Foxconn's Big Improvements Include Chairs, Knitting Classes

The New York Times took a victory lap of sorts, when it published the latest installment of its iEconomy series explaining how Foxconn changed after global outrage over working conditions. In a way, a victory lap is warranted. The Times's series is partially responsible for raising awareness about how badly workers in Foxconn factories, elevating what had previously been rumors on fanboy blogs into Pulitzer bait. Nearly a year after the paper published a jaw-dropping story on the "human costs" of building an iPad, they've circled back to the Foxconn factory floor to find that things have improved, if only slightly.
RELATED: Foxconn Plant Closed After a Massive Brawl Among Workers
Take the case of Pu Xiaolon. Before the mistreatment of Foxconn workers was making headlines, she had to spend 12 or so hours a day inspecting iPads on a rickety wooden stool. Now she has a chair -- with a back. She's also been indulging in the knitting classes that Foxconn started offering a few months ago. These sound like tiny improvements, but it sounds like they're having a big impact on worker morale. Ms. Pu, for instance, doesn't feel as much like a robot any more. "“There was a change this year," she told The Times. "I'm realizing my value."
RELATED: Explosion at Apple Supplier Foxconn Kills Two
Chairs and classes won't solve all of Foxconn's problems, though. It was nearly a year ago that Foxconn claimed to have fixed all of its worker issues, but as the months went by, more reports surfaced of insane overtime hours, student interns being forced to work on the assembly line and The company is still breaking Chinese law by letting its employees work more than 49 hours a week, though it says it can have this resolved by next summer, and student interns are still showing up on Foxconn's factory floor. We haven't heard of suicide pacts, lately, but we haven't heard of Foxconn workers jumping for joy at their wonderful new working lives either.
RELATED: China Thinks It's Apple's Responsibility to Fix Foxconn
As The Times does a good job of expressing, though, Apple is going to have to get involved, if we're really going to see change in how electronics are built. Fat chance. "Apple is scared that if we open the kimono too wide, it will ruin what has made Apple special," said the former Apple official. "But that's the only way to really improve things. If you don't share what you know, then no one else gets a chance to learn from your mistakes and discoveries.

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Amazon most satisfying website to shop: survey

 Amazon.com Inc remained the best website for shopping online while JC Penney Co Inc suffered the largest drop in customer satisfaction of any major online retailer this holiday season, according to a survey released on Thursday.
Flash sale sites Gilt.com and RueLaLa.com were among the worst performers in online shopping satisfaction this season, according to ForeSee's Holiday E-Retail Satisfaction Index.
"The importance of satisfying them and giving a great consumer experience is going to pay back huge dividends in terms of profitability for these retailers," said Larry Freed, president and chief executive officer of ForeSee, which measures customer satisfaction for companies, including retailers.
Amazon has held the highest score in each of the eight years of the index, due in part to the wide variety of merchandise it offers and a site that is easy to use.
"They've really done a great job in setting the standard for everybody else," Freed said of Amazon.
Amazon's score was again 88 out of 100, while Gilt.com and Fingerhut.com shared the lowest score of 72. LLBean.com had the second-highest ranking, 85, up 4 points from a year earlier.
A score of 80 or higher is considered strong, Freed said.
JC Penney's score fell to 78 from 83.
"They've struggled a lot in their stores as they've tried to reinvent themselves a bit and that's carried over a little bit to the website," Freed said.
Other retailers that saw their ForeSee satisfaction scores drop included Apple Inc - down to 80 from 83 - and Dell Inc, which fell to 77 from 80.
At Apple, as the popular tech company has brought out more products, navigating the site has become more of an issue, said Freed. Improving the functionality of the site would give it the biggest boost, he said.
No. 1 U.S. retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc, which is trying to grow its online sales, scored a 78 for its Walmart.com website, down from 79 in 2011. Rival Target Corp's website scored 79, up from 76 last year, when it had some struggles after taking over control of the site from Amazon.
As for those flash sale sites coming in at the low end of the scores, Freed noted that some are trying to grow beyond the premise of flash sales, which offer a limited amount of marked down merchandise at specific times.
"It works for some kinds of consumers, it's not going to work for every kind of consumer," said Freed. "Their models today are going to work and they're going to have a chance to be successful, but at the end of the day it's not the right answer for everybody."
ForeSee's 2012 report was based on more than 24,000 surveys collected from visitors to websites of the 100 largest online retailers from Thanksgiving to Christmas, up from 40 retail sites in prior years.

