Yelp to add more flags to anti-abortion pregnancy centers


 The Yelp website is shown on a computer screen in Los Angeles, March 17, 2010. The online reviews site Yelp said Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2022, that it is rolling out a new feature to protect users seeking abortions from being misled about anti-abortion centers listed on its platform.

 (AP Photo/Richard Vogel, File)


The online reviews site Yelp said Tuesday it is rolling out a new feature to protect users seeking abortions from being misled about anti-abortion pregnancy centers listed on its platform.

Such centers are typically religiously affiliated and deter clients from having an abortion. On Tuesday, Yelp said it will place a consumer notice on the listings informing users that the centers “typically provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite.”

In 2018, moderators for the San Francisco-based company began recategorizing listings for such organizations as “crisis pregnancy centers” or “faith-based crisis pregnancy centers.” The organizations had previously categorized themselves as reproductive health services, medical centers and other health and medical categories.

“It’s well-reported that crisis pregnancy centers do not offer abortion services, and it’s been shown that many provide misleading information in an attempt to steer people seeking abortion care to other options,” the company said in a post on its website detailing the change.

Yelp’s move might put more pressure on Google to do something similar with listings on its site. Last week, hundreds of Google employees released a petition calling on the company to fix misleading search results for abortion services by removing “fake abortion providers” and halt its business with “publishers of disinformation related to abortion services.”

In June, Democratic lawmakers in Congress also urged the company to curb the appearance of the anti-abortion pregnancy centers for certain search results. But Republicans pushed back last month, warning the tech giant not to do so in a letter sent by 17 conservative attorney generals to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Google did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Tuesday.

In the past several months, Yelp said it has also been picking up on efforts to better match users searching for abortion clinics with those services and make it less likely those users will see anti-abortion pregnancy centers in search results. The company said it has evaluated roughly 33,500 listings this year and recategorized nearly 470 pages for the centers.

‘Pre-bunking’ shows promise in fight against misinformation

By DAVID KLEPPER

 The Google logo is seen at the Vivatech show in Paris, France, June 15, 2022. Google and a team of university researchers have hit on what they say could be an effective way to make people more impervious to the harmful impact of online misinformation. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)

Soon after the Russian invasion, the hoaxes began. Ukrainian refugees were taking jobs, committing crimes and abusing handouts. The misinformation spread rapidly online throughout Eastern Europe, sometimes pushed by Moscow in an effort to destabilize its neighbors.

It’s the kind of swift spread of falsehoods that has been blamed in many countries for increased polarization and an erosion of trust in democratic institutions, journalism and science.

But countering or stopping misinformation has proven elusive.

New findings from university researchers and Google, however, reveal that one of the most promising responses to misinformation may also be one of the simplest.

In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, the researchers detail how short online videos that teach basic critical thinking skills can make people better able to resist misinformation.

The researchers created a series of videos similar to a public service announcement that focused on specific misinformation techniques — characteristics seen in many common false claims that include emotionally charged language, personal attacks or false comparisons between two unrelated items.

Researchers then gave people a series of claims and found that those who watched the videos were significantly better at distinguishing false information from accurate information.

It’s an approach called “pre-bunking” and it builds on years of research into an idea known as inoculation theory that suggests exposing people to how misinformation works, using harmless, fictional examples, can boost their defenses to false claims.

With the findings in hand, Google plans to roll out a series of pre-bunking videos soon in Eastern Europe focused on scapegoating, which can be seen in much of the misinformation about Ukrainian refugees. That focus was chosen by Jigsaw, a division of Google that works to find new ways to address misinformation and extremism.

“We have spent quite a bit of time and energy studying the problem,” said Beth Goldberg, Jigsaw’s head of research and one of the authors of the paper. “We started thinking: How can we make the users, the people online, more resilient to misinformation?”

The two-minute clips then demonstrate how these tactics can show up in headlines, or social media posts, to make a person believe something that isn’t true.

They’re surprisingly effective. Subjects who viewed the videos were found to be significantly better at distinguishing false claims from accurate information when tested by the researchers. The same positive results occurred when the experiment was replicated on YouTube, where nearly 1 million people viewed the videos.

Researchers are now investigating how long the effects last, and whether “booster” videos can help sustain the benefits.

Earlier findings have suggested that online games or tutorials that teach critical thinking skills can also improve resiliency to misinformation. But videos, which could be played alongside online advertisements, are likely to reach many more people, said Jon Roozenbeek, a Cambridge University professor and one of the authors of the study.

Other authors included researchers at the University of Bristol in the U.K. and the University of Western Australia.

Google’s effort will be one of the largest real-world tests of pre-bunking so far. The videos will be released on YouTube, Facebook and TikTok, in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. All three countries have accepted large numbers of Ukrainian refugees and their citizens could be vulnerable to misinformation about refugees.

Jigsaw CEO Yasmin Green said the work on prebunking is intended to complement Google’s other efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation: “As the scourge of misinformation grows, there’s a lot more we can do to provide people with prompts and features that help them stay safe and informed online.”

While journalistic fact checks can be effective in debunking a particular piece of misinformation, they’re time and labor intensive. By focusing on characteristics of misinformation in general instead of specific claims, pre-bunking videos can help a person spot false claims on a wider variety of topics.

