Nutritix

Tag: Politics

  • