Worldwide, modern slavery is on the rise, and with it, goods and products made under forced labor. The work usually takes place under poor conditions, violence, or threat of violence. The EU Commission is now proposing a ban on the sale and import of products made with forced labor. Bricks, textiles, and electronics. Tobacco, tea, and coffee. Cement, cobalt, gold—the U.S. Department of Labor’s list is long. It lists goods produced by forced or child labor. All over the world, people are enslaved to fill the wallets of a few. Nearly 50 million by 2021. The EU Commission now wants…
Author: World News Intel
As a key pandemic-aid program pushed money out faster to bigger companies and majority white areas than to small firms and communities of color, the U.S. Small Business Administration made repeated changes to try to make it more equitable. Some worked. Some didn’t. Now that the Paycheck Protection Program is almost entirely in the rearview mirror, here are some lessons learned from a year of reporting on it that speak to more than just this forgivable-loan effort. If you don’t account for inequality, you’ll get more of it. The way the PPP loans gushed out in the early part of…
But they hold differing opinions about what that phrase means, and two-thirds of U.S. adults say churches should keep out of politics (WoodyUpstate/Getty Images) Pew Research Center conducted this survey to explore Americans’ attitudes about religion’s role in public life. The survey asked respondents whether they think churches and other religious organizations should be involved in politics, whether the U.S. should be a “Christian nation,” whether they have heard of “Christian nationalism” (and if so, what they think of it), and about their perceptions of religion’s role in the Supreme Court, among other topics. For this report, we surveyed 10,588…
Most say that, compared with five years ago, those who commit sexual harassment or assault at work are more likely to be held responsible and those who report it are more likely to be believed Brenda Gutierrez, Frances Fisher and Me Too movement founder Tarana Burke hold a banner at the “#MeToo Survivors’ March and Rally” on Nov. 12, 2017, in Hollywood, California. (Chelsea Guglielmino/FilmMagic) Pew Research Center conducted this study to better understand Americans’ views about the #MeToo movement and the impact they think the movement has had on the workplace five years after the hashtag went viral. This…
With the next United Nations Biodiversity Conference set to kick off in Canada this week, a report out Monday details how corporate interests have attempted to influence efforts to protect the variety of life on Earth amid rampant species loss.”Addressing corporate capture of the CBD is a precondition for saving biodiversity.”After a long-delayed and mostly virtual meeting in Kunming, China last year to work on a post-2020 global biodiversity framework (GBF), nearly 20,000 delegates are headed to Montreal for the second part of COP15, which will bring together countries party to a multilateral treaty, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).The…
You might not know it from reading Tuesday’s statement announcing Australia’s eighth consecutive increase in interest rates, but our Reserve Bank might finally have done enough. The statement says inflation is still “too high” and that the bank expects to increase rates further, although it is “not on a pre-set course”. But, as it happens, the bank is unlikely to increase rates again for a further two months. The board doesn’t meet in January, meaning the nine weeks between now and its first meeting for 2023 on February 7 will provide an unusually long time for reflection – the first…
Costs are beginning to fall throughout US supply chains, easing inflationary pressures even as importers voice concern that fresh disruptions related to Covid-19 in China may yet bring further trouble. Higher logistics costs, which companies largely passed on to customers, presented one of the pandemic’s greatest business challenges and helped to power a historic run-up in consumer prices from the start of 2021 until the middle of this year. Backed-up ports, a shortage of truck drivers and scarce warehouse space that left some stores short of inventory defined last year’s peak Christmas retail season.This year those problems have started to…
AI hates uncertainty. Yet to navigate our unpredictable world, it needs to learn to make choices with imperfect information—as we do every single day. DeepMind just took a stab at solving this conundrum. The trick was to interweave game theory into an algorithmic strategy loosely based on the human brain called deep reinforcement learning. The result, DeepNash, toppled human experts in a highly strategic board game called Stratego. A notoriously difficult game for AI, Stratego requires multiple strengths of human wit: long-term thinking, bluffing, and strategizing, all without knowing your opponent’s pieces on the board. “Unlike chess and Go, Stratego…
This Pew Research Center analysis provides data about Truth Social as Donald Trump runs for president in 2024. It is based on an October 2022 Center study that examined Truth Social and six other alternative social media sites – BitChute, Gab, Gettr, Parler, Rumble and Telegram – using a multi-method approach. Sites were included in the study if they had publicly accessible posts, were mentioned in news media, and had at least 500,000 unique visitors in December 2021. The survey portion of the study was conducted May 16-22, 2022, among 10,188 U.S. adults. Everyone who completed the survey is a…
Lula da Silva has narrowly won the runoff election for Brazilian president against Jair Bolsonaro. The incumbent president has not yet accepted his defeat, stoking fears of violent confrontations. Enormous challenges await the new President, Lula. He must fight poverty in Brazil, stop deforestation in the Amazon and bring a divided country back together. Left-wing trade union leader and ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has won the election for president of Brazil. With 50.9 percent of the vote, he narrowly beat the far-right incumbent president Jair Messias Bolsonaro in the runoff. Lula had already won the first round of…