Facebook Papers are a ‘call to arms’ over pressing need to regulate: MPs
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The Facebook Papers make clear the pressing need for governments around the world to crack down and put meaningful regulations on the social media giant, say two Canadian MPs who are part of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation.© Provided by Global News Senior campaigner Flora Rebello Arduini adjusts an installation outside parliament in Westminster in London, Monday, Oct. 25, 2021. A 4-metre-high installation depicting Mark Zuckerberg surfing on a wave of cash was constructed outside parliament, as Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen is due to testify to MPs on how the company puts profits ahead of public safety. The action comes after SumOfUs research revealed Instagram is still awash with posts promoting eating disorders, unproven diet supplements and skin-whitening products. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

That committee is preparing to hear from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen during a meeting next month in Brussels, Belgium. The two Canadian MPs spoke with Global News Monday about what they are taking away from the revelations in the Facebook Papers.

In short? The time to act is now, they say.

"It is past time for stronger platform governance and it is past time for greater accountability," said Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith.

"I think it’s a call to arms for public rules."

READ MORE: Facebook failed to stop global spread of abusive content, documents reveal

On Monday morning, 17 American news organizations began publishing a series of articles that paint a damning portrait of Facebook's internal operations with regards to how it manages and reviews content.

The articles are based on thousands of pages of internal company documents obtained by Haugen, a whistleblower who was formerly a product manager at the social media giant.

EXPLAINED: What are the Facebook Papers?

Haugen has testified before American and British regulators about how she says Facebook prioritizes profits over safety. She had said the company hides research assessing what role it plays in inciting political violence, and the records have prompted serious concerns about the extent to which its products hurt teenage users, particularly girls.

Several of the media articles about the Facebook Papers cited records showing the social media giant's employees have warned the company was failing to police abusive content, repeatedly being told it was causing harm, and that its algorithms were inciting political violence for years.

Angus says parliamentarians have ‘obligation’ to hold Facebook, other social media sites to account

Erskine-Smith said the revelations add to the urgency for government to regulate the algorithms used by social media companies seriously and force greater transparency on them.

He pointed to C-11, the Digital Charter Implementation Act, as an example of legislation the government should prioritize when Parliament resumes at the end of November.

READ MORE: Facebook whistleblower says platform amplifies online hate, extremism

NDP MP Charlie Angus said the coming session of Parliament should be one where all parties work together to crack down on social media giants like Facebook in light of the information in Facebook Papers.

“I think Canadians are expecting this Parliament to show maturity and work together," Angus told Global News. "I think Big Tech would be an area where we could all work together.”

"The Facebook papers reveal more about what we already know – that this is a massively powerful corporation that has consistently refused to take action to address the real-time harms that are happening on its platform," he continued.

"Mr. Trudeau must address this longstanding pattern of corporate negligence. This will include efforts to break up the Facebook monopoly, to institute rigorous oversight and to establish credible penalties, including criminal sanctions, for the corporate negligence at Facebook."

Erskine-Smith suggested discussions about breaking up Facebook would only be effective if done in partnership with American lawmakers.

The International Grand Committee on Disinformation was first created in 2018.

The goal of the committee is to bring together lawmakers and policymakers facing the challenge of trying to regulate the "increasing – and increasingly malignant – influence of social media platforms."

—With files from The Associated Press and Reuters.

People or profit? Facebook papers show deep conflict within

By BARBARA ORTUTAY

October 25, 2021 

Facebook the company is losing control of Facebook the product — not to mention the last shreds of its carefully crafted, decade-old image as a benevolent company just wanting to connect the world.

Thousands of pages of internal documents provided to Congress by a former employee depict an internally conflicted company where data on the harms it causes is abundant, but solutions, much less the will to act on them, are halting at best.

The crisis exposed by the documents shows how Facebook, despite its regularly avowed good intentions, appears to have slow-walked or sidelined efforts to address real harms the social network has magnified and sometimes created. They reveal numerous instances where researchers and rank-and-file workers uncovered deep-seated problems that the company then overlooked or ignored.

Final responsibility for this state of affairs rests with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who holds what one former employee described as dictatorial power over a corporation that collects data on and provides free services to roughly 3 billion people around the world.

“Ultimately, it rests with Mark and whatever his prerogative is — and it has always been to grow, to increase his power and his reach,” said Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse University communications professor who’s followed Facebook closely for years.

