How artificial intelligence may be making you buy things. Qian Xuesen: The man the US deported - who then helped China into space. Transracial adoption: 'I've been accused of kidnapping my white child' Image copyrightFosterdadflipper Stories of transracial adoption most often feature white families adopting black and Asian children.
When the opposite happens, and black and Asian parents adopt white children, officials and members of the public can become very suspicious. Environment activists: 'I got death and rape threats’ We give up on our kids if we criminalise them at 10. News, latest-news, criminal responsibility, indigenous incarceration, simon smart When I was about seven years old, mucking around with a mate, I decided it might be fun to throw rocks at cars.
Revealed: 'dozens' of girls subjected to breast-ironing in UK. An African practice of “ironing” a girl’s chest with a hot stone to delay breast formation is spreading in the UK, with anecdotal evidence of dozens of recent cases, a Guardian investigation has established.
Community workers in London, Yorkshire, Essex and the West Midlands have told the Guardian of cases in which pre-teen girls from the diaspora of several African countries are subjected to the painful, abusive and ultimately futile practice. Japan’s Working Mothers: Record Responsibilities, Little Help From Dads. TOKYO — The paperwork never ends for Yoshiko Nishimasa.
There are the meticulous logs she must fill out every day, not to mention the pages of work she carefully checks and approves with a personalized stamp. She even keeps daily records of conversations, activities and meals. From bean to bar in Ivory Coast, a country built on cocoa. Asking about the importance of cocoa in Ivory Coast feels a little like making enquiries about the value of grapes in Burgundy.
When I put the question to N’Zi Kanga Rémi, who has for the last 18 years beengovernor of the rural department of Adzopé, north-east of the sprawling port city of Abidjan, he leaned forward in his chair and fixed me with an amused stare. His booming voice went up a decibel to fill the administrative offices on whose walls his own portrait alternated with that of his nation’s president. “It doesn’t make sense to ask an Ivorian what cocoa means to him!” He said. “It means everything! How Parents Are Robbing Their Children of Adulthood. Now, many of the students she works with are immigrants or first-generation college students.
“As I read about the scandal, I feel for those parents, I do,” she said. But “first-generation students coming through here are figuring out how to navigate an educational system that hasn’t always been built for them,” she said. “It is changing the course of their lives and the lives of their families.” Cathy Tran, 22, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, is the daughter of people who immigrated from Vietnam who did not attend college. As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling. Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country. Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill.
And last month, officials in the central Florida city of Deltona faced the reality that, despite their best efforts to recycle, their curbside program was not working and suspended it. Those are just three of the hundreds of towns and cities across the country that have canceled recycling programs, limited the types of material they accepted or agreed to huge price increases. Prompting this nationwide reckoning is China, which until January 2018 had been a big buyer of recyclable material collected in the United States. The Arctic: Photos revealing a new global frontier - BBC Culture. The photographer grew up on the Yamal Peninsula.
He was surprised by the pace of change when he returned, saying “it’s a huge development”. The Arctic, he argues, has a special importance for Russia. “It’s a huge part of Russian territory – people used to live there, then when the Soviet Union collapsed, it was almost abandoned – a lot of settlements left, people moved to the west. But now people are back, the military are back – they’ve reopened old ports and built up new ports; they’ve opened up new facilities.” How to solve the plastic packaging paradox. Image copyright Getty Images Today, plastic packaging has a bad (w)rap.
But the first commercially viable version of the now ubiquitous material - cellophane - was conceived in a more innocent age, before anyone worried about plastic in landfill, or the sea, or the food chain. Neoliberalism promised freedom – instead it delivers stifling control. My life was saved last year by the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, through a skilful procedure to remove a cancer from my body.
Now I will need another operation, to remove my jaw from the floor. I’ve just learned what was happening at the hospital while I was being treated. On the surface, it ran smoothly. Underneath, unknown to me, was fury and tumult. New Zealand suffers egg shortage as farmers scramble to go free-range. New Zealand is in the grip of an egg shortage as the industry undergoes a massive period of disruption while it transitions to free-range farming.
