Vegetarian patties have long been available to Americans seeking healthier alternatives to hamburgers. Mainstream fast food chains also have been looking for healthier alternatives that would not compromise on flavor. Burger King teamed with California-based Impossible Foods to create a meatless hamburger that would taste as good as its world famous Whopper. The new meatless option was rolled out in 59 Burger King restaurants in the St. Louis, Missouri, area. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports.
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Day: April 2, 2019
Singapore submitted wide-ranging fake news legislation in parliament on Monday, stoking fears from internet firms and human rights groups that it may give the government too much power and hinder freedom of speech.
The law would require social media sites like Facebook to carry warnings on posts the government deems false and remove comments against “public interest.”
The move came two days after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said governments should play a more active role in regulating the online platform.
But Simon Milner, who works on Facebook’s public policy in Asia, said after the law was tabled, the firm was “concerned with aspects of the law that grant broad powers to the Singapore executive branch to compel us to remove content they deem to be false and proactively push a government notification to users.”
“As the most far-reaching legislation of its kind to date, this level of overreach poses significant risks to freedom of expression and speech, and could have severe ramifications both in Singapore and around the world,” said Jeff Paine, managing director of the Asia Internet Coalition, an industry association of internet and technology companies in the region.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Singapore’s Law Minister K. Shanmugam said the new legislation would not hinder free speech.
“This legislation deals with false statements of facts. It doesn’t deal with opinions, it doesn’t deal with viewpoints. You can have whatever viewpoints however reasonable or unreasonable,” he said.
Tech giants Facebook, Twitter and Google all have their Asia headquarters in the city-state, a low-tax finance hub seen as a island of stability in the middle of the fast-growing but often-turbulent Southeast Asia region.
“Malicious actors”
Singapore, which has been run by the same political party since independence from Britain more than 50 years ago, says it is vulnerable to fake news because of its position as a global financial hub, its mixed ethnic and religious population and widespread internet access.
It is ranked 151 among 180 countries rated in the World Press Freedom Index of Reporters Without Borders, a non-government group that promotes freedom of information, below the likes of Russia and Myanmar.
The new bill proposes that the government get online platforms to publish warnings or “corrections” alongside posts carrying false information, without removing them.
This would be the “primary response” to counter falsehoods online, the Law Ministry said.
“That way, in a sense, people can read whatever they want and make up their minds. That is our preference,” Law Minister K. Shanmugam told reporters on Monday.
Under the proposals, which must be approved by parliament, criminal sanctions including hefty fines and jail terms will be imposed if the falsehoods are spread by “malicious actors” who “undermine society”, the ministry said, without elaborating.
It added that it would cut off an online site’s “ability to profit”, without shutting it down, if the site had published three falsehoods that were “against the public interest” over the previous six months.
It did not say how it would block a site’s profit streams.
The bill came amid talk of a possible general election this year. Law Minister Shanmugam declined to comment when asked if the new legislation was related to a vote.
“This draft law will be a disaster for human rights, particularly freedom of expression and media freedom,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director, Asia division, at Human Rights Watch.
“The definitions in the law are broad and poorly defined, leaving maximum regulatory discretion to the government officers skewed to view as “misleading” or “false” the sorts of news that challenge Singapore’s preferred political narratives.”
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Networks like Bluetooth connect our devices easily and effortlessly. But the area that these portable networks cover is big enough to make them hackable. Now, a group of engineers from Purdue has solved that problem by turning your body into a network. Kevin Enochs explains.
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Australia’s treasurer said he will unveil the government’s first balanced annual budget plan in a decade days before general elections are called.
The budget to be announced late Tuesday will be the conservatives coalition’s final major act before going to voters in May with the argument that they are better economic managers than the center-left Labor Party opposition.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the budget for the fiscal year starting July 1 would achieve a surplus without increasing taxes.
“Tonight’s budget sets Australia up for the next decade,” Frydenberg told reporters on arrival at Parliament House.
“It builds a stronger economy and secures a better Australia for every Australian and we do that without increasing taxes,” he added.
Frydenberg also foreshadowed “congestion-busting infrastructure” to reduce commuting times in Australia’s largest and most congested cities.
The government also plans to provide tax breaks for low and middle-income earners.
Up to 4 million low-income Australians in a population of 25 million will receive one-off payments by July to help with rising energy bills.
A conservative government delivered balanced budgets for a decade before the global financial crisis hit in 2008. A newly elected Labor government then ran up a record deficit with economic stimulus spending.
Australia’s revenue has improved with rising prices for its biggest exports, coal and iron ore.
Opinion polls suggest that Labor will win the next election. Scott Morrison would become the sixth Australian prime minister since 2007 to fail to last an entire three-year term.
Parliament will sit for three days this week before it rises for the last time before elections are held on May 11 or May 18.
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President Donald Trump’s threat to shut down the southern border raised fears Monday of dire economic consequences in the U.S. and an upheaval of daily life in a stretch of the country that relies on the international flow of not just goods and services but also students, families and workers.
Politicians, business leaders and economists warned that such a move would block incoming shipments of fruits and vegetables, TVs, medical devices and other products and cut off people who commute to their jobs or school or come across to go shopping.
Let’s hope the threat is nothing but a bad April Fools’ joke,” said economist Dan Griswold at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia. He said Trump’s threat would be the “height of folly,” noting that an average of 15,000 trucks and $1.6 billion in goods cross the border every day.
“If trade were interrupted, U.S. producers would suffer crippling disruptions of their supply chains, American families would see prices spike for food and cars, and U.S. exporters would be cut off from their third-largest market,” he said.
Trump brought up the possibility of closing ports of entry along the southern border Friday and revisited it in tweets over the weekend because of a surge of Central Americans migrants who are seeking asylum. Trump administration officials have said the influx is straining the immigration system to the breaking point.
Elected leaders from border communities stretching from San Diego to cities across Texas warned that havoc would ensue on both sides of the international boundary if the ports were closed. They were joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which said such a step would inflict “severe economic harm.”
In California’s Imperial Valley, across from Mexicali, Mexico, farmers rely on workers who come across every day from Mexico to harvest fields of lettuce, carrots, onions and other winter vegetables. Shopping mall parking lots in the region are filled with cars with Mexican plates.
More than 60 percent of all Mexican winter produce consumed in the U.S. crosses into the country at Nogales, Arizona. The winter produce season is especially heavy right now, with the import of Mexican-grown watermelons, grapes and squash, said Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas.
He said 11,000 to 12,000 commercial trucks cross the border at Nogales daily, laden with about 50 million pounds of produce such as eggplants, tomatoes, bell peppers, lettuce, cucumbers and berries.
He said a closing of the border would lead to immediate layoffs and result in shortages and price increases at grocery stores and restaurants.
“If this happens — and I certainly hope it doesn’t — I’d hate to go into a grocery store four or five days later and see what it looks like,” Jungmeyer said.
Laredo Mayor Pete Saenz, chairman of the Texas Border Coalition, said a closure would be catastrophic.
“Closing the border would cause an immediate depression in border state communities and, depending on the duration, a recession in the rest of the country,”he said.
“Our business would end,” said Marta Salas, an employee at an El Paso shop near the border that sells plastic flowers that are used on the Mexican side by families holding quinceaneras, the traditional coming-of-age celebrations.
Salas said her whole family, including relatives who attend the University of Texas at El Paso, would be affected if the border were closed.
“There are Americans who live there. I have nephews who come to UTEP, to grade school, to high school every day,” Salas said.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration said Monday as many as 2,000 U.S. inspectors who screen cargo and vehicles at ports of entry along the Mexican border may be reassigned to help handle the surge of migrants. Currently, about 750 inspectors are being reassigned.
That, too, could slow the movement of trucks and people across the border.
The effects were evident Monday: Sergio Amaya, a 24-year-old American citizen who lives in Juarez, Mexico, and attends UTEP, said it normally takes him two minutes to cross the bridge. It took an hour this time.
“The Border Patrol agent said it’s going to get worse” Amaya said.
Instead of ensuring the flow of goods across the border, the inspectors are being put to work processing migrants, taking their applications for asylum and transporting them to holding centers.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the reassignments are necessary to help manage the huge influx that is overloading the system.
“The crisis at our border is worsening, and DHS will do everything in its power to end it,” Nielsen said.
In addition to reassigning inspectors, Nielsen has asked for volunteers from non-immigration agencies within her department and sent a letter to Congress requesting resources and broader authority to deport families faster. The administration is also ramping up efforts to return asylum seekers to Mexico.
Apprehensions all along the southern border have soared in recent months, with border agents on track to make 100,000 arrests and denials of entry there in March, more than half of them families with children.