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Private picture of Mark Zuckerberg's family leaked

Even Mark Zuckerberg's family can get tripped up by Facebook's privacy settings.
A picture that Zuckerberg's sister posted on her personal Facebook profile was seen by a marketing director, who then posted the picture to Twitter and her more than 40,000 followers Wednesday.
That didn't sit well with Zuckerberg's sister, Randi, who tweeted at Callie Schweitzer that the picture was meant for friends only and that posting the private picture on Twitter was "way uncool." Schweitzer replied by saying the picture popped up on her Facebook news feed.
The picture shows four people standing around a kitchen staring at their phones with their mouths open while Mark Zuckerberg is in the background.
Randi Zuckerberg, who used to run Facebook's marketing department and now produces a reality television show, eventually said Schweitzer was able to see the picture because they had a mutual friend. Those tweets have since been taken down.
Schweitzer declined to comment when reached by The Associated Press. Randi Zuckerberg didn't reply to a message via Twitter seeking comment.
Randi Zuckerberg used the dustup to write about online sharing etiquette.
"Digital etiquette: always ask permission before posting a friend's photo publicly. It's not about privacy settings, it's about human decency," she posted on Twitter.
But Randi Zuckerberg's comments sparked sharp reactions from people who thought the issue wasn't about etiquette, but rather Facebook's often changing and often confusing privacy settings.
"The thing that bugged me about Randi Zuckerberg's response is that she used her name as a bludgeoning device. Not everyone has that. She used her position to get it taken it down," said Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group in San Francisco.
While Facebook has made improvements in explaining the social network's privacy settings, Galperin said they remain confusing to most people. She added that with people using Facebook as part of their everyday lives, the consequences of fumbling privacy settings can become serious.
"Even Randi Zuckerberg can get it wrong. That's an illustration of how confusing they can be," she said.
The Menlo Park, Calif., company recently announced it is changing its privacy settings with the aim of making it easier for users to navigate them.
The fine-tuning will include several revisions that will start rolling out to Facebook's more than 1 billion users during the next few weeks and continue into early next year.
The most visible change — and perhaps the most appreciated — will be a new "privacy shortcuts" section that appears as a tiny lock at the top right of people's news feeds. This feature offers a drop-down box where users can get answers to common questions such as "Who can see my stuff?"
But Galperin said Wednesday's incident also illustrates a general concern about Internet privacy. Essentially, she said, if you share information or a photo with your social network, people in your network have the ability to share that with whomever else they choose.
The mobile photo-sharing service Instagram, which is owned by Facebook Inc., had to answer to backlash to privacy concerns recently when new terms of service suggested user photos could be used in advertisements. The company later said it would remove the questionable language.

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China tightening controls on Internet