Zuckerberg has an ironclad hold on Facebook Inc. He holds the majority of the company’s voting shares, controls its board of directors and has increasingly surrounded himself with executives who don’t appear to question his vision.

But he has so far been unable to address stagnating user growth and shrinking engagement for Facebook the product in key areas such as the United States and Europe. Worse, the company is losing the attention of its most important demographic — teenagers and young people — with no clear path to gaining it back, its own documents reveal.

Young adults engage with Facebook far less than their older cohorts, seeing it as an “outdated network” with “irrelevant content” that provides limited value for them, according to a November 2020 internal document. It is “boring, misleading and negative,” they say.

In other words, the young see Facebook as a place for old people.

Facebook’s user base has been aging faster, on average, than the general population, the company’s researchers found. Unless Facebook can find a way to turn this around, its population will continue to get older and young people will find even fewer reasons to sign on, threatening the monthly user figures that are essential to selling ads. Facebook says its products are still widely used by teens, although it acknowledges there’s “tough competition” from TikTok, Snapchat and the like.

So it can continue to expand its reach and power, Facebook has pushed for high user growth outside the U.S. and Western Europe. But as it expanded into less familiar parts of the world, the company systematically failed to address or even anticipate the unintended consequences of signing up millions of new users without also providing staff and systems to identify and limit the spread of hate speech, misinformation and calls to violence.

In Afghanistan and Myanmar, for instance, extremist language has flourished due to a systemic lack of language support for content moderation, whether that’s human or artificial intelligence-driven. In Myanmar, it has been linked to atrocities committed against the country’s minority Rohingya Muslim population.

But Facebook appears unable to acknowledge, much less prevent, the real-world collateral damage accompanying its untrammeled growth. Those harms include shadowy algorithms that radicalize users, pervasive misinformation and extremism, facilitation of human trafficking, teen suicide and more.

Internal efforts to mitigate such problems have often been pushed aside or abandoned when solutions conflict with growth — and, by extension, profit.

Backed into a corner with hard evidence from leaked documents, the company has doubled down defending its choices rather than try to fix its problems.

“We do not and we have not prioritized engagement over safety,” Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, told The Associated Press this month following congressional testimony from whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen. In the days since Haugen’s testimony and appearance on “60 Minutes” — during which Zuckerberg posted a video of himself sailing with his wife Priscilla Chan — Facebook has tried to discredit Haugen by repeatedly pointing out that she didn’t directly work on many of the problems she revealed.

Full Coverage: The Facebook Papers

“A curated selection out of millions of documents at Facebook can in no way be used to draw fair conclusions about us,” Facebook tweeted from its public relations “newsroom” account earlier this month, following the company’s discovery that a group of news organizations was working on stories about the internal documents.

“At the heart of these stories is a premise which is false. Yes, we’re a business and we make profit, but the idea that we do so at the expense of people’s safety or wellbeing misunderstands where our own commercial interests lie,” Facebook said in a prepared statement Friday. “The truth is we’ve invested $13 billion and have over 40,000 people to do one job: keep people safe on Facebook.”

Statements like these are the latest sign that Facebook has gotten into what Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook data scientist, described as a “siege mentality” at the company. Zhang last year accused the social network of ignoring fake accounts used to undermine foreign elections. With more whistleblowers — notably Haugen — coming forward, it’s only gotten worse.

“Facebook has been going through a bit of an authoritarian narrative spiral, where it becomes less responsive to employee criticism, to internal dissent and in some cases cracks down upon it,” said Zhang, who was fired from Facebook in the fall of 2020. “And this leads to more internal dissent.”

“I have seen many colleagues that are extremely frustrated and angry, while at the same time, feeling powerless and (disheartened) about the current situation,” one employee, whose name was redacted, wrote on an internal message board after Facebook decided last year to leave up incendiary posts by former President Donald Trump that suggested Minneapolis protesters could be shot. “My view is, if you want to fix Facebook, do it within.”

This story is based in part on disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen’s legal counsel. The redacted versions received by Congress were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including The Associated Press.


They detail painstakingly collected data on problems as wide-ranging as the trafficking of domestic workers in the Middle East, an over-correction in crackdowns on Arabic content that critics say muzzles free speech while hate speech and abuse flourish, and rampant anti-vaccine misinformation that researchers found could have been easily tamped down with subtle changes in how users view posts on their feed.

The company insists it “does not conduct research and then systematically and willfully ignore it if the findings are inconvenient for the company.” This claim, Facebook said in a statement, can “only be made by cherry-picking selective quotes from individual pieces of leaked material in a way that presents complex and nuanced issues as if there is only ever one right answer.”

Haugen, who testified before the Senate this month that Facebook’s products “harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy,” said the company should declare “moral bankruptcy” if it is to move forward from all this.


At this stage, that seems unlikely. There is a deep-seated conflict between profit and people within Facebook — and the company does not appear to be ready to give up on its narrative that it’s good for the world even as it regularly makes decisions intended to maximize growth.

“Facebook did regular surveys of its employees — what percentage of employees believe that Facebook is making the world a better place,” Zhang recalled.

“It was around 70 percent when I joined. It was around 50 percent when I left,” said Zhang, who was at the company for more than two years before she was fired in the fall of 2020.

Facebook has not said where the number stands today.

See full coverage of the “The Facebook Papers” here: https://apnews.com/hub/the-facebook-papers

EXPLAINER: Just what are 'The Facebook Papers,' anyway?

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Facebook profits rise amid revelations from leaked documents

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Facebook dithered in curbing divisive user content in India (apnews.com)

Facebook profits rise amid revelations from leaked documents


LONDON — Amid fallout from the Facebook Papers documents supporting claims that the social network has valued financial success over user safety, Facebook on Monday reported higher profit for the latest quarter.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The company's latest show of financial strength followed an avalanche of reports on the Facebook Papers — a vast trove of redacted internal documents obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including The Associated Press — as well as Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s Monday testimony to British lawmakers.

Facebook said its net income grew 17% in the July-September period to $9.19 billion, buoyed by strong advertising revenue. That’s up from $7.85 billion a year earlier. Revenue grew 35% to $29.01 billion. The results exceeded analyst expectations for Facebook's results.

The company's shares rose 2.5% in after-hours trading after closing up 1% for the day.

“For now, the revenue picture for Facebook looks as good as can be expected,” said eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson. But she predicted more revelations and described the findings so far as “unsettling and stomach-churning.”

CEO Mark Zuckerberg made only a brief mention of what he called the “recent debate around our company." Largely repeating statements he made after Haugen's Oct. 5 testimony before a U.S. Senate subcommittee, he insisted that he welcomes “good faith criticism” but considers the current storm a “coordinated effort” to paint a “false picture" of the company based on leaked documents.

“It makes a good soundbite to say that we don’t solve these impossible tradeoffs because we’re just focused on making money, but the reality is these questions are not primarily about our business, but about balancing difficult social values," Zuckerberg said.

Haugen, meanwhile, told a British parliamentary committee Monday that the social media giant stokes online hate and extremism, fails to protect children from harmful content and lacks any incentive to fix the problems, providing momentum for efforts by European governments working on stricter regulation of tech companies.

While her testimony echoed much of what she told the U.S. Senate this month, her in-person appearance drew intense interest from a British parliamentary committee that is much further along in drawing up legislation to rein in the power of social media companies.

Haugen told the committee of United Kingdom lawmakers that Facebook Groups amplifies online hate, saying algorithms that prioritize engagement take people with mainstream interests and push them to the extremes. The former Facebook data scientist said the company could add moderators to prevent groups over a certain size from being used to spread extremist views.

“Unquestionably, it’s making hate worse,” she said.

Haugen said she was “shocked" to hear that Facebook wants to double down on what Zuckerberg calls “the metaverse,” the company’s plan for an immersive online world it believes will be the next big internet trend.

"They’re gonna hire 10,000 engineers in Europe to work on the metaverse,” Haugen said. “I was like, ‘Wow, do you know what we could have done with safety if we had 10,000 more engineers?’” she said.

Facebook says it wants regulation for tech companies and was glad the U.K. was leading the way.

“While we have rules against harmful content and publish regular transparency reports, we agree we need regulation for the whole industry so that businesses like ours aren’t making these decisions on our own," Facebook said Monday.

It pointed to investing $13 billion (9.4 billion pounds) on safety and security since 2016 and asserted that it’s “almost halved” the amount of hate speech over the last three quarters.

