Videos from Miami Wemedia

Show Open: March 10, 2010

On air: Has America lost its power over Israel?

US Vice President Joe Biden’s trying to recover from the embarrassment of arriving in Israel on a peace mission, to be greeted by an announcement of 1,600 new homes being built in disputed East Jerusalem. So is the US now ignored by Israel? A once strong force that has lost its influence? Or has Israel always done what it wants, regardless of outside pressure? This is how the visit is playing in Israeli and Palestinian newspapers.

On air: The end of the office?

I’m just back from the opening reception at WeMedia and I wanted to share on conversation I had while there. Ritchie Lucas runs a company called Think Factory. He believes that the way we build our working lives around offices is incredibly inefficient (and believes the net can connect the unemployed with those who could use their ability). As well as that, he told me that information is now more important to all of us than people and relationships with them. We don’t need to see the person who’s providing us with a service, and we don’t need to see the people we work with he argued. We just need the information they can give us. It’s a radical idea that would change how we work and how we get others to work for us. Now of course, he ’s hoping this will happen as his business is built on this, but do you think Ritchie’s logic holds?

Doing a good job or being true to your conscience?

Is this just another story about a man that cannot deal with his own sexuality? It seems so, for Californian State Senator Roy Ashburn who has come out as gay, who has a voting record that has opposed every social initiative to support gay rights in California.

However, Senator Ashburn says that he did the right thing by supporting the views of his majority conservative constituents. He is quoted here in The Christian Science Monitor as saying: “My votes reflect the wishes of the people in my district,”

Is Happiness a natural state ?

….and therefore if you aren’t happy, then you’re ill ?

Here’s an article that has got a lot of people talking from the New Yorker.

Louis Menand reviews a couple of new books which deal with the subject of  depression and writes :

“what has changed is not the number of people who are clinically depressed but the definition of depression, which has been defined in a way that includes normal sadness.”

On air: Violence in Nigeria

Two questions appear to be at the centre of your discussions of the weekend’s shocking violence near Jos. They are: 1) Why is it happening? and 2) why isn’t more attention being paid to it? (Though Hillary has now commented.)We’ll ask both, as well as hear about our sister’s show Africa Have Your Say’s discussion on what now needs to be done to present such massacres happening again. Questions and comments welcome… and pls leave your number if you want to come on air. We won’t publish the number online.

WHYS at the Univ. of Miami

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On air: Do women need extra help to succeed?

A law that has been reintroduced in India which would reserve a third of all seats in the national parliament and state legislatures for women. Its progress is being delayed by protests today in the upper house. It again raises the issue of whether women require this kind of assistance to achieve the same success and power as men. (And an interesting bit of context to this story is that it was original proposed back in 1996 and 14 years in clearly some Indians still feel it’s very necessary.)

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