 |
|
|
|||||
A new Texas law promoting the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda requires first-ever warning labels on foods like chips and candies that contain dyes and additives not allowed in other countries. It could have far-reaching effects on the nation’s food supply, but a review of the legislation shows it also misrepresents the status of some ingredients that would trigger the action. The law signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on Sunday requires foods made with any of more than 40 dyes or additives to have labels starting in 2027 saying they contain ingredients not recommended for human consumption in Australia, Canada, the European Union or the U.K. But a review shows that nearly a dozen of the targeted additives are either authorized in the cited regions or already restricted in the U.S. The law, which will send the food industry scrambling to respond, is laudable in its intent, but could lead to incorrect citations and potential legal challenges, a consumer advocacy group said. I dont know how the list of chemicals was constructed, said Thomas Galligan, a scientist with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Warnings have to be accurate in order to be legal. The law, approved with wide bipartisan support, is part of a flurry of similar legislation this year by GOP-led statehouses as lawmakers align themselves with U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.s Make America Healthy Again agenda. Texas would be the first in the U.S. to use warning labels to target additives, rather than nutrients like sugar or saturated fat, to change American diets. It will force food companies to decide whether to reformulate products to avoid the labels, add the newly required language, pull certain products from Texas shelves or oppose the measure in court. It’s unclear how the list of additives was created. Inquiries to the office of the bill’s author, Republican state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, were not immediately returned. Some of the targeted ingredients are allowed in all the named regions Regulators in Australia, Canada, the EU and the U.K. take a cautious approach to food additives: If a product’s safety is uncertain, it can be banned or restricted until it is determined to be safe. By contrast, the U.S. generally allows products on the market unless there is clear risk of harm. Three additives targeted by Texas partially hydrogenated oils, Red Dye No. 4 and Red Dye No. 3 are not approved or have been banned in food by U.S. regulators. Several of the other listed ingredients are allowed in all four of those regions, noted Galligan and representatives from the Consumer Brands Association, a food industry trade group. Examples of those include: Blue Dye No. 1; Blue Dye No. 2; butylated hydroxyanisole, or BHA; butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT; diacetyl; interesterified soybean oil; lactylated fatty acid esters of glycerol and propylene glycol; and potassium aluminum sulfate. In addition, the legislation contains regulatory loopholes that could prevent certain ingredients from being labeled at all, said Melanie Benesh, an analyst with the Environmental Working Group, an activist organization that focuses on toxic chemicals. For example, the food additive azodicarbonamide, known as ADA and used as a bleaching agent in cereal flours, is included on the Texas list. But under the Federal Code of Regulations, it may safely be used in food under certain conditions. That federal regulation likely exempts ADA from the state labeling law, Benesh said. The law, as passed, may not end up having the impact that legislators intended, Benesh said. Nutrition experts welcome a look at food additives Nutrition experts have long worried about the potential health effects of food additives, even as it remains unclear how much of a role processed foods have in driving chronic health disease. Research has shown that requiring food label warnings can help steer consumers toward healthier choices and prompt industry to remove concerning ingredients. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has proposed front-of-package labels that would flag levels of saturated fat, sugar and sodium. This represents a big win for Texas consumers and consumers overall, said Brian Ronholm, director of food policy for Consumer Reports. Its a reflection of states not wanting to wait for the federal government to act. The law also creates a state nutrition advisory committee, boosts physical education and nutrition curriculum requirements in public and charter schools, and requires nutrition courses for college students and medical professionals doing continuing education. States take on additives Several states have been taking action to restrict dyes and additives in foods. In 2023, California became the first state to ban some chemicals and dyes used in candies, drinks and other foods because of health concerns. The state expanded on that last year by barring several additional dyes from food served in public schools. Other laws passed this year include one in Arkansas banning two particular additives from food sold or manufactured in the state and a West Virginia law includes a statewide ban on seven dyes. Lawmakers in several states have passed measures this year banning certain additives from food served or sold at public schools, according to an Associated Press analysis using the bill-tracking software Plural. That includes Texas, where the governor last month signed a bill banning foods with certain ingredients from being served in school lunches. Its a pretty dizzying time to be watching whats happening, because usually policies that are not very industry friendly are opposed, particularly in red states,” said Christina Roberto, director of the University of Pennsylvanias Center for Food and Nutrition Policy, With RFK and the MAHA movement, its really turned things upside-down in some ways. At the federal level, Kennedy and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary have pledged to remove arificial dyes from foods and have pressured industry to take voluntary action. Some large food manufacturers have complied. Health advocates have long called for the removal of artificial dyes from foods, citing mixed studies indicating they can cause neurobehavioral problems, including hyperactivity and attention issues, in some children. The FDA previously has said that the approved dyes are safe and that the totality of scientific evidence shows that most children have no adverse effects when consuming foods containing color additives. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Jonel Aleccia and Jamie Stengle, Associated Press Associated Press writer David A. Lieb contributed to this report.
