Month: August 2020

The Federal Reserve just tweaked how it thinks about inflation, and this could have a huge impact on gold and gold mining stocks.

Speaking at Jackson Hole last week, Fed Chair Jerome Powell unveiled an adjustment in U.S. monetary policy that would allow inflation to average 2 percent over a period of time. The implication is that the Fed would let increases in consumer prices overshoot the 2 percent target rate, which the U.S. has rarely touched since 2012 (if we’re going by the headline consumer price index (CPI), which I’ll talk more about below).

To support this reframing of inflation, Powell says interest rates are likely to remain near zero for some time longer, possibly for another five years.

This policy change could be constructive for gold prices and, consequently, gold producers. This is something I’ve written and spoken about many times before. According to the World Gold Council (WGC), in years when the rate of annual inflation was greater than 3 percent, the price of gold increased 15 percent on average in nominal terms. That’s 10 percentage points higher than the increase that gold prices saw on average in years when inflation was 3 percent or lower.

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Disinformation does not only travel from anonymous websites and social networks toward mainstream media outlets but also the other way round. Raskrinkavanje’s research claims that the Serbian-language arm of Russian state media outlet Sputnik “appears to be one of the key links between media outlets situated in Serbia and those in [the Bosnian Serb-dominated entity of] Republika Srpska”.

Sputnik’s content is republished by media outlets in both Serbia and Republika Srpska, while Sputnik republishes news from Serbian media. Raskrinkavanje alleged that most of Sputnik’s articles are “disinformation”, “clickbait”, “fake news”, “conspiracy theories” and “factual manipulations”.

Research by the Atlantic Council of Montenegro NGO said that “Sputnik Serbia is the most popular Russian state media outlet in the Western Balkans, whose content is passed on by local media”.

In a report for NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence entitled ‘Russia’s Strategic Interests and Tools of Influence in the Western Balkans’, analyst Dimitar Bechev also pointed to Sputnik’s impact outside Serbian borders, noting that its content was also republished by numerous radio stations, as well as newspapers and websites in Serbia

“For instance, during the 2018 Bosnian elections, Sputnik positioned itself as a mouthpiece for [Bosnian Serb political leader] Milorad Dodik and [his] SNSD [party],” Bechev wrote.

The European Union’s EUvsDisinfo website, which aims to respond to alleged Russian disinformation, has accused Sputnik of spreading fake news, conspiracy theories and propaganda.

Tihomira Doncheva, author of a piece
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By Express News Service

VIJAYAWADA: Terming the “slanderous” report on top bureaucrats in a vernacular daily “a vicious campaign by vested interests”, the YSR Congress said it will stand by the IAS officers and urged the State government to take action against the people responsible for such reports.

A day after it was reported that a couple of district collectors were lured into honey trap, YSRC MLA Jogi Ramesh on Sunday said it was part of the campaign against YS Jagan Mohan Reddy government by “political pimps and brokers” and demanded that criminal action be taken against the perpetrators.

“The district collectors are working hard in the times of pandemic and targeting them with malicious reports is unpardonable,” Jogi Ramesh  said. Ramesh added that the Jagan Mohan Reddy government is standing with the people during the coronavirus crisis.

TOPLINE

President Trump, who boasts often of his TV ratings, tweeted Saturday that the just-ended Republican National Convention had 147.9 million “views,” a figure almost double the total released by measuring service Nielsen for the convention’s four-day run.

KEY FACTS

Just as children are about to return to school, a video in Urdu has been widely shared in Bradford, and possibly elsewhere, falsely claiming that sick pupils could be removed their families without parental consent. Dr John Wright of Bradford Royal Infirmary is joining efforts to debunk the idea – and says the reopening of schools is important for children, and parents.

This week the schools are going back and everyone is nervous. We have grown accustomed to home working and social distancing, so the idea of hundreds of thousands of children and young people suddenly coming together in confined environments for long periods of time is hard to comprehend – a throwback to the pre-Covid-19 era.

From the start, Covid-19 created fertile ground for the spread of fake news, as I wrote in April.

The ban on hospital visiting at the peak of the pandemic led to a disconnect between patients and staff and relatives. We struggled to counter the rumours in different communities that we were harming patients or that coronavirus was a cunning attempt by the Home Office to lure in people to repatriate them. We had sick patients who refused to be admitted for fear of what we were going to do to them.

Now the anxiety about returning
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The term fake news has been a part of our vocabulary since the 2016 US presidential election. As the amount of fake news in circulation grows larger and larger, particularly in the United States, it often spreads like wildfire. Subsequently, there is an ever-increasing need for fact-checking and other solutions to help people navigate the oceans of factual and fake news that surround us.

Help may be on the way, via an interdisciplinary field where eye-tracking technology and computer science meet. A study by University of Copenhagen and Aalborg University researchers shows that people’s eyes react differently to factual and false news headlines.