Another method, content moderation by social media companies, can often be inconsistent. While platforms like Facebook and Twitter often remove misinformation that violates their rules, they’re also criticized for failing to do more. Other platforms like Telegram or Gab boast a largely hands-off approach to misinformation.

Social media content moderation and journalistic fact checks can also run the risk of alienating those who believe the misinformation. They might also be ignored by people who already distrust legitimate news outlets.

“The word fact checking itself has become politicized,” Roozenbeek said.

Pre-bunking videos, however, don’t target specific claims, and they make no assertions about what is true or not. Instead, they teach the viewer how false claims work in general — whether it’s a claim about elections or NASA’s moon landings, or the latest outbreak of the avian flu.

That transferability makes pre-bunking a particularly effective way of confronting misinformation, according to John Cook, a research professor at Australia’s Monash University who has created online games that teach ways to spot misinformation.

“We’ve done enough research to know this can be effective,” Cook said. “What we need now is the resources to deploy this at scale.”

Amazon keeps growing, and so does its cache of data on you

By HALELUYA HADERO

The Amazon logo is seen in Douai, northern France, April 16, 2020. In August 2022, Amazon has said it will spend billions of dollars in two gigantic acquisitions that, if approved, will broaden its ever growing presence in the lives of consumers. This time, the company is targeting two areas: health care and the "smart home." (AP Photo/Michel Spingler, File)


From what you buy online, to how you remember tasks, to when you monitor your doorstep, Amazon is seemingly everywhere.

And it appears the company doesn’t want to halt its reach anytime soon. In recent weeks, Amazon has said it will spend billions of dollars in two gigantic acquisitions that, if approved, will broaden its ever growing presence in the lives of consumers.

This time, the company is targeting two areas: health care, through its $3.9 billion buyout of the primary care company One Medical, and the “smart home,” where it plans to expand its already mighty presence through a $1.7 billion merger with iRobot, the maker of the popular robotic Roomba vacuum.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a company known for its vast collection of consumer information, both mergers have heightened enduring privacy concerns about how Amazon gathers data and what it does with it. The latest line of Roombas, for example, employ sensors that map and remember a home’s floor plan.

“It’s acquiring this vast set of data that Roomba collects about people’s homes,” said Ron Knox, an Amazon critic who works for the anti-monopoly group Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “Its obvious intent, through all the other products that it sells to consumers, is to be in your home. (And) along with the privacy issues come the antitrust issues, because it’s buying market share.”

Amazon’s reach goes well beyond that. Some estimates show the retail giant controls roughly 38% of the U.S. e-commerce market, allowing it to gather granular data about the shopping preferences of millions of Americans and more worldwide. Meanwhile, its Echo devices, which house the voice assistant Alexa, have dominated the U.S. smart speaker market, accounting for roughly 70% of sales, according to estimates by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Ring, which Amazon purchased in 2018 for $1 billion, monitors doorsteps and helps police track down crime — even when users might not be aware. And at select Amazon stores and Whole Foods, the company is testing a palm-scanning technology that allows customers to pay for items by storing biometric data in the cloud, sparking concerns about risks of a data breach, which Amazon has attempted to assuage.

“We treat your palm signature just like other highly sensitive personal data and keep it safe using best-in-class technical and physical security controls,” the company said on a website that provides information about the technology.

Even consumers who actively avoid Amazon are still likely to have little say about how their employers power their computer networks, which Amazon — along with Google — has long dominated through its cloud-computing service AWS.

“It’s hard to think of another organization that has as many touch points as Amazon does to an individual,” said Ian Greenblatt, who heads up tech research at the consumer research and data analytics firm J.D. Power. “It’s almost overwhelming, and it’s hard to put a finger on it.”

And Amazon — like any company — aims to grow. In the past few years, the company has purchased the Wi-Fi startup Eero and partnered with the construction company Lennar to offer tech-powered houses. With iRobot, it would gain one more building block for the ultimate smart home — and, of course, more data.

Customers can opt out of having iRobot devices store a layout of their homes, according to the vacuum maker. But data privacy advocates worry the merger is another way Amazon could suck up information to integrate into its other devices or use to target consumers with ads.

In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski denied that’s what the company wants to do.

“We do not use home maps for targeted advertising and have no plans to do so,” Levandowski said.

Whether that will relieve concerns is another matter, especially in light of research about Amazon’s other devices. Earlier this year, a group of university researchers released a report that found voice data from Amazon’s Echo devices are used to target ads to consumers — something the company had denied in the past.

Umar Iqbal, a postdoc at the University of Washington who led the research, said he and his colleagues found Echo devices running third-party Skills, which are like apps for Alexa, that communicate with advertisers.

Levandowski said consumers can opt out of receiving “interest-based” ads by adjusting their preferences on Amazon’s advertising preferences page. She also said Amazon doesn’t share Alexa requests with advertising networks.

Skills that collect personal information are required to post their privacy policies on a detail page in Amazon’s store, according to the company. Researchers, however, found only 2% of Skills are clear about their data collection practices, and the vast majority don’t mention Alexa or Amazon at all.

For companies like Amazon, data collection is for more than just data’s sake, noted Kristen Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame.

“You can almost see them just trying to paint a broader picture of an individual,” Martin said. “It’s about the inferences that they’re able to draw about you specifically, and then you compared to other people.”

Amazon’s One Medical deal, for instance, has sparked questions about how the company would handle personal health data that would fall into its lap.

Should the deal close, Levandowski said customers’ health information will be handled separately from all other Amazon businesses. She also added Amazon wouldn’t share personal health information outside of One Medical for “advertising or marketing purposes of other Amazon products and services without clear permission from the customer.”

But Lucia Savage, a chief privacy officer at the chronic care provider Omada Health, said that doesn’t mean One Medical wouldn’t be able to get data from other arms of Amazon’s business that could help it better profile its patients. The information just has to flow one way, she said.

To be sure, privacy concerns are not limited to Amazon. In the aftermath of Roe v Wade being overturned, for instance, Google said it would automatically get rid of information about users who visit abortion clinics amid pressure from Democratic lawmakers. Meanwhile, Meta, which owns Facebook, settled a class action lawsuit in February over its use of “cookies” about a decade ago that tracked users after they logged off Facebook.

But unlike Meta and Google, whose focus is mainly on selling ads, Amazon might benefit more from collecting data because its primary goal is to sell products, said Alex Harman, director of competition policy at the anti-monopoly group Economic Security Project.

“For them, data is all about getting you to buy more and be locked into their stuff,” Harman said.

Amazon plans to shut Amazon Care service amid One Medical overlap

Spencer Soper, Bloomberg News

The Amazon.com Inc. logo is displayed on an Apple Inc. laptop computer in this arranged photograph taken in the Brooklyn borough of New York, U.S., on Monday, April 23, 2019. Amazon.com Inc. is scheduled to release earnings figures on April 25. Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

Amazon.com Inc. is closing its primary care and telehealth service, a sudden move that follows the company’s deal to buy the One Medical chain of clinics. 

Amazon Care, which was launched in 2019, will close by the end of the year, Senior Vice President Neil Lindsay said in an email to the company’s health care team. 

“This decision wasn’t made lightly and only became clear after many months of careful consideration,” Lindsay said in the email, which was reviewed by Bloomberg. “Although our enrolled members have loved many aspects of Amazon Care, it is not a complete enough offering for the large enterprise customers we have been targeting, and wasn’t going to work long-term.”

Lindsay said many displaced workers will have opportunities to join other teams within Amazon.

Kristen Helton, who ran Amazon Care, is on a break that began earlier this summer, Bloomberg reported earlier this month.

Amazon Care overlaps with services provided by One Medical, which Amazon said in July it would acquire in an all-cash deal valued at US$3.49 billion. One Medical, whose parent is called 1Life Healthcare Inc., operates 182 medical offices in 25 markets in the US. Customers pay a subscription fee for access to its physicians and round-the-clock digital health services. Amazon in February announced plans to expand Amazon Care to 20 additional cities, including New York, Chicago, Miami and San Francisco.

News of the closing came as a surprise to members of the team, according to a person familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter.

“It just seems like there weren’t enough health care hires from the start,” the person said. “A lot of internal Amazon people were working in a space they didn’t know anything about.”

Amazon for years has been trying to break into the health care industry. It purchased mail-order pharmacy PillPack Inc. in 2018 and joined a much ballyhooed health care venture with JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. that fizzled out after three years.

Danish adoptees call for S. Korea to probe adoption issues

By KIM TONG-HYUNG

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Peter Møller, attorney and co-head of the Danish Korean Rights Group, speaks during a news conference in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2022. Dozens of South Korean adoptees who were sent to Danish parents as children in the 1970s and ‘80s have formally demanded Tuesday, Aug 23, 2022, the South Korean government investigate the circumstances surrounding their adoptions, which they say were corrupted by systemic practices that falsified or obscured children's origins. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Dozens of South Koreans adopted by Danish parents decades ago have formally demanded the South Korean government investigate their adoptions, which they say were marred by widespread practices that falsified or obscured children’s origins.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Seoul has up to four months to decide whether to accept the application collectively filed Tuesday by the 53 adoptees. If it does, that could possibly trigger the most far-reaching inquiry into foreign adoptions in the country, which has never fully reconciled the child export frenzy engineered by past military governments that ruled from the 1960s to ’80s.

The application cites a broad range of grievances emphasizing how scores of children were carelessly or unnecessarily removed from their families amid loose government monitoring and a lack of due diligence.

Perhaps more crucially, the country’s special laws aimed at promoting adoptions practically allowed profit-driven agencies to manipulate records and bypass proper child relinquishment.

Most of the South Korean adoptees sent abroad were registered by agencies as legal orphans found abandoned on the streets, although they frequently had relatives who could be easily identified and found. This made the children more easily adoptable as agencies raced to send more kids to the West at faster speeds.

“None of us are orphans,” said Peter Møller, attorney and co-head of the Danish Korean Rights Group, as he described the group’s members who filed the application.

“(In) a lot of papers, the Korean state at the time have stamped papers that say people were found on the streets. If you do a little bit of math, that would mean that from the 1970s and 1980s Seoul would be flooded with baskets with children lying around in the streets. … Basements will be filled with lost child reports at police stations.”

Møller, who was adopted to Denmark in 1974, said about 50 more of the group’s members are expected to join the application and that he plans to come back to South Korea with their files in September.

The complaints by adoptees who filed the application include inaccurate or falsified information in adoption papers that distort their biological origins, such as wrong birth names, dates or locations, or details about birth parents.

Some of the adoptees say they discovered that the agencies had switched their identities to replace other children who died or got too sick to travel to Danish parents, which made it highly difficult or often impossible to trace their roots.

