This might not be the typical expat blog, written by a German expat, living in the Philippines since 1999. It's different. In English and in German. Check it out! Enjoy reading!
Dies mag' nun wirklich nicht der typische Auswandererblog eines Deutschen auf den Philippinen sein. Er soll etwas anders sein. In Englisch und in Deutsch! Viel Spass beim Lesen!
You plan to move to the Philippines? Wollen Sie auf den Philippinen leben?
There are REALLY TONS of websites telling us how, why, maybe why not and when you'll be able to move to the Philippines. I only love to tell and explain some things "between the lines". Enjoy reading, be informed, have fun and be entertained too!
Ja, es gibt tonnenweise Webseiten, die Ihnen sagen wie, warum, vielleicht warum nicht und wann Sie am besten auf die Philippinen auswandern könnten. Ich möchte Ihnen in Zukunft "zwischen den Zeilen" einige zusätzlichen Dinge berichten und erzählen. Viel Spass beim Lesen und Gute Unterhaltung!
Visitors of germanexpatinthephilippines/Besucher dieser Webseite.Ich liebe meine Flaggensammlung!
Showing posts with label Associated Press. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Associated Press. Show all posts
As trouble mounted late in the first set, in which Bencic broke in each of Gauff's last two service games — one of which ended with a pair of double-faults — the American kept missing the mark, compiling a whopping 20 unforced errors.
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Coco Gauff's consecutive-set streak ended at the Australian Open. Her bid for a second Grand Slam title continued on Sunday, Jan. 19, with a 5-7, 6-2, 6-1 comeback victory over Belinda Bencic in the fourth round.
Coco Gauff of the US returns a shot from Belinda Bencic of Switzerland during their fourth round match at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne, Australia, Sunday, Jan. 19, 2025. (AP)
Gauff, a 20-year-old from Florida who won the 2023 U.S. Open as a teenager, had collected all 16 sets she'd played this year and 24 of her past 25 dating to the end of last season, which included a title at the WTA Finals.
But the tournament's No. 3 seed was unable to control her shots well enough at the start against Bencic on a steamy early afternoon in Rod Laver Arena, where the temperature hit 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 Celsius) and the blue playing surface was bathed in sunlight.
Spectators seated along the sides of the court fanned themselves; Gauff sought relief from cool air provided at the players' sideline benches.
As trouble mounted late in the first set, in which Bencic broke in each of Gauff's last two service games — one of which ended with a pair of double-faults — the American kept missing the mark, compiling a whopping 20 unforced errors.
When her shots would land into the net, too long or too wide, or Bencic's would fall beyond her reach, Gauff repeatedly turned toward her coaches' box and put her arms wide with palms up, as if to ask, “What am I supposed to do?” After some of her nine double-faults, Gauff slapped her leg.
But Gauff recalibrated after the hour-plus first set, accumulating points in bunches, repeatedly hammering returns of serve and doing a much better job of targeting spots from the baseline. In sum, she was very much back to her best self, and not only did Gauff cut her unforced errors in half in the second set, but also put together a 17-2 edge in winners over that span.
By the end, Gauff was in total control, and she motioned to the crowd for more noise after a reflex volley to win a point in the final game.
Part of the problem in the early going, to be sure, was that Bencic is a terrific ball-striker. Her current ranking of No. 294 is misleading: The 27-year-old from Switzerland, who reached a career best of No. 4, only returned to action in October from maternity leave.
Her best past results have arrived on hard courts, including a run to the semifinals of the U.S. Open in 2019 and a singles gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. She's now 0-3 in fourth-round matches at Melbourne Park, though, losing previously to International Tennis Hall of Fame member Maria Sharapova in 2016 and to eventual champion Aryna Sabalenka two years ago.
Gauff now faces No. 11 Paula Badosa in the quarterfinals on Tuesday. Badosa defeated Olga Danilovic 6-1, 7-6 (2) to get to the final eight in Melbourne for the first time.
The winner of Gauff vs. Badosa will play either No. 1 Sabalenka, who is seeking a third consecutive Australian Open title, or No. 27 Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, the 2021 French Open runner-up.
