NINE out of 10 learning and development (L&D) professionals in this region believe that proactively building employee skills for today and tomorrow will help navigate the evolving future of work.
L&D helps organisations thrive amid uncertain economic times and a people-centric culture recognises that organisational success depends on people’s success.
Management, communication and sales are some of the top in-demand skills that are highly sought after by companies in Malaysia, according to Linkedin’s latest “Workplace Learning Report”.
Since upskilling and reskilling are essential, over half of those L&D leaders across Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines surveyed expect to have more spending power in 2023.
The report said retention is a big issue as 93% of organisations are concerned over it.
This is so since many organisations grappled with unprecedented employee turnover in the pandemic’s wake.
And even while some layoffs have made headlines in recent months, talent development professionals continue to grapple with skills shortages and turnover risk for critical talent.
It is not surprising that attrition anxieties persist.
People who are not learning normally leave organisations as they do not fit or grapple to understand the new ways of doing things.
The
Malaysian Education Ministry should review the way English is taught and find ways and means to improve it, rather than rehashing the failed
PPSMI in the guise of the DLP
The challenge arisen from the use of drugs is an international one; it is most acute in the US. Twelve percent of global drug users come from the country, three times the proportion of the US population to that of the world, according to a recent report released by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
Facts and statistics revealed that the US government has been delegating its primary responsibility to protect its citizens to the people themselves. The drug abuse is just one case in point.
Politicians have been ignoring the sedation or even outright poison administered by interest groups to the public, always for selfish political gains.
Check out this photographic to get deeper understanding of the gravity, causes and costs of this social malaise in the US.
Drug Abuse: A Social Malaise in US. Graphics: Tang Tengfei, Chen He, Liu Xidan, Xia Qing/GT >>
A man smokes marijuana while celebrating the passage of Amendment 3 which legalizes recreational marijuana in Missouri during an Election night watch party in downtown St. Louis, US on November 8, 2022. Photo: VCG
Big Pharma greed, lobbying, failed governance, and economic woes lead to US' drug crisis
Editor's Note:
While the US continues to buy into the dual fallacy of being the "city upon a hill" and a "beacon of democracy," the reality on the ground tells a different story - an increasingly large swathe of the American population struggling with drug abuse, growing worries around gun violence, an ever-widening economic gap between the haves and the have nots, intensifying political polarization, more arbitrary detention of and hatred toward minorities... These sustained forms of unrest not only exacerbate social inequality and worsens domestic human rights conditions, but also expose the US' hypocrisy as it is unable to resolve its own issues, yet never stops criticizing other nations' human rights records.
The Global Times is publishing a series of articles that examine these and other sociopolitical and economic forms of chaos in the US. This is the first installment in the series.
America's drug abuse problem - a long-existing thorn in the side of US society - has grown more serious in recent years in the country along with an increasing number of young people turning to drugs due to dwindling economic opportunities and the apparent death of the so-called "American Dream," analysts said.
Statistics showed that 12 percent of global drug users come from the US, three times the proportion of the US population to that of the world, according to a report released by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
Experts told the Global Times that the deep-rooted drug problem in the US reflects the US' failure in social governance. Despite the US government's pledge to solve the problem, not much progress has been made so far, which exposes its failed regulation across multiple systems and its inability to make an effective and comprehensive response.
The drug problem in the US is caused by an interplay among economic interests, lobby groups, as well as social and cultural factors, an expert in international relations at Fudan University, told the Global Times.
The drug problem is the US' big systematic problem. It is hard to solve. The US should make more efforts as a nation and at the same time, take action together with other countries. Instead of shifting blame and making groundless accusations against other countries, which undermines China-US counter-narcotics cooperation, it should face its own problem squarely, observers said.
Prevalent phenomenon
A man walks past a large consignment of drugs seized by police in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on February 17, 2022. Photo: Xinhua
The US National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics (NCDAS) lists eight categories of drugs most commonly used in the country: alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, fentanyl, opioids (mainly referring to psychotropic substances under control), prescription stimulants, methamphetamines, and heroin.
Forty-six percent of US drug users report having experience in using cannabis and prescription stimulants, 36 percent have used opioids and methamphetamines, 31 percent have used prescription stimulants, 15 percent have used heroin, and 10 percent have used cocaine.
Darnell Turner, a young US teacher, told the Global Times that a good percentage of young people around him are drug users, perhaps 30 percent or so.
"Most normally just use marijuana, however some, especially my college friends, take even harder drugs, like cocaine and acid. Adderall, a drug used to improve attention and focus, is extremely common in educational environments," he said, adding that recreational drug uses isn't only confined to the younger generation. Many older people also suffer from drug addiction.
"Most of them take drugs because they're bored, or because of depression brought about by economic insecurity. Taking drugs allows them to dull the pain from modern American society," he said, stressing that this is dangerous and useless.
While the US federal and state governments keep making pledges to tackle the drug problem, they have failed to take substantive measures due to the lobbying activities of various interest groups, observers said.
Reports showed that large pharmaceutical companies in the US devote large sums of money to peddle narratives such as "opioids are harmless" and push forward drug legalization as well as promotion of drug sales and prescription of drugs. The lawmakers who receive money from them actively promote bills that benefit Big Pharma.
The process of legalizing marijuana serves as one striking example. According to a report on the OpenSecrets website in April 2022, the marijuana and cannabis industry spent over $4.2 million lobbying on a variety of issues and legislation in 2021, including the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment, and Expungement (MORE) Act of 2021 which aimed to remove marijuana from the list of federally controlled substances.
Amazon also spent $14.5 million funding lobbying activities between April and December in 2021 on a variety of bills, including the MORE Act, read the report.
"Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), the sole Republican co-sponsor of the bill, has received more money from the marijuana industry than any other member of Congress with $52,100 in contributions received since his election in 2017," it said.
The US government has chosen economic interests over people's lives and health, thereby exerting a sustained push for drug legalization in the country. Despite this gloomy reality, the US government, which should play an important role in the fight against one of the biggest public health challenges, chooses to sit idly by and watch things getting worse, observers said.
In the last decade, drug-related deaths in the country have risen significantly; the numbers more than tripled in Delaware and New Hampshire. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the year following the outbreak of the pandemic (from April 2020 to April 2021), more than 100,000 people in the US died from drug overdoses, eight times the number from shooting incidents, and nearly triple the number of deaths caused by traffic accidents.
Deep-rooted social causes
Throughout history, the US war on drugs has repeatedly failed due to not only governmental incompetence but also the country's deep-rooted social problems, observers told the Global Times.
It is the US society's various complex social factors that, together, have led to the country gradually becoming the world's largest consumer of drugs, they noted. "From the Vietnam War, to financial crises and the COVID-19 pandemic, drug abuse in the US has surged whenever there are economic turndowns or prominent social contradictions."
The US' official drug war can be traced back to 1952, when then-president Richard Nixon signed the famous Boggs Act to set mandatory sentences for drug convictions.
The act and subsequent laws soon proved defective and impractical. In the 1960s and 70s, the US' time-consuming war in Vietnam triggered a "counterculture movement" as American society at the time was flooded by anti-war sentiments. Many youngsters, later known as "hippies," poured onto the streets with brandishing signs promoting love, psychedelic rock, sex, and drugs.
Nearly 40 percent of American high school seniors in the late 1970s reported illicit drug use, according to data from a survey funded by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
The COVID pandemic saw another spike in drug use in the US, as NIDA statistics showed that 91,799 and 106,999 people in the US died from drug-related overdoses in 2020 and 2021 respectively, a sharp increase from 70,630 in 2019.
Apart from social recession or crises that stimulate drug use at times, the severe inaccessibility to quality education targeting young people is also another contributing factor behind the US' drug abuse problem, experts noted.