The adoptees called for the commission to broadly investigate the alleged wrongdoings surrounding their adoptions, including how agencies potentially falsified records, manipulated children’s backgrounds and origins, and proceeded with adoptions without the proper consent of birth parents. They want the commission to establish whether the government should be held accountable for failing to monitor the agencies and confirm whether the uptick in adoptions was fueled by increasingly larger payments and donations from adoptive parents, which apparently motivated agencies to create their own supply.

The adoptees also called for the commission to push Holt Children’s Services and the Korea Social Service — the two agencies that sent kids to Denmark — into providing full access to the entirety of their adoption documents and background information. They also say all those records should be transferred to government authorities handling post-adoption services to prevent the information from being destroyed or manipulated.

South Korean adoptees for years have been criticizing agencies over what they see as a lack of transparency and an unwillingness to open records. Møller said some adoptees in Denmark remain reluctant to join the application out of fear that the agencies might destroy their records.

Holt didn’t answer repeated calls seeking comment. The KSS deferred all questions to Holt, the bigger agency.

Holt already has an ongoing legal battle with U.S. adoptee Adam Crapser, who in 2019 filed a 200 million won ($150,000) damage suit against the agency and the South Korean government for failing to follow through on his adoption and ensure that his American parents naturalized him. After being abused and abandoned by two different sets of American parents, Crapser was deported in 2016 following run-ins with the law 

The Danish adoptees initially considered filing a lawsuit against the agencies or South Korean government before dropping the idea because South Korean law puts the burden of proof entirely on the plaintiffs in civil cases. If the truth commission decides to investigate the adoptions, its findings could later be used by adoptees in possible damage suits against the agencies or government, said Philsik Shin, a Seoul-based scholar who helped the adoptees prepare the application.

About 200,000 South Koreans were adopted overseas during the past six decades, mainly to white parents in the United States and Europe. Denmark was one of the biggest destinations for South Korean children in Europe, receiving about 9,000 adoptees — most of them from the 1960s to late 1980s when South Korea was ruled by consecutive military governments.

During the height of the adoptions in the late 1970s and mid-1980s, agencies aggressively solicited newborns or young children from hospitals and orphanages, often in exchange for payments, and operated maternity homes where single mothers were pressured to give away their babies. Adoption workers toured factory areas and low-income neighborhoods in search of struggling families who could be persuaded to give away their children.

The agencies were run by board members close to military leaders, who saw adoptions as a tool to reduce the number of mouths to feed and the remove the socially undesirable, including children from unwed mothers. Adoptions were also aimed at deepening ties with the democratic West amid a fierce regime competition with rival North Korea, according to the military governments’ documents obtained by AP.

It wasn’t until 2013 when South Korea’s government required foreign adoptions to go through family courts, ending a decadeslong policy of allowing private agencies to dictate child relinquishments, transfer of custodies and emigration.

Past S. Korean gov’ts blamed for abuses, deaths at facility
By KIM TONG-HYUNG

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Park Sun-yi, left, a victim of Brothers Home, weeps during a press conference at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission office in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2022. The commission has found the country's past military governments responsible for atrocities committed at Brothers Home, a state-funded vagrants' facility where thousands were enslaved and abused from the 1960s to 1980s. 

(AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has found the country’s past military governments responsible for atrocities committed at Brothers Home, a state-funded “vagrants’ facility” where thousands were enslaved and abused from the 1960s to 1980s.

The landmark report on Wednesday came 35 years after a prosecutor first exposed the horrors at the facility in the southern port city of Busan and details an attempted cover-up of incriminating evidence that would have confirmed a state-sponsored crime.

The commission’s chairperson, Jung Geun-sik, urged South Korea’s current government to issue a formal apology to survivors and explore ways to ease their suffering as he announced the initial results of its investigation into Brothers, including extreme cases of forced labor, violence and deaths.

The commission also called for the government to review the conditions at current welfare facilities around the country and swiftly ratify the United Nations convention against enforced disappearances.

The commission “confirmed that the direct and indirect exercise of government authority resulted in the forced confinement of people deemed as vagrants at Brothers Home and caused serious violations of human rights, including forced labor, physical assault, cruel treatment, deaths and disappearances,” Jeung said in a news conference at the commission’s office in Seoul.

“The state has ignored pleas (by inmates) to correct the human rights violations at Brothers Home, had knowledge of the problems but did not act to resolve them, and attempted to distort and minimize the scale of the abuses after the Brothers Home incident became known in 1987, preventing proper legal handling (of the abuses) based on facts,” he said.

Lee Jae-seung, a senior commission official who oversees the Brothers inquiry, said he wouldn’t hesitate to define Brothers as a state crime.

The commission’s report was based on an examination of a broad range of evidence, including documents from police, prosecutors and courts, and Brothers’ own files, such as intake documents and death certificates. It also found records that suggest the facility abusively administered psychiatric drugs to control inmates.

The commission said the violence and abuse at Brothers were even worse than previously known. It said its examination of records so far point to at least 657 deaths at Brothers, which was higher than the previously known tally of 513 between 1975 and 1986 documented in the facility’s records.

The commission also confirmed that Busan police randomly seized people off the streets to send them to Brothers, regardless of whether they had easily identifiable homes or families. They often allowed Brothers employees, who toured the city in trucks, to do the kidnapping themselves.