Sabalenka stretched her winning streak in Melbourne to 18 matches by defeating 14th-seeded Mirra Andreeva 6-1, 6-2, and Pavlyuchenkova beat No. 18 Donna Vekic 7-6 (0), 6-0.
Martina Hingis, from 1997 to 1999, was the last woman with three straight championships in Australia.
WASHINGTON (AP) — TikTok said it will have to “go dark” this weekend unless the outgoing Biden administration assures the company it won’t enforce a shutdown of the popular app after the Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld the federal law banning the app unless it’s sold by its China-based parent company.
The Supreme Court in its ruling held that the risk to national security posed by TikTok's ties to China overcomes concerns about limiting speech by the app or its 170 million users in the United States.
The decision came against the backdrop of unusual political agitation by President-elect Donald Trump, who vowed that he could negotiate a solution, and the administration of President Joe Biden, which has signaled it won’t enforce the law — which was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support — beginning Sunday, his final full day in office.
ADVERTISEMENT
“TikTok should remain available to Americans, but simply under American ownership or other ownership that addresses the national security concerns identified by Congress in developing this law,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement, noting that actions to implement the law will fall to the new administration.
TikTok released a statement late Friday saying “statements issued today by both the Biden White House and the Department of Justice have failed to provide the necessary clarity and assurance to the service providers that are integral to maintaining TikTok’s availability to over 170 million Americans.”
“Unless the Biden Administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers assuring non-enforcement, unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on January 19,” the statement said.
A sale does not appear imminent and, although experts have said the app will not disappear from existing users' phones once the law takes effect, new users won't be able to download it and updates won't be available. That will eventually render the app unworkable, the Justice Department has said in court filings.
Trump, mindful of TikTok’s popularity and his own 14.7 million followers on the app, finds himself on the opposite side of the argument from prominent Senate Republicans who fault TikTok’s Chinese owner for not finding a buyer before now. Trump said in a Truth Social post shortly before the decision was issued that TikTok was among the topics in his conversation Friday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, who is expected to attend Trump’s inauguration, used the app to thank the incoming president for “his commitment to work with us to keep TikTok available.”
It’s unclear what options are open to Trump, a Republican, once he is sworn in as president Monday. The law allowed for a 90-day pause in the restrictions on the app if there had been progress toward a sale before it took effect. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who defended the law at the Supreme Court for the Democratic Biden administration, told the justices last week that it's uncertain whether the prospect of a sale once the law is in effect could trigger a 90-day respite for TikTok.
The decision explores the intersection of the First Amendment and national security concerns in the fast-changing realm of social media, and the justices acknowledged in their opinion that the new terrain has been difficult to navigate given they know relatively little about it.
“Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary,” the court said in an unsigned opinion, adding that the law “does not violate petitioners' First Amendment rights.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch filed short separate opinions noting some reservations about the court's decision but going along with the outcome.
“Without doubt, the remedy Congress and the President chose here is dramatic,” Gorsuch wrote. Still, he said he was persuaded by the argument that China could get access to “vast troves of personal information about tens of millions of Americans.”
Some digital rights groups slammed the court’s ruling shortly after it was released.
“Today’s unprecedented decision upholding the TikTok ban harms the free expression of hundreds of millions of TikTok users in this country and around the world,” said Kate Ruane, a director at the Washington-based Center for Democracy & Technology, which has supported TikTok’s challenge to the federal law.
Content creators who opposed the law also worried about the effect on their business if TikTok shuts down. “I’m very, very concerned about what’s going to happen over the next couple weeks,” said Desiree Hill, owner of Crown’s Corner mechanic shop in Conyers, Georgia. “And very scared about the decrease that I’m going to have in reaching customers and worried I’m going to potentially lose my business in the next six months.”
At arguments, the justices were told by a lawyer for TikTok and ByteDance Ltd., the Chinese technology company that is its parent, how difficult it would be to consummate a deal, especially since Chinese law restricts the sale of the proprietary algorithm that has made the social media platform wildly successful.
