Powered exoskeletons may help people with weak muscles move better. Exoskeletons are often made from metal, which means their joints are rigid. Now researchers at a university in Switzerland are working on flexible, rubber robots that could replace the metal joints in exoskeletons, making them far more flexible. VOA’s Deborah Block has a report.
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Nike will launch a hijab for female Muslim athletes early next year, becoming the first major sports apparel maker to offer a traditional Islamic head scarf designed specifically for competition, the company said on Wednesday.
The head covering, marketed under the “Pro Hijab” brand, is designed to allow athletes to observe the traditional Islamic practice of covering the head without compromising performance.
Made from a lightweight, flexible material, the hijab is expected to hit stores shelves in early 2018, Nike said in a statement.
In recent years, the hijab has become the most visible symbol of Islamic culture in the United States and Europe. Many Muslim women cover their heads in public with the hijab as a sign of modesty, but some critics see it as a sign of female oppression.
With sensitivities over immigration and the perceived threat of Muslim extremism running high, the head scarf has led to attacks against Muslim women. At the same time, the hijab has evolved in a symbol of diversity that Nike has embraced.
The Women’s March on Washington, held the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, used the face of a woman wearing a hijab in an American flag pattern as its promotional image.
Muslim athletes visiting Nike’s headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, just outside of Portland, have complained about the difficulties of wearing a hijab while competing, according to the company.
The company consulted with Muslim women athletes from around the world, including Middle Eastern runners and cyclists, in the designing the hijab.
Other companies have also set their sights on hijab sales to Muslim athletes.
Last year, Danish sportswear company Hummel unveiled a soccer jersey with an attached hijab for the Afghanistan national women’s soccer team.
Non-professional women Muslim athletes have used athletic hijabs made by smaller companies.
But Nike’s annual net sales in the billions and its reach in popular culture can do more to bring Muslim athletes into the fold, said Amna Al Haddad, a Nike sponsored weightlifter from the United Arab Emirates who consulted on “Pro Hijab.”
“[It will] encourage a whole new generation to pursue sports without feeling there is a limitation because of modesty or dress-code,” Haddad said.
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Major technology firms say they are moving to fix any vulnerabilities in their operating systems, a day after WikiLeaks released documents pertaining to an alleged CIA hacking arsenal capable of spying on people through microphones in mobile phones and other electronic devices such as smart televisions.
In a statement issued Wednesday, Apple said it had already addressed many of the issues identified in the WikiLeaks documents, but said it would “continue work to rapidly to address any identified vulnerabilities.”
“We always urge customers to download the latest iOS to make sure they have the most recent security updates,” Apple said.
Samsung made a similar comment, saying it was aware of the report and “urgently looking into the matter.”
“Protecting consumers’ privacy and the security of our devices is a top priority at Samsung,” the South Korean electronics company said.
Security flaws
According to the WikiLeaks documents, the CIA identified weaknesses within the software used by Apple, Google, Microsoft and other U.S.-based manufacturers; but, instead of informing the companies of the vulnerabilities, the CIA “hoarded” the exploits, leaving people open to potential hacking.
“By hiding these security flaws from manufacturers like Apple and Google the CIA ensures that it can hack everyone; at the expense of leaving everyone hackable,” WikiLeaks said in a statement accompanying the release of the documents.
The CIA would neither confirm nor deny the legitimacy of the documents, although WikiLeaks boasts a nearly perfect record on the authenticity of the documents it publishes.
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The productivity of American workers grew at a slower pace in fourth quarter and last year recorded the smallest annual gain in five years.
The Labor Department said Wednesday that productivity grew at a 1.3 percent annual pace from October through December, down from 3.3 percent in the third quarter. For 2016, productivity eked out a 0.2 percent increase, the smallest since a 0.1 percent gain in 2011.
Labor costs, which account for changes in productivity, rose at a 1.7 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter. That’s up from a 0.7 percent increase from July through September.
The fourth-quarter numbers were unchanged from an original report in February.
Gains in productivity have slowed in recent years for reasons economists are struggling to understand. Since 2007, productivity has grown by an average 1.2 percent a year, compared to an average 2.6 percent from 2000 through 2007 and 2.1 percent from 1947 through 2016.
Productivity measures output per hour worked. Increases are crucial for economic prosperity. When their workers are more productive, employers can afford to pay them more. And productivity gains, along with growth in the number of people working, determine how fast the economy grows.
The U.S. economy grew at a sluggish annual 1.9 pace from October through December, down sharply from 3.5 percent growth in the third quarter.
President Donald Trump vowed during the election campaign to double growth to 4 percent a year through tax cuts, deregulation and increased government spending on infrastructure and defense. Economists are skeptical he can reach that goal – or even the target of 3 percent or better offered by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin – given the productivity slump and a slow-growing labor force.
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Home-renting site Airbnb is providing women with a new way to earn money and build businesses with more women than men on the site and women in Kenya gaining the most, the company said on Tuesday.
Airbnb said women have outnumbered men using the site since its 2008 launch and there are currently more than one million women hosts — amounting to 55 percent of users — who have earned over $10 billion in the past nine years.
A report released to coincide with International Women’s Day on March 8 showed Kenyan women were gaining the most, earning about one-third of their annual household expenditure from Airbnb and often using this to launch their own businesses.
Women in India came second in the list, earning 31 percent of their annual household expenditure through Airbnb.
This contrasted with Germany and France, where Airbnb income was lowest among 14 countries surveyed, amounting to about three and four percent of average household expenditure, with many using this money to supplement part-time jobs.
“Through platforms like Airbnb, women around the world are finding a new source of supplemental income and a new opportunity for economic security and independence,” Airbnb said in a statement.
The positive message from Airbnb comes as the San-Francisco based start-up runs into disputes in cities like Barcelona, Berlin and Paris that claim it deprives locals of accommodation for permanent rent and hikes rental prices.
Studies show that one of the biggest obstacles for women entrepreneurs around the world is lack of access to capital to start businesses.
But the sharing economy business is billed for explosive growth, estimated by PricewaterhouseCoopers to reach $335 billion by 2025, from around $15 billion in 2016.
“The money I’ve made has helped pay part of my sister’s doctorate degree,” Airbnb cited one of its Kenyan hosts, Pamellah Gakenia, as saying.
Globally, women’s annual earnings, estimated at $10,778, are roughly half those of men, the World Economic Forum says, partly because fewer women have formal jobs.
