Food addiction and the eating of improper foods has one-quarter of Americans overweight. Black women are in the worst condition as nearly half of them are overweight. Our weight problem is the result of eating too much food and eating the wrong foods.
Uninformed eating habits has us buying and living off unhealthy, high-fat, high-cholesterol, and low-fiber diets that completely destroy our appearance.
Thirty percent [now almost 40 percent] of the population has high cholesterol, which leads to heart disease and cancer, especially colon and rectal cancer. Half of what we eat is eaten out, predominantly at fast food chains that advertise heavily to drive the purchase of overly processed foods.
Advertisers often use our most gifted athletes to get us to buy death burgers, with their additives, pork, bleached bread, hormones and preservatives.
And we buy it and eat it and get fatter and sicker and poorer each day from doctor bills we can’t afford to pay, and from buying pills for acid indigestion and heartburn and headaches, all due to the toxins that get stored in our bodies from the overly processed and improper foods that we eat.
Fifty percent of the population has high blood pressure and hypertension, which are the leading causes of 500,000 strokes [now 795,000] each year and major contributors to heart attacks. High blood pressure and hypertension are again the result of, eating fried, salty, sugary foods, and a lack of exercise.
What we are witnessing is that fast food equals fast death. And a sedentary lifestyle, meaning a lifestyle where you just sit as a couch potato observing the television, or work in a stationary position, getting no form of exercise, gets you an early seat in the grave.
Now I don’t know about you, but I would certainly like to stay out of the grave since we’re going to be in the grave for such a long time. Wouldn’t you like to prolong your life? Then someone has to inspire you to change your way of living.
Photos: MGN Online
Did you know that the simple, cost-you-nothing things like prayer, proper rest, proper diet and fasting can help heal whatever ails you?
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught that 90% of our illnesses could be cured by just fasting. Proper rest, proper diet and fasting can help the body heal itself of toxins, especially those caused by stress.
But do we rest properly? Do we fast? Do we have a proper diet? Do we maintain a connection with the Divine Being through prayer?
No. Instead we engage in riotous behavior and we have moved away from God in a very extreme way, leading us many steps closer to the grave.
THE MERCHANTS OF DEATH
There’s tremendous profit in promoting the death-dealing lifestyles that many of us lead. You may not believe it but the leading promoters of our destructive lifestyles are the United States government, the food and drug industries and the medical community.
Chief Albert Luthuli, renowned anti-Apartheid activist and Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize laureate, died in 1967 after being struck by a train. His death was ruled accidental, but in May this year, 57 years later, South Africa’s national prosecuting authority reopened the inquest, saying there are suspicions regarding the circumstances of his death.
South Africaunder colonial rule
The country had been under colonial rule for almost 250 years by the time Luthuli was born in 1898, and regardless of whether it was the Netherlands (1652-1795 and 1803-1806) or Great Britain (1795-1803 and 1806-1961), the majority of Luthuli’s countrymen were treated as second class citizens for decades.
A photo of Albert Luthuli of South Africa, wearing a Chief’s ceremonial garb, receives the Nobel Peace Prize in the presence of King Olaf of Norway, hangs at the Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, north of Johannesburg, South Africa, June 19, 2008. Photo: AP Photo/Themba Hadebe
Successive colonists were attracted by the lure of the mineral revolution that was taking place in the country. The greed of this desire to possess the country’s mineral wealth would see them enact various phases of dispossession and the exclusion of Black people from power in the quest for wealth.
The first signs of the considerable mineral wealth emerged in 1867 when South Africa’s diamond mining industry was established, with diamonds being discovered near Kimberley in what is today known as the Northern Cape.
The Kimberley diamond fields, and later discoveries in Gauteng, the Free State, and along the Atlantic coast emerged as major sources of gem-quality diamonds, securing South Africa’s position as the world’s leading producer by the mid-20th century.
Later, the discovery of the Witwatersrand goldfields in 1886 was a turning point in South Africa’s history. The demand for franchise rights for English-speaking immigrants working on the new goldfields was the pretext Britain used to go to war with the Transvaal and Orange Free State in 1899.
White government
South Africa became a Union with its own White government in 1910, but the country was still regarded as a colony of Britain until 1961. Driven by Western exploitation and the desire for its considerable mineral wealth, it appeared that little attention was being paid to the yoke of oppression that was being placed on the citizens of the country.
Luthuli was still a teenager when in 1913, the Land Act was introduced to prevent Black people, except those living in the Cape Province (now the Western Cape), from buying land outside reserves.
When the National Party (NP) took power in 1948, marking the beginning of White Afrikaner rule under the scrutiny of Britain, these laws designed to exclude Black people from the economy started to take sinister shape as they covered the entire country.
The policy of Apartheid was adopted by the NP as soon as they assumed power, and this was followed two years later by the Group Areas Act, which was passed to segregate Blacks and Whites and saw the Communist Party banned.