Category:
E-Commerce
Big Tech scored a major victory this week in the battle over using copyrighted materials to train AI models. Anthropic won a partial judgment on Tuesday in a case brought by three authors who alleged the company violated their copyright by storing their works in a library used to train its Claude AI model. Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that Anthropics use of copyrighted material for training was fair use. His decision carries weight. “Authors cannot rightly exclude anyone from using their works for training or learning as such,” Alsup wrote. “Everyone reads texts, too, then writes new texts. They may need to pay for getting their hands on a text in the first instance. But to make anyone pay specifically for the use of a book each time they read it, each time they recall it from memory, each time they later draw upon it when writing new things in new ways would be unthinkable.” Alsup called training Claude “exceedingly transformative,” comparing the model to “any reader aspiring to be a writer.” That language helps explain why tech lobbyists were quick to call it a major win. Experts agreed. “It’s a pretty big win actually for the future of AI training,” says Andres Guadamuz, an intellectual property expert at the University of Sussex who has closely followed AI copyright cases. But he adds: “It could be bad for Anthropic specifically, depending on authors winning the piracy issue, but that’s still very far away.” In other words, its not as simple as tech companies might wish. “The fair use ruling looks bad for creators on its surface, but this is far from the final word on the matter,” says Ed Newton-Rex, a former AI executive-turned-copyright campaigner and founder of Fairly Trained, a nonprofit certifying companies that respect creators rights. The case is expected to be appealedand even at this stage, Newton-Rex sees weaknesses in the rulings reasoning. “The judge makes assertions about training, not de-incentivizing creation, and about AI learning like humans do, that feel easy to rebut,” he says. “This is, on balance, a bad day for creators, but its just the opening move in what will be a long game.” While the judge approved training AI models on copyrighted works, other elements of the case werent so favorable for Anthropic. Guadamuz says Alsups decision hinges on a “solid fair use argument on the transformative nature of AI training.” The judge thoroughly applied the four-factor test for fair use, Guadamuz noted, and the ruling could reshape broader copyright approaches. “We may start seeing the beginnings of rules for the new world, [where] having legitimate access to a work would work strongly in proving fair use, while using shadow libraries would not,” he says. And thats the catch: This wasnt an unvarnished win for Anthropic. Like other tech companies, Anthropic allegedly sourced training materials from piracy sites for easea fact that clearly troubled the court. “This order doubts that any accused infringer could ever meet its burden of explaining why downloading source copies from pirate sites that it could have purchased or otherwise accessed lawfully was itself reasonably necessary to any subsequent fair use,” Alsup wrote, referring to Anthropics alleged pirating of more than 7 million books. That alone could carry billions in liability, with statutory damages starting at $750 per booka trial on that issue is still to come. So while tech companies may still claim victory (with some justification, given the fair use precedent), the same ruling also implies that companies will need to pay substantial sums to legally obtain training materials. OpenAI, for its part, has in the past argued that licensing all the copyrighted material needed to train its models would be practically impossible. Joanna Bryson, a professor of AI ethics at the Hertie School in Berlin, says the ruling is “absolutely not” a blanket win for tech companies. “First of all, it’s not the Supreme Court. Secondly, it’s only one jurisdiction: The U.S.,” she says. “I think they dont entirely have purchase over this thing about whether or not it was transformative in the sense of changing Claudes output.”
Category:
E-Commerce
Oil prices are dropping further, and U.S. stocks are pulling close to their all-time high Tuesday on hopes that Israels war with Iran will not damage the global flow of crude, even if a tentative truce seemed to fray under fire in the morning. The S&P 500 was 1.2% higher in afternoon trading, following up on even bigger gains for stocks across Europe and Asia, after President Donald Trump said late Monday that Israel and Iran had agreed to a complete and total ceasefire. The main measure of Wall Street’s health is back within 1% of its record set in February after falling roughly 20% below during the spring. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 518 points, or 1.2%, as of 1:56 p.m. ET, and the Nasdaq composite was 1.5% higher. The strongest action was again in the oil market, where a barrel of benchmark U.S. crude fell 5.4%, to $64.82. Brent crude, the international standard, dropped 5.5%, to $66.62. The fear throughout the Israel-Iran conflict has been that it could squeeze the worlds supply of oil, which would pump up prices for gasoline and hurt the global economy. Iran is a major producer of crude, and it could also try to block the Strait of Hormuz off its coast, through which 20% of the worlds daily oil needs passes on ships. Oil prices began falling sharply on Monday after Iran launched what appeared to be a limited retaliatory strike that did not target the production or movement of oil. Prices kept falling even after attacks continued past a deadline to stop hostilities early Tuesday. Trump later said that the ceasefire was in effect. Oil prices have dropped so much in the last two days that theyre below where they were before the fighting began nearly two weeks ago. With the global oil market well supplied and the OPEC+ alliance of producing countries steadily increasing production, oil prices could be headed even lower as long as the ceasefire holds and a lasting peace solution can be found, said Carsten Fritsch, commodities analyst at German-based Commerzbank. Falling oil prices should take some pressure off inflation, and that in turn could give the Federal Reserve more leeway to cut interest rates. Wall Street loves lower rates because they can give the economy a boost by making it cheaper for U.S. households and businesses to borrow money to buy a car or build a factory. But they could also give inflation more fuel. That latter threat is why the Fed has been hesitant to cut rates this year after lowering them through the end of last year. The Fed has said repeatedly that it wants to wait and see how much Trumps tariffs will hurt the economy and raise inflation before committing to its next move. So far, the economy seems to be holding up okay, though a report on confidence among U.S. consumers came in weaker on Tuesday than economists expected, while inflation has remained only a bit above the Fed’s 2% target. Trump, though, has been pushing for more cuts to rates. And two of his appointees to the Fed have said in the last week that they may consider cutting rates as soon as the Feds next meeting next month. Fed Chair Jerome Powell remains more cautious. He said again in testimony delivered to Congress Tuesday that the Fed is well positioned to wait to learn more about the likely course of the economy before considering any adjustments to our policy stance. Asked whether a cut could arrive as soon as July, Powell said: We will get to a place where we cut rates, sooner rather than laterbut I wouldnt want to point to a particular meeting. I dont think we need to be in any rush because the economy is still strong. Such mixed messages had Treasury yields swiveling up and down in the bond market. The yield on the 10-year Treasury eased to 4.30%, from 4.34% late Monday. The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks expectations for Fed action, fell to 3.82%, from 3.84%. On Wall Street, cruise operator Carnival steamed 6.7% higher after delivering a much stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. CEO Josh Weinstein said it’s seeing strong demand from people booking cruises close to the departure date, and customers are spending strongly once on board. Carnival also raised its forecast for an underlying measure of profit for the full year. Uber Technologies rose 7.8% after it said customers in Atlanta can use its app to ride in Waymo autonomous vehicles. Coinbase Global rallied 11.4% as the cryptocurrency exchange rose with the price of Bitcoin, which jumped back above $105,000. In stock markets abroad, indexes rallied more than 1% everywhere from France to Germany to Japan, following the announcement of the Israel-Iran ceasefire. Hong Kongs jump of 2.1% and South Koreas leap of 3% were two of the strongest moves. By Stan Choe, David McHugh, and Elaine Kurtenbach, AP business writers
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||