Women hosts interviewed by Airbnb said they often employ others to help them with the rental business.
“My cleaner Lulu, a recent migrant from the Eastern Cape who doesn’t speak much English, now earns enough to pay her kids’ school fees,” it quoted South African host, Belinda, as saying.
The top five countries for women Airbnb hosts among the 14 surveyed were Kenya where women earned 34 percent of average household expenditure, India at 31 percent, Morocco 20 percent, China 19 percent and Japan 15 percent.
The data was based on an email survey of 112,000 Airbnb hosts with more than 44,000 responses from Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Morocco, South Africa, Spain, Britain and the United States.
China has granted preliminary approval for 38 new Trump trademarks, paving the way for President Donald Trump and his family to develop a host of branded businesses from hotels to insurance to bodyguard and escort services, public documents show.
Trump’s lawyers in China applied for the marks in April 2016, as Trump railed against China at campaign rallies, accusing it of currency manipulation and stealing U.S. jobs. Critics maintain that Trump’s swelling portfolio of China trademarks raises serious conflict of interest questions.
China’s Trademark Office published the provisional approvals on Feb. 27 and Monday.
If no one objects, they will be formally registered after 90 days. All but three are in the president’s own name. China already registered one trademark to the president, for Trump-branded construction services, on Feb. 14.
If President Trump receives any special treatment in securing trademark rights, it would violate the U.S. Constitution, which bans public servants from accepting anything of value from foreign governments unless approved by Congress, ethics lawyers from across the political spectrum say. Concerns about potential conflicts of interest are particularly sharp in China, where the courts and bureaucracy are designed to reflect the will of the ruling Communist Party.
Dan Plane, a director at Simone IP Services, a Hong Kong intellectual property consultancy, said he had never seen so many applications approved so quickly. “For all these marks to sail through so quickly and cleanly, with no similar marks, no identical marks, no issues with specifications boy, it’s weird,” he said.
The trademarks are for businesses including branded spas, massage parlors, golf clubs, hotels, insurance, finance and real estate companies, retail shops, restaurants, bars, and private bodyguard and escort services.
Spring Chang, a founding partner at Chang Tsi & Partners, a Beijing law firm that has represented the Trump Organization, declined to comment specifically on Trump’s trademarks. But she did say that she advises clients to take out marks defensively, even in categories or subcategories of goods and services they may not aim to develop.
“I don’t see any special treatment to the cases of my clients so far,” she added. “I think they’re very fair and the examination standard is very equal for every applicant.”
Richard Painter, who served as chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, said the volume of new approvals raised red flags.
“A routine trademark, patent or copyright from a foreign government is likely not an unconstitutional emolument, but with so many trademarks being granted over such a short time period, the question arises as to whether there is an accommodation in at least some of them,” he said.
Painter is involved in a lawsuit alleging that Trump’s foreign business ties violate the U.S. Constitution. Trump has dismissed the lawsuit as “totally without merit.”
China’s State Administration for Industry and Commerce, which oversees the Trademark Office, and Trump Organization general counsel Alan Garten did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
When the Trump administration issued its executive order in Janurary restricting travelers from certain countries, many tech companies and their employees were quick to express their objections.
But now, with the new executive order out limiting travel to the U.S. for people from six countries, the response from Silicon Valley has been largely muted.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, Facebook and Microsoft has so far remained quiet.
In reaction to the first travel executive order, the three companies were among 100 U.S. tech firms that filed a legal brief in opposition. At the time, Google said 76 of its employees were affected by the executive order.
Still, some firms, such as Uber, Lyft, Mozilla and Airbnb, were quick to express their objections to Monday’s executive order.
Lyft, the ride-hailing firm, plans to meet with the American Civil Liberties Group this week to discuss how “we can further support their efforts,” Logan Green, Lyft’s CEO, said in a statement. The company gave the civil liberties organization $1 million in January.
“Our sentiment has not changed: President (Donald) Trump’s immigration ban is unjust and wrong,” an Uber spokesperson said. “We will continue to stand up for those in the Uber community affected.”
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tweeted a tribute to his grandfather, “Thinking of great grandfather Issac Benioff who came to US from Kiev as Refugee. W/O him no @Salesforce (2M jobs/200B GDP) or@GameOfThrones!” (Benioff’s cousin, David, is the co-creator of the hit TV series.)
Tech lobbying group and trade organizations have largely stayed mum about the limited travel ban.
One exception is TechNet, which represents tech firms such as Facebook and Apple. It put out a statement this week saying that “unfortunately, just like the first order, this new policy singles out individuals based on their country of origin and will adversely impact technology workers who live and work in our nation.”
The industry has been anxiously waiting for the Trump administration’s revamp of the H-1B visa program, which Silicon Valley uses to hire skilled workers. Late last week, the administration jettisoned an aspect of the H-1B visa application process called “premium processing,” which allowed companies to pay extra for their visa applications to be expedited.
That change underscored the uncertainty in the industry over how the Trump administration will ultimately handle both work visas and travel restrictions.
“What’s next?” said Evan Engstrom, executive director of Engine, an advocacy and research group focused on tech startups.
“What everyone is concerned about is what anti-immigration policies are going to be more expansive,” Engstrom said.
It’s a point echoed by a Yahoo executive.
“American businesses like Yahoo need certainty, particularly around the ability to hire and retain top talent. A piecemeal approach leaves question marks for companies and employees,” April Boyd, a Yahoo vice president and head of global public policy, said in a statement. “We encourage the administration to work with Congress on a thoughtful, lasting approach to bring positive change to the current immigration system.”
Each April 1, the U.S. holds a lottery for 65,000 H-1B visas and 20,000 additional visas for foreign students with master’s degrees. Last year, there were requests for more than 200,000, a record figure.
But critics say skilled-worker visa programs have hurt American workers. Companies have used them, they say, to hire foreign workers who are not highly skilled and who are paid lower than market rate wages.
The biggest users of the H-1B program have been outsourcing firms that provide IT consulting.
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The Earth’s atmosphere, and magnetic fields protect us from the damaging, and potentially deadly effects of gamma rays. But in space, and in some earthly disaster scenarios like a nuclear meltdown, it takes several feet of concrete or lead to keep us safe. But a new vest of flexible light material might solve the gamma ray problem as we try to figure out ways to set up shop on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Wednesday March 8 marks International Women’s Day, with festivals, concerts and exhibitions among the numerous events planned around the world to celebrate the achievements of women in society.