By 1960, the oppression of the Apartheid government had gained steam, culminating in the deaths of 70 Black demonstrators killed at Sharpeville. The news of this atrocity reached the world and triggered international outrage. The African National Congress (ANC), Africa’s oldest liberation organization formed in 1912, was banned soon thereafter.
Teacher and chief
Albert Luthuli was born into a religious family, and his childhood was like many of his peers, with a notable exception—he desired to be educated despite the colonial restrictions on access to learning and he started to become consciously aware of his religion.
He completed a teaching course in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal and was later confirmed in the Methodist Church and became a lay preacher.
In 1920, he received a government bursary to attend a higher teachers’ training course at Adams College, and subsequently joined the college as a teacher, where he saw firsthand the struggles of the working class.
In 1935, Luthuli was called upon to become chief in his ancestral village of Groutville in KwaZulu-Natal. For 17 years, he immersed himself in the local problems of his people, adjudicating and mediating local quarrels and organizing African cane growers to guard their own interests.
Through minor clashes with White authority, Luthuli had his first direct experience with African political predicaments. Travel outside South Africa also widened his perspective during this period.
Conflict with the authorities
It was at this stage that Luthuli’s political involvement started to accelerate as he became more involved with the ANC and he became the provincial chairperson of the party in 1951. At 54, he was a late bloomer in politics.
His public support for the 1952 Defiance Campaign, which saw thousands of people peacefully refuse to obey Apartheid laws of segregation and subjugation, brought him into direct conflict with the South African government, and after refusing to resign from the ANC, he was dismissed from his post as chief in November 1952.
At the annual ANC conference in December 1952, Luthuli was elected president-general by a large majority and he was subsequently banned by the Apartheid government from publicly addressing supporters.
In 1960, Luthuli was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but the South African authorities said he was banned and refused to allow him to travel to Oslo, Sweden, to accept the award. It was only the following year, with cajoling from the Peace Prize committee, that the Apartheid authorities finally relented and allowed him and his wife, Nokukhanya, to travel to receive it.
Nobel Peace Prize
Luthuli was acutely aware of the global platform his speech would give him and the millions of South Africans who had to endure countless horrors and deprivations at the hands of the Apartheid government, the very reason that the government had obstinately refused him permission to travel before finally relenting.
“As you may have heard, when the South African Minister of Interior announced that subject to a number of rather unusual conditions, I would be permitted to come to Oslo for this occasion, conditions, Mr. President, made me literally to continue (to be) a bad man in the free Europe. He expressed the view that I did not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for 1960.”
Unbowed and defiant, Luthuli used the opportunity to share with a global audience the reality of the situation in a country, where censorship hid the atrocities that were being committed away from the global eye.
“I recognize, however, that in my country, South Africa, the spirit of peace is subject to some of the severest tensions known to men. Yes, it is idle to speak of our country as being in peace, because there can be no peace in any part of the world where there are people oppressed.
For that reason, South Africa has been, and continues to be, the focus of world attention. I therefore regard this award as a recognition of the sacrifice made by many of all races, particularly the African people, who have endured and suffered so much for so long.”
Support fromMartin Luther King Jr.
With his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Luthuli achieved what he had set out to do—bring worldwide attention to the plight of the majority of the people in South Africa.
On October 22, 1962, University of Glasgow students elected Luthuli as lord rector in recognition of his “dignity and restraint,” and his adherence to non-violence saw him supported by civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., who commended Luthuli’s reputation and spoke of his admiration for Luthuli’s “dedication to the cause of freedom and dignity.”
In September 1962, King and Luthuli issued the Appeal For Action Against Apartheid organized by the American Committee on Africa, which boosted solidarity between the anti-Apartheid and civil rights movements and urged Americans to protest Apartheid through non-violent measures such as boycotts.
The Apartheid government responded to Luthuli’s increasingly global prominence by tightening the noose on his freedoms, and in 1964, imposed a banning order that was so severe that he could not even travel to the nearest town a few kilometers away from his house.
John Vorster, then-minister of justice, said Luthuli’s activism advanced communism, and he cautioned him against publishing any statements, making contact with banned individuals, or addressing gatherings.
Quest for justice
Luthuli, by then a renowned anti-Apartheid activist, died on July 21, 1967. The official report stated that he was hit by a train near Gledthrow station, Groutville, KwaZulu-Natal, but his family and activists have long cast doubts on the White-minority government’s version of his death.
Its inquest found that the Nobel laureate had died in an accident after being hit by a train as he was walking by a railway line near his home in the KwaZulu-Natal province. But campaigners suspected that the regime killed him and covered it up by claiming he died of a fractured skull after being struck by a train.
In September 1967, an inquest held by the Apartheid regime at a magistrates’ court found the evidence “did not disclose any criminal culpability on the part of the South African Railways and anyone else.”
In May this year, the country’s justice minister at the time, Ronald Lamola, announced that a new inquest will be held into the mysterious death of Luthuli. In a statement, Lamola said a new inquest would “open very real wounds,” but “the interest of justice can never be bound by time.”
Lamola said he acted on the recommendation of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), which cited a mathematical and scientific report as saying that it was highly unlikely that Luthuli was struck by a train and died because of this.
While details of the new inquest have yet to be made public, it is understood that experts undertook an historic forensic investigation and reconstructed the crime scene, finding that there were significant suspicions around how reports of his cause of death had been captured.
Luthuli’s death—at the height of his international acclaim—did not lead to the dismantling of the Apartheid system that he had fought hard to remove.
Instead, the system profited and persevered for another 23 years before his beloved ANC was unbanned in 1990 and Nelson Mandela, who would later become the country’s first democratically elected president, was released from prison.
Luthuli’s family has maintained since his death that the international renown he used as a platform to speak out against the ravages of oppression was the reason behind his death.
Luthuli was bringing international attention to the cause of freedom in South Africa and stood in the way of those opposed to democracy and Black majority rule. Therefore, was he stopped?
More than 1,000 doctors and nurses are among at least 44,211 people killed in Israel’s 13-month assault on the Gaza Strip, officials in the Hamas-governed Palestinian enclave said Nov. 24.
“Over 310 other medical personnel were arrested, tortured, and executed in prisons,” Gaza’s Government Media Office also said in a statement, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency. “The Israeli army also prevented the entry of medical supplies, health delegations, and hundreds of surgeons into Gaza.”
“Hospitals have been a declared target for the Israeli army, which bombed, besieged, and stormed them, killing doctors and nurses, injuring others after directly targeting them,” the office said. The statement came after the director of the main partially functioning hospital in northern Gaza was injured in an Israeli strike.
Hussam Abu Safiyeh is the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital—which, according to Al Jazeera, Israeli forces have repeatedly attacked, damaging “the facility’s generators, fuel tanks, and main oxygen station.”
The wounded director said: “These people, they target everyone, but I swear, this will not stop us from continuing our humanitarian work. We will keep on providing this service no matter what it costs us.”
Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, in addition to killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, Israeli forces have injured at least 104,567 others. Along with attacking hospitals, they have destroyed many homes, schools, and religious sites, and displaced most of the enclave’s 2.3 million people.
Israel—which has been armed by the Biden administration and bipartisan U.S. Congress—faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice over its conduct in Gaza.
Additionally, the International Criminal Court earlier this week (Nov. 21) issued arrest warrants for Israel’s current prime minister and former defense minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri.
Last month (October), 99 U.S. healthcare providers who have volunteered in Gaza since last fall, sent U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris a letter detailing “the massive human toll from Israel’s attack” and urging them to “end this madness now!”
“It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4 percent of Gaza’s population,” the Americans wrote.
“With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.”
“We quickly learned that our Palestinian healthcare colleagues were among the most traumatized people in Gaza, and perhaps in the entire world,” they continued.
“All were acutely aware that their work as healthcare providers had marked them as targets for Israel. This makes a mockery of the protected status hospitals and healthcare providers are granted under the oldest and most widely accepted provisions of international humanitarian law.”
They added that “we wish to be absolutely clear: Not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities.
We urge you to see that Israel has systematically and deliberately devastated Gaza’s entire healthcare system, and that Israel has targeted our colleagues in Gaza for torture, disappearance, and murder.”
Despite such appeals and accounts, the outgoing Biden-Harris administration has declined to cut off weapons to the Israeli government and earlier this week most U.S. senators from both major parties rejected a trio of resolutions from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that would have blocked some American arms sales to Israel.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, center, surrounded by ministers from the government attends a session of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in Jerusalem. Monday Nov. 18, 2024.
At least three people have been reportedly injured in an Israeli drone strike in southern Lebanon less than a day after a truce deal took effect between the regime and the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah.
The attack took place near a vehicle in the village of Markaba in southern Lebanon on November 28, Israeli Army Radio reported without giving more details.
Israel was forced to accept a ceasefire with Hezbollah after suffering heavy losses following more than 14 months of fighting and failing to achieve its goals in its aggression on Lebanon. The truce agreement officially came into effect at 04:00 local time (0200 GMT) on November 27.
Hezbollah opened a support front for Palestinians in Gaza only a day after the Israeli regime unleashed its genocidal war against the besieged territory in October 2023, launching numerous retaliatory attacks against Israeli targets in the occupied territories.
Following the truce announcement, the resistance movement warned it was fully ready to counter further potential Israeli aggression against Lebanon while stressing the recent ceasefire deal was driven by its thousands-strong triumphant operations.
Israel warns southern Lebanon residentsagainst returning home
The Israeli military on November 28 issued a threat to the residents of the border villages in southern Lebanon, warning them against returning home.