Haugen accused Facebook-owned Instagram of failing to keep children under 13 — the minimum user age — from opening accounts, saying it wasn’t doing enough to protect kids from content that, for example, makes them feel bad about their bodies.

“Facebook’s own research describes it as an addict’s narrative. Kids say, ‘This makes me unhappy, I feel like I don’t have the ability to control my usage of it, and I feel like if I left, I’d be ostracized,‘” she said.

The company last month delayed plans for a kids’ version of Instagram, geared toward those under 13, in order to address concerns about the vulnerability of younger users.

Pressed on whether she believes Facebook is fundamentally evil, Haugen demurred and said, “I can’t see into the hearts of men.” Facebook is not evil, but negligent, she suggested.

It was Haugen's second appearance before lawmakers after she testified in the U.S. about the danger she says the company poses, from harming children to inciting political violence and fueling misinformation. Haugen cited internal research documents she secretly copied before leaving her job in Facebook’s civic integrity unit.

The documents, which Haugen provided to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, allege Facebook prioritized profits over safety and hid its own research from investors and the public. Some stories based on the files have already been published, exposing internal turmoil after Facebook was blindsided by the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot and how it dithered over curbing divisive content in India. More is to come.

Representatives from Facebook and other social media companies plan to speak to the British committee Thursday.

Haugen is scheduled to meet next month with European Union officials in Brussels, where the bloc's executive commission is updating its digital rulebook to better protect internet users by holding online companies more responsible for illegal or dangerous content.

Under the U.K. rules, expected to take effect next year, Silicon Valley giants face an ultimate penalty of up to 10% of their global revenue for any violations. The EU is proposing a similar penalty.

___

See full coverage of the “Facebook Papers” here: https://apnews.com/hub/the-facebook-papers

___

Associated Press writer Marcy Gordon in Washington contributed to this report.

Barbara Ortutay And Kelvin Chan, The Associated Press

Whistleblower tells British panel Facebook algorithm geared for 'bad' users

"Facebook has been unwilling to accept even little slivers of profit being sacrificed for safety," former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen said Monday.


Former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen arrives for a Senate commerce committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on October 5. 

Pool Photo by Drew Angerer/UPI | License Photo

Oct. 25 (UPI) -- In her second appearance before a national legislative body in less than a month, whistleblower Frances Haugen told British lawmakers Monday that Facebook is "unquestionably" stoking levels of hatred and addiction through its social platform.

Three weeks after detailing her experience in the U.S. Congress, the former Facebook data scientist told the British parliamentary Online Safety Bill committee in London that the company is "making hate worse" because tapping into anger among users online is the simplest way to grow its audience.

Further, she said that Facebook algorithms actually work to send users to pages with more extreme content.

"Bad actors have an incentive to play the algorithm," she said in her testimony Monday. "The current system is biased toward bad actors, and people who push people to the extremes."

Haugen said that efforts at Facebook to shield users from harmful or hateful content aren't working mainly due to institutional biases that prioritize revenue growth.

"Facebook has been unwilling to accept even little slivers of profit being sacrificed for safety," she said.

Haugen was invited to testify before the British panel to lend expertise to proposed legislation that aims to rein in the power of social media companies and crack down on harmful content in Britain.

The landmark legislation also aims to punish social companies if they fail to safeguard users online.

Haugen went public last month with criticism that said Facebook profits from stoking political divisions and spreading disinformation, and has long known that the platform is potentially harmful to younger users.

Haugen first detailed her experience on 60 Minutes early this month and later testified before the U.S. Senate commerce committee.

RELATED  Facebook whistleblower invited to speak to European Parliament

She told Parliament Monday that Facebook's Instagram platform is "more dangerous than other forms of social media," as it creates risks of addiction and self-harm for teen and child users.

Instagram, she said, "is about social comparison and about bodies", which feeds addictive behavior in unhappy children who "can't control their use of the app, but feel like they cannot stop using it."

It may not be possible to adapt Instagram's algorithms to make it sufficiently safe for children, she warned.

Last month, Facebook announced that it was pausing the launch of Instagram Kids, a child-specific version of the photo-sharing app, to evaluate concerns about the effect of social platforms on children.

Haugen's testimony Monday came a week after the stabbing death of British lawmaker David Amess, whose killing led to calls for more scrutiny for Britain's online safety bill and additional criticism of online behaviors

Labor Party leader Keir Starmer demanded that the owners of digital platforms be criminally sanctioned for failing to shut down extremism.

Before Monday's hearing, Haugen said that she never saw Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg give any indication that he cared to protect users from potential harm.

"Right now, Mark is unaccountable," she said, according to The Guardian. "He has all the control. He has no oversight, and he has not demonstrated that he is willing to govern the company at the level that is necessary for public safety."

Facebook's independent oversight board said last week that it invited Haugen to appear in the coming weeks, and has been invited to speak before the European Parliament's consumer protection committee on Nov. 8 for a session focused on updating European Internet regulations.

Union vote at Amazon’s NY warehouse big step closer

By BOBBY CAINA CALVAN

Organizers deliver "Authorization of Rresentation" forms to the National Labor Relations Board in New York, Monday, Oct. 25, 2021. Union organizers have delivered more than 2,000 signatures to federal labor officials in a bid to unionize workers at Amazon's distribution center in New York's Staten Island. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)


NEW YORK (AP) — The National Labor Relations Board said there was sufficient interest to form a union at an Amazon distribution center in New York, after union organizers on Monday delivered hundreds of signatures to the agency — a key step in authorizing a vote that could establish the first union at the nation’s largest online retailer.

This is the second unionizing attempt in the past year at Amazon. Workers in Alabama resoundingly defeated an effort earlier this year, but organizers there are asking federal officials for a do-over.

Organizers delivered more than 2,000 signed union-support cards to the NLRB’s Brooklyn office after launching the effort in April. The specific number of signatures was not immediately available.

“This is a small victory,” said Christian Smalls, a former employee of the retail giant who now leads the fledgling Amazon Labor Union, adding, “We know the fight has just started.”

As part of its petition to hold a union vote, organizers must have submitted signatures from at least 30% from the roughly 5,500 employees who the union says work at four adjoining Amazon facilities that it seeks to represent under collective bargaining.

Monday’s development puts the company on notice that the NLRB has determined that union organizers have met the minimum threshold for Amazon to formally acknowledge and to respond to the union-organizing petition. That means the company must post notices on its premises that the union is seeking to become the bargaining representative for thousands of Amazon workers on Staten Island.

The company could have several avenues to challenge the effort, including contesting the number of employees that union organizers used to calculate the minimum signatures they needed.

“We’re skeptical that a sufficient number of legitimate employee signatures has been secured to warrant an election,” Amazon’s spokesperson, Kelly Nantel, said in a statement.

“If there is an election, we want the voice of our employees to be heard and look forward to it. Our focus remains on listening directly to our employees and continuously improving on their behalf,” Nantel said.

While a vote is not yet certain, organizers hailed the formal filing of their petition as an important step to forming a union.

“This was the easy part,” Smalls said of the signature gathering. “Convincing at least 50% of the workers to vote yes is the hard part.”

Smalls says he was fired last year after organizing a walkout to protest working conditions, although Amazon said he repeatedly violated company policies.

NLRB staff members started counting the cards soon after they were delivered, and union organizers were confident that they had met the minimum necessary. They had planned a rally outside the Staten Island distribution center Monday evening.

Following the count, the NLRB ordered Amazon to provide a roster of employees who would be covered by the proposed union and set November 15 as the start of hearings on the union-organizing petition.

If an election is held, the NLRB said it will conduct voting by secret ballot. Smalls proposed that the election be held on March 30, the day he was fired.

If organizers in New York succeed, it could launch other union drives across the company’s vast empire, which includes more than 100 fulfillment centers and nearly 1 million employees across the United States.

Amazon employees have complained about long work hours, insufficient breaks and safety, with Smalls and others likening working conditions to modern-day sweatshops. The employee turnover rate has also been a cause of concern.

The union efforts on Staten Island come as Amazon is on a hiring binge. It announced in September it wants to hire 125,000 delivery and warehouse workers and is paying new recruits an average of $18 an hour in a tight job market. That’s in addition to the 150,000 seasonal workers it plans to bring on for the holidays.

The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union had led the effort to form a union at the Alabama facility that was defeated in April.

A hearing officer for the NLRB found in August that Amazon potentially interfered with the Alabama election. And the RWDSU is now waiting for a decision from an NLRB regional director to see whether the hearing officer’s guidance will be sanctioned. But even with a second election, labor experts say a union victory there is a long shot.