The annual event has been held since the early 1900s and traditionally promotes a different theme each year, with this year’s edition calling on people to #BeBoldForChange and push for a more gender-inclusive working world.
Reuters photographers have been speaking with women in a range of professions around the world about their experiences of gender inequality.
Here are just a few of the women and their comments:
Doris Leuthard, Switzerland
Doris Leuthard says she still sees gender inequality occur in the workplace.
“Salaries. The differences between wages of men and women can be up to 20 percent. It happens to many women. Transparency helps, discussions about salaries are important. In upper management and leading positions in politics we still seem to be the minority. I encourage women to work on their career,” she said.
Cristina Alvarez, Mexico
“I’ve never felt any gender inequality,” Alvarez said.
“I believe women can do the same jobs as men and that there should be no discrimination.”
Serpil Cigdem, Turkey
“When I applied for a job 23 years ago as an engine driver, I was told that it is a profession for men. I knew that during the written examination even if I got the same results with a male candidate, he would have been chosen. That’s why I worked hard to pass the exam with a very good result ahead of the male candidates,” Cigdem said.
“In my opinion, gender inequality starts in our minds saying it’s a male profession or it’s a man’s job,” she said.
Phung Thi Hai, Vietnam
Hai is among a group of 25 women working at a brick factory where she has to move 3,000 bricks a day to the kiln.
“How unfair that a 54-year-old woman like me has to work and take care of the whole family. With the same work male laborers can get a better income. Not only me, all women in the village work very hard with no education, no insurance and no future,” she said.
Tomoe Ichino, Japan
“In general, people think being a Shinto priest is a man’s profession. If you’re a woman, they think you’re a shrine maiden, or a supplementary priestess. People don’t know women Shinto priests exist, so they think we can’t perform rituals. Once, after I finished performing jiichinsai [ground-breaking ceremony], I was asked, ‘So, when is the priest coming?,'” Ichino said.
“When I first began working as a Shinto priest, because I was young and female, some people felt the blessing was different. They thought: ‘I would have preferred your grandfather.'”
“At first, I wore my grandfather’s light green garment because I thought it’s better to look like a man. But after a while I decided to be proud of the fact that I am a female priest and I began wearing a pink robe, like today. I thought I can be more confident if I stop thinking too much [about my gender].”
Yanis Reina, Venezuela
“No doubt this is a job initially intended for men, because you have to be standing on the street all your shift, it is dirty, greasy and there is always a strong gasoline smell. I have to adapt the pants of my uniform because they are men’s and make me look weird but I adore my work. My clients are like my relatives, they come here everyday and we chat a couple of minutes while the tank is being filled. They come every day because they feel safer to be served by a woman,” Reina said.
“With the difficult situation that we have in Venezuela, having a job that covers your expenses is almost a luxury, but beyond that, I’m very proud of my job. I believe that now we, the women, have to be the warriors,” she said.
Januka Shrestha, Nepal
“There is no difference in a vehicle driven by a woman and man. While driving on the road people sometimes try to dominate a vehicle especially when they see a woman driving it,” she said.
“People have even used foul language toward me. When this happens I keep quiet and work even harder to prove that we are as capable as men,” Shrestha said.
Maxine Mallett, Britain
“The most stressful time of my career was when I had children. Women who return to work after having a child are sometimes treated with suspicion, as if they now lack commitment to the school when it is quite the opposite,” Mallett said.
“We need to remove barriers and support all. Having a fulfilling career should not have to be a battle that you have to constantly fight.”
Jeung Un, South Korea
“Most news outlets prefer to employ male photographers. I feel strongly about gender inequality,” Un said.
“When I cover violent scenes, sometimes I am harassed and hear sexually-biased remarks.”
Deng Qiyan, China
“Sometimes [gender inequality] happens,” Qiyan said.
“But we cannot do anything about that. After all, you have to digest all those unhappy things and carry on.”
Emilie Jeannin, France
“Once I could not help laughing when an agricultural advisor asked me, where the boss was, when I was standing right in front of him. I can assure you that the meeting got very quickly cut short!,” Jeannin said.
“Being a breeder is seen as a man’s job. In the past women were usually doing the administrative work or low level tasks. People need to be more open-minded. This change needs to happen everywhere not just on the fields.”
Meet more of the women in our photo gallery:
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Wednesday March 8 marks International Women’s Day, with festivals, concerts and
exhibitions among the numerous events planned around the world to celebrate the achievements of women in society.
Reuters photographers have been speaking with women in a range of professions around the world about their experiences of gender inequality.
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Staying up late into the night, Lilia Lobato Martinez watched endless YouTube videos to teach herself the computer code she used to help build her prize-winning Ool app for volunteers in Guadalajara, Mexico.
In her country, she is usually the only woman in tech competitions, which often hand out men’s T-shirts to the winners.
Now the 18-year-old electrical engineering student is using the $10,000 she won for her app in last year’s international girls-only Technovation competition to further develop Ool, which has so far linked over 1,000 volunteers with 20 non-profit groups in Mexico’s second-biggest city.
“A lot of people were constantly complaining everything’s wrong, but I found that no one was going out to the street to volunteer,” said Lobato. “So I decided to develop an app that’s a compendium of all the non-profit organizations, so we can learn what Mexico is building.”
A male-dominated field
With plans to eventually set up a center to teach children to code, she said many of her female friends shied away from IT development because it was male-dominated. Only four out of 40 students on her degree course are women, she pointed out.
Across Latin America, the participation of girls and women in technology and science has lagged far behind men, experts say.
And while awareness of the need to correct the imbalance is growing, social and economic pressures mean many are still pushed into other areas or expected to start work straight after school rather than going into higher education.
“Boys think it’s easy for them and they expect to be smart in technology … it’s not expected for girls, and that’s reinforced by the education system quite often,” said Gloria Bonder, Buenos Aires-based UNESCO chair on women, science and technology in Latin America.
The portrayal of women in the media, and a lack of role models also contribute to making it a system-wide problem, added Bonder, who is working on a Central American pilot project to incorporate gender equality into science and technology education.
While 44 percent of all science research positions — including social sciences — in the region are held by women, they are under-represented in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), according to UNESCO.