It said residents are prohibited until further notice from moving South to the line of 10 villages and their surroundings, and also within the villages themselves.
These villages include Shebaa, Hebarieh, Marjeyoun, Arnoun, Yahmor, Qantara, Shaqra, Barashit, Yatar and Mansouri, it noted.
“The Israeli military does not intend to target you, and therefore, at this stage, you are prohibited from returning to your homes from this line South until further notice,” it said.
The military warned that anyone who moves South of this line exposes himself to danger.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei says Tehran recognizes Nicolás Maduro as Venezuela’s “legitimate and elected president” and condemns U.S. intervention in the South American country’s internal affairs.
In a post on his X account on Nov. 23, Baghaei said Iran believes that any foreign intervention in Venezuela’s internal affairs is a breach of international law and the United Nations Charter, as well as a blow to peace and stability in the country.
“We condemn illegal interventions by the U.S. and some of its allies in Venezuela’s internal affairs—which is reminiscent of malign and divisive interventions of 2019 via recognition of a parallel government,” the Iranian spokesperson added.
He expressed Iran’s solidarity with Venezuela’s legitimate and elected President Maduro.
Iran hails efforts by the Venezuelan government and people to overcome the problems caused by the U.S.’s illegal sanctions and unjustified pressures, he noted.
Baghaei’s post came after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Nov. 19 that Washington recognized Venezuelan opposition candidate Edmundo González as the “president-elect” of the South American country, months after President Maduro won the July election.
In a post on X, Blinken demanded “respect for the will” of Venezuelan voters.
Back in August, Venezuela’s Supreme Justice Tribunal ratified President Maduro’s victory in the July 28 presidential election.
Maduro had previously accused the U.S. and right-wing American tech entrepreneur Elon Musk of attempting to engineer coups in his country.
Maduro, who became president following the death of his mentor Hugo Chavez in 2013, was re-elected in 2018 despite U.S.-orchestrated opposition.
Venezuela has also been hit by U.S. sanctions for years, and grappling with economic challenges, including hyperinflation.
Since November 2019, the U.S.-led sanctions have pushed unbridled inflation in Venezuela to above 4,000 percent.
When the people of Botswana voted its nearly six decades-old government out of power in October, they chose a president who appears to be in line with a new wave of progressive African leaders.
The Southern African country of 2.4 million people selected its sixth head-of-state, however, the first one unaffiliated with the Botswana Democratic Party that ruled since independence in 1966.
Botswana’s new president, Duma Boko, 54, and his Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) party defeated the incumbent president, Mokgweetsi Masisi, in a ballot largely driven by dissatisfaction over a sunken economy.
Botswana was considered an African success story that suffered from a global drop in demand for mined diamonds, which was 80 percent of its exports. That and high unemployment, particularly among youth, people voted for change, a new leader, and a different vision for the country.
“It is one of the rarest moments that can only be acknowledged in retrospect,” said President Boko, at his inauguration on Nov. 10. “For nearly three score years, our democracy remained unbroken, unproven, and untested. On the 30th of October this year, together, we tested this democracy,” he said.
“It is with pride, and perhaps even a tinge of relief, that I can proudly say we have passed this test with flying colors. Together, we usher in a new political dawn,” he noted.
Africa observers and analysts see the human rights attorney as the latest in a string of new leaders looking to shake up business as usual on the continent. Along that line, Mr. Boko is seen as a forward thinker and pan-African leader at a time Africa is at a crossroads of obtaining a viable future for African people amidst a volatile global environment.
Analysts say Africa’s growing geo-political significance continues to attract foreign powers. In the decades of African nations gaining independence from colonialism came several phases such as neo-colonialism, and now a renewed scramble for Africa’s mineral wealth, and foreign-induced militarism.
The continent remains central as a financial source for world powers seeking to remain viable in the 21st Century. Whether it is military or economic cooperation, the continent piques the interest of the U.S., Russia, China and others.
Notwithstanding the foreign interests, meddling, and control, moves for self-determination are also being waged across the continent.
For instance, in West Africa, new leaders in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali are upending unequal power equations with powers like the U.S. and France. They unified their efforts in the Alliance of Sahel States as a regional bloc.
These rearrangements include wresting control of their resources from foreign hands, expelling American and French militaries, and realigning with other global partners.
Although in Southern Africa, if remarks Mr. Boko made in a recent interview are any indication, he too wants unbalanced relationships with Africa to end and U.S. big gun politics to stop.
While sharing his thoughts on the return of U.S. President Donald Trump to a reporter, Mr. Boko said in his previous term, Mr. Trump scaled down the “self-declared” role of America as a “police force of the world.”
“We saw him withdraw American troops from various places and not participate in generating new wars, and so I hope his return means a continuation along that path,” Mr. Boko said.
His comment could indicate a sentiment that reflects a growing anti-U.S. military posture across Africa exemplified by the evictions of American and French troops from Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali over the last two years.
