If you feel like letting go, hold tight_(advert)

The Bank of Australia and New Zealand has revealed a moving ad campaign, encouraging gay couples to keep holding hands, even in the face of uncertainty. It has released the ad as part of its sponsorship of Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and Auckland's Pride.

The company says that "even in 2017, the simple act of holding hands is still difficult for some people – let’s change that and #HoldTight."

The ad shows couples holding hands in different social scenes - such as on a date to the cinema or going out to a restaurant - and then quickly dropping them when they encounter someone they are not sure will accept them. In the final scene, after hesitating, the couple decides to hold each other even tighter.

The ANZ bank hopes the clip will empower couples so that “when you feel like letting go, hold tight”, showing couples standing defiant against societal prejudices and fighting for their safety.
PS: I find this advert highly educational, both for gay and for straight people. Pass it on.

Paintings That Describe Everything Wrong with the World Today

Polish artist Pawel Kuczynski creates satyrical paintings filled with thought-provoking messages about the world today. From politics and war to social media and screen addiction, Pawel's work covers a wide range of issues. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential contemporary artists in his genre and has received more than 100 awards and distinctions. Check out some of his best works below. A few of them might be hard to decode, which in my opinion, makes them even more compelling.

Spanish government to spearhead efforts to find Civil War victims

By NATALIA JUNQUERA

Spain’s Justice Minister Dolores Delgado on Wednesday announced that the government will spearhead the search for people who went missing under the regime of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, and whose bodies are still lying in mass graves and by roadsides. Until now, this recovery effort had been a private initiative led by relatives and volunteers.

The Socialist Party (PSOE) government will also create an official census of victims of the Civil War (1936-1939) and the subsequent dictatorship, which ended with Franco’s death in 1975.

Privatizing the exhumations was a policy that was doomed to have poor results

PABLO DE GREIFF, EX-UN RAPPORTEUR

The Pedro Sánchez administration additionally wants to reform existing historical memory legislation to cancel rulings that were handed down by Francoist courts, and to create a truth commission. Officials are also considering outlawing associations that “glorify Francoism,” such as the Franco Foundation.

“It is not acceptable that people who are over 90 years old are in despair thinking that they will never recover their parents’ remains, or are faced with a ‘no’ from a judge or an arbitrary decision made by a local government,” said Minister Dolores Delgado on Wednesday in Congress. “It is unacceptable for Spain to continue to be the second country after Cambodia with the largest number of missing people.”

There are still more than 1,200 mass graves left to open in Spain, according to a map available at the Justice Ministry.

During the administration of PSOE Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, which passed the Historical Memory Law in 2007, the executive gave grants to victims’ associations to help fund their search for mass graves with help from hired professionals. When Mariano Rajoy of the Popular Party (PP) came to power, this funding was slashed and the graves were opened thanks to donations from Norwegian electricians’ unions, prize money from the United States, and orders issued by courts in Argentina, 10,000 kilometers from the scene of the crimes.

FRANCO FOUNDATION

The Spanish government is also considering ways of outlawing “associations or organizations that glorify Francoism.” The National Francisco Franco Foundation, which lays fresh flowers on the dictator’s grave every day of the year, keeps archival material and publishes online articles praising Franco and minimizing the harsh repression that followed the war, and which the historian Paul Preston has described as “the Spanish Holocaust.” One of the options is to include “glorifying Francoism” in the criminal code, and another is to amend existing association and foundation laws. The Franco Foundation has not received state funds for years, but its members get tax breaks.

The new PSOE administration now wants to lead all the steps of the process through a newly created agency that will answer to the Justice Ministry. Authorities said they will draft a national plan to locate missing persons and will enlist experts in the fields of archeology, law and forensic medicine, as well as representatives from victims’ associations.

As for the victim census, it will be Spain’s first. Until then, the closest thing continues to be a list drawn up by former investigating Judge Baltasar Garzón, who began probing Franco-era crimes before being disbarred for 11 years in 2012.

At her congressional appearance, Minister Delgado mentioned a “damning” report by the United Nations rapporteur Pablo de Greiff, who visited Spain in 2014 and lamented that Franco’s victims were being ignored by the Spanish state.

“I think this is wonderful news,” said De Greiff, who left his UN position a month ago. “Privatizing the exhumations was a policy that was doomed to have poor results. These are difficult processes: Argentina and Chile have achieved great things, but 30 years later than they thought. This should be a state policy, it benefits everyone.” El País, 12.07.18

Big Brother is watching (from China):

Photo: Gilles Sabrie/The New York Times/Laif 2018

The Pitfalls of Late-night Snacking

By ANNABEL O'CONNOR
The New York Times, August 10th 2018

Nutrition scientists have long debated the best diet for optimal health. But now some experts believe that it’s not just what we eat that’s critical for good health, but when we eat it. A growing body of research suggests that our bodies function optimally when we align our eating patterns with our circadian rhythms, the innate 24-hour cycles that tell our bodies when to wake up, when to eat and when to fall asleep. Studies show that chronically disrupting this rhythm — by eating late meals or nibbling on midnight snacks, for example — could be a recipe for weight gain and metabolic trouble. 