For example, in Peru and Colombia, around a third of natural science researchers are women, but they account for just a quarter of engineering and technology researchers.
Now a number of projects are striving to improve access for girls and give them the skills and confidence to compete in those jobs.
Developers’ boot camp
One of these is the Laboratoria coding academy in Lima, which spots talent “where no one else is looking,” said its chief executive, Mariana Costa Checa.
More than 1,000 women applied for 70 places at its intensive boot camp where candidates from low-income backgrounds train as front-end web developers.
The application process involves a series of rigorous tests, alongside interviews with candidates’ families to reduce the drop-out rate for the course, which also runs in Santiago, Mexico City and the Peruvian city of Arequipa, and helps participants land jobs with companies such as IBM.
Along with computer programs like JavaScript, it teaches workplace skills that are crucial for women who have little experience of formal-sector employment, said Costa.
She expects some Laboratoria graduates will go on to develop technical solutions for problems in their communities.
“The first thing we look for is a job, because it gives them economic stability, and for our average student, it triples their income,” said Costa.
It also gives them “a new perspective in life,” she added. “It starts changing the way they look at the world — and I think there’s enormous value in then bringing that change to their own communities.”
Many girls are on their own
With many girls from poor families under pressure to start earning as soon as they finish school, Rebeca Vargas, president of the U.S.-Mexico Foundation, said most of those who signed up for the international STEM mentoring program she helped set up in Mexico’s Puebla state did so without telling their parents.
Nearly all are now studying STEM subjects at college or university.
“Some of the girls we worked with last year had to sell bread and food on the street to be able to earn money to eat,” said Vargas, whose foundation developed the program with Mexico’s public education secretariat and the New York Academy of Sciences.
Girls take a different route
Families often expect girls to pay their way at home but not to seek senior positions at corporations or well-paid jobs.
“They’re supposed to work but they’re not supposed to be educated,” Vargas said.
Wendy Arellano Martinez, who won a scholarship to study biotechnology engineering at the prestigious Monterrey Technology Institute after the mentoring program, is now part of a team developing a project to make spectacle frames from recycled plastic bottles for older people on low incomes.
“We’re going to be looking for funds from organizations or foundations to help us distribute our products to people who need them but don’t have the resources,” said the 18-year-old student from Puebla. “I want to give the same support that I received.”
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Researchers are developing a blood test that can tell not only whether someone has cancer, but in what organ the tumors are lurking. The test could mean more prompt, potentially life-saving treatment for patients.
Researchers describe their blood test as a kind of dual authentication process. It is able to detect the presence of dying tumor cells in blood as well as tissue signatures, to signal to clinicians which organ is affected by the cancer.
There already are tests that screen for traces of DNA released by dying cancer cells. Such blood tests show promise in the treatment of patients to see how well anti-cancer therapies are working.
But researchers at the University of California, San Diego discovered a new clue, using organ-specific DNA signatures, that leads them to the particular organ that is affected.
The finding makes the new blood test potentially useful as a screening tool in people suspected of having cancer.
UC-San Diego bioengineering professor Kun Zhang is senior author of a paper in Nature Genetics about the experimental test.
“So when you try to do these kinds of early screening or early detection [tests], these people are healthy. So if you take a blood draw and then you do a test, and you find some signature of cancer, that is not enough because you do not know what to do next,” Zhang said. “And so, in this case, we developed a method where we can say whether there is a cancer growing in the body and if the answer is ‘Yes,’ we can also say something about where does it grow.”
The test screens for a DNA signature called a CpG methylation haplotype, which is unique for each tissue in the body.
When a cancer grows in an organ, it competes with healthy tissue for nutrients and space, killing off healthy cells, which release their DNA into the bloodstream.
The haplotype signatures, identified by the blood test, could tell doctors what cells are being destroyed, and therefore what organ is being invaded by cancer. Zhang says knowing a tumor’s location is especially crucial for early detection and treatment.
Researchers created a database of complete CpG methylation patterns for 10 different normal tissues: the lungs, liver, intestine, colon, brain, pancreas, spleen, stomach, kidney and blood. To put together the genetic marker database, the investigators also analyzed tumor and blood samples of cancer patients.
They screened the blood samples of 59 patients with lung or colorectal cancer, comparing those findings to people without cancer.
“It could be potentially used as a screening test,” Zhang said. “So I think that is the real potential. We need to do a few more rigorous clinical observations before we can get to that point.”
Zhang envisions eventually using the blood test to look for markers of cancer as part of routine blood work.
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Gorging on bacon, skimping on nuts? These are among food habits that new research links with deaths from heart disease, strokes and diabetes.
Overeating or not eating enough of 10 specific foods and nutrients contributes to nearly half of U.S. deaths from these causes, the study suggests.
”Good” foods that were undereaten are nuts and seeds; seafood rich in omega-3 fats, including salmon and sardines; fruits and vegetables; and whole grains.
”Bad” foods or nutrients that were overeaten include salt and salty foods; processed meats including bacon, bologna and hot dogs; red meat including steaks and hamburgers; and sugary drinks.
The research is based on U.S. government data showing there were about 700,000 deaths in 2012 from heart disease, strokes and diabetes, and on an analysis of national health surveys that asked participants about their eating habits. Most didn’t eat the recommended amounts of the foods studied.
The 10 ingredients combined contributed to about 45 percent of those deaths, according to the study.
More detail on risks, benefits
It may sound like a familiar attack on the typical American diet, and the research echoes previous studies on the benefits of heart-healthy eating. But the study goes into more detail on specific foods and their risks or benefits, said lead author Renata Micha, a public health researcher and nutritionist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.
The results were published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Micha said the foods and nutrients were singled out because of research linking them with the causes of death studied. For example, studies have shown that excess salt can increase blood pressure, putting stress on arteries and the heart. Nuts contain healthy fats that can improve cholesterol levels, while bacon and other processed meats contain saturated fats that can raise levels of unhealthy LDL cholesterol.
In the study, too much salt was the biggest problem, linked with nearly 10 percent of the deaths. Overeating processed meats and undereating nuts and seeds and seafood each were linked with about 8 percent of the deaths.
The Food and Drug Administration’s recent voluntary sodium reduction guidelines for makers of processed foods is a step in the right direction, as are taxes that some U.S. cities have imposed on sugar-sweetened beverages, Micha said.