On Nov. 29, Chad added itself to the chain of nations kicking the French military out in an announcement from its Foreign Ministry hours after French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot visited the country.
Chad’s Foreign Minister Abderaman Koulamallah stressed the move does not completely break ties with its former colonial power, but another notch toward self-reliance. France has 1,000 troops in the country.
On the same day Senegal’s Pres. Bassirou Diomaye Faye told AFP that the French military must also exit his nation. “Senegal is an independent country, it is a sovereign country, and sovereignty does not accept the presence of military bases in a sovereign country,” said Mr. Faye, who was elected in March vowing to end dependence on foreign powers.
“In terms of the anti-U.S. military sentiment, it’s getting stronger across the continent,” said Abayomi Azikiwe, political commentator and editor of Pan-African News Wire.
Mr. Azikiwe noted that Mr. Boko’s rise in Botswana exists in a progressive Southern African Development Community (SADC) bloc of nations known to stand for struggles in Africa and elsewhere.
“The Southern African Development Community is one of the most united and organized regional groupings on the continent,” explained Mr. Azikiwe to The Final Call.
“They support the Palestinians strongly, the people of the Western Sahara—the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic,” as well as its history of “liberation movements turned political parties,” he said, as examples.
Mr. Boko was elected while Africa is experiencing great transition and changes. There is a growing Pan-African movement and anti-imperialist sentiment on the continent that has popular support, say observers.
“I definitely would say that it’s the emergence of an anti-imperialist front and movement that’s not just settled within the state structures,” said Netfa Freeman of Pan-African Community Action (PACA). “But on the level of civil society and people’s organizations on the ground in those countries,” he told The Final Call.
It is important to understand that the growing sentiment has popular support because the U.S. and the West demonize those countries and progressive leaders, Mr. Freeman remarked.
In the case of the Alliance of Sahel States, they are led by military leaders. America and the West won’t highlight the role of the people developing their own structures and formations connected to what the countries are doing.
“So, it’s not just some military government doing things … some kind of populist type things that they’re claiming are for the people, but it’s actually the people involved in these things,” said Mr. Freeman. “So that’s good,” he added.
A concerning underbelly of AI (artificial intelligence) technological advancement is the farming out of data labeling to Global South countries.
For very little pay, the data labeling process includes identifying raw data, in many cases graphic and disturbing images—including suicide, child abuse, sexual assault, text files, videos, and more. Then additional labels and information are added so that a “machine learning model” can learn from it.
In May of this year, nearly 100 Kenyan tech workers, known as “data labelers,” wrote an open letter to U.S. President Joe Biden, ahead of a state dinner at the White House honoring Kenya’s President William Ruto.
The authors urged the U.S. president to help end “modern-day slavery” in Kenya’s tech sector. The signers of the letter, according to thehill.com, work as data labelers, content moderators and artificial intelligence (AI) workers for American companies like Meta’s Facebook, ScaleAI and OpenAI.
Fast forward to a CBS 60 Minutes segment from November 24, “How Kenya became the ‘Silicon Savannah,” where reporter Lesley Stahl is interviewing Kenyan civil rights activist Nerima Wako-Ojiwa.
During interview Wako-Ojiwa explains the tech workers’ desperation in a country with high unemployment has led to a culture of exploitation with unfair wages and no job security.
“It’s terrible to see just how many American companies are just doing wrong here,” Wako-Ojiwa said. “And it’s something that they wouldn’t do at home (in U.S.), so why do it here?”
Afterward the 60 Minutes narrator added, “The familiar narrative is that artificial intelligence will take away human jobs, but right now it’s also creating jobs.
There’s a growing global workforce of millions toiling to make AI run smoothly. It’s grunt-work that needs to be done accurately and fast. To do it cheaply, the work is often farmed out to developing countries like Kenya.”
Echoing Wako-Ojiwa, Stahl, reporting from Kenya said, “American Tech giants like Meta and Open AI have been contracting middleman and companies to hire Kenyon workers for their operations.” She added, “Those employees tell us that the work was mentally draining and emotionally harmful (and) there’s no job security and the pay was dismal.”
At an unemployment rate, among its youth population of 67 percent, the East African country has become one of the main hubs for this kind of grunt-work.
In the open letter, which can be found on foxglove.org.uk American big tech companies are taken to task for “systemically abusing and exploiting African workers.” The letter points to the fact that U.S. companies, “are undermining the local labor laws, the country’s justice system and violating international labor standards.”
In addition, it points out that “working conditions amount to modern day slavery. Any trade-related discussions between the U.S. and Kenya must take into account these abuses and ensure that the rights of all workers are protected.”
In the letter, and again as reported on 60 Minutes, data labelers discussed the horrendous conditions they are required to work under, for very little pay.