For US teens, "it's easier to get alcohol than marijuana" used to be a common sentiment in some states, and scenes involving teens smoking marijuana are not rare in American TV series or Hollywood movies. In 2021, 30.5 percent of 12th graders and 17.3 percent of 10th graders in the US reported having used marijuana, according to NIDA.
"Chinese children are warned by parents and teachers to stay away from drugs since early age. But some American parents and teachers, rather than discouraging such behavior among their students, may even encourage some [drug use]," said the Fudan University expert. "These adults have very weak anti-drug awareness, and a few even use drugs themselves."
Against such a complex social backdrop, Nixon and his several successors in recent decades, including Ronald Reagan in the 1990s and more recently former president Donald Trump, have tried to curtail the drug abuse problem in various ways. However, very few of their efforts really worked.
Worse still, crackdowns on drugs have caused "unintended, negative consequences," such as putting a big strain on America's criminal justice system, the proliferation of drug-related violence, and an increase in racial issues locally, said a 2016 article published on American news and opinion website Vox.
Therefore, as the war on drugs looks unwinnable, some US policy experts and historians have to focus more on rehabilitation. Ironically, they seem to have given up, turning to advocate for "the decriminalization of currently illicit substances, and even the legalization of all drugs," the article said.
Buck-passing games
A lab evaluates edible marijuana gummy samples in California on August 22, 2018. Photo: VCG
The failure in giving effective "prescriptions" to prevent drug abuse leaves the US frantically attempting to pass the buck to other countries. Over the years, American politicians and media outlets have consistently accused China of selling fentanyl or precursor chemicals that end up on US shores.
"This sort of blame game does not benefit anyone except for the opportunistic politicians who wish to deflect blame onto a scapegoat. This scapegoat changes regularly, from China, to Mexico, and even Columbia. But in the case of the fentanyl crisis, the US government and healthcare system can only blame themselves," said Turner.
He told the Global Times that fentanyl has been spread in the US, not by the Chinese or the Mexicans, but by the US healthcare industry, which has a monetary incentive to overprescribe drugs. "If the US is serious about fighting the drug crisis, it must fundamentally reshape this sector."
In December 2021, the US government imposed sanctions on 25 entities and individuals allegedly involved in drug trafficking, among which four Chinese chemical companies and one Chinese citizen appeared on the sanctions list for supplying chemicals used to make fentanyl.
US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price on January 18 said that China is no longer a major source of fentanyl flowing into the US, but they continue to target China-origin precursor chemicals being used in fentanyl production.
In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry's spokesperson Wang Wenbin on January 20 said that China has played an active role in international counternarcotics law enforcement cooperation under the framework of the UN conventions on drug control and always put precursor chemicals under strict control. China is the first in the world to have officially scheduled fentanyl as a class.
US sanctions have severely impacted and limited China's counternarcotics capabilities, said Wang, calling on the US to lift sanctions and stop discrediting China's drug control efforts.
Over the years, China has actively cooperated with the US, while the US has passed on the blame. The US' attitude is not conducive to solving the problem, which truly needs international cooperation, analysts said.
According to data from the China National Narcotics Control Commission in 2019, since 2012, China has informed the US drug enforcement authorities of 383 pieces of information related to Fentanyl parcels, while the US has informed China of only six smuggling cases of fentanyl.
"International cooperation is entirely necessary, but what is most important in the struggle against drugs is introspection and investigating the profiteers in the business sector, the public and, yes, even in the government sectors. Only then can the US government take legitimate steps to combat the spread of drugs," Turner suggested.
A picture released by the Danish Defence Command shows the gas leak at the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline seen from the Danish F-16 interceptor on Bornholm, Denmark on September 27, 2022. The two Nord Stream gas pipelines linking Russia and Europe have been hit by unexplained leaks, raising suspicions of sabotage. Photo: AFP
More than four months after the explosion of Nord Stream pipelines, a shocking report by US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh released on Wednesday has once again ignited international public opinion. The report provides details of how the US intelligence agencies planned the sabotage under the order of US President Joe Biden and how the US Navy carried out the bombing with the cooperation of the Norwegian forces. After the report was published, Washington quickly denied it. But simply using the phrase "fake news" is obviously not convincing. The international community needs to keep asking Washington until it gives a convincing explanation.
The 85-year-old Hersh is a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. More than 50 years ago, his report that exposed the US military's massacre of Vietnamese civilians significantly pushed the anti-war movement in the US. He was also behind the investigation of the notorious incident of Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse in 2003 and contributed to revealing the Watergate scandal, one of the most disgraceful political scandals in Washington's history. Hersh's latest report is not comparable to conspiracy theories in public opinion, nor are they something Washington can just gloss over.
To be honest, the suspicions about the US are not baseless, but the details that got exposed still send chills down one's spine. For example, the report claims that Washington had been secretly planning the sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines since the end of 2021, long before the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. And in more than nine months of debate, Washington focused not on whether to blow up the pipelines, but on how to leave no evidence behind. Therefore, the execution forces, time, place, and the way the explosion was carried out were all carefully planned. Even the most imaginative screenwriter in Hollywood would not dare to write such a plot. If what is reported in Hersh's article is true, then the world will probably have to reassess the US' capability to disrupt peace.
The explosion of the Nord Stream pipelines, one of the world's most important transnational energy supply infrastructures, was an extreme event in international politics. Under the fragile political mutual trust, the Nord Stream pipelines were once a main artery of energy connecting Western Europe and Russia, stabilizing the security situation by expanding common interests. Because of this, it has always been a "thorn in the eye" of Washington.
With the blast of the Nord Stream pipelines, the only remaining bridge to build common security in Europe was destroyed, which means that Western European countries have to choose to be deeply bound with the US at the crossroads of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Hersh also mentioned in his latest report that "Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia - while diminishing European reliance on America." This is one of the main reasons Washington decided to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines.
Attacking and destroying major civil infrastructure is a highly egregious act of terrorist nature and must not be tolerated. The international community has no dispute over this. After the explosion, many countries publicly condemned it, and the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also declared that sabotage on the Nord Stream gas pipelines would be "in no-one's interest."
The Global Times then published an editorial, calling for relevant international agencies to set up a joint investigation team to restore the truth as soon as possible, find out the perpetrators, and let them be punished. But as expected, some countries are blocking such an international investigation, and more than four months have passed, with little progress made. Hersh's report now at least provides an important clue to the international investigation.
It is worth noting that the US mainstream media, which has always claimed to be "professional" and "independent," was selectively blind to Hersh's revelations or simply reported denials by the US government. Compared with their unanimously pointing their fingers at Russia after the explosion, this abnormal silence shows that American media agencies are very clear about when to be high-profile or low-key.
A large number of facts show that the US is the well-deserved leader in the "double standard arena." It is obsessed with and good at fabricating rumors or making groundless accusations against others. But it will never admit its own mistakes or even crimes, even if the evidence is solid. It will instead try to blame others. Public opinion predicts that the US government will most likely respond to Hersh's revelations in this way, which will leave another stain on its international credibility.
It is likely to become an event with the Rashomon effect in the 21st century for how the Nord Stream pipeline incident happened. But it does not mean that we should give up the pursuit of the truth, because it is not only about morality, responsibility, and conscience, but also about what kind of footnotes human beings will write for war and peace when looking back at this period of history in the future. This is very important.
US urged to explain Nord Stream blasts after Pulitzer winner's probe
A picture released by the Danish Defence Command shows the gas leak at the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline seen from the Danish F-16 interceptor on Bornholm, Denmark on September 27, 2022. The two Nord Stream gas pipelines linking Russia and Europe have been hit by unexplained leaks, raising suspicions of sabotage. Photo: AFP
About five months after the explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipelines which shocked the world, an article by veteran US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has accused the US of being the culprit of the blasts.
Washington has denied the accusations without further explanation, but the article immediately prompted a fierce verbal confrontation between the US and Russia and making waves in geopolitics.