The New York City organizing drive is taking place without the support of a national union.

VAPING IS A BETTER WAY TO SMOKE POT

Study: More than 1 in 7 teens, adolescents in U.S., Canada have vaped pot


Marijuana vaping is becoming increasingly common among adolescents and teens in the United States and Canada, according to a new analysis. 

Photo by 1503849/Pixabay

Oct. 25 (UPI) -- More than one in seven adolescents and teens in the United States and Canada has vaped marijuana in their lifetimes, an analysis published Monday by JAMA Pediatrics.

Pooled results for nearly 200,000 people ages 11 to 18 from 17 studies indicates that 14% used e-cigarettes to smoke the drug, also known as cannabis, at some point as of 2019-20, the data showed.

This is up from 6% between 2013 and 2016, the researchers said.

In 2019-2020, an estimated 13% of people in this age group vaped marijuana during the previous 12 months, up from 7% in 2017-18, according to the researchers.

RELATED Study: Marijuana vaping more common among Hispanic, Black youths

And just over 8% had used the devices to consume the drug over the previous 30 days in 2019-20 compared to fewer than 2% between 2013-2016.

"Adolescent cannabis vaping is becoming more common in the United States and Canada," study co-author Carmen Lim told UPI in an email.

"Not only is it linked to poorer cognitive development in adolescents, [but] it could increase risk of dependence, other substance use and many other health, social and behavioral problems later in life," said Lim, a doctoral candidate at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

Previous studies indicated that as many as one in five adolescents and teens in the United States regularly use e-cigarettes, or vaping devices, to smoke marijuana, and that the habit is more common among people in this age group who are Hispanic than those who are White or Black.

This is despite links between the use of illegal marijuana vaping devices and serious lung injury.

For this analysis, Lim and her colleagues analyzed data from 17 studies that collectively tracked the marijuana vaping habits of 198,845 adolescents and teens in the United States and Canada.

RELATED Vaping-linked lung injury less common in states with legalized marijuana

In addition to identifying the increased use of these devices for marijuana within the age group, the findings also suggest that cannabis oil, as opposed to dried leaves, now may be the preferred option, particularly in the United States, the researchers said.

"Cannabis vaping is a new phenomenon, [but] we can draw examples from global tobacco and alcohol policy, both of which have achieved successes in reducing prevalence and minimizing harms," Lim said.

"For example, cannabis marketing and advertising of THC products through targeted ads on the internet should be strictly regulated. Policy makers can also consider imposing a potency- and weight-based tax defined by THC levels," she said.

BY VAPING POT YOU INHALE 99.9% VAPORIZED SMOKE WITH NO PARTICULATE MATTER UNLIKLE OTHER FORMS OF SMOKING

GOOD NEWS SMOKERS
Study: 87% of excess lung cancer risk eliminated if smokers quit before age 45

By Amy Norton, HealthDay News


If people who smoke cigarettes quit by age 45, they could eliminate 87% of the increased cancer risk they face as smokers, according to a new study. 

File Photo by Pexels/Pixabay

Smokers who kick the habit before age 45 can nearly eliminate their excess risk of dying from lung or other cancers, a new study estimates.

It's well-established that after smokers quit, their risk of tobacco-related cancers drops substantially over time.

Researchers said the new findings underscore the power of quitting as early as possible. Among more than 400,000 Americans they followed, smokers died of cancer at three times the rate of nonsmokers. However, smokers who managed to quit by age 45 lowered that excess risk by 87%.

And if they overcame the habit by age 35, their excess risk of cancer death was erased, said Blake Thomson, a researcher at the American Cancer Society who led the study.

He stressed that it's never too late to quit. Smokers who quit in their 50s to early 60s also substantially lowered their excess risk of cancer death.

But the findings do underscore the power of kicking the habit as early as possible.

"If you're a smoker in your 30s, hopefully these findings will speak to you," Thomson said.

The study was published this month in the journal JAMA Oncology. It looked at data on more than 410,000 Americans who entered an ongoing federal health survey between 1997 and 2014.

Around 10,000 participants died of cancer during the study period. And on average, smokers were three times more likely to die of cancer -- most often lung cancer -- compared with people who'd never smoked.

Much, however, depended on age -- the age at which smokers both started and quit.