 China's new communist leaders are increasing already tight controls on Internet use and electronic publishing following a spate of embarrassing online reports about official abuses.
The measures suggest China's new leader, Xi Jinping, and others who took power in November share their predecessors' anxiety about the Internet's potential to spread opposition to one-party rule and their insistence on controlling information despite promises of more economic reforms.
"They are still very paranoid about the potentially destabilizing effect of the Internet," said Willy Lam, a politics specialist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "They are on the point of losing a monopoly on information, but they still are very eager to control the dissemination of views."
This week, China's legislature took up a measure to require Internet users to register their real names, a move that would curtail the Web's status as a freewheeling forum to complain, often anonymously, about corruption and official abuses. The legislature scheduled a news conference Friday to discuss the measure, suggesting it was expected to be approved.
That comes amid reports Beijing might be disrupting use of software that allows Web surfers to see sites abroad that are blocked by its extensive Internet filters. At the same time, regulators have proposed rules that would bar foreign companies from distributing books, news, music and other material online in China.
Beijing promotes Internet use for business and education but bans material deemed subversive or obscene and blocks access to foreign websites run by human rights and Tibet activists and some news outlets. Controls were tightened after social media played a role in protests that brought down governments in Egypt and Tunisia.
In a reminder of the Web's role as a political forum, a group of 70 prominent Chinese scholars and lawyers circulated an online petition this week appealing for free speech, independent courts and for the ruling party to encourage private enterprise.
Xi and others on the party's ruling seven-member Standing Committee have tried to promote an image of themselves as men of the people who care about China's poor majority. They have promised to press ahead with market-oriented reforms and to support entrepreneurs but have given no sign of support for political reform.
Communist leaders who see the Internet as a source of economic growth and better-paid jobs were slow to enforce the same level of control they impose on movies, books and other media, apparently for fear of hurting fledgling entertainment, shopping and other online businesses.
Until recently, Web surfers could post comments online or on microblog services without leaving their names.
That gave ordinary Chinese a unique opportunity to express themselves to a public audience in a society where newspapers, television and other media are state-controlled. The most popular microblog services say they have more than 300 million users and some users have millions of followers reading their comments.
The Internet also has given the public an unusual opportunity to publicize accusations of official misconduct.
A local party official in China's southwest was fired in November after scenes from a videotape of him having sex with a young woman spread quickly on the Internet. Screenshots were uploaded by a former journalist in Beijing, Zhu Ruifeng, to his Hong Kong website, an online clearing house for corruption allegations.
Some industry analysts suggest allowing Web surfers in a controlled setting to vent helps communist leaders stay abreast of public sentiment in their fast-changing society. Still, microblog services and online bulletin boards are required to employ censors to enforce content restrictions. Researchers say they delete millions of postings a day.
The government says the latest Internet regulation before the National People's Congress is aimed at protecting Web surfers' personal information and cracking down on abuses such as junk e-mail. It would require users to report their real names to Internet service and telecom providers.
The main ruling party newspaper, People's Daily, has called in recent weeks for tighter Internet controls, saying rumors spread online have harmed the public. In one case, it said stories about a chemical plant explosion resulted in the deaths of four people in a car accident as they fled the area.
Proposed rules released this month by the General Administration of Press and Publications would bar Chinese-foreign joint ventures from publishing books, music, movies and other material online in China. Publishers would be required to locate their servers in China and have a Chinese citizen as their local legal representative.
That is in line with rules that already bar most foreign access to China's media market, but the decision to group the restrictions together and publicize them might indicate official attitudes are hardening.
That comes after the party was rattled by foreign news reports about official wealth and misconduct.
In June, Bloomberg News reported that Xi's extended family has amassed assets totaling $376 million, though it said none was traced to Xi. The government has blocked access to Bloomberg's website since then.
In October, The New York Times reported that Premier Wen Jiabao's relatives had amassed $2.7 billion since he rose to national office in 2002. Access to the Times' Chinese-language site has been blocked since then.
Previous efforts to tighten controls have struggled with technical challenges in a country with more than 500 million Internet users.
Microblog operators such as Sina Corp. and Tencent Ltd. were ordered in late 2011 to confirm users' names but have yet to finish the daunting task.
Web surfers can circumvent government filters by using virtual private networks — software that encrypts Web traffic and is used by companies to transfer financial data and other sensitive information. But VPN users say disruptions that began in 2011 are increasing, suggesting Chinese regulators are trying to block encrypted traffic.
Curbs on access to foreign sites have prompted complaints by companies and Chinese scientists and other researchers.
In July, the American Chamber of Commerce in China said 74 percent of companies that responded to a survey said unstable Internet access "impedes their ability to do business."
Chinese leaders "realize there are detrimental impacts on business, especially foreign business, but they have counted the cost and think it is still worthwhile," said Lam. "There is no compromise about the political imperative of controlling the Internet.

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Prosecutor killed in Guatemala along with 6 others

 Guatemala's attorney general dispatched a special team Monday to investigate the slaying of a federal prosecutor and six other people in an attack near the Mexican border.
Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz said she was sending prosecutors and investigators to the area of northern Guatemala where Irma Yolanda Olivares, who worked in one of the prosecutor's regional officers, was slain along with an official working for a government social service agency and five others on Sunday night.
President Otto Perez Molina blamed the attack on drug traffickers, who have taken over swathes of territory along the border with Mexico.
The Interior Ministry said that a group of armed, masked men had intercepted the sport-utility vehicle carrying Olivares and three other passengers, who were returning from the inauguration of a hotel in the city of La Mesilla. The attackers opened fire, then burned the victims' bodies, officials said. Three other people were found fatally shot and burned in another vehicle nearby, official said.
Officials were not immediately able to determine the identities of the three or whether they were killed by the same attackers, said Ricardo Guzman, sub-secretary general in the prosecutor's office.
"The death of a member of the attorney general's team is a serious attack against the institution and against the work done by each prosecutor's office to fight impunity in this country," Paz said.

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Pardon for pope's butler who stole papers expected

The Vatican has summoned journalists for a briefing on what Italian news reports say is an expected pardon for Pope Benedict XVI'S former butler, who stole the pontiff's personal papers and leaked them in a bid to expose the "evil and corruption" in the Catholic Church.
Paolo Gabriele was arrested May 23 after Vatican police found heaps of papal documents in his Vatican City apartment. He was convicted of aggravated theft by a Vatican tribunal on Oct. 6 and has been serving his 18-month sentence in the Vatican police barracks.
The Vatican has made no secret that the pope would pardon Gabriele. The only question was when. A pre-Christmas pardon was widely expected.
Veteran Vatican journalists reported the announcement would come Saturday, and the Vatican press office scheduled a last-minute briefing.

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Pope stresses family values as gay marriage gains

The pope pressed his opposition to gay marriage Friday, denouncing what he described as people eschewing their God-given gender identities to suit their sexual choices — and destroying the very "essence of the human creature" in the process.
Benedict XVI made the comments in his annual Christmas address to the Vatican bureaucracy, one of his most important speeches of the year. He dedicated it this year to promoting traditional family values in the face of gains by same-sex marriage proponents in the U.S. and Europe and efforts to legalize gay marriage in places like France and Britain.
In his remarks, Benedict quoted the chief rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, in saying the campaign for granting gays the right to marry and adopt children was an "attack" on the traditional family made up of a father, mother and children.
"People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being," he said. "They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves."
"The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man's fundamental choice where he himself is concerned," he said.
It was the second time in a week that Benedict has taken on the question of gay marriage, which is currently dividing France, and which scored big electoral wins in the United States last month. In his recently released annual peace message, Benedict said gay marriage, like abortion and euthanasia, was a threat to world peace. The Vatican went on a similar anti-gay marriage media blitz last month after three U.S. states approved gay marriage by popular vote.
After the peace message was released last week, gay activists staged a small protest in St. Peter's Square. On Friday, gay activists sharply criticized the pope's take on gender theory and insisted that where gay marriage has been legalized, families are no worse off.
Italy's main gay rights group Arcigay called the pope's comments "absurd, dangerous and totally out of synch with reality." And a coalition of four U.S. Catholic organizations representing gay, lesbian and transgender people said the pope had an "outmoded" view of what it means to be man and woman.
"Increasingly Catholics in the United States and around the world see what we see. Catholics, following their own well-formed consciences, are voting to support equal rights for LGBT people because in their churches and communities they see a far healthier, godly and realistic vision of the human family than the one offered by the pope," according to a statement from the groups Call To Action, DignityUSA, Fortunate Families, and New Ways Ministry.
Church teaching holds that homosexual acts are "intrinsically disordered," though it stresses that gays should be treated with compassion and dignity. As pope and as head of the Vatican's orthodoxy watchdog before that, Benedict has been a strong enforcer of that teaching: One of the first major documents released during his pontificate said men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies shouldn't be ordained priests.
For the Vatican, though, the gay marriage issue goes beyond questions of homosexuality, threatening what the church considers to be the bedrock of society: a family based on a man, woman and their children.
In his speech, the pope cited Bernheim as lamenting how a new philosophy of sexuality has taken hold, whereby sex and gender are "no longer a given element of nature that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society."
He said God had created man and woman as a specific "duality" — "an essential aspect of what being human is all about."
Now, though, "Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his own nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will."
The Vatican's opposition to gay marriage has been falling largely on deaf ears. In addition to the U.S. election gains, the Constitutional Court in largely Roman Catholic Spain upheld the law legalizing gay marriage last month. Earlier this month, the British government announced it will introduce a bill next year legalizing gay marriage, though it would ban the Church of England from conducting same-sex ceremonies.
In France, President Francois Hollande has said he would enact his "marriage for everyone" plan within a year of taking office last May. The text will go to parliament next month. But the country has been divided by vocal opposition from religious leaders, prime among them Bernheim, as well as some politicians and parts of rural France.
The Socialist government's plan also envisions legalizing same-sex adoptions. Benedict quoted Bernheim as denouncing the plan, saying that it would mean a child would essentially be considered an object people have a right to obtain.
"When freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God," Benedict said.