That is the premise of a new book, “The Circadian Code,” by Satchin Panda, a professor at the Salk Institute and an expert on circadian rhythms. Dr. Panda argues that people improve their metabolic health when they eat their meals in a daily 8- to 10-hour window, taking their first bite of food in the morning and their last bite early in the evening. 

This approach, known as early timerestricted feeding, stems from the idea that human metabolism follows a daily rhythm, with our hormones, enzymes and digestive systems primed for food intake in the morning and afternoon. Many people, however, eat from roughly the time they wake up until shortly before they go to bed. Dr. Panda has found in his research that the average person eats over a 15-hour or longer period each day, starting with something like milk and coffee shortly after rising and ending with a glass of wine, a late-night meal or a handful of chips, nuts or some other snack shortly before bed. 

That pattern of eating, he says, conflicts with our biological rhythms. Scientists have long known that the human body has a master clock in the brain, located in the hypothalamus, that governs our sleep-wake cycles in response to bright-light exposure. A couple of decades ago, researchers discovered that there is not just one clock in the body but a 

collection of them. Every organ has an internal clock that governs its daily cycle of activity. During the day, the pancreas increases its production of the hormone insulin, which controls blood sugar levels, and then slows it down at night. The gut has a clock that regulates the daily ebb and flow of enzymes, the absorption of nutrients and the removal of waste. The communities of trillions of bacteria that comprise the microbiomes in our guts operate on a daily rhythm as well. These daily rhythms are so ingrained that they are programmed in our DNA: Studies show that in every organ, thousands of genes switch on and switch off at roughly the same time every day. 

“We’ve inhabited this planet for thousands of years, and while many things have changed, there has always been one constant: Every single day the sun rises and at night it falls,” Dr. Panda said. “We’re designed to have 24-hour rhythms in our physiology and metabolism. These rhythms exist because, just like our brains need to go to sleep each night to repair, reset and rejuvenate, every organ needs to have down time to repair and reset as well.” 

Most of the evidence in humans suggests that consuming the bulk of your food earlier in the day is better for your health, said Dr. Courtney Peterson, an assistant professor in the department of nutrition sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dozens of studies demonstrate that blood sugar control is best in the morning and at its worst in the evening. We burn more calories and digest food more efficiently in the morning as well. 

At night, the lack of sunlight prompts the brain to release melatonin, which prepares us for sleep. Eating late in the evening sends a conflicting signal to the clocks in the rest of the body that it’s still daytime, Dr. Peterson said. “If you’re constantly eating at a time of day when you’re not getting brightlight exposure, then the different clock systems become out of sync,” she said. “It’s like one clock is in the time zone of Japan and the other is in the U.S. It gives your metabolism conflicting signals about whether to rev up or rev down.” Most people know what happens when we disrupt the central clock in our brains by flying across multiple time zones or burning the midnight oil: Fatigue, jet lag and brain fog set in. Eating at the wrong time of day places similar strain on the organs involved in digestion, forcing them to work when they are programmed to be dormant, which can increase the risk of disease, said Paolo Sassone-Corsi, the director of the Center for Epigenetics and Metabolism at the University of California, Irvine. “It’s well known that by changing or disrupting our normal daily cycles, you increase your risk of many pathologies,” said Dr. Sassone-Corsi, who recently published a paper on the interplay between nutrition, metabolism and circadian rhythms. 

In 2012, Dr. Panda and his colleagues at the Salk Institute took genetically identical mice and split them into two groups. One had round-the-clock access to high-fat, high-sugar food. The other ate the same food but in an eight-hour daily window. Despite both groups’ consuming the same amount of calories, the mice that ate whenever they wanted got fat and sick while the mice on the timerestricted regimen did not: They were protected from obesity, fatty liver and metabolic disease. 

While studies suggest that eating earlier in the day is optimal for metabolic health, it does not necessarily mean that you should skip dinner. It might, however, make sense to eat relatively light dinners. One group of researchers in Israel found in studies that overweight adults lost more weight and had greater improvements in blood sugar, insulin and cardiovascular risk factors when they ate a large breakfast, modest lunch and small dinner compared to the opposite: A small breakfast and a large dinner. Dr. Peterson said it confirms an age-old adage: Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper.