Search

Just another WordPress site

Rachel swan

Wigan’s Rachel Thompson recalls 19 months of pain ahead of big Super League return

by www.mirror.co.uk Leave a Comment

After 19 months out of action, it’s little wonder Wigan’s Rachel Thompson can’t wait for Betfred Women’s Super League to kick-off.

The England centre, 28, attended today’s season launch at Headingley knowing she is edging ever closer to her long-awaited return. Wigan captain Thompson didn’t play at all last year and missed the World Cup after an horrific knee injury. Recollecting a fateful play-off game against Castleford in September 2021, she said: “I dislocated my kneecap, snapped my ACL, my MCL and my meniscus.

“I had it reconstructed in the November and had to have another op to have some of it cleaned out. It has been a tough, old journey. A long 19 months on the sidelines. Not that I’m counting! There’s a lot of girls in our squad that I haven’t even had an opportunity to play with let alone captain. But I’m probably about a month away from playing now. For me it’s just about just getting back on the pitch but also bringing that leadership style to the team and really stepping up a gear from what we did last year.”

Thompson feared she might have to quit at some stages. She said: “It was always a possibility. There were times when the knee constantly didn’t feel good or wasn’t working properly. There were times when I felt I might have to hang up the boots but the club was great. I had a lot of good people around me who said ‘Just stick with and trust the process.’ It has come good and for the past couple of months it has felt fine.”

Super League returns with a rematch of last year’s Grand Final when champions Leeds Rhinos host York Valkyrie in front of the Sky Sports cameras on Easter Sunday. Both sides will pay their players for the first time in 2023, another sign that the sport is growing on the back of an excellent home World Cup. And the game forms part of a double-header with the men’s Super League fixture between Leeds and Huddersfield Giants.

(L-r) Barrow’s Michelle Larkin, Warrington’s Armani Sharrock, Castleford’s Kaitlin Varley, York’s Sinead Peach, Salford’s Louise Fellingham, Leeds’ Hanna Butcher, Huddersfield’s Bella Sykes, Bradford’s Jess Harrop, Wigan’s Rachel Thompson, Featherstone’s Danielle Waters, St Helens’ Jodie Cunningham and Leigh’s Mairead Quinn at the Betfred Women’s Super League launch in Leeds (ALLAN MCKENZIE/SWPIX) (

Image:

Allan McKenzie/SWpix.com)

Wigan, who start at Warrington on April 16, were left trophyless last year but they hope to challenge this time around. Thompson has been with them since day one, becoming their first signing in 2018 when she ended the year by scoring a hat-trick in the Grand Final win over Leeds. The sport has grown massively since then, expanding to 12 clubs this year with the addition of Leigh Leopards and Salford Red Devils.

Thompson added: “The girls put on a great show at the World Cup and they are now just getting the recognition they deserve. We see it all the time: the hard work and hours they put in after work but the world doesn’t. But now it’s good to see the games being on Sky, the World Cup was on the BBC and it’s really exciting.”

Read More

Read More

Read More

Read More

Read More

This is how a Singaporean mum built a 6-figure business with just $2,000

by www.asiaone.com Leave a Comment

Having kids doesn’t come cheap.

According to NUS economists in 2018, the cost to raise a child in Singapore is estimated to be between $280,000 and $560,000, depending on household income.

From the get-go, you have to make decisions about the right formula, diaper brand etc. And for working mums who are breastfeeding – the right type of pump.

One local mum turned her experience and challenge finding an affordable breast pump into a business opportunity.

With $2,000, straight out of her kids’ savings, she started a breast pump brand that now rakes in a six-figure annual revenue.

To find out more, Rachel Kelly spoke to Stacy Chow, Founder, Baby Express on The Afternoon Update.

Rachel Kelly: Let’s talk about the business. What was the catalyst that made you take that leap of faith and decide that you were going to launch Baby Express?

Stacy Chow: I did plan to head back to the workforce once I had recovered from giving birth, but I was always wondering how I was supposed to be able to breastfeed and work at the same time.

Back in 2018, I found myself looking around for a portable breast pump in Singapore but to no avail – which I believed was something that a working mother would need.

I happened to meet up with a few suppliers and manufacturers, where we got on and that was how things really started – my own business of making breast pumps.

We were fortunate as the local market was lacking them then, creating this fantastic opportunity for us to grow rapidly.

We worked with a factory to conceptualise some designs for us and we fine-tuned from there, making it as practical as possible for working mothers.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CqcwngxS3ON/?hl=en

Rachel: So what’re you offering currently? Are you expanding your product portfolio as well?

Stacy: We launched Baby Express – a portable and wireless breast pump with no obstructive wires – in August 2019.

It is hands-free and very quiet. As many offices do not have a lactation room, working mothers can then pump from their desks, during meetings and just about anywhere.

In terms of portfolio, we have extended slightly this year because we realised that the market not just wants a product, where you can get it from anywhere, but an experience and a guide.

That’s also partly why I took up marketing courses to understand how the market works, a lactation consultant course and a postpartum doula course – even though I wasn’t from an entrepreneurial background.

We’ll be able to assist our users and guide them on the right breastfeeding journey. We also have the essentials that a breastfeeding mum would need.

Rachel: I think it is important to enjoy the convenience of having a comfortable pump even when you’re sitting at your desk, and not carrying around something big and chunky – especially when you’re balancing a baby, a laptop and a pump at the same time. What were some of the key challenges that you faced? What was sales like in the beginning compared to now?

Stacy: The biggest challenge was not really understanding how to run a business properly.

It was really something that I chanced upon with lots of opportunities and help from many great people to get started on the journey.

In the beginning, it wasn’t that great because we were not a pioneer in the market as there were others available overseas, but our primary goal was to create something affordable yet reliable.

We started off selling about less than 50 pumps a week to about 500 currently.

Rachel: What are some of the key lessons you’ve learnt that you’re able to share with the mothers out there who may be thinking of a career shift or want to start a business of their own – without neglecting their kids too?

Stacy: It’s not the easiest with 4 kids and an active business.

The good thing is that the business runs on a flexible schedule so that’s one way to manage my priorities.

Another lesson that I’ve learnt is to really stand in the shoes of a consumer to see if the product really helps. I think it’s very easy to own a product nowadays but the main problem is left to wonder how this product is going to integrate into people’s lives.

Listen to the full podcast on Awedio: SPH’s free digital audio streaming service , as Stacy shared more on how she turned $2,000 in savings into a breast pump brand that now brings in six-figures in annual revenue.

Download the podcast.

ALSO READ: How this single mum of 4 became a super successful businesswoman in Singapore

This article was first published in MONEY FM 89.3 .

How Social Media Can Become Our New Rape Whistle

by www.thecut.com Leave a Comment

Photo: Photos: Patrick Swan/Corbis, Radius Images/Corbis

Earlier this week, on the heels of guilty verdicts in the Steubenville case of two football players who sexually assaulted a girl and broadcast it on social media, teenagers in the town of Torrington, Connecticut, were blowing up Facebook and Twitter with vile, victim-blaming comments about a 13-year-old who says she was raped by two 18-year-old football players. If we hadn’t been aware before, this week has made clear that, in the digital era, the accuser and the accused are not the only parties involved in sexual assault cases. We’re all bystanders on social networks.

Social media has been rightly hailed for bringing the Steubenville crime to light. Texts, tweets, and photos were essential to establishing that this was not a consensual act and not a “he said/she said” story. Yet paradoxically, both the Steubenville and Torrington rape cases have escalated the narrative — one that’s swirled around ever since the days of A/S/L queries in an AOL chatrooms — that the Internet is jeopardizing the privacy and safety of teens. And, in particular, teen girls.

Before it was even available in every home, let alone every purse and pocket in America, adults were worried that the Internet would enable sexual assault and stalking of naïve teens, who would log on and reveal details about themselves to older predators. As we welcomed Web 2.0 and smartphones and broadband into our lives, it became clear that their peers perhaps posed a greater risk, as social media became the place where bullying and rumor-mongering — practices as old as schoolyard itself — became easy to spread at the click of a button. The case of Amanda Todd took these fears to a horrifying extreme: The Canadian teenager was so brutally harassed after a topless photo of her made the rounds in her high school that she eventually committed suicide.

Even though the Steubenville case involved the malicious spread of information online — photos of the passed-out victim were plastered all over social media without her consent — the fact that the case ended in two rape convictions notably revealed that social media is not always negative for young women. “Cellphone videos can be forwarded to authorities, not circulated as jokes,” writes Amanda Hess at Slate. “Text messages can be used to identify rapists, not shame victims. And photos can establish central facts, not publicize humiliation.”

When issuing the Steubenville verdict, Judge Thomas Lipps warned teens to think about “how you record things on the social media so prevalent today.” Lipps, with his finger-wagging tone, is not alone in his fears about the effects of Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. As columnist Kathleen Parker writes this week in the Washington Post , “What hasn’t been addressed is the factor of social media in the events themselves.” She wonders whether our tendency to ‘gram and tweet the tiniest details has detached us from events unfolding in front of our faces, some modern form of the psychological effect that murder victim Kitty Genovese ushered in almost 60 years ago. The implication is that all of the high schoolers who tweeted and retweeted and texted the violence that was perpetrated against this girl in Ohio would have somehow been more likely to intervene in a pre-digital era. Decades of research on the Bystander Effect has shown us that’s not true, which means the Internet is once again acquitted. Bullies, killers, and rapists are the problem, not the medium by which they broadcast their crimes.

In almost every prominent news story about how the dynamics of social media play out offline, young women are set up as victims rather than agents and drivers of technology. The case has been made repeatedly that the digital era puts young women at risk in new ways — they can be stalked with smartphones, slut-shamed on instant messenger, targeted by rapists on social media. But the Internet can also be a source of power and protection — and I’m not just talking about accountability in rape cases. (A new report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project finds that 34 percent of teen girls “mostly go online using their cell phone,” compared with 24 percent of teen boys. “This is notable since boys and girls are equally likely to be smartphone owners,” the study says.) I use an app called CheckOn.Me , which notifies a select group of contacts if I fail to log in to the app after, say, meeting up with some unknown CraigsList seller about buying a chair. More generally, social media allows me a way to casually check up on friends. If I know a friend of mine was on a blind date the night before, I confess that I am slightly relieved when I see a new tweet from her in the morning or that she’s liked something on Facebook. For all the headlines about women being creeped online, it’s easy to forget that, far more often, social media provides new ways to blow the whistle.

The Internet isn’t some lawless netherworld, it’s merely a reflection of social dynamics — and yes, sometimes crimes — that occur in the offline world. Put another way, by Sarah Gram in an essay about teen girls and selfies, “Do we honestly think that by ceasing to take and post selfies, the bodies of young women would cease to be spectacles?” If we didn’t have Instagram pictures and tweets about it, the rape that occurred in Steubenville wouldn’t be any less real. It just would have been less documented. I agree with Judge Lipps that we should all think about how we’re using social media: Rather than just recognizing its potential to hurt and expose, start appreciating how it enables us to help keep each other safe.

Maybe Australia needs another ‘banana republic’ moment to reset our gun-shy budget politics

by www.abc.net.au Leave a Comment

There’s a process in politics known as giving people space, or sometimes just giving people permission.

When there is a difficult issue to be confronted, around which everyone has very entrenched views, players outside the system (or sometimes even in it) can help break a stalemate by resetting the boundaries of the discussion.

In the world of political deal making, it is the great value of having a more diverse parliament than one purely comprising two major political groupings.

It’s not just that there are votes on the floor to be had, negotiations to be done. It’s that the cross bench opens up new discussions in places where it is difficult for the major parties to go without straying from long held positions.

Would Labor have been prepared to move as far this week , for example, as they did on policies which severely constrain — in practice, if not explicitly — new coal and gas projects, if the Greens hadn’t been calling for a total ban on such projects?

We aren’t talking here about whether or not any of the policy options are good, bad or indifferent. Just about the mechanics of a political party that has become gun-shy about doing anything significant about emissions reduction, after repeated pastings by the Coalition, having “space” to move. But not as far as the Greens might want.

The task of giving governments space to move also often falls to those outside the system but with authority or credibility to change the conversation.

Federal parliament rose this week for the last time before Jim Chalmers’ budget on May 9.

Never has there been more need to change the political conversation about policy than there has been about federal budgets just now.

Reflecting on Keating’s ‘banana republic’ remark

The number of utterly inconsistent ideas and realities pressing in on the budget discussion, not just the budget itself, is at a level I certainly haven’t seen in four decades of writing about them. Yet it’s still not at the point where someone really calls it out and changes the discussion altogether.

The period leading up to Paul Keating’s banana republic statement comes to mind. There had been maybe one or two years of increasing alarmist conversation about Australia’s foreign debt.

But it was Keating’s remark that if we didn’t fix it, we would become a banana republic that really transformed the debate about economic policy in Australia.

Of course, by comparison with the sorts of numbers for budget deficits and debt that we have now absorbed, the alarms of the mid 1980s seem sort of laughable.

At that point, though, there seemed to be a range of hard but clear options for dealing with the “crisis”: budgetary change — in the form of significant spending cuts and tax changes which would enhance investment decisions; labour and product market deregulation to make the economy more efficient and competitive.

These were perhaps the first layer of policy prescription orthodoxies that continue to prevail in theory, if not in practice, right through to today.

On top of that, we have been stuck with the ludicrous idea that tax as a percentage of GDP can go no higher than 23.9 per cent of GDP: ludicrous because it has no basis in economic policy. It has just been asserted as being really excellent because it was the level that prevailed when John Howard left office.

The spending side of the budget alone has carried the burden of the whole “debt and deficits” schtick.

Nudging the government towards courage

So here we are approaching the 2023 budget with literally unparalleled levels of debt and deficit generated through a pandemic; with an acknowledgement that the demands of our ageing population alone are going to significantly increase government spending; with an eye-watering commitment to a questionable nuclear submarine program dwarfing all previous levels of expenditure; that the current mix of tax bases in the economy are inefficient and eroding; but still little real sign that the status quo on tax might have to change.

