-age people in China has fallen over the past decade and the population has barely grown, adding to strains in an aging society. A once-a-decade government census found the population rose to 1.411 billion people last year, up 72 million from 2010.

Statistics show 12 million babies were born last year, which would be down 18% from 2019’s 14.6 million.

Chinese over 60, who number 264 million, accounted for 18.7% of the country’s total population in 2020, 5.44 percentage points higher than in 2010. At the same time, the working-age population fell to 63.3% of the total from 70.1% a decade ago.

The shift to the two-child rule led to a temporary bump in the numbers of births but its effects soon wore off and total births continued to fall because many women continued to decide against starting families.

Japan, Germany and some other wealthy countries face the same challenge of having fewer workers to support aging populations. However, they can draw on investments in factories, technology and foreign assets, while China is a middle-income country with labor-intensive farming and manufacturing.

Ige and Green, The Odd Couple

Lt. Gov. Josh Green knew it irritated people when he sign waved for his 2018 campaign in hospital scrubs.

And he admits he’s not following typical government protocol when he jumps ahead of the state Department of Health to announce new and sometimes alarming COVID-19 case numbers on social media, hours ahead of the official data release.

But Green, 51, doesn’t care. He insists that as a Hawaii island emergency room physician, his first goal is to solve problems while alerting the public about important health information.

Green also has contradicted his boss, Gov. David Ige, and has apologized twice to Ige “for getting ahead of my skis.”

“David Ige and I are not a natural couple,” Green told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “While I respect his engineering thinking, I’m a shoot-from-the-hip physician and he provides the cautious checks and balances.

“Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Our governor is very analytical and that is a strength. But he’s not a dynamic communicator and that leads a lot of people to get frustrated. Sometimes I’m way out ahead of a story and that’s not typical of government communications. Does he always love having me as lieutenant governor? You’d have to ask him.”

Oahu Homeless upate

7/11/21 - Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s signature approach to addressing homelessness across Oahu — by eliminating the use of Honolulu police officers and instead relying on social service and health care workers around the clock — has been modified to now include the use of police officers, reduced in scope to the urban core and scaled back in its hours of operation.

Anton Krucky, the city’s director of Office of Housing and Homelessness, for months has been saying the city’s new Crisis Outreach Response and Engagement program would free up Honolulu Police Department officers’ time by not having them respond to nonviolent, homeless-related calls.

Instead, a new team of social workers and health care workers, who are in the process of being hired, are now expected to respond to homeless-related calls, backed up by HPD officers.

Even before he took office in January, Blangiardi pledged to eliminate the previous administration’s “compassionate disruption” approach to homelessness that used a combination of homeless sweeps and social service outreach to clear city streets and sidewalks of homeless encampments and offer housing and other serv­ices to Oahu’s homeless.

The city is no longer removing homeless people via sweeps of camps but is continuing to remove their possessions, Krucky said.

The new Crisis Outreach Response and Engagement approach represented Blangiardi’s first homeless-­related idea of his own, albeit modeled after a similar program borrowed from Denver.

But Oahu’s version already has been restricted to cover an area just from Kalihi to Waikiki. And instead of running 24 hours a day, the new concept has been scaled back to only two shifts per day, staffed by 12 to 20 workers with certifications in mental health, homeless outreach and medical practices who have yet to be hired.

CORE is expected to cost $3 million, using federal, COVID-19 American Rescue Plan Act funds once they become available.

CORE is modeled after Denver’s Support Team Assistance Response program that deploys paramedics and mental health professionals to respond to nonviolent, homeless-related calls such as trespassing and indecent exposure.

In its first six months of operation in 2020, Denver’s STAR program responded to 748 calls and none required the assistance of the Denver Police Department, according to a STAR Program Evaluation.

Andrew Cuomo resigns

NEW YORK >> Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced his resignation today over a barrage of sexual harassment allegations in a fall from grace a year after he was widely hailed nationally for his detailed daily briefings and leadership during some of the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

By turns defiant and chastened, the 63-year-old Democrat emphatically denied intentionally mistreating women and called the pressure for his ouster politically motivated. But he said that fighting back in this “too hot” political climate would subject the state to months of turmoil.

“The best way I can help now is if I step aside and let government get back to governing,” Cuomo said in a televised address.

The third-term governor’s resignation, which will take effect in two weeks, was announced as momentum built in the Legislature to remove him by impeachment and after nearly the entire Democratic establishment had turned against him, with President Joe Biden joining those calling on him to resign.

The decision came a week after New York’s attorney general released the results of an investigation that found Cuomo sexually harassed at least 11 women.

Investigators said he subjected women to unwanted kisses; groped their breasts or buttocks or otherwise touched them inappropriately; made insinuating remarks about their looks and their sex lives; and created a work environment “rife with fear and intimidation.”

At the same time, Cuomo was under fire over the discovery that his administration had concealed thousands of COVID-19 deaths among nursing home patients.

Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a 62-year-old Democrat and former member of Congress from the Buffalo area, will become the state’s 57th governor and the first woman to hold the post. She said Cuomo’s resignation was “the right thing to do and in the best interest of New Yorkers.”

The #MeToo-era scandal cut short not just a career but a dynasty: Cuomo’s father, Mario Cuomo, was governor in the 1980s and ’90s, and the younger Cuomo was often mentioned as a potential presidential candidate. Even as the scandal mushroomed, he was planning to run for reelection in 2022.

Republicans exulted in Cuomo’s departure but still urged impeachment, which could prevent him from running for office again. “This resignation is simply an attempt to avoid real accountability,” state GOP chair Nick Langworthy said.

At the White House, Biden said: “I respect the governor’s decision.” At the same time, he said Cuomo had “done a helluva job” on infrastructure and voting rights, and “that’s why it’s so sad.”