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Margaret Thatcher in UK hospital after operation

 Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is recuperating at a hospital after an operation to remove a bladder growth, a friend said Friday.
The 87-year-old Thatcher went to see her doctor after experiencing some discomfort and subsequently had the growth removed, according to longtime adviser Tim Bell.
The operation was "completely satisfactory," Bell said. He said he couldn't go into detail as to the nature of the growth and declined to name the hospital, saying he did not want it to be inundated with calls.
Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister, has been in fragile health since she suffered a series of small strokes more than a decade ago. Although she has occasionally appeared at private functions, she has not made public statements for some time.
Thatcher was not well enough to join Britain's queen for a lunch with former and serving prime ministers earlier this year, and two years ago she missed an 85th birthday party thrown for her by Prime Minister David Cameron at his official residence at No. 10 Downing Street. But in October she was well enough to mark her birthday with a lunch out in London with her son Mark and his wife.
Thatcher's declining health was a focus of Oscar-winning biopic "The Iron Lady," which premiered last year.
Thatcher served as prime minister from May 1979 until her resignation in November 1990. She was the first leader to win three consecutive elections, dominating British politics throughout the 1980s.
She was a firm supporter of her American ideological peer, President Ronald Reagan, but is a divisive figure in Britain, where the fruits of her legacy are still debated.

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Margaret Thatcher in hospital after operation

 Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the country's first woman elective leader, is in hospital recovering from surgery to remove a growth on her bladder, a source close to the family said on Friday.
After experiencing pain in her bladder earlier in the week, he 87-year-old went to hospital where she underwent a minimally invasive operation, Tim Bell, a public relations executive who once served as image maker to Thatcher, said.
"The operation was completely satisfactory. She's now recovering in hospital and as soon as she's recovered she'll go home," Bell said.
Known as the "Iron Lady," Thatcher, who stepped down in 1990, embraced free market policies, challenged trade unions and privatised many state-owned companies during her 11 years in power, polarising British voters.
Britain's only woman prime minister, who led her country in a war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in 1982 and was close to the late U.S. President Ronald Reagan, was forced to step down by her own party.
Thatcher suffered a series of mild strokes in late 2001 and 2002, after which she cut back on public appearances and later cancelled her speaking schedule.
She was hospitalised in 2010 for tests relating to a flu illness.