There are few people trying to give the government space here — and even possibly a bit of a nudge towards courage.

One of them is crossbencher Allegra Spender who on Friday organised a tax roundtable with a range of experts to open up the discussion about what needs to happen.

Spender isn’t necessarily saying we need more tax or less tax. Her point seems to be more about the efficacy of some tax arrangements.

One of the experts at the roundtable was Dr Ken Henry. Henry was a key player in the Keating tax reforms of the 1980s and in the Howard/Costello reforms of the 1990s .

And he headed the wildly ambitious tax review commissioned by Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan which is mostly known for what became known as the mining tax. It also proposed profound changes to many of our tax bases — including land and transport — which have never really seen the light of day.

In a landmark speech a couple of weeks ago, Henry sought to revive the debate . And in a subsequent interview on 7.30, he observed that Australia had been “kidding ourselves” about the scope to rein in a huge deficit through spending cuts alone.

Over 20 years, he said, Australia had neither managed to keep spending under control or boost productivity in a way sufficient to allow us not to increase taxes.

That meant the task now, given a budget deficit of around $44 billion, was that “we’re talking about a fairly immediate or close to immediate increase in revenue of the order of $50 billion a year”.

‘Incremental’ changes here and there

But instead, we had been having a brawl about superannuation changes that would raise “something of the order of $2 billion a year”.

“Clearly that is a drop in the bucket compared to the $50 billion, at least, that needs to be raised in additional revenue, in short order.” Henry said.

“It’s remarkable to me that there’s been so much debate over what is really such a small measure. If this is how we’re going to address the problem by incremental change here and incremental that change there, and so on, we’re going to need 20 or 30 such measures, in order to address the fiscal challenge that we confront.”

Henry argues Australia has to learn how to place less reliance on personal income tax and more reliance on other revenue bases “that do less economic damage”.

Other tax bases are morphing, or disappearing, before our eyes, he notes. For example, fuel excise is disappearing thanks to electric cars.

But beyond that, he says: “As a nation that has such a peculiar reliance upon the export of natural resources, mineral resources in particular, I still find it quite extraordinary that we have not been able to figure out how to extract more revenue from that particular source. It just defies understanding.”

On Friday, the Financial Review revealed the government is looking at raising billions of dollars more tax from the profits of gas producers through the existing petroleum resource rent tax.

One suspects that, like superannuation changes, that might be just a “drop in the bucket”.

First, we need a clear direction — and a reset in our discussion about the aims and methods of the federal budget.

Laura Tingle is 7.30’s chief political correspondent.

Posted

Home improvement projects will be more expensive this year

by www.cbsnews.com Leave a Comment

Homeowners planning major renovations this year could face sticker shock.

The price of construction and building materials rose 3% in February from a year ago, labor data shows. But some items have  skyrocketed. The cost of construction bricks has jumped 25%, while general contractors are charging more amid a shortage of skilled workers, Wall Street Journal reporter Rachel Wolfe told CBS News.

“That has led to these projects just dragging out and dragging out,” she said, adding that some Americans are just “living in these half-finished houses among piles of construction debris because there just aren’t enough workers to finish the job.”

The construction industry needs about 546,000 additional workers to keep up pace for 2023, the Associated Builders and Contractors said last month. Homeowners typically call contractors when it’s time to renovate their property.

Despite higher material costs, improvement projects will continue to be a top priority for homeowners this year as opposed to moving into another property, according to Houzz , an online home renovation marketplace. That’s partly because more homeowners are staying put, deterred from trading up by historically high mortgage rates. Most homeowners planning to renovate have their sights set on remodeling a bathroom or kitchen, while smaller numbers are looking to hire a professional to spruce up electrical wiring or cabinets, the survey found.

The median cost of revamping a kitchen and main bathroom — the two most popular renovations homeowners undertake — is $20,000 and $13,500 respectively, Houzz found. That’s an increase from $12,000 and $8,000 respectively in 2020, according to Houzz.

Contractors are also feeling the impact of higher building material prices and labor costs.

“We have prices on one side, homeowners on the other side and we’re squeezed in between,” Miguel Villamil, who owns a general contracting firm in Indianapolis, told CBS News.

Still, the elevated price of building materials didn’t deter homeowners from making upgrades last year. In 2021, 24.5 milion homeowners completed at least one home improvement project — up from 22.2 million in 2019, according to a Harvard University study .

All told, Americans spent an estimated $567 billion on home improvements and repairs in 2022, up 15% from 2021, the Harvard study found. That figure is expected to reach $580 billion this year.

Khristopher J. Brooks

Khristopher J. Brooks is a reporter for CBS MoneyWatch covering business, consumer and financial stories that range from economic inequality and housing issues to bankruptcies and the business of sports.