The app allows users to watch hundreds of videos in about half an hour because some are only a few seconds long, according to a lawsuit filed last year by Kentucky complaining that TikTok is designed to be addictive and harms kids' mental health. Similar suits were filed by more than a dozen states. TikTok has called the claims inaccurate.
The dispute over TikTok's ties to China has come to embody the geopolitical competition between Washington and Beijing.
“ByteDance and its Chinese Communist masters had nine months to sell TikTok before the Sunday deadline,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., wrote on X. “The very fact that Communist China refuses to permit its sale reveals exactly what TikTok is: a communist spy app. The Supreme Court correctly rejected TikTok’s lies and propaganda masquerading as legal arguments.”
The U.S. has said it’s concerned about TikTok collecting vast swaths of user data, including sensitive information on viewing habits, that could fall into the hands of the Chinese government through coercion. Officials have also warned the algorithm that fuels what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect.
TikTok points out the U.S. has not presented evidence that China has attempted to manipulate content on its U.S. platform or gather American user data through TikTok.
TikTok, which sued the government last year over the law, has long denied it could be used as a tool of Beijing. A three-judge panel made up of two Republican appointees and a Democratic appointee unanimously upheld the law in December, prompting TikTok’s quick appeal to the Supreme Court.
Without a sale to an approved buyer, the law bars app stores operated by Apple, Google and others from offering TikTok beginning Sunday. Internet hosting services also will be prohibited from hosting TikTok.
ByteDance has said it won’t sell. But some investors have been eyeing it, including Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and billionaire businessman Frank McCourt. McCourt’s Project Liberty initiative has said it and its unnamed partners have presented a proposal to ByteDance to acquire TikTok’s U.S. assets. The consortium, which includes “Shark Tank” host Kevin O’Leary, did not disclose the financial terms of the offer.
McCourt, in a statement following the ruling, said his group was “ready to work with the company and President Trump to complete a deal."
Prelogar told the justices last week that having the law take effect “might be just the jolt” ByteDance needs to reconsider its position.
FILE - Surfers catch waves in the Pacific Ocean off of Ho'okipa Beach Park, Nov. 22, 2024, near Paia, Hawaii. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson, File)
A long-awaited La Nina has finally appeared, but the periodic cooling of Pacific Ocean waters is weak and unlikely to cause as many weather problems as usual, meteorologists said Thursday.
La Nina, the flip side of the better-known El Nino, is an irregular rising of unusually cold water in a key part of the central equatorial Pacific that changes weather patterns worldwide.
The last El Nino was declared finished last June, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasters have been expecting La Nina for months. Its delayed arrival may have been influenced — or masked — by the world's oceans being much warmer the last few years, said Michelle L'Heureux, head of NOAA's El Nino team.
"It's totally not clear why this La Nina is so late to form, and I have no doubt it's going to be a topic of a lot of research," L'Heureux said.
But even as the temperature signature was late to arrive and small at that, L'Heureux said some of the effects across the globe have shown up and forecasters have made seasonal predictions based on La Nina conditions.
In the United States, La Ninas tend to cause drier weather in the South and West. They tend to make weather wetter in parts of Indonesia, northern Australia and southern Africa, L'Heureux said. They typically bring more Atlantic hurricanes in summer months, but L'Heureux forecast that this La Nina will have dissipated by the summer.
El Nino often leads to rainier weather in the United States, and tends to increase temperatures globally while La Nina has the opposite effect. Studies have found that La Nina droughts have been costlier than weather extremes linked to El Nino.
The last La Nina ended in 2023 after an unusual three-year stretch.
Everyone is optimistic for the film business in 2025, and the offerings for moviegoers — which include at least 110 films projected to open on over 2,000 screens — according to the National Association of Theatre Owners. And the momentum is there.
A scene from 'Inside Out 2' (Images courtesy of The Walt Disney Studios via AP)
Movie ticket sales took a bit of a hit in 2024. The annual domestic box office is expected to end up at around $8.75 billion, down more than 3 percent from 2023, according to estimates from Comscore.
It’s not as dire as it was in the pandemic years, but it’s also not even close to the pre-pandemic norm when the annual box office regularly surpassed $11 billion.
This is the year the business felt the effects of the Hollywood strikes of 2023, the labor standoff that delayed productions and releases and led to a depleted calendar for exhibitors and moviegoers. And yet it’s not as bad as it could have been, or at least as bad as analysts projected at the start of the year.
“This has been a really incredible comeback story for the industry,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “Just a couple of months ago it was a question of whether we would even hit $8 billion for the year.”
Hollywood continues to learn lessons about what moviegoers really want, what works and what doesn’t. Here are the biggest takeaways from 2024.
A scene from 'Deadpool and Wolverine'
The strike fallout was real
The Hollywood strikes might have ended in 2023, putting productions back into full swing and sending stars out on the promotional circuit again — but the ripple effect of the work stoppages and contract standoffs showed their real effects on the 2024 release calendar.
The first two quarters were hit hardest, with tentpoles pushed later in the year (“Deadpool & Wolverine,” for one) or even into 2025 (like “Mission: Impossible 8”). With no Marvel movie kicking off the summer moviegoing season, the box office was down a devastating 27.5 percent from 2023 right before “Inside Out 2” opened in June.
“It’s an unpredictable business but it thrives on stability,” Dergarabedian said. “When the release calendar is thrown off, the momentum stops.”
The PG rating (and animation) ruled
Sequels and franchises dominated the top 10 movies of the year, as has often been the case in the past 15 years. But this year, films carrying a PG rating did especially well, starting with the biggest movie of 2024: “Inside Out 2,” which also became the biggest animated movie of all time, not accounting for inflation.
Family films with a PG rating — including “Despicable Me 4,”“Moana 2,”“Wicked,” “Kung Fu Panda 4,” “Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” “Mufasa” and “The Wild Robot” — grossed over $2.9 billion this year, accounting for around 33 percent of the annual box office, according to Comscore. Movies rated PG-13, by contrast, made up about 30 percent of ticket sales.
A scene from 'Moana 2'
The Disney impact
After a quieter 2023 and several years without a film at the very top of the charts, the Walt Disney Co. came back roaring in 2024 with three of the top five movies of the year: “Inside Out 2,” “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “Moana 2.” In mid-December, it crossed the $2 billion domestic mark, the second time any studio has done so since 2019 (that was also Disney, in 2022). Its 20th Century division also played an important part with “Alien: Romulus” and “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.”
“It’s a different industry when Disney commits to theatrical releases,” said Daniel Loria, an executive at the movie data and analytics trade The Boxoffice Company.
Looking at ‘flops’ a different way
Every year has high-profile flops and disappointments, and this was no exception. Sony had a rough go with its “Spider-Man” adjacent titles like “Madame Web” and “Kraven the Hunter” (but this also seems to be the fate lately for anyone not named “Deadpool”). Universal had higher hopes for “The Fall Guy,” as did Warner Bros. for “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” and “Joker: Folie à Deux.”
“It’s a reductive way of thinking about those passion projects,” Loria said. “Those movies didn’t come out with huge expectations, meaning theaters didn’t clear out the house and give them three auditoriums per site in hopes for money to come in.”
This was, however, part of the problem with “Joker 2,” which was expected to be more in line with the first which made over $1 billion. But even that has a caveat, Loria thinks.
“It wasn’t just that ‘Joker’ didn’t perform, it’s that there was nothing coming in behind it to make up that momentum,” Loria said. “That’s more the fault of a release schedule where one movie is supposed to carry a month. That model doesn’t work anymore.”
Audiences crave options and a diverse lineup
What does work, Loria said, is a diverse lineup, with the Thanksgiving and Christmas successes being the perfect example. At Thanksgiving, there was “Wicked,” “Gladiator II” and “Moana 2.” Christmas had “Mufasa,” “Sonic 3,” and a lot of adult offerings too, including “Nosferatu,” “A Complete Unknown” and “Babygirl.”