“We do this work at great cost to our health, our lives and our families. U.S. tech giants export their toughest and most dangerous jobs overseas. The work is mentally and emotionally draining. We scrub Facebook, TikTok and Instagram to ensure these important platforms do not become awash with hate speech and incitement to violence.
We label images and text to train generative AI tools like ChatGPT for OpenAI. Our work involves watching murder and beheadings, child abuse and rape, pornography and bestiality, often for more than 8 hours a day. Many of us do this work for less than $2 per hour,” noted the letter.
The open letter and the 60 Minutes segment spent considerable time discussing the psychological damage of sitting for hours, days and weeks, watching such graphic, horrific images.
“These (American-based) companies do not provide us with the necessary mental health care to keep us safe. As a result, many of us live and work with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We weren’t warned about the horrors of the work before we started, explained the letter from the data labelers.
In many cases, the effects of watching graphic images, to render a safe system, result in PTSD, similar to “Explosive Ordinance Disposal.” This is a process where hazardous explosives are disabled or rendered safe.
This takes a tremendous psychological toll on the person whose full-time job is exposing himself to the inherent danger that comes with disabling a live bomb.
According to Time Magazine, the work of data labeling is simple: “Feed an AI with labeled examples of violence, hate speech, and sexual abuse, and that tool could learn to detect those forms of toxicity in the wild.
That detector would be built into ChatGPT to check whether it was echoing the toxicity of its training data and filter it out before it ever reached the user. It could also help scrub toxic text from the training datasets of future AI models.”
The European Union said Friday it sent TikTok an urgent request for more information about Romanian intelligence files suggesting that Moscow coordinated influencers on its platform to promote an election candidate who became the surprise front-runner in the nation’s presidential election.
The 27-nation bloc’s executive branch is using its sweeping digital rulebook to scrutinize the video-sharing app’s role in the vote. which saw the far-right populist Calin Georgescu coming from out of nowhere to take top spot. But the election was thrown into turmoil Friday after the country’s top court annulled results from the first round of voting.
Declassified files released by Romanian authorities earlier this week suggest that a pro-Russia campaign used the messaging app Telegram to recruit thousands of TikTok users to promote Georgescu.
It is unclear from the intelligence release whether Georgescu was aware of the alleged campaign or assisted in it.
European Commission officials said they asked the TikTok to comment on the files and to provide information on actions that it’s taking in response. It’s the second time the commission has asked the TikTok for information since the election’s first round of voting on Nov. 24, and comes a day after it ordered the Chinese-owned platform to retain all election-related files and evidence.
TikTok declined to comment.
“We are concerned about mounting indications of coordinated foreign online influence operation targeting ongoing Romanian elections, especially on TikTok,” Henna Virkkunen, the commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, said in a post on X.
TikTok has 24 hours to respond to the EU request, officials told a press briefing in Brussels
Virkunnen said also called on TikTok to “urgently redress” its policies on content moderation and amplification policies and comply with the bloc’s Digital Services Act, a wide-ranging set of rules designed to clean up social media platforms.
She had urged TikTok to step up resources “to counter information operations” ahead of a final vote planned for Sunday, when Georgescu was due to face pro-EU reformist Elena Lasconi of the Save Romania Union party. But now that the Romanian Constitutional Court has issued its unprecedented decision to cancel the initial results, the first round of voting will have to be held again.
Georgescu’s unexpected rise in the polls plunged the European Union and NATO country into turmoil and spurred the authorities to release the files.
Romania’s intelligence services alleged that one TikTok user paid $381,000 to influencers on the platform to promote content about Georgescu. They said they obtained information that “revealed an aggressive promotion campaign” to increase and accelerate the candidate’s popularity.
Some of the thousands of social media accounts used in the campaign were allegedly created years ago but were only activated in the weeks leading up to the first round vote, the files indicated.
The Tampa Bay Rays’ potential new ballpark got a boost Thursday when the St. Petersburg City Council voted to approve the bonds necessary to finance the $1.3 billion stadium.
This is only part of the deal. The Pinellas County Commission also must decide whether to approve its share, with a vote set later in December. Meanwhile, the Rays will play this season in the New York Yankees’ spring training site, Steinbrenner Field in Tampa because of hurricane damage to Tropicana Field.
The Rays have said it is impossible to play at the Trop next year and maybe not until 2026. The vote Thursday was to issue bonds that could finance a new stadium, perhaps by the 2028 season. It came after the county hedged on the financing deal, while the overall plan was approved by the city and county last summer.
The ballpark is part of a larger $6,5 billion project called the Historic Gas Plant District, which is an urban restoration effort aimed at righting a wrong when Black people were moved out so that Tropicana Field and a highway could be built on prime land in downtown St. Petersburg.
“There’s more to it for me than just baseball. We are upholding our part of the bargain,” said Deborah Figgs-Sanders, chair of the St. Petersburg City Council. “We honored our deal.”
Now it’s up to the Pinellas County Commission to decide to issue bonds that would be paid for by tourist taxes that can’t be spent on such things as hurricane recovery. That meeting is set for Dec. 17.