A journal editorial said public health policies targeting unhealthy eating could help prevent some deaths, while noting that the study didn’t constitute solid proof that ”suboptimal” diets were deadly.
The study’s recommended amounts, based on U.S. government guidelines, nutrition experts’ advice, and amounts found to be beneficial or harmful in previous research:
‘Good’ ingredients
— Fruits: 3 average-sized fruits daily
— Vegetables: 2 cups cooked or 4 cups raw vegetables daily
— Nuts/seeds: 5 1-ounce servings per week — about 20 nuts per serving
— Whole grains: 2½ daily servings
— Polyunsaturated fats, found in many vegetable oils: 11 percent of daily calories
— Seafood: about 8 ounces weekly
‘Bad’ ingredients
— Red meat: 1 serving weekly — 1 medium steak or the equivalent
— Processed meat: None recommended
— Sugary drinks: None recommended
— Salt: 2,000 milligrams daily — just under a teaspoon.
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Researchers at New York University’s School of Medicine found that diabetes increased the risk of cancer death among Asians by an average of 26 percent, a statistic similar in the West.
Data for the new study drew on an analysis of 770,000 people with Type 2 diabetes throughout East and South Asia. Diabetics were followed for an average of 13 years to see if they developed cancer and what types. During that time more than 37,300 cancer deaths were identified.
Yu Chen, an epidemiology professor at the NYU School of Medicine’s Department of Population Health who was the study’s lead author, says Asians with Type 2 diabetes are more likely to be diagnosed with rarer cancers than Westerners, including cancers of the liver, thyroid and kidney which was double the risk compared to non-diabetics in Asia.
There was also a more than two and a half times increased risk of cancer of the endometrium and a 1.7 times higher risk of breast cancer among diabetic Asians compared to those who were not diabetic.
The number of cancers of the gallbladder and bile ducts in Asia were comparable to those in the West, according to Chen. Those sites are closer in the body to the pancreas, where insulin is made.
Chen thinks there may be several mechanisms at work, but data suggests that insulin may in some way stimulate the growth of cancer.
“Patients with diabetes that have high levels of insulin, some cancers are very sensitive to insulin, so it may promote the tumor growing,” she said.
The findings were published in the journal Diabetologia.
Chen said the study was undertaken because there’s been little research on an association between diabetes and cancer in Asia.
She said the research suggests Type 2 diabetes should be added to the list of cancer risk factors, along with diet and cigarette smoking.
“Cancer prevention needs to take into account for diabetes the lifestyles related to diabetes – [which] may reduce the risk of diabetes and also cancer,” she said.
Chen suggested that diabetics should receive more cancer screenings, in addition to medical interventions to reduce the risk of diabetes overall.
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Brazil’s federal environmental agency, Ibama, launched on Tuesday a centralized database to track timber from source to sale, a vital step in the fight against illegal logging in the Amazon.
The system, known as Sinaflor, allows individual trees to be electronically tagged and monitored as they are cut down and pass through the supply chain, with regulators able to check the database via their cell phones while on patrol.
With built-in satellite mapping, timber being sold as legal can be checked against the exact area of licensed commercial production it is claimed to originate from.
The system marks a step change from the current system, which environmentalists criticize as being open to fraud and human error as databases are isolated, poorly managed and cannot be easily accessed to verify documentation attached to timber.
“The new system offers a much more comprehensive process of control,” Suely Araújo, president of Ibama, said in an interview in her office in Brasilia. “What’s not in Sinaflor will be illegal timber.”
The system is the result of four years of work and was envisioned under the forest code passed into law in 2012, which gave the federal government power to create and manage a national system to regulate the supply chain of timber.
Illegal logging is one of the greatest threats to the preservation of the Amazon. In the year until July 2016, Amazonian rainforest six times the size of Los Angeles was cut down.
That was the second rise in two years, ending a 10-year period in which deforestation was dramatically reduced. Brazil’s Environment Ministry, under which Ibama falls, has vowed to reverse the trend.
Sinaflor has already been piloted in the state of Roraima and is being introduced this week in Rondonia. The states are legally obliged to use the system, and Araújo expects to have it up and running across the country by the end of the year.
“When we manage to implement it in the whole country, I think it will be a step change in terms of control,” Araújo said.
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Hundreds of Egyptians protested around the country on Tuesday, blocking roads and surrounding government offices, after a change to the way bread rations are managed raised fears that the government was cutting food subsidies by the back door.
Bread subsidies are an explosive issue in Egypt, where over 70 million receive state rations. Core inflation in the country has soared above 30 percent since Egypt floated its currency in November, securing a $12 billion loan package from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to support a government austerity program.
Protests began on Monday after changes to a bread subsidy scheme left some people without their ration.
Unrest grew on Tuesday, with angry crowds gathering in the port city of Alexandria, in at least one poor Cairo neighborhood, and several other cities across Egypt.
Supply—Uprising became the top trending Twitter hashtag for Egypt as Egyptians posted pictures of confused people outside bakeries and in the street.
“We were surprised when the bakers refused to give us bread with the excuse that the Supply Ministry reduced their rations,” said Ahmed Faraj, an Alexandria resident.
Most protests drew small crowds and dissipated quickly, but offered the first major evidence of public anger over rising living costs.
“We are suffering from high prices. We have nothing left to live on but bread and now the government wants to deprive us of it,” said Samia Darwish, a 50-year-old homemaker in Alexandria.
Sale of bread subsidized
Egypt operates a system in which each family receives a plastic card to buy five subsidized loaves per person per day.
The government then pays bakeries a subsidy per loaf.
Bakers also receive “gold cards” to sell bread to individuals without a smartcard — generally those waiting for cards.
The Supply Ministry issued a statement on Monday denying it planned to cut bread subsidies after local media reported that rations would go from five to three loaves a day.
However, last week it did reduce the amount bakers can sell via the “gold card” scheme, according to a document seen by Reuters. The move is likely aimed at reducing misuse of those cards, which costs the government hundreds of millions of pounds a year.
Bread sales lead to black market
A Reuters report last year revealed flaws in the system allow bakers to overstate sales to profit from the black market, where they sell subsidized flour to private bakeries at a profit, costing the government billions of pounds.
The dangers are not lost on President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, in a country where economic discontent has helped unseat two presidents in five years. He has promised prosperity and stability in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising, and has committed to protecting the poorest from the pain of austerity.
