Ethical Finance

Switzerland ranked 21th in the Tobacco Control Scale report, back from 18th in 2013. The report is published once every three years, the last one, which was referring to 2013, being made available in 2014.

The 2016 Tobacco Control Scale was launched on March 23 at the 7th European Conference on Tobacco or Health (ECToH). It presents the results of the development and implementation of tobacco control policies in 35 European countries, using a tool called Tobacco Control Policy Scale.

The Vatican has issued new figures showing it narrowed its deficit by half in 2015 to 12.4 million euros. That compares with a deficit of €25.6 million in 2014. The Vatican released the figures for 2015 but didn’t include fuller details as it has in previous years, citing a transition in its financial accounting system that also delayed disclosure of the 2015 figures.

The tech industry in the city of Wellington, New Zealand, is looking to recruit tech experts from around the world, offering a free holiday to the country for anyone who can prove their merit.

In a bid to supplement Wellington’s technology pool, the city is offering "the ultimate tech career trip" by flying 100 people from all around the world to New Zealand to fill 100 jobs. The Wellington Regional Reconomic Development Agency and Workhere New Zealand are paying for all flights and accommodation for the international techies.

Smartphone production and disposal over the last 10 years is proving to have a significant impact on our planet, according to a Greenpeace USA report released yesterady on the sideline of Mobile World Congress 2017, which kicked off in Barcelona.
In From Smart to Senseless report it warned: “Electronics manufacturing is highly energy-intensive and its energy footprint is growing significantly, as the volume and complexity of our electronic devices continues to expand.”

Google and Jigsaw have launched a new tool that uses artificial intelligence to filter ‘toxic’ comments online. The tool, known as Perspective, has been designed to crack down on online harassment by letting creators and readers identify abusive comments or comments that are likely to make ‘someone leave a conversation’.

Google’s freely available software is being tested by a range of news organisations, including The New York Times, The Guardian and The Economist, as a way to help simplify the jobs of humans reviewing comments on their stories.”News organizations want to encourage engagement and discussion around their content but find that sorting through millions of comments to find those that are trolling or abusive takes a lot of money, labor, and time. As a result, many sites have shut down comments altogether. But they tell us that isn’t the solution they want. We think technology can help.” said Jared Cohen, president of Jigsaw, the Google social incubator that built the tool.

"Even in an age of rising nationalism, we as a global technology sector need to become a trusted and neutral digital Switzerland," Smith said at the RSA Conference 2017 in San Francisco.

This week’s security conference is getting more focus than ever before, thanks to the 2016 US presidential election, which generated more news on cyberattacks, email leaks, and cybersecurity blunders than anything else. The United States had formally accused Russia of hacking the Democratic Party to influence election results. While the US and private security firms released reports showing a connection to Russia, not everyone trusted these results since Russia won’t accept the blame and a Democratic President was then leading the US.

Although the US election is over, the problem of fake news isn’t. Apple CEO Tim Cook said it’s time to do something about it.

“All of us technology companies need to create some tools that help diminish the volume of fake news,” Cook said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph on Friday. Cook also called for governments to lead information campaigns to crack down on fake news in an interview with a British national newspaper. The scourge of falsehoods in mainstream political discourse came to the fore during recent campaigns, during which supporters of each side were accused of promoting misinformation for political gain.

Transparency International (TI), the world’s leading anti-corruption movement, said in its annual Corruption Perceptions Index for 2016 that in countries with populist or autocratic leaders, "instead of tackling crony capitalism, those leaders usually install even worse forms of corrupt systems."

Based on expert opinions of public sector corruption, the annual report rated Denmark and New Zealand as the least-corrupt countries, followed by Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, and Norway.