The shortage has also been caused by an increased appetite for eggs, with New Zealanders consuming 230 eggs per person last year, compared with 200 per person a decade ago. But the main problem is farmers struggling to modify their operations and maintain output as the industry moves from cage to barn and free-range egg production. Over the past few years all of New Zealand’s major supermarket brands have committed to stop selling caged eggs by 2027, as have a number of major food service providers, and fast-food chains including McDonalds and Burger King. The increased demand for barn and free-range eggs has caused occasional shortages in egg supply, said Nikhil Sawant, a Countdown supermarket spokesperson. The decrease comes as farmers search for new land and infrastructure to build much larger free-range farming operations. The truth about expired food: how best-before dates create a waste mountain.
Would you eat a six-month-old yoghurt?
This is a question you may have asked if you read the recent story about a US grocer and his year-long experiment eating expired food. It started in October 2016, when Scott Nash, founder of the Mom’s Organic Market chain of grocery stores, wanted to make a smoothie. The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes. When broadcaster Sandi Toksvig was studying anthropology at university, one of her female professors held up a photograph of an antler bone with 28 markings on it.
“This,” said the professor, “is alleged to be man’s first attempt at a calendar.” Toksvig and her fellow students looked at the bone in admiration. “Tell me,” the professor continued, “what man needs to know when 28 days have passed? I suspect that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.” Women have always tracked their periods. Misinformation on social media: Can technology save us?
If you get your news from social media, as most Americans do, you are exposed to a daily dose of hoaxes, rumors, conspiracy theories and misleading news. When it’s all mixed in with reliable information from honest sources, the truth can be very hard to discern. In fact, my research team’s analysis of data from Columbia University’s Emergent rumor tracker suggests that this misinformation is just as likely to go viral as reliable information.
Many are asking whether this onslaught of digital misinformation affected the outcome of the 2016 U.S. election. The truth is we do not know, although there are reasons to believe it is entirely possible, based on past analysis and accounts from other countries. Each piece of misinformation contributes to the shaping of our opinions. Browser Tabs Are Ruining Your Brain. Evernote is available on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Microsoft Edge. Its privacy policy states that it doesn’t sell or give data to third-party parties for advertising purposes, and it also offers two-factor authentication. That said, though, Evernote did endure a scandal in 2016 in which it abruptly changed its privacy policy, allowing its employees to read its users’ notes “to improve machine learning analysis.”
Researchers Link Syrian Conflict to a Drought Made Worse by Climate Change. Drawing one of the strongest links yet between global warming and human conflict, researchers said Monday that an extreme drought in Syria between 2006 and 2009 was most likely due to climate change, and that the drought was a factor in the violent uprising that began there in 2011. The drought was the worst in the country in modern times, and in a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists laid the blame for it on a century-long trend toward warmer and drier conditions in the Eastern Mediterranean, rather than on natural climate variability. The researchers said this trend matched computer simulations of how the region responds to increases in greenhouse-gas emissions, and appeared to be due to two factors: a weakening of winds that bring moisture-laden air from the Mediterranean and hotter temperatures that cause more evaporation.
Mariana Trench: Deepest-ever sub dive finds plastic bag. Image copyright Tamara Stubbs. The children growing up in a ‘motherless village’ In eastern Indonesia there are areas where almost all young mothers have gone to work abroad. 'You get used to the gunfire' – filming the Libyan women's football team. ‘Just what our country needs!” Do we need black people on our banknotes? Usually, when a new campaign to rectify our national failure to acknowledge black ingenuity in building modern Britain comes along, I support it enthusiastically. The maths problem that could bring the world to a halt - BBC Future. Berlin Brandenburg: The airport with half a million faults. Image copyright Getty Images The sweeping approach along a slick set of motorway junctions is convincing enough - although there is curiously little traffic.
Then, the main terminal building comes into view - its statement entrance with huge expanses of glass and exits from a large railway station below emerging into a piazza in front. To one side stands a smart hotel. Biased and wrong? Facial recognition tech in the dock. Image copyright Getty Images Police and security forces around the world are testing out automated facial recognition systems as a way of identifying criminals and terrorists.
Maths and tech specialists need Hippocratic oath, says academic. Mathematicians, computer engineers and scientists in related fields should take a Hippocratic oath to protect the public from powerful new technologies under development in laboratories and tech firms, a leading researcher has said. There's A War On Sugar. Is It Justified? (Ep. 285) - Freakonomics Freakonomics. 'It can kill you in seconds': the deadly algae on Brittany's beaches. Oktoberfest 'produces 10 times as much methane as Boston' Violence against women: The stories behind the statistics. Poor Kids May Have Less Developed Brains. Alisa Miller: How the news distorts our worldview. Hurricane Harvey: Houston's flooding made worse by unchecked urban development and wetland destruction.
The Real Cost of Cheap Shirts. Evidence-Based Lies. The facade of veracity in medical… Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. How to Lie With Maps. The internet has profoundly shaped… France might ban stores from throwing away unsold clothing. Snow machines and fleece blankets: inside the ski industry’s battle with climate change. Fighting the vanilla thieves of Madagascar. Let my daughter work. The World’s Worst Industrial Disaster Is Still Unfolding. Ayanna Pressley introduces legislation to lower federal voting age to 16. Council for a Livable World - Political action to reduce nuclear threats. The Double X Economy by Linda Scott review – the need to empower women. The unlisted: how people without an address are stripped of their basic rights.
China transferred detained Uighurs to factories used by global brands – report. A Kenyan Painter Casts a Critical Eye on China’s Role in Africa. Has Airbnb grown a conscience? The Gig Economy Is Coming for Your Job. Pre-teen girls 'tricked into sex acts on webcams' Race/Related: School Diversity Blunders. Delivery dilemma: Americans are ordering more, but the U.S. can only handle so much. Race/Related: Family and Incarceration (Part 3) After Climate Despair. Climate change: Oceans running out of oxygen as temperatures rise. Police in Croatia deport Nigerian table tennis players to Bosnia.
The big smoke: how bushfires cast a pall over the Australian summer. Goo Hara and the trauma of South Korea's spy cam victims. World Toilet Day: The lives of Indian sanitation workers. ‘We failed to reach Europe – now our families disown us’ 3.7 Million Refugee Children Are Out Of School. NSW fires: almost 600 schools closed today amid catastrophic bushfire conditions. Delhi’s smog blamed on crop fires – but farmers say they have little choice. Japanese women demand right to wear glasses at work. How big tech is dragging us towards the next financial crash. ‘It shut all my doors’: how a Quebec law banning religious symbols derails women’s careers.
Inequality in India can be seen from outer space. : China and Forced Organ Harvesting - Break Point. How Britain dishonoured its African first world war dead. Universities failing to address thousands of racist incidents. About 41% of the global population are under 24. And they’re angry… 37 Countries Support Xinjiang Camps for Uyghurs at the United Nations. Number of IT failures at banks and other firms is unacceptable, say MPs.
How Filter Bubbles Distort Reality: Everything You Need to Know. At least 80,000 attend march against Catalan independence. Protesters form human chain across Lebanon. Thousands of Iraqis defy bloody crackdown on Tahrir Square protest. British heritage sites not inclusive enough, survey shows. Why Is the World So Loud? Oxfam alleges abuse in UK supermarket supply chains. We millennials have more ‘friends’ than ever. So why are we so lonely? Displaced people: Why are more fleeing home than ever before? As Greenland melts, something strange is happening to the ice sheet. Trade in sea turtle products is banned, but they’re still in demand for tortoiseshells and sold in Japan. Is Jordan running out of water? 'Feminist emergency' declared in Spain after summer of violence.
Fast fashion: Should we change how we think about clothes? : China and Forced Organ Harvesting - Break Point. 'It can kill you in seconds': the deadly algae on Brittany's beaches. Violence against women: The stories behind the statistics. France announces anti-femicide measures as 100th killing recorded. A “million word gap” for children who aren’t read to at home. Get The Facts - Fight the New Drug.