“We want the president to know that the poor are dying of the high prices,” said Gamal Ahmed, from Alexandria.
Abdel Aal Darwish, the head of the bakeries division at the Alexandria Chambers of Commerce, called on the government to reverse the move and issue all Egyptians with cards.
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A programmer, computer programmer, developer, dev, coder, or software engineer is a person who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software. One who practices or professes a formal approach to programming may also be known as a programmer analyst. A programmer’s primary computer language (Assembly, COBOL, C, C++, C#, Java, Lisp, Python, etc.) is often prefixed to these titles, and those who work in a Web environment often prefix their titles with Web. The term programmer can be used to refer to a software developer, Web developer, mobile applications developer, embedded firmware developer, software engineer, computer scientist, or software analyst. However, members of these professions possess other software engineering skills, beyond programming; for this reason, the term programmer, or code monkey, is sometimes considered an insulting or derogatory oversimplification of these other professions. This has sparked much debate amongst developers, analysts, computer scientists, programmers, and outsiders who continue to be puzzled at the subtle differences in the definitions of these occupations.
Testing and debugging
Programmers test a program by running it and looking for bugs (errors). As they are identified, the programmer usually makes the appropriate corrections, then rechecks the program until an acceptably low level and severity of bugs remain. This process is called testing and debugging. These are important parts of every programmer’s job. Programmers may continue to fix these problems throughout the life of a program. Updating, repairing, modifying, and expanding existing programs is sometimes called maintenance programming. Programmers may contribute to user guides and online help, or they may work with technical writers to do such work.
Application versus system programming
Computer programmers often are grouped into two broad types: application programmers and systems programmers. Application programmers write programs to handle a specific job, such as a program to track inventory within an organization. They also may revise existing packaged software or customize generic applications which are frequently purchased from independent software vendors. Systems programmers, in contrast, write programs to maintain and control computer systems software, such as operating systems and database management systems. These workers make changes in the instructions that determine how the network, workstations, and CPU of the system handle the various jobs they have been given and how they communicate with peripheral equipment such as printers and disk drives.
Types of software
Programmers in software development companies may work directly with experts from various fields to create software – either programs designed for specific clients or packaged software for general use – ranging from video games to educational software to programs for desktop publishing and financial planning. Programming of packaged software constitutes one of the most rapidly growing segments of the computer services industry. Some companies or organizations – even small ones – have set up their own IT team to ensure the design and development of in-house software to answer to very specific needs from their internal end-users, especially when existing software are not suitable or too expensive. This is for example the case in research laboratories.
In some organizations, particularly small ones, people commonly known as programmer analysts are responsible for both the systems analysis and the actual programming work. The transition from a mainframe environment to one that is based primarily on personal computers (PCs) has blurred the once rigid distinction between the programmer and the user. Increasingly, adept end users are taking over many of the tasks previously performed by programmers. For example, the growing use of packaged software, such as spreadsheet and database management software packages, allows users to write simple programs to access data and perform calculations.
In addition, the rise of the Internet has made web development a huge part of the programming field. Currently more software applications are web applications that can be used by anyone with a web browser. Examples of such applications include the Google search service, the Outlook.com e-mail service, and the Flickr photo-sharing service.
Programming editors, also known as source code editors, are text editors that are specifically designed for programmers or developers for writing the source code of an application or a program. Most of these editors include features useful for programmers, which may include color syntax highlighting, auto indentation, auto-complete, bracket matching, syntax check, and allows plug-ins. These features aid the users during coding, debugging and testing.
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Minor floods caused by rising sea levels may end up costing U.S. coastal communities as much money and resources as major hurricane disasters, U.S. scientists said.
As climate change causes sea levels to rise, such “nuisance flooding” is expected to become more frequent and costly for cities like Washington, San Francisco, Boston and Miami, researchers said.
Over the last 20 years, Washington has endured more than 94 hours a year of nuisance flooding. By 2050, the capital could see as many as 700 hours of flooding a year, the scientists estimated in a study published in the American Geophysical Union journal Earth’s Future.
“Since these events are not extreme, they don’t get a lot of attention,” said Amir AghaKouchak, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California-Irvine and co-author of the study.
Inconvenience to public
The National Ocean Service defines nuisance flooding as “flooding that leads to public inconveniences such as road closures” but rarely causes death or injury. Such floods can overwhelm storm drains, slowly degenerate infrastructure and strain city resources.
Roads and sidewalks were not built to be under saltwater for hours on end, and cities usually have to close roads and send in trucks to clean them up, the scientists said.
“They definitely can’t withstand this,” said lead author Hamed Moftakhari, also of UC-Irvine. And the damage leads to “long, drawn-out costs,” he added.
In Boston specifically, “king tides” overwhelm walkways and roads several times a year. The East Coast city is predicted to see up to 100 hours of such nuisance flooding a year by 2030, the UC-Irvine scientists said.
Residents have already noticed the semifrequent inconvenience, according to Mia Goldwasser, Boston’s climate preparedness program manager.
“There are always people sending pictures to the city, saying, ‘Look at all the flooding happening with very little rain,’ ” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview this week. The city has already noted several waterfront hot spots where “it’s going to be worse [in the future] if there’s already flooding.”
More awareness
The flooding has raised awareness among the general public to the everyday realities of climate change, Goldwasser added: “It’s an inconvenience to people when they’re walking and driving and biking, moving around their neighborhood.”
The scientists are using the data as a “call to action” for coastal cities to examine the issue and decide on the best ways to respond to rising sea levels.
“We believe that if you have information on the type of hazard, the potential cost, then you can plan,” said AghaKouchak.
Boston has begun to come up with ideas to mitigate the effects of rising seas on infrastructure, which include floodproofing properties and potentially building a massive seawall.
Some roads and buildings may become corroded by nuisance floods, while others could end up completely under water, Goldwasser said.
“There’s still a lot that we don’t know, that we’re trying to figure out,” she said. “What are the most effective solutions? … How do we actually implement them?”
As for the total cost of the floods over the next few decades, Goldwasser said that’s still to be determined, though it’s expected to be “pretty significant.”
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Brazil’s worst-ever recession intensified unexpectedly in the final quarter of 2016, data showed on Tuesday, frustrating hopes for signs of a recovery and stepping up pressure on President Michel Temer and the central bank to do more to promote growth.