Brothers, run by late owner Park In-keun and his family, also embezzled the wages of thousands of inmates who were forced into slave labor, which involved construction work both offsite and at Brothers, as well as work in factories making clothing, ballpoint pens and fishing hooks.

So far, no one has been held accountable for hundreds of deaths, rapes and beatings at Brothers.

Jung acknowledged that the recommendations the commission makes to the government aren’t binding but said its findings could be used as evidence for survivors if they pursue lawsuits for damages against the government or any remaining Brothers stakeholders. The commission did not directly recommend the pursuit of criminal charges.

The commission’s report was based on its investigation into the cases of 191 individuals, who were among 544 Brothers survivors who have so far filed applications. The commission plans to produce more reports as it continues its investigations.

Jung said the commission also plans to look into the foreign adoptions of Brothers children, which The Associated Press first confirmed in 2019. Through documents obtained from officials, lawmakers or through freedom of information requests, the AP found direct evidence that 19 children were adopted out of Brothers between 1979 and 1986, and indirect evidence suggesting at least 51 more adoptions.

Some Brothers survivors wept from their seats as Jung and Lee announced the results of the investigation.

Choi Seung-woo, who landed in Brothers as a schoolchild in 1982 after being kidnapped by police and endured severe beatings and sexual abuse for years, said the report gives survivors “hope and courage.” He urged the government to actively support survivors who are grappling with financial and health problems and intense “trauma.”

“(The commission’s findings) give us another opportunity to redeem ourselves in court, but no one knows how long that’s going to take,” Choi said.

Lee Chae-sik, another former inmate, said the commission’s truth-finding efforts won’t mean much if survivors don’t receive immediate help.

“I am fine. I run three convenience stores, but what about this guy?” Lee said, showing his text messages with another former inmate stuck in a long-term care hospital. “Our country has been waiting for us to die.”

From the 1960s to 1980s, South Korean military dictators ordered roundups to beautify the streets. Thousands — including homeless and disabled people, as well as children — were snatched off the streets and brought to facilities where they were detained and forced to work. The commission said such roundups were “illegal and unconstitutional” as they violated people’s fundamental rights and freedoms.

In interviews with dozens of former Brothers inmates, many said that as children, they were brought to the facility after police officers kidnapped them, and that their parents had no idea of their whereabouts.

Many inmates were enslaved, raped and, in hundreds of cases, beaten to death or left to die, their bodies dumped in the woods, according to dozens of interviews with survivors and a review of an extensive range of government and Brothers documents obtained by the AP.

The commission said the facility’s death records describe many of the victims as already dead upon arrival at hospitals, which it said either indicates dismal health conditions at the overcrowded facility or an attempt to conceal deaths caused by beatings and torture.

The commission said records show that Brothers, which had a designated ward for inmates with mental health problems, purchased abnormal volumes of psychiatric drugs. Such drugs were likely forced upon a broad range of inmates as the facility’s owners tried to maintain their grip over a sprawling compound they controlled with severe violence and military-style discipline.

“Brothers Home arbitrarily administered drugs to inmates who struggled to adjust or were rebellious, and the psychiatric ward was used as a so-called ‘disciplinary ward,”’ the commission said in its report.

The commission also highlighted an extreme case of a former Brothers inmate who reunited with his relatives nearly five decades after he landed at the facility.

The man, identified only by his surname Seol, was grabbed from a Busan train station and locked up at Brothers sometime around 1974 and 1975. He was transferred years later to an orphanage, which registered him as an orphan, soon after his family registered him as dead following years of futile searches. Seol reunited with his relatives in June last year, following the commission’s investigation into his family background.

The roundups intensified as South Korea began preparing to bid for and host the 1988 Summer Olympics. Brothers, a mountainside compound in Busan, was the largest of these facilities and had around 4,000 inmates when its horrors were exposed in 1987.

Kim Yong Won, the former prosecutor who exposed Brothers, told the AP that high-ranking officials blocked his investigation under direction from the office of military strongman Chun Doo-hwan, who feared an embarrassing international incident on the eve of the Olympics.

Following Kim’s watered-down investigation and narrow indictments, Park, the Brothers’ owner, was acquitted by the Supreme Court in 1989 of charges linked to illegal confinement of inmates. Park, who served a short prison term for embezzlement and other relatively minor charges, died in 2016.

The commission began investigating the Brothers abuse in May last year, following a yearslong struggle for redemption by Brothers survivors, many of whom are struggling with financial and health problems.

Crucial illegal road threatens Amazon rainforest
By FABIANO MAISONNAVE

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This May 2, 2022, photo provided by Xingu + Network shows an illegal road inside a protected area called Terra do Meio (Middle Earth) Ecological Station in Para state, in the Brazilian Amazon. The dirt road is now just a few miles shy of connecting two of the worst areas of deforestation in the region. (Xingu + Network via AP)

An illegal dirt road ripping through protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon is now just a few miles shy of connecting two of the worst areas of deforestation in the region, according to satellite images and accounts from people familiar with the area. If the road is completed it will turn a large area of remaining forest into an island, under pressure from human activity on all sides.

Environmentalists have been warning about just this kind of development in the rainforest for decades. Roads are significant because most deforestation occurs alongside them, where access is easier and land value higher.

On the east side of the new road is a massively-deforested area where Brazil’s largest cattle herd, 2.4 million head, now grazes. This municipality of Sao Felix do Xingu is the country’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, thanks to deforestation, according to Climate Observatory, a network of environmental groups. It is roughly the size of Maine and has a population of 136,000.

To the west is an area where three years ago ranchers coordinated the burning of several swaths of virgin forest in an episode famously known as the Day of Fire. This municipality, larger than Maryland, is Brazil’s eighth-largest greenhouse gas emitter.

Wedged in between is the Xingu basin. The Xingu River that runs through it is one of the main tributaries of the Amazon River. It begins in the drier Cerrado biome, surrounded by tens of thousands of square miles of protected areas.

The Xingu River is home to several Indigenous peoples, who are now pressed on both sides by an onslaught of settlers who have built a large network of dirt roads and illegal airstrips. Experts said the stakes could not be higher.

The opportunities for new deforestation “in the center of the corridor of protected areas of the Xingu brings the risk of an irreversible breaking of the Amazon rainforest, dividing it into islands of degraded forest, which does not have the strength to resist climate change. We need to protect and maintain large forest corridors to sustain the resilience of the threatened biome,” Biviany Rojas, the program coordinator of Socio-Environmental Institute, a Brazilian non-profit, told the Associated Press.

Almost half of Brazil’s climate pollution comes from deforestation, according to Climate Observatory. The destruction is so vast now that the eastern Amazon, just east of Xingu basin, has ceased to be a carbon sink, or absorber, for the Earth and has converted into a carbon source, according to a study published in 2021 in the journal Nature.

“They come to deforest, to extract timber and to dig for gold,” Indigenous leader Mydjere Kayapo told the AP in a phone interview. His people, the Kayapo, have suffered invasions from loggers and gold miners, who contaminate rivers with mud and mercury, co-opt leaders and provoke internal division.

The new road was detected earlier this year. According to satellite images analyzed by a network of nonprofits called Xingu+ and reviewed by the AP, it is 27 miles (43 kilometers) long.

The road cuts through two ostensibly protected areas: Terra do Meio (Middle Earth) Ecological Station, a federal unit, and Iriri State Forest, managed by the state of Pará, famous for its deforestation rates.

From January to August, Terra do Meio alone lost 9 square miles (24 square kilometers) of forest, and Iriri lost 6 square kilometers (2 square miles) of rainforest along the illegal road. In July, Xingu+ reported the illegal road-building to Brazil’s attorney general.

The city of Novo Progresso is also west of the new road. In recent days, the city has been covered by thick smoke from wildfires, deliberately set. On Monday alone, satellite sensors picked up 331 outbreaks of fire in the municipality, according to monitoring from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. August, which falls in the dry season, is typically the second worst month for both deforestation and fire.

Brazil’s federal agency ICMBio, which manages protected areas, and Pará’s secretary of environment, didn’t respond to AP emails seeking comment about the illegal road. These are the agencies responsible for protecting the areas flanking the road.

Under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, the area deforested in Brazil’s Amazon has reached a 15-year high, according to official data. The space agency said its national monitoring systems showed the Brazilian Amazon lost more than 5,000 square miles (13,200 square kilometers) of rainforest in the 12 months from Aug. 2020 to July 2021. New data is expected out by the end of the year.

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

LIFE & TIMES OF THE 1%

Paul Newman’s daughters sue late actor’s charity foundation
By DAVE COLLIN


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FILE — Susan Newman, left, and Nell Newman arrive at the SeriousFun Children's Network event at the Dolby Theatre, May 14, 2015, in Los Angeles. A new lawsuit filed Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2022, has exposed a deep rift between two of Paul Newman's daughters and the late actor's charitable foundation, over how it gives away some of the millions of dollars it makes off the Newman's Own line of food and drink products. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, File)


HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — A new lawsuit has exposed a deep rift between two of Paul Newman’s daughters and the late actor’s charitable foundation funded by profits from the Newman’s Own line of food and drink products.

The daughters, Susan Kendall Newman and Nell Newman, allege their own charity organizations are both supposed to receive $400,000 a year from the Newman’s Own Foundation under a mandate by their father, but the foundation has cut those payments in half in recent years.

They filed a lawsuit Tuesday in state court in Stamford, Connecticut, seeking $1.6 million in damages to be donated to their foundations for charitable giving.

The daughters say their father, who started Newman’s Own Foundation three years before he died in 2008, allowed the foundation to use his name and likeness — but only on several conditions including giving each of the two daughters’ foundations $400,000 a year.

Susan Kendall Newman, who lives in Oregon, and Nell Newman, of California, worry the foundation is setting the stage to completely remove them from having any say in how some of profits from Newman’s Own products are donated to charities. They also accused the foundation of “contradicting” their father’s wishes and intentions for years.

“No one should have to feel that the legacy of a departed loved one is being dishonored in the way that Newman’s Own Foundation has disregarded the daughters of Paul Newman,” Andy Lee, a New York City attorney for the daughters, said in a statement.

“This lawsuit does not seek personal compensation for Mr. Newman’s daughters, but simply seeks to hold (Newman’s Own Foundation) accountable to the charities they have shortchanged in recent years and would ensure they receive an increased level of support in the future, in line with Mr. Newman’s wishes,” he said.

Newman’s Own Foundation has not yet filed a response to the lawsuit in court but has released a statement.

