Amazon to enter the medical industry, GM closes down factories, falling life expectancy for Americans, and ships continuing to sale to North Korean ports despite international sanctions.

Here are the top newsworthy items from this past week as shared on our Facebook page.

• Bitcoin has now fallen by about 80% since peaking late last year.

From The Wall Street Journal

• Amazon is starting to sell software that mines patient medical records for information. The data could be used by doctors and hospitals to improve treatment and cut costs.

From The Wall Street Journal

• GM is laying off 14,300 employees. It’s shuttering five factories in the U.S. and Canada, and says that two more closings will be announced internationally. By next year, it will no longer make the Buick LaCrosse, the Chevrolet Impala, or the Cadillac CT6 sedan. It’s even killing the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid.

From Axios

• AT&T plans to offer a three-tiered streaming video service next year that will feature original movies and television series, in an effort to take on Netflix.

From The Wall Street Journal

• The shooting game Fortnite now has more than 200 million players, up 60% from the figure released in June.

From Bloomberg

• Teslas and other electric vehicles in China constantly send information about the precise location of cars to the government, adding to the surveillance tools available as President Xi Jinping steps up the use of technology to track Chinese citizens.

From AP

• Life expectancy for Americans fell again last year because of the opioid and suicide crises, continuing the longest sustained decline in a century.

From Washington Post

• The number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. fell to its lowest level in more than a decade, according to new Pew Research Center estimates based on 2016 government data. There were 10.7 million unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. in 2016, down from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007, according to the new estimates. The lawful immigrant population grew 22% during the same period, an increase of more than 6 million people.

• Over the past two years, the U.S. and U.N. have unveiled the tightest sanctions ever applied to North Korea, yet ships continue sailing to and from North Korean ports, carrying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fuel, coal and other products. They do so through a shifting array of tactics obscuring the ships’ links to Pyongyang, such as using fake customs manifests, painting over hulls with false names and turning off tracking devices at sea.

From The Wall Street Journal

• Longer growing seasons are helping northern farmers to plow up forests for crops such as corn that were once hard to grow in chilly territories. The new prospect of warmer-weather crops is helping lift farmland prices, too: An acre near La Crete, Alberta, in Canada, is selling for nearly five times what it fetched nearly 10 years ago.

From The Wall Street Journal

 

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