Brazil’s gross domestic product contracted by 3.6 percent last year, statistics agency IBGE said, following a 3.8 percent drop in 2015. The nation’s two-year downturn is the longest and deepest on record for Latin America’s biggest nation.
The economic contraction worsened in the fourth quarter, with a steeper-than-expected decline of 0.9 percent, following a 0.7 percent drop in the previous three months.
Investment tumbled 10.2 percent in 2016, in a sharp drop that is partly blamed by economists on Brazil’s chronically high interest rates.
The central bank started to cut its benchmark rate from a decade-high of 14.25 percent in October and is expected to take it to single digits this year.
The disappointing data fueled calls for the central bank to accelerate the pace of rate cuts, currently running at 75 basis points per meeting. Yields on rate futures showed an increasing chance of a steeper cut when the bank makes its next scheduled policy decision in April, according to traders.
“There’s a lot of idle capacity in the economy and that’s a reason for the central bank to move faster,” said Cristiano Oliveira, chief economist at Sao Paulo-based Banco Fibra, responding to Tuesday’s data.
Slow growth rate expected
The majority view among economists is that Brazil will emerge from recession in 2017, but at a very slow growth rate of 0.5 percent, which would be insufficient to reduce unemployment.
The government has forecast growth of 1 percent.
Some economists tempered their views even further following the dismal performance in 2016.
“We see zero growth in 2017, or maybe just a little bit above that,” said Carlos Kawall, chief economist at Banco Safra, in Sao Paulo. “We should not see any big recovery this year; we will have to wait until 2018.”
Green shoots sprouting slowly
Finance Minister Henrique Meirelles rebuked that pessimism by saying after the figures were announced that Brazil is “clearly” starting to grow again, based on indicators ranging from cardboard and motorcycle production to supermarket sales.
A revised forecast for economic growth in 2017 will be announced by March 22, Meirelles said, taking into account the worse-than-expected fourth-quarter data.
Betting that investors’ growing confidence in Brazil would hold, the government reopened on Tuesday a 10-year global bond seeking to raise at least $500 million.
Signs of an imminent recovery include a rebound in vehicle traffic, which appears to have hit bottom in the fourth quarter, according to a senior executive at CCR SA, the country’s biggest toll road operator.
Car output also jumped nearly 15 percent in February, according to the national automakers’ association Anfavea, and farmers hope to harvest a record soy crop this year.
None of that, however, is likely to make for anything more than a shallow and underwhelming recovery, according to Goldman Sachs economist Alberto Ramos.
“A very weak labor market backdrop and still high levels of household and corporate indebtedness should limit the strength of the recovery,” Ramos said.
Tax hikes not ruled out
The downturn has left nearly 13 million people unemployed, caused a record number of bankruptcy filings and led agencies to strip Brazil of its hard-won investment grade credit rating.
It also contributed to the impeachment of former President Dilma Rousseff last year and to the low approval ratings of her successor, President Temer, whose agenda of budget and pension reforms has helped fuel a strong rally in Brazilian equities and currency since last year.
If the economy continues to disappoint, tax revenues could fall short of expectations, putting the country’s budget target at risk. Meirelles said the government could raise taxes or cut spending further if necessary to achieve its 143.1 billion reais ($45.87 billion) primary deficit goal.
Although this recession has been the deepest in Brazil’s history, it has not been marked by the financial upheaval seen in other crises in the country’s turbulent economic past.
Previous downturns were often accompanied by sovereign debt crises, capital flight and hyperinflation, none of which happened during the current slump.
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Swiss firms from food and beverage giant Nestle to banking groups UBS and Credit Suisse pledged new goals on Tuesday for supporting and promoting women.
While Switzerland has Europe’s second-highest proportion of women in the workforce, it trails global standards on gender diversity in boardrooms and in management positions.
Consultancies EY, Deloitte and PwC and staffing agency Adecco all committed to increase female leadership in their Swiss businesses to between 20 and 35 percent by 2020.
This follows a recent survey by EY that found Swiss firms with at least 20 percent women in top management rated their financial situation as better, while studies by UBS have found companies with greater gender diversity consistently outperform.
Women represent just 6.7 percent of Swiss executives, according to Credit Suisse, compared with a global average of 13.8 percent and European average of 12.6 percent. They occupy one out of eight board seats, half the European average.
Hiring plans
Swiss women-in-business initiative Advance has spearheaded the move, with Credit Suisse’s domestic business saying it would strive for equal hiring in campus recruitment, while Nestle committed to grow the proportion of women in management positions worldwide every year.
Siemens Switzerland pledged to reach equal pay in the next three years, while IKEA Switzerland improved its paid paternity leave to two months.
Switzerland was the second-to-last European country to embrace women’s suffrage in 1971, more than half a century after Norway, Germany, Canada and the United States. And it took two decades more for the Swiss supreme court to force one canton to let women take part in local votes in 1990.
IKEA Switzerland head Simona Scarpaleggia, one of just four female CEOs out of 78 in Credit Suisse’s study, helped found Advance in 2013 and says the Swiss system needs to change to make things more straightforward for working mothers.
“Either you give up your time, which happens most often, or you get private support, which is very expensive. It wouldn’t be so complicated to change this system, as many other countries are doing,” said Scarpaleggia, who also co-chairs the U.N. High-Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment, said.
Policy positions
The Swiss government hopes women will help fill a growing shortfall of skilled labor, but it eschews many policies, such as quotas and more parental leave, that promote women elsewhere.
It is among the handful of developed countries that give new fathers no time off, meaning infant care falls largely on women.
High child care costs mean many new mothers opt out of their professions or return part time, generally not returning to full time until children reach age 9, statistics show.
Many women step off the ladder later in their careers, tired of being pigeonholed and passed over for promotions.
“Companies are surprised that, if they look at the statistics, it’s often women between 45 and 50 who are leaving,” said Nia Joynson-Romanzina, who left UBS in 2015 to found consultancy iCubed.
The Advance initiative is seeking to “change Switzerland one company at a time,” Citi Country Officer Kristine Braden said.
“I’m quite optimistic because, despite the conservative approach, Swiss people are very pragmatic,” Scarpaleggia said.
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The U.S. trade deficit in January hit the highest level in nearly five years.
Tuesday’s report from the Commerce Department says the gap between what Americans sell to foreigners and what U.S. customers buy from overseas grew by 9.6 percent for the month to $48.5 billion.