The younger people started smoking, the greater their risk of eventually dying from cancer. Among those who started before age 18, the risk of dying from cancer was increased at least three-fold.

When people started smoking before age 10, their risk of cancer death was quadrupled versus lifelong nonsmokers.

It may sound surprising, Thomson noted, but there are smokers who get hooked that early in life.

For people who pick up the habit at a tender age, "it's imperative that they quit as soon as possible," Thomson said.

That's because overall, his team estimates, smokers who quit before age 35 wiped out their excess risk of dying from cancer. Meanwhile, those who quit before age 45 slashed their excess risk by 87%.

The outlook was also good for smokers who quit later. If they managed to do so between the ages of 45 and 54, their excess risk was cut by 78%, and by 56% if they quit between the ages of 55 and 64.

"The take-home message is that it is never too early and never too late to quit," said Dr. David Tom Cooke, a volunteer spokesperson for the American Lung Association.

He said doctors should help patients kick the habit as early as possible, but also "never give up" trying to quit.

"Sometimes an individual has to quit multiple times to stay off tobacco products permanently," said Cooke, who is also a professor of general thoracic surgery at the University of California, Davis Health.

In general, he said, smokers fare better when they get some help in the effort, whether from their doctor or through free government "quitlines," which operate in every state. In a recent study, Cooke and his colleagues found that participating in California's free quitline boosted quit rates among smokers seen at their clinic.

That kind of support, Thomson said, can help people sort out their smoking-cessation options. These include two prescription medications and over-the-counter nicotine replacement products, like gums and patches.

Smoking raises the risk of numerous cancers, Thomson noted -- including colon, kidney, bladder, stomach and pancreatic cancer. But lung cancer is the top cancer killer among smokers.

Some former smokers who've quit within the past 15 years still qualify for annual CT scans to screen for lung cancer -- depending on their age and how heavily they smoked in the past.

"I would encourage any current or former smoker to talk to their primary care provider and find out if they are eligible for lung cancer screening," Cooke said.More information

The American Lung Association has resources to help smokers quit.

Copyright © 2021 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

FBI: Hate crimes against Asian Americans higher in 2020 than first reported


The FBI said in an update that more than 60% of hate crimes nationwide last year were motivated by race.

 UPI Photo

Oct. 25 (UPI) -- Hate crimes against Americans of Asian descent increased in 2020 even more than federal authorities first reported, the FBI said in an update on Monday.

The FBI said the figures it reported in August were incomplete due to an error in statistics from the state of Ohio. At the time, the bureau said crimes against Asian Americans increased 70% last year. Monday's update pushed that figure to 76%.

The FBI said it corrected the error in the Ohio reporting.

Jay Greenberg, deputy assistant director of the FBI's criminal division, said that the increase occurred mostly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Because a hate crime is defined as a violent or property crime with a bias motivation, that crime could be categorized a number of different ways," Greenberg told ABC News.

"We would like the public to reach out to us if they believe that they are a victim of a hate crime. It's not for the public to make that determination; we will work with our state and local partners and help determine how best to investigate that."

The FBI update said more than 60% of hate crimes nationwide were motivated by race.

The bureau noted that one-fifth of hate crimes in 2020 were motivated by sexual orientation and 13% were attributed to religious bias.

SPACE RACE 2.5 CAPITALI$M IN SPACE
Blue Origin, partners announce plans for private space station


Blue Origin's founder Jeff Bezos (R) greets "Star Trek" actor William Shatner as he emerges his space trip on October 13. 

Photo by Blue Origin/EPA-EFE



Oct. 25 (UPI) -- Jeff Bezos announced plans on Monday for Blue Origin to run the world's first private space station called the Orbital Reef, which would serve as a space business park and a regular destination for space tourists.

Blue Origin will partner with a Sierra Nevada Corp. subsidiary called Sierra Space, along with Boeing, Redwire Space and Genesis Engineer to make the space station happen.

While not giving a date for when the Orbital Reef would be operational, participants said it will create business and research opportunities and should be attractive to industrial, international and commercial customers.

"For over 60 years, NASA and other space agencies have developed orbital space flight and space habitation, setting us up for commercial business to take off in this decade," Brent Sherwood, Blue Origin's senior vice president of advanced development programs, said in a statement.

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"We will expand access, lower the cost and provide all the services and amenities needed to normalize space flight. A vibrant business ecosystem will grow in low Earth orbit, generating new discoveries, new products, new entertainments and global awareness."