Given previous US behaviors, Chinese experts believe that the Hersh report is highly credible and Washington's denial cannot hinder Russia's determination to dig out more evidence from the report's value as a clue.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Wednesday urged the US to give an explanation over its role in 2022 explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipelines. "The White House must now comment on all these facts," Zakharova said in a post on her Telegram page.
In response, White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said on Wednesday that the investigative article was "utterly false and complete fiction," and the CIA and Pentagon also dismissed the allegation with similar rhetoric, according to media reports.
Hersh, an 85-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner, published the article on his personal website on Wednesday, stating the US military involvement of sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipelines after senior White House officials' nine-month long plot inside the national security community.
Citing sources with direct knowledge of the plot, the article revealed many details of the operation: Explosives were planted by US Navy divers under the cover of the NATO maritime exercise; and a surveillance plane of NATO member Norway triggered the explosives on September 26, 2022 after US President Joe Biden greenlighted the operation.
Although there's no final verdict on who was responsible, the US, NATO, as well as investigators from Sweden and Denmark agreed it was "a result of sabotage."
Finding smoking gun
Some US media had blamed Russia as the likely culprit soon after the Nord Stream explosion in September 2022, but Hersh wrote that political elites from his country has more incentives to destroy the pipeline regarding their words prior to the incident.
On February 7, 2022, US President Joe Biden threatened that "if Russian tanks or troops cross the border of Ukraine, there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2."
At a press conference in September 2022 about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested halting Nord Stream is a "tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy" and stop Russia from "weaponizing energy" for political purposes.
If Biden were an ordinary citizen, and a tube explosion had happened somewhere in the US after Biden made those threats, his words would have been interpreted by the US procurator as a strong motive, and Biden would bear legal liability,Lü Xiang, an expert on US studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Thursday.
Hersh proved his credibility in his investigations on the 1969 massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US forces and US troops brutalizing Iraqi prisoners after the US invasion in 2003, which prompted Lü to believe in his latest investigation of the North Stream pipeline explosion.
"Even if it's not 100 percent accurate - exposure of such shady activity can hardly be 100 percent accurate - it's definitely not made up out of nowhere," Lü noted.
As of press time, US mainstream media including The New York Times and The Washington Post maintained silence on the matter, which is qualified to be top on a US newspaper's front page.
Lü suspected the consistent silence was a sound coordination between the US media and the US government, and the strategy is to deny it and wipe it from news portals even if their smoking gun was caught.
Li Haidong, a professor at the Institute of International Relations at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Thursday that as the US had used washing powder to accuse Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction, it's a genius of playing dirty.
Hersh's courage should be praised, yet analysts expressed concerns about his safety.
It is obvious that the US benefited most from the destroyed pipelines. "If the US was behind the sabotage, definitely the Americans would have carefully planned how to destroy or hide the evidence and mislead the public," Li said.
Lü said that without an entity in legal sense to be in charge of such international disputes, it is almost impossible to establish a legal fact even if more evidence further support the point that the US was the culprit. But this investigative report will strengthen Russia's determination to dig out more evidence, he said.
Reactions to the blasts by some Western leaders also added to suspicion of US, including then British Prime Minister Liz Truss' texting "it's done" to Blinken and former Polish foreign minister's tweet "Thank you, USA."
In January 2023, Russia blamed that Sweden and Denmark, who were investigating holes in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, "have something to hide" and blocked Russia from engaging in the joint investigation.
"Whether or not the US is the culprit, Europe has acted too obedient. It is also tragic that as the Russia-Ukraine conflict intensifies, Europe has less and less room to bargain with US on security issues," Li said.
European politicians should reflect on whether blindly following the US would ultimately benefit Europe, or just the opposite, the expert said. He urged Europe to effectively strengthen autonomy. "Otherwise incidents like the Nord Steam pipeline blasts could happen again, and the price will again be paid by Europe, not the US."
The
Malaysian Education Ministry should review the way English is taught and find ways and means to improve it, rather than rehashing the failed
PPSMI in the guise of the DLP 