Eyes spend a bit less time on fake news headlines

Researchers placed 55 different test subjects in front of a screen to read 108 news headlines. A third of the headlines were fake. The test subjects were assigned a so-called ‘pseudo-task’ of assessing which of the news items was the most recent. What they didn’t know, was that some of the headlines were fake. Using eye-tracking technology, the researchers analyzed how much time each person spent reading the headlines and how many fixations the person per headline.

“We thought that it would be interesting to see if there’s a difference in the way people read news headlines, depending on whether the headlines are factual or false. This has never been studied. And, it turns out that there is indeed a statistically significant difference,” says PhD fellow and lead author Christian Hansen,
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Wheaton resident Joe Goldberg was taken aback when he was asked to create a new course on fake news for the College of DuPage.

“Your first reaction is, ‘You’re kidding, because it’s a huge topic,'” said Goldberg, an adjunct professor who teaches other mass communication classes at the Glen Ellyn-based school.

Goldberg titled his class “Fake News & The Search for Truth in Today’s Media.” The three-credit course begins Sept. 21.

Sandy Fries, program chair of mass communications and journalism at COD, reached out to Goldberg more than a year ago. Fries says he felt Goldberg was uniquely qualified to develop a curriculum examining fake news.

“(Goldberg) is a former covert agent for the CIA,” Fries said. “He knows about this subject matter in a way that goes beyond textbooks and what most people would know.”

Goldberg worked for the CIA from 1985 to 1993, focusing on propaganda, analysis, recruitment and training. He drew from his CIA career as inspiration for his self-published 2014 fictional thriller “Secret Wars: An Espionage Story.”

Goldberg said he already incorporates introductory media literacy lessons in his existing courses. But Goldberg’s new class allowed him to go deeper into ways that suspect information can spread and be weaponized.

With social media, “we’re all broadcasters, we’re all journalists, we’re all content creators,” Goldberg said. “This can all help fake news to proliferate.”

Goldberg plans
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Editor’s note

Beginning with the Sept. 1 edition, letters of endorsement for or opposition to candidates for office will be limited to 200 words.

Letter spread fake news about Democrats

I am once again writing to defend the truth versus one group over another. I am an independent and have voted on both sides over the years. The recent letter to the editor titled “Build what back?” by Agnes Chastain was filled with so much inaccuracy I was compelled to correct what I am sure are honest mistakes.

The slogan for the DNC is actually “United we stand.” The “build back better” is a slogan for Joe Biden’s economic recovery plan and is a slogan that has been used for other programs of the United Nations. The Democratic National Convention did not issue any guidelines forbidding the use of the phrase “under God.” On the national stage, the phrase “under God” was used during the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of each night of the 2020 DNC, although the phrase “under God” was omitted from at least two recitations of the pledge during the DNC of two instances which occurred during individual council meetings, the LGBTQ caucus meeting and the Muslim Delegates Assembly on Aug. 18.

If you plan on writing a letter to the editor, it is important that actually check your facts, instead of using social media and biased news reports as your source, or just spreading fake news

Peter Webb

Loveland

Ben Aste will make
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A popular video blogger pranked Romanian media by tricking them into running a fake news story about an apparent car crash.

Andrei Şelaru, known online as Selly, is the most popular Romanian YouTuber with millions of social media followers.

Selly doctored a video to make it look like he had been involved in a car accident and sent it to Romanian newsrooms.

The 19-year-old said he wanted to show how easily fake news gets picked up by some outlets.

“People believe all that they see on TV, so my experiment set out to show the entire country how something fake can become news in Romania,” he told Euronews. “I manufactured a video, noticeably made on a computer and sent it to the editorial office of the most-watched news programme in Romania. In a few hours, it was all over the news.”

Only a few of the many outlets that Selly tricked issued an apology.

Libertatea.ro, one of the main Romanian news websites, said it would enhance information checks, increase its number of journalists and bolster resources assigned to verifying news. It also published an article apologising to readers. The Libertatea journalist who signed the fake news article told Euronews it was a beginner’s mistake.

“I didn’t verify with Selly,” Anamaria Nedelcoff told Euronews. “I made the mistake and I am sorry for it. Worst of all, I regret the hatred my team had to put up with because of what happened.
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In February, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, declared that Covid-19 was not the only public health emergency the world was facing — we were also suffering from an “infodemic” of fake medical news. “Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus,” he said, “and is just as dangerous.”

The metaphor of a psychic infection accompanying a physical one fits neatly into the current “post-truth” narrative. Articles from news sources including the Associated Press ran with the metaphor, describing misinformation as a contagion with “no antidote in sight”.

Such reporting has been strengthened by academic papers making startling claims about the human impact of false information. Earlier this month, outlets including the BBC, Deutsche Welle and The New York Times published articles about research that linked coronavirus misinformation to at least 800 deaths. (The validity of this research was later contested.)

There is good reason to be wary of the spread of dangerous and misleading misinformation online. But the conceptual framework of the infodemic, casting it in terms of disease, risks oversimplifying the problem — and letting the politicians and experts off the hook.

Infodemiology, the study of how to manage an information overload during an epidemic, is a recent field: researchers at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) and the Oxford Internet Institute
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