The Orbital Reef business model will provide an avenue for countries without a space program to participate in space research, along with investors, travel companies, entrepreneurs and investors.

Janet Kavandi, Sierra Space president and a former NASA astronaut, said her company is supplying its Dream Chaser spaceplane, the space module and additional space technologies for the space station.

"As a former NASA astronaut, I've been waiting for the moment where working and living in space is accessible to more people worldwide, and that moment has arrived," Kavandi said in a statement.

Blue Origin would provide core modules and the launching system, while Boeing would add a science module and provide station operations, maintenance engineering and its Starliner crew spacecraft.

Partner Redwire Space would provide microgravity research, development, manufacturing and payload operations, while Genesis Engineering Solutions would offer a new single-person spacecraft for routine operations and tourist excursions.

Arizona State University is to lead a global consortium of universities that provide research advisory services and public outreach.

"The single-person spacecraft will transform spacewalking," said Brand Griffin, program manager for Genesis Engineering Solutions. "Space workers and tourists alike will have safe, comfortable and quick access outside Orbital Reef."

Blue Origin, Boeing chart course for 'business park' in space


(Reuters) - Billionaire Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin on Monday unveiled plans to develop a commercial space station called "Orbital Reef" with Boeing, aiming to launch the spacecraft in the second half of this decade

.

© Reuters/Isaiah Downing FILE PHOTO: Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos addresses the media about the New Shepard rocket booster and Crew Capsule mockup at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs

The venture will be built in partnership with Sierra Space, the spaceflight wing of defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corp, and will be backed by Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering Solutions and Arizona State University.

Orbital Reef will be operated as a "mixed use business park", and plans to provide the infrastructure needed to scale economic activity and open new markets in space, Blue Origin and Sierra Space said.

"Seasoned space agencies, high-tech consortia, sovereign nations without space programs, media and travel companies, funded entrepreneurs and sponsored inventors, and future-minded investors all have a place on Orbital Reef," the companies said in a statement.

Sierra in April announced plans to offer the first free-flying commercial space station. (https://bit.ly/2ZlJ8g3)

In July, Blue Origin had a successful debut space tourism flight, with Bezos and three others aboard. Earlier this month, 90-year-old U.S. actor William Shatner - Captain James Kirk of "Star Trek" fame - became the oldest person in space aboard a rocketship flown by Blue Origin.

(Reporting by Tiyashi Datta in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath)

#ABOLISHCBP

Report: Border Patrol agents who made bigoted posts received reduced discipline

By UPI Staff

U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2018. File Photo by Mani Albrecht/ U.S. Customs and Border Protection/UPI | License Photo

Oct. 25 (UPI) -- A U.S. House of Representatives agency found that over 130 Border Patrol agents who made bigoted posts against migrants in secret social media groups received reduced disciplinary measures.

An internal investigation launched in 2019 by the Committee on Oversight and Reform shows that a secret group called "I'm 10-15" had more than 9,500 members in July 2019 who took to the group to express job dissatisfaction among other things.

The committee said that the Trump administration blocked access to the group's records and that Customs and Border Protection began producing documents in February 2021.

"Documents obtained by the Committee show that although CBP was aware of misconduct on 'I'm 10-15' since August 2016, the agency took minimal action to strengthen social media training or guidance after the media began reporting on agents' misconduct and the Committee launched its investigation in 2019," the report stated.

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Of the 135 employees the committee looked into, 60 agents were subjected to discipline. Of those, two were fired, 43 were suspended, 12 were given letters of reprimand, and three were issued other disciplinary action.

Some misconduct included a sexually explicit doctored image and derogatory comments about a member of Congress. The employee was given a suspension and given back pay. Another Border Patrol supervisor who posted a video of a migrant falling off a cliff to their death faced a 30-day suspension.

The committee said that the CBP had weaknesses in its disciplinary process to hold its employees accountable and that there is a lack of social media guidance and training given to agents.
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The report also stated that CBP employees have low morale, causing them to post their frustrations on the Facebook group. Federal surveys have shown that employees view the agency as having a "poor organizational climate."

The committee recommended CBP leadership to demonstrate social media accountability, to provide social media training, screen applicants with records of discrimination, make disciplinary records available, and address issues of poor morale.