Horror is often the safest bet for theatrical, but this year had even veterans pleasantly surprised by just how enthusiastic that audience can be, with hits like “Longlegs,” “Nosferatu,” “Terrifier 3” and “Smile 2” getting people out of the house.
Re-releases of movies in theaters that are also widely available in the home thrived this year. Some of the biggest successes included Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,”“Coraline” and “The Phantom Menace.”
“It just shows our industry once again that audiences truly understand the difference between a communal, big screen theatrical experience that they crave even on films that they’ve had the opportunities to see in the home,” Nolan said in December. “That theatrical experience that we all know and love is so powerful and so exciting. It’s a very clear demonstration of it.”
Viral marketing moments
As silly as it sounds, this is the year the novelty popcorn bucket became a star. It started with the accidentally suggestive “Dune: Part 2” creation, which “Deadpool & Wolverine” latched onto in a less accidental way. More recently, the “Nosferatu” coffin buckets have been fetching high resale prices.
For Loria, it’s all part of a trend that theaters have been noticing since reopening during the pandemic: Moviegoers aren’t back in pre-pandemic numbers, but those who did come back were spending more on concessions and premium tickets (like IMAX and other large format screens) than ever before.
2025 looks bright
Everyone is optimistic for the film business in 2025, and the offerings for moviegoers — which include at least 110 films projected to open on over 2,000 screens — according to the National Association of Theatre Owners. And the momentum is there.
“There’s been a huge amount of box office generated in the last six weeks of the year,” Dergarabedian said. “This is the best opening act 2025 could have.”
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Disgruntled X users are again flocking to Bluesky, a newer social media platform that grew out of the former Twitter before billionaire Elon Musk took it over in 2022. While it remains small compared to established online spaces such as X, it has emerged as an alternative for those looking for a different mood, lighter and friendlier and less influenced by Musk.
FILE - The app for Bluesky is shown on a mobile phone, left, and on a laptop screen on June 2, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
What is Bluesky?
Championed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Bluesky was an invitation-only space until it opened to the public in February. That invite-only period gave the site time to build out moderation tools and other features. The platform resembles Musk's X, with a "discover" feed and a chronological feed for accounts that users follow. Users can send direct messages and pin posts, as well as find "starter packs" that provide a curated list of people and custom feeds to follow.
Why is Bluesky growing?
Bluesky said in mid-November that its total users surged to 15 million, up from roughly 13 million at the end of October, as some X users look for an alternative platform to post their thoughts and talk to others online. The post-election uptick in users isn't the first time Bluesky has benefited from people leaving X. The platform gained 2.6 million users in the week after X was banned in Brazil in August — 85% of them from Brazil, the company said. About 500,000 new users signed up in one day in October, when X signaled that blocked accounts would be able to see a user's public posts.
Across the platform, new users — among them journalists, left-leaning politicians and celebrities — have posted memes and shared that they were looking forward to using a space free from advertisements and hate speech. Some said it reminded them of the early days of Twitter more than a decade ago.
Despite Bluesky's growth, X posted after the election that it had "dominated the global conversation on the U.S. election" and had set new records.
Beyond social networking
Bluesky, though, has bigger ambitions than to supplant X. Beyond the platform itself, it is building a technical foundation — what it calls "a protocol for public conversation" — that could make social networks work across different platforms — also known as interoperability — like email, blogs or phone numbers.
Currently, you can't cross between social platforms to leave a comment on someone's account. Twitter users must stay on Twitter and TikTok users must stay on TikTok if they want to interact with accounts on those services. Big Tech companies have largely built moats around their online properties, which helps serve their advertising-focused business models.
Bluesky is trying to reimagine all of this and working toward interoperability.
CLAUDIA HUTH poses next to a painting showing herself and painted by her son in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
BERLIN (AP) — Like many other young women living in communist East Germany, Solveig Leo thought nothing about juggling work and motherhood. The mother of two was able to preside over a large state-owned farm in the northeastern village of Banzkow because childcare was widely available.