The Rays have had no comment. The team has previously said they are abiding by the current agreement and intend to stay in St, Petersburg.
The Rays’ home since 1998, the domed Tropicana Field was hit hard by Hurricane Milton on Oct. 9, with most of its fabric roof shredded and water damage inside. The city of St. Petersburg, which owns the Trop, released an assessment of the damage and repair needs that estimated the cost at $55.7 million.
U.S. stock indexes rose to more records Wednesday after tech companies talked up how much of a boost they’re getting from the artificial-intelligence boom.
The S&P 500 climbed 0.6% to add to what’s set to be one of its best years of the millennium. It’s the 56th time the index has hit an all-time high this year after climbing in 11 of the last 12 days.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 308 points, or 0.7%, while the Nasdaq composite added 1.3% to its own record.
Salesforce helped pull the market higher after delivering stronger revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected, though its profit fell just short.
CEO Mark Benioff highlighted the company’s artificial-intelligence offering for customers, saying “the rise of autonomous AI agents is revolutionizing global labor, reshaping how industries operate and scale.” The stock price of the company, which helps businesses manage their customers, jumped 11%.
Marvell Technology leaped even more after delivering better results than expected, up 23.2%. CEO Matt Murphy said the semiconductor supplier is seeing strong demand from AI and gave a forecast for profit in the upcoming quarter that topped analysts’ expectations.
All the optimistic talk helped Nvidia, the company whose chips are powering much of the move into AI, rally 3.5%. It was the strongest force pushing upward on the S&P 500 by far.
They helped offset an 8.9% drop for Foot Locker, which reported profit and revenue that fell short of analysts’ expectations.
CEO Mary Dillon said the company is taking a more cautious view, and it cut its forecasts for sales and profit this year. Dillon pointed to how keen customers are for discounts and how soft demand has been outside of Thanksgiving week and other key selling periods.
Retailers overall have offered mixed signals about how resilient U.S. shoppers can remain. Their spending has been one of the main reasons the U.S. economy has avoided a recession that earlier seemed inevitable after the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates to crush inflation. But shoppers are now contending with still-high prices and a slowing job market.
This week’s highlight for Wall Street will be Friday’s jobs report from the U.S. government, which will show how many people employers hired and fired last month. A narrower report released Wednesday morning suggested employers in the private sector increased their payrolls by less last month than economists expected. Hiring in manufacturing was the weakest since the spring, according to Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP.
The report strengthened traders’ expectations that the Fed will cut its main interest rate again when it meets in two weeks.
The Fed began easing its main interest rate from a two-decade high in September, hoping to offer more support for the job market. The central bank had appeared set to continue cutting rates into next year, but the election of Donald Trump has scrambled Wall Street’s expectations somewhat. Trump’s preference for higher tariffs and other policies could lead to higher inflation, which could alter the Fed’s plans.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday that the central bank can afford to cut rates cautiously because inflation has slowed from its peak two years ago and the economy remains sturdy.
A separate report on Wednesday said health care, finance and other businesses in the U.S. services sector are continuing to grow, but not by as much as before and not by as much as economists expected.
One respondent from the construction industry told the survey from the Institute for Supply Management that the Fed’s rate cuts haven’t pulled down mortgage rates as much as hoped. Plus, “the unknown effect of tariffs clouds the future.”
In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.18% from 4.23% late Tuesday.
On Wall Street, Campbell’s sank 6.2% for one of the S&P 500’s sharper losses despite increasing its dividend and reporting a stronger profit than analysts expected. Its revenue fell short of Wall Street’s expectations, and the National Football League’s Washington Commanders hired Campbell’s CEO Mark Clouse as its team president.
Gains for airline stocks helped offset that drop after JetBlue Airways said it saw stronger bookings for travel in November and December following the presidential election. It also said it’s benefiting from lower fuel prices, as well as lower costs due to improved on-time performance.
JetBlue jumped 8.3%, while Southwest Airlines climbed 3.5%.
All told, the S&P 500 rose 36.61 points to 6,086.49. The Dow climbed 308.51 to 45,014.04, and the Nasdaq composite rallied 254.21 to 19,735.12.
In stock markets abroad, South Korea’s Kospi sank 1.4% following a night full of drama in Seoul.
President Yoon Suk Yeol was facing possible impeachment after he suddenly declared martial law on Tuesday night, prompting troops to surround the parliament. He revoked the martial law declaration six hours later.
In the crypto market, bitcoin climbed near $99,000 after Trump said he would nominate Paul Atkins, a cryptocurrency advocate, to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission.
A federal appeals court panel on Friday unanimously upheld a law that could lead to a ban on TikTok as soon as next month, handing a resounding defeat to the popular social media platform as it fights for its survival in the U.S.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied TikTok’s petition to overturn the law — which requires TikTok to break ties with its China-based parent company ByteDance or be banned by mid-January — and rebuffed the company’s challenge of the statute, which it argued had ran afoul of the First Amendment.