U.S. exports rose six-tenths of a percent, as American companies sold more cars overseas, but U.S. commercial aircraft sales faltered. Export gains were overwhelmed by a surge in imported cell phones and autos, along with rising costs for oil imports.
The head of the White House National Trade Council, Peter Navarro wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently that the trade deficit hurts economic growth and could be a threat to national security.
In a note to journalists, analysts at Wells Fargo Securities say growing exports and imports are also a sign of improving economies in the United States and key trading partners. They blame some of the trade gap on the strength of the U.S. dollar, which means American-made products are more expensive, and harder to sell on global markets.
Other concerns came to light in a survey of hundreds of economists across the nation by the National Association for Business Economics. Many of these experts said expected increases in government spending could increase the deficit.
In a VOA interview, survey committee chair Richard DeKaser said members have concerns about efforts to limit immigration to the United States, and would support allowing more arrivals for highly-skilled migrants.
Housing market
A separate report from a private company says U.S. home prices jumped a strong 6.9 percent during the past year. Tuesday’s report from CoreLogic also forecasts a 4.8 percent price gain over the next year, which is well above the expected rate of inflation. The authors say prices are rising because of economic recovery, limited supply of homes for sale, and continued low mortgage interest rates.
Economists have been watching the housing market with particular care since severe problems in this sector contributed to the Great Recession.
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The secret to better job satisfaction may be as easy as having a healthy sex life, a new study suggests.
According to researchers at Oregon State University, married employees who “prioritized sex at home” were better workers and enjoyed work more.
On the other hand, the research showed that people who bring work-related stress home “impinges on employees’ sex lives,” leading researchers to recommend leaving work at the office.
The reason sex helps workers enjoy work more is that it releases dopamine and oxytocin, both of which are mood enhancers the effects of which can last into the next day. They added that the effects can last for at least 24 hours and worked equally among men and women.
“We make jokes about people having a ‘spring in their step,’ but it turns out this is actually a real thing and we should pay attention to it,” said Keith Leavitt, an associate professor in OSU’s College of Business and an expert in organizational behavior and management. “Maintaining a healthy relationship that includes a healthy sex life will help employees stay happy and engaged in their work, which benefits the employees and the organizations they work for.”
“This is a reminder that sex has social, emotional and physiological benefits, and it is important to make it a priority,” Leavitt said. “Just make time for it.”
For their study, researchers followed 159 married employees for two weeks and had them fill out two brief questionnaires each day. Those who had sex reported better moods the next day, particularly in the morning, which allowed them to be more engaged.
“Making a more intentional effort to maintain a healthy sex life should be considered an issue of human sustainability, and as a result, a potential career advantage,” Leavitt said. “Employers [in the U.S.] can steer their employee engagement efforts more broadly toward work-life balance policies that encourage workers to disconnect from the office,” he said.
The French recently enacted a law that bars after-hours email and gives employees a ‘right to disconnect.’
“Technology offers a temptation to stay plugged in, but it’s probably better to unplug if you can,” he said. “And employers should encourage their employees to completely disengage from work after hours.”
The study was published this month in the Journal of Management.
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A German court rejected a temporary injunction against Facebook on Tuesday in a case brought by a Syrian refugee who sued the social networking site for failing to remove faked posts linking him to crimes and militant attacks.
The Wuerzburg district court said in a preliminary ruling that Facebook is neither a “perpetrator nor a participant” in what it said was “undisputable defamation” by Facebook users, but simply acting as a hosting provider that is not responsible for preemptively blocking offensive content under European law.
The posts in dispute featured a picture showing Anas Modamani, a 19-year-old from Damascus, taking a selfie with Chancellor Angela Merkel in September 2015 at a refugee shelter in the Berlin district of Spandau.
Modamani’s image was subsequently shared on Facebook on anonymous accounts, alongside posts falsely claiming he was responsible for the Brussels airport bombing of March 2016 and setting on fire a homeless man in December last year by six migrants at an underground station in Berlin.
The court rejected the need for a temporary injunction sought by Modamani to require Facebook to go beyond measures the company had taken to block defamatory images of him for Facebook users in Germany using geo-blocking technology.
In a statement following the decision, Facebook expressed concern for Modamani’s predicament but said the court’s ruling showed the company acted quickly to block access to defamatory postings, once they had been reported by Modamani’s lawyer.
The case has been closely watched as Germany, a frequent critic of Facebook, is preparing legislation to force the social networking website to remove “hate speech” from its web pages within 24 hours or face fines.
After the ruling, Modamani’s lawyer in the case, Chan-jo Jun, told a news conference he was disappointed such imagery continued to circulate online and more must be done to force Facebook to delete hate-filled content on its own accord.
“We have to decide whether we want to accept that Facebook can basically do whatever it wants or whether German law, and above all the removal of illegal contents in Germany, will be enforced. If we want that we need new laws,” Jun said.
Modamani’s complaint maintained that defamatory images based on the selfie posted to Facebook were still viewable online outside of Germany, or by users within Germany using a sophisticated Tor browser.
But the court found that the risk of average German users seeing the illegal content was not sufficiently credible and therefore a temporary injunction was unnecessary at this stage.
The ruling said there remained a legitimate issue over whether it was technically feasible for Facebook to do more to block such images, but this would require testimony by experts.
Tuesday’s decision is subject to appeal within one month of the yet-to-be-published written judgment, a court statement said. Jun declined to say whether an appeal was planned, saying the decision remained up to his client.
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Facebook has launched a tool it says will help flag so-called fake news.
The tool adds a “disputed news” flag on stories that have been deemed fake by what Facebook says are third parties, including Snopes, Politifact and Factcheck.org.
Facebook announced the disputed news flag in December, but it appears it only has gone live in the past day or so, according to news reports.
If a story is flagged by some of Facebook’s 1.86 billion users, the company will determine which to send to the third parties. If the story is fake, it will still be on Facebook, but will carry a notice that it was disputed along with an explanation about why.
Disputed stories can still be shared, but users will be warned they are sharing fake news.
According to USA Today, one fake news story about how President Trump’s Android phone was the source of White House leaks came from a fake news site called “The Seattle Tribune.” The story now appears with a disputed flag as well as links to third party explanations as to why.
A May 2016 survey from the Nieman Lab said 44 percent of Americans get their news from Facebook.
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