“Best practices surrounding philanthropic organizations do not allow for the establishment of perpetual funding allotments for anyone, including Nell and Susan Newman,” the statement said. “A meritless lawsuit based on this faulty wish would only divert money away from those who benefit from Paul Newman’s generosity.”

The foundation added, “While we expect to continue to solicit Newman family recommendations for worthy organizations, our funding decisions are made each year and will continue to reflect the clear aim of Paul Newman and our responsibility to the best practices governing private foundations.”

Paul Newman, who lived in Westport with his wife, actor Joanne Woodward, created the Newman’s Own brand in 1982, with all profits going to charities. Today the product line includes frozen pizza, salsa, salad dressings and pasta sauces, as well as dog food and pet treats.

In his will, Paul Newman left his assets to his wife and Newman’s Own Foundation.

Newman’s Own, the products company, is a subsidiary of Newman’s Own Foundation, a nonprofit organization. The foundation says more than $570 million has been given to thousands of charities since 1982.

According to 2020 tax records, the foundation had more than $24 million in income and paid out $11.5 million in contributions, gifts and grants. Operating and administrative expenses totaled nearly $4.5 million.

According to his daughters’ lawsuit, Newman’s Own Foundation wrote to them only four days after their father’s death, saying it would reserve the right to stop allocating funds to charities identified by the daughters. The lawsuit says that contradicted Paul Newman’s explicit instructions to the foundation.

SO WHY DIDN'T DADDY PUT THEM ON THE FOUNDATION BOARD

THE GOVERNOR IS NOT PRO LIFE

Oklahoma governor rejects clemency for death row inmate
By SEAN MURPHY and KEN MILLER

FILE - In this photo from a video screen, death row inmate James Coddington speaks to the Oklahoma Board of Pardon and Parole on Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022, in Oklahoma City. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt has rejected clemency for Coddington, who is facing execution for the 1997 hammer killing of a man. Stitt’s decision on Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2022, paves the way for Coddington to be executed by lethal injection on Thursday. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File)


OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt on Wednesday rejected clemency for a man facing execution this week for the 1997 hammer killing of a Choctaw man, despite a recommendation from the state’s Pardon and Parole Board that his life be spared.

James Coddington was convicted and sentenced to die for the beating death of his friend and coworker, 73-year-old Albert Hale, inside Hale’s Choctaw home. Prosecutors say Coddington, who was 24 at the time, became enraged when Hale refused to give him money to buy cocaine.

Coddington’s execution is scheduled for Thursday morning.

“After thoroughly reviewing arguments and evidence presented by all sides of the case, Governor Kevin Stitt has denied the Pardon and Parole Board’s clemency recommendation for James Allen Coddington,” Stitt’s office said in a statement.

During a clemency hearing this month before the state’s five-member Pardon and Parole Board, an emotional Coddington, now 50, apologized to Hale’s family and said he is a different man today.

“I’m clean, I know God, I’m not ... I’m not a vicious murderer,” Coddington told the board. “If this ends today with my death sentence, OK.”

Mitch Hale, Albert Hale’s son who had urged the parole board not to recommend clemency, said he feels a sense of relief with Stitt’s decision.

“Our family can put this behind us after 25 years,” Hale, 64, said. “No one is ever happy that someone’s dying, but (Coddington) chose this path ... he knew what the consequences are, he rolled the dice and lost.”

Hale said he, his wife, goddaughter and a friend were en route to McAlester to attend the execution.

Coddington’s attorney, Emma Rolls, told the panel that Coddington was impaired by years of alcohol and drug abuse that began when he was an infant and his father put beer and whiskey into his baby bottles.

Rolls said Coddington doesn’t have any pending appeals that would delay or stop his execution on Thursday.

“While we are profoundly disheartened by this decision, we appreciate the pardons board’s careful consideration of James Coddington’s life and case, Rolls said in a statement following Stitt’s announcement.

“The Board’s clemency recommendation acknowledged James’s sincere remorse and meaningful transformation during his years on death row,” Rolls said.

The Rev. Don Heath, chair of the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty said “there is no mercy or forgiveness” in Stitt’s heart.

“I am surprised, and, quite honestly, angry at Gov. Stitt’s rejection of clemency for James Coddington. Stitt’s statement does not give a reason for his denial — it simply states that a jury convicted Coddington of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death,” Heath said in a statement.

“We have 25 executions scheduled over the next 29 months. I am afraid that the Pardon and Parole Board hearings will be moot exercises,” Heath said.

The parole board had voted 3-2 to recommend Coddington for clemency.

Stitt, a Republican, had said he planned to meet with Hale’s family, prosecutors and Coddington’s attorneys before making his decision.

Coddington was twice sentenced to death for Hale’s killing, the second time in 2008 after his initial sentence was overturned on appeal.

Stitt has granted clemency only one time, in November, to death row inmate Julius Jones just hours before Jones was scheduled to receive a lethal injection. The first-term governor commuted Jones’ sentence to life in prison without parole.

Jones’ case had drawn national attention after it was featured in “The Last Defense,” a three-episode documentary that cast doubt on Jones’ conviction, and there were numerous protests in Oklahoma City in the days leading up to Jones’ scheduled execution date.

Stitt said in an interview with The Associated Press earlier this month that had he allowed Jones’ execution to go forward “that would have definitely torn our state apart.”