Contrast that with Claudia Huth, a mother of five, who grew up in capitalist West Germany. Huth quit her job as a bank clerk when she was pregnant with her first child and led a life as a traditional housewife in the village of Egelsbach in Hesse, raising the kids and tending to her husband, who worked as a chemist.
Both Leo and Huth fulfilled roles that in many ways were typical for women in the vastly different political systems that governed Germany durings its decades of division following the country’s defeat in World War II in 1945.
As Germany celebrates the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989 — and the country’s reunification less than a year later on Oct. 3, 1990 — many in Germany are reflecting on how women’s lives that have diverged so starkly under communism and capitalism have become much more similar again — though some differences remain even today.
“In West Germany, women — not all, but many — had to fight for their right to have a career,” said Clara Marz, the curator of an exhibition about women in divided Germany for the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Germany.
Women in East Germany, meanwhile, often had jobs — though that was something that “they had been ordered from above to do,” she added.
Built in 1961, the Wall stood for 28 years at the front line of the Cold War between the Americans and the Soviets. It was built by the communist regime to cut off East Germans from the supposed ideological contamination of the West and to stem the tide of people fleeing East Germany.
Today only a few stretches of the 156.4-kilometer (97.2-mile) barrier around the capitalist exclave of West Berlin remain, mostly as a tourist attraction.
“All the heavy industry was in the west, there was nothing here,” Leo, who is now 81 years old, said during a recent interview looking back at her life as a woman under communism. “East Germany had to pay war reparations to the Soviet Union. Women needed to work our own way out of that misery.”
By contrast, Leo said, women in the West didn't need to work because they were “spoiled by the Marshall Plan” — the United States’ generous reconstruction plan that poured billions of dollars into West Germany and other European countries after the war.
In capitalist West Germany, the economy recovered so quickly after the total devastation of WWII that people soon started talking of a Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle,” that brought them affluence and stability less than 10 years after the war.
That economic success, however, indirectly hampered women’s quest for equal rights. Most West German women stayed at home and were expected to take care of their household while their husbands worked. Religion, too, played a much bigger role than in atheist East Germany, confining women to traditional roles as caregivers of the family.
Mothers who tried to break out of these conventions and took on jobs were infamously decried as Rabenmütter, or uncaring moms who put work over family.
Not all West German women perceived their traditional roles as restrictive.
“I always had this idea to be with my children, because I loved being with them," said Huth, now 69. “It never really occurred to me to go to work.”
More than three decades after Germany’s unification, a new generation of women is barely aware of the different lives their mothers and grandmothers led depending on which part of the country they lived in. For most, combining work and motherhood has also become the normal way of life.
Hannah Fiedler, an 18-year-old high school graduate from Berlin, said the fact that her family lived in East Germany during the decades of the country's division has no impact on her life today.
“East or West — it's not even a topic in our family anymore,” she said, as she sat on a bench in the capital's Mitte neighborhood, which marks the former course of the Berlin Wall in the then-divided city.
She also said that growing up, she had not experienced any disadvantages because she's female.
“I'm white and privileged — for good or worse — I don't expect any problems when I enter the working world in the future,” she said.
Some small differences between the formerly divided parts of Germany linger on. In the former East, 74 percent of women are working, compared to 71.5 percent in the West, according to a 2023 study by the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung foundation.
Childcare is also still more available in the former East than in the West.
In 2018, 57 percent of children under the age of three were looked after in a childcare facility in the eastern state of Saxony. That compares with 27 percent in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia and 44 percent in Hamburg and Bremen, according to Germany's Federal Statistical Office.
Germany as a whole trails behind some other European countries when it comes to gender equality.
Only 31.4 percent lawmakers in Germany's national parliament are female, compared to 41 percent in Belgium's parliament, 43.6 percent in Denmark, 45 percent in Norway and 45.6 percent in Sweden.
Nonetheless, Leo, the 81-year-old farmer from former East Germany, is optimistic that eventually women all over the country will have the same opportunities. “I can’t imagine that there are any women who don’t like to be independent,” she said.