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” said the court’s opinion, which was written by Judge Douglas Ginsburg. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”
TikTok and ByteDance — another plaintiff in the lawsuit — are expected to appeal to the Supreme Court, though its unclear whether the court will take up the case.
“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said in a statement.
“Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people,” Hughes said. Unless stopped, he argued the statute “will silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the US and around the world on January 19th, 2025.”
Though the case is squarely in the court system, it’s also possible the two companies might be thrown some sort of a lifeline by President-elect Donald Trump, who tried to ban TikTok during his first term but said during the presidential campaign that he is now against such action.
“He wants to save TikTok,” Rep. Michael Waltz, Trump’s pick for national security adviser, said Friday during an interview on Fox Business.
The law, signed by President Joe Biden in April, was the culmination of a yearslong saga in Washington over the short-form video-sharing app, which the government sees as a national security threat due to its connections to China.
The U.S. has said it’s concerned about TikTok collecting vast swaths of user data, including sensitive information on viewing habits, that could fall into the hands of the Chinese government through coercion. Officials have also warned the proprietary algorithm that fuels what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect. The European Union on Friday expressed similar concerns as it investigates intelligence that suggests Russia possibly abused the platform to influence the elections in Romania.
“Today’s decision is an important step in blocking the Chinese government from weaponizing TikTok,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement Friday.
TikTok, which sued the government over the law in May, has long denied it could be used by Beijing to spy on or manipulate Americans. Its attorneys have accurately pointed out that the U.S. hasn’t provided evidence to show that the company handed over user data to the Chinese government, or manipulated content for Beijing’s benefit in the U.S. They have also argued the law is predicated on future risks, which the Department of Justice has emphasized pointing in part to unspecified action it claims the two companies have taken in the past due to demands from the Chinese government.
Friday’s ruling came after the appeals court panel, composed of two Republicans and one Democrat appointed judges, heard oral arguments in September.
In the hearing, which lasted more than two hours, the panel appeared to grapple with how TikTok’s foreign ownership affects its rights under the Constitution and how far the government could go to curtail potential influence from abroad on a foreign-owned platform. On Friday, all three denied TikTok’s petition.
In the court’s ruling, Ginsburg, a Republican appointee, rejected TikTok’s main legal arguments against the law, including that the statute was an unlawful bill of attainder, or a taking of property in violation of the Fifth Amendment. He also said the law did not violate the First Amendment because the government is not looking to “suppress content or require a certain mix of content” on TikTok.
“Content on the platform could in principle remain unchanged after divestiture, and people in the United States would remain free to read and share as much PRC propaganda (or any other content) as they desire on TikTok or any other platform of their choosing,” Ginsburg wrote, using the abbreviation for the People’s Republic of China.
Judge Sri Srinivasan, the chief judge on the court, issued a concurring opinion.
TikTok’s lawsuit was consolidated with a second legal challenge brought by several content creators — for which the company is covering legal costs — as well as a third one filed on behalf of conservative creators who work with a nonprofit called BASED Politics Inc. Other organizations, including the Knight First Amendment Institute, had also filed amicus briefs supporting TikTok.
“This is a deeply misguided ruling that reads important First Amendment precedents too narrowly and gives the government sweeping power to restrict Americans’ access to information, ideas, and media from abroad,” said Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the organization. “We hope that the appeals court’s ruling won’t be the last word.”
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, lawmakers who had pushed for the legislation celebrated the court’s ruling.
“I am optimistic that President Trump will facilitate an American takeover of TikTok to allow its continued use in the United States and I look forward to welcoming the app in America under new ownership,” said Republican Rep. John Moolenaar of Michigan, chairman of the House Select Committee on China.
Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, who co-authored the law, said “it’s time for ByteDance to accept” the law.
To assuage concerns about the company’s owners, TikTok says it has invested more than $2 billion to bolster protections around U.S. user data.
The company has also argued the government’s broader concerns could have been resolved in a draft agreement it provided the Biden administration more than two years ago during talks between the two sides. It has blamed the government for walking away from further negotiations on the agreement, which the Justice Department argues is insufficient.
Attorneys for the two companies have claimed it’s impossible to divest the platform commercially and technologically. They also say any sale of TikTok without the coveted algorithm — the platform’s secret sauce that Chinese authorities would likely block under any divesture plan — would turn the U.S. version of TikTok into an island disconnected from other global content.
Still, some investors, including Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and billionaire Frank McCourt, have expressed interest in purchasing the platform. Both men said earlier this year that they were launching a consortium to purchase TikTok’s U.S. business.
This week, a spokesperson for McCourt’s Project Liberty initiative, which aims to protect online privacy, said unnamed participants in their bid have made informal commitments of more than $20 billion in capital.
