Month: December 2015

(credit: Steven Depolo/Flickr)

After more than a quarter of a century of rising diabetes rates, the number of new cases seems to be on a downward trend.

From 1980 to 2009, the annual number of new diabetes cases more than tripled in the US, going from 493,000 to 1.7 million diagnoses a year in people aged 18 to 79. But since 2009, case numbers appear to have slumped, though the decline had not registered as statistically significant. Now, using newly released data from 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that case numbers are definitely on their first sustained decline. In 2014, the number of diagnosed cases was down to 1.4 million.

“It seems pretty clear that incidence rates have now actually started to drop,” said Edward Gregg, one of the CDC’s top diabetes researchers told the New York Times. “Initially it was a little surprising because I had become so used to seeing increases everywhere we looked.”

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

The Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems has sent complaints to the data protection agencies in three EU countries—Ireland, Germany, and Belgium—asking them to suspend the flow of personal data from Facebook's operations in Ireland to the US. This follows his earlier success at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which ruled that the Safe Harbour framework under which personal data was being transferred was no longer valid because of mass surveillance of EU citizens by the NSA. Subsequently, the Irish High Court said that the Irish data protection commissioner (DPC) was obliged to investigate Schrems' earlier complaints.

His letter to the authorities in Ireland, where Facebook has its European headquarters, asks the Irish data protection agency "to suspend all data flows from 'Facebook Ireland Ltd' to 'Facebook Inc'." Schrems makes the same request to the data protection agencies in Germany and Belgium. In a release accompanying his complaints, Schrems explains why he has taken this unusual approach of involving several data protection agencies (DPAs): "My personal experience with the Irish DPC are rather mixed, which is why I felt involving more active DPAs make proper enforcement actions more likely. I hope the DPAs will cooperate in this case."

Schrems' unhappiness with the way the Irish DPC has dealt with his earlier complaints, and his fear that it still might not implement the CJEU ruling, is evident in a section of his new submission that is headed "Misconduct in public office." It contains the following extraordinary passage:

Last week, publisher Koei Tecmo made a surprisingly frank admission on Facebook that the upcoming Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 wouldn't be released in the EU or US because it was worried about how Western audiences would react to the way the game depicts women. Given that it features a sun-tanning system, "butt fights" between bikini-clad ladies, and a horrifyingly ambitious physics model, it's not all that surprising Koei Tecmo spoke up.

"Do you know many issues happening in video game industry with regard to how to treat female in video game industry?" read part of the the now-deleted Facebook post. "We do not want to talk those things here. But certainly we have gone through in last year or two to come to our decision."

The publisher has since taken to Twitter to distance itself from the Facebook post, claiming that the Koei Tecmo employee posting on Facebook was speaking out of line.