Coddington’s execution would the the fifth since Oklahoma resumed carrying out the death penalty in October.

The state had halted executions in September 2015 when prison officials realized they had received the wrong lethal drug.

It was later learned the same wrong drug had been used previously to execute an inmate, and executions in the state were put on hold.

Alberta school boards say they shouldn't be using savings to pay teachers


While the Alberta government touts an upcoming net provincial increase in school staff this fall, growing school boards say drawing from their savings accounts to hire more teachers is unsustainable.


Some growing Alberta school divisions say they have to pull money 

out of savings to cover the cost of staffing their schools.© Bryan Labby/CBC

The provincial government says school divisions and charter schools will pull millions of dollars out of their reserves to help pay for approximately 800 more teachers and 790 more support staff in the coming school year.

"I'm thrilled to see more teachers and educational assistants will be hired in the coming school year," Education Minister Adriana LaGrange said in a press release on Wednesday.

LaGrange's acting press secretary, Erin Allin, also said school divisions with more than two per cent enrolment growth will also qualify for a new $7 million grant to help them handle the influx of pupils.

The population of Alberta K-12 students continues to grow. The ministry projects that more than 760,000 students will enrol in school this September— a jump of 2.1 per cent from the previous year.

Enrolment changes

Meanwhile, growing school boards continue to warn that the province's $142 million increase to the education budget isn't keeping pace with inflation or enrolment growth. The flux in staffing for the coming school year also varies widely across Alberta.

Leduc-based Black Gold School Division is drawing more than $2.4 million from its savings — with the minister's permission — and almost all of it will pay for staff to accommodate an anticipated 4.3 per cent enrolment decrease.

But, the division also budgeted for 13 fewer education assistants in classrooms to help pay for more teachers.

Superintendent Bill Romanchuk said in an email on Friday he hopes extra funding from a one-year learning disruption grant announced in June will help to hire some of them back.

"Drawing from reserves for any organization is unsustainable," Romanchuk wrote. "With this in mind, we are working to build capacity in each school to minimize the effect of reduced staffing in upcoming years."

Teacher and support staff numbers for 2022-23

Also dipping into savings to pay for staff is Edmonton Public Schools. School board chair Trisha Estabrooks said half of the $10 million draw down will pay for salaries to help educate an extra 2,800 students expected to enrol this fall.

Reserves should instead be used for unanticipated costs and emergencies, she said.

With a provincial funding formula that sees grants lag behind enrolment growth, the division calculates it will be short of the funding equivalent for 1,700 students.

"This is indicative of a broken funding model, right?" Estabrooks said on Thursday. "For large school divisions, this model doesn't work for us."

To soften that blow, the education ministry is giving some school divisions "bridge funding," which they intend to phase out over time.

The $7 million set aside for school divisions experiencing exceptional growth is a drop in the bucket compared to the need, Estabrooks said.

Allin said that exceptional growth funding could be higher if enrolment exceeds predictions.

Phasing out a parallel system of online schooling that was in place for much of the COVID-19 pandemic also means Edmonton Public is planning to employ 218 fewer teachers and 128 fewer support staff this coming year.

Similarly, the Calgary Board of Education is preparing for an influx of more than 1,500 new students – enough to fill a high school — with an increase of 12 full-time teaching staff. Calgary Catholic Schools is expecting 543 more pupils this year and will have three fewer teachers to work with.

Projected Alberta school budgets

Alberta Teachers' Association president Jason Schilling says asking school divisions to dip into rainy day funds to cover the ongoing cost of doing business is problematic.

"It tells me that the government's not serious about funding education appropriately," he said Thursday.

In addition to larger class sizes, teachers are seeing increasingly complex classes populated by students with more diverse needs.

The ministry is also handing schools $50 million more than it promised in the spring budget to help them pay the costs of a new collective agreement for teachers.

Dove Canada Throws Shade Over Lisa LaFlamme’s Controversial Ousting

Brent Furdyk -

Lisa LaFlamme© Photo by George Pimentel/Shutterstock

Canadian TV viewers were shocked when longtime "CTV National News" anchor Lisa LaFlamme was let go by the network's parent company, Bell Media.

That shock turned to outrage when reports emerged indicating the reason behind LaFlamme's ouster was her decision to stop dyeing her hair, with the Globe and Mail quoting a "senior company official" who said that execs were uncomfortable with her her decision to let her hair revert to its natural grey.

Bell Media took to social media for some damage control, announcing that steps are being taken "to initiate an independent third-party internal workplace review of our newsroom."

Meanwhile, controversy has only been growing since LaFlamme parted ways with her employer of 35 years, even meriting an op-ed in the Washington Post, and now an iconic Canadian soap brand is wading into the fray.

In posts on Twitter and Instagram, Dove Canada subtly threw some shade with a new campaign urging women to #KeepTheGrey.

"Age is beautiful. Women should be able to do it on their own terms, without any consequences. Dove is donating $100,000 to Catalyst, a Canadian organization helping building inclusive workplaces for all women," reads the caption.

This is accompanied by a video, in which the text "women with grey hair are being edged out of the place," can be read, along with "together we can support women aging beautifully on their own terms," which then features a colour photo of a woman that fades to grey, urging others to transform their own selfies into greyscale and share with the aforementioned hashtag.

Here's a sampling of how people have been responding to Dove Canada's new campaign on Twitter.