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Budget deficit worsens, credit rating at risk

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's budget deficit worsened in November, data showed on Friday, increasing the risk it will lose its top-notch credit rating and overshoot this year's borrowing forecast.
The data - which showed public sector net borrowing, excluding financial sector interventions, hit 17.5 billion pounds last month - is gloomy news for Britain's coalition government.
Deficit reduction and preserving Britain's credit rating have been top goals for the coalition of Conservatives and Lib Dems, which came to power in June 2010, just after the country's budget deficit peaked at 11.2 percent of GDP.
Last year, the budget deficit totalled 8 percent of GDP, and the government's own budget watchdog forecasts it will take until 2017 before it falls below 3 percent and the government manages to run a surplus on cyclically-adjusted non-investment spending.
Chancellor George Osborne had originally planned to meet this goal by the next election in 2015, but far weaker than expected growth since 2010 now makes that look impossible.
While other official data released on Friday showed Britain's economy may avoid a forecast contraction in the last three months of 2012, analysts say the borrowing numbers could see the country's credit rating revised early next year.
"The disappointing November public finance data fuel mounting expectations that at least one of the credit rating agencies will strip the UK of its AAA rating in 2013," said Howard Archer, chief UK economist at IHS Global Insight.
Standard & Poor's last week joined Fitch and Moody's and put a negative outlook on its triple-A rating for Britain. The latter two agencies - which have had a negative outlook since early this year - will review their ratings in early 2013.
Last month's public sector net borrowing figure of 17.5 billion pounds exceeded economists' expectations. They had forecast it would come in just below the 16.3 billion pounds reached in November 2011.
Borrowing since the start of the tax year in April is now nearly 10 percent higher than at the same point in 2011.
This calls into question forecasts issued earlier this month by the government's budget watchdog which estimated borrowing will fall 11 percent to total 108.5 billion pounds in the 2012-13 tax year.
Some of the fall in borrowing forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) was due to money expected from the auction of next-generation mobile phone frequencies and a deal with the Bank of England to return interest paid on its bond holdings - cash that will not boot the public finances until early 2013.
But even disregarding this, some economists think Osborne, the finance minister, may struggle to hit the OBR's targets.
Archer expects an overshoot of some 14 billion pounds, while economists at Barclays see an overshoot of 6.5 billion pounds, assuming the radio spectrum auction brings in the 3.5 billion pounds pencilled in by the OBR.
WEAKER GROWTH
Britain's economy shrank for nine months between late 2011 and mid-2012, but revised figures from the Office for National Statistics showed on Friday that growth rebounded by 0.9 percent in the third quarter of 2012, a little less than the 1.0 percent first estimated.
There was slightly brighter news from Britain's dominant services sector, which grew 0.1 percent in October after a 0.6 percent decline in September.
This was better than many economists had expected, and raises the prospect that the economy will avoid a return to contraction that the OBR and the Bank of England have predicted.
"It's not a great number but it is positive," said Ross Walker, an economist at Royal Bank of Scotland. "On the basis of all the published data it looks like the fourth quarter will be broadly flat, rather than negative."
Another bright spot was third-quarter current account data, which showed Britain's deficit with the rest of the world narrowed more than expected to 12.8 billion pounds, equivalent to 3.3 percent of GDP, from 17.4 billion in the second quarter.
However, economic growth will need to translate into stronger tax revenues and lower spending on social benefits if the government is to meet its budget goals.
November's budget overshoot was driven by a 6.3 percent year-on-year rise in central government spending, while tax revenues grew just 0.6 percent.
The closure of a North Sea oil field earlier this year has done major damage to corporation tax revenues, but Barclays economist Blerina Uruci said she was more concerned about signs that spending by government departments was rising more than expected.
"It could suggest difficulties with delivering efficiency savings as austerity fatigue sets in," she said.
The OBR said it expected to see underspending by government departments towards the end of the fiscal year, as well as stronger future growth in income tax and sales tax revenues.
Business minister Vince Cable sought to play down worries about the state of public finances, saying more austerity than planned could tip the economy back into recession.
"The fact that there has been a temporary increase in borrowing I don't think is a matter for criticism," he told BBC radio. "The government ... have been flexible, just accepting that when the economy slows down you are going to get bigger deficits (and) the government has to borrow to cover them."
However, the Labour Party said Friday's data showed there had already been too much austerity.
"By squeezing families and businesses too hard, choking off the recovery and so pushing borrowing up, not down, (Prime Minister) David Cameron and George Osborne's economic plan has completely backfired," said Labour legislator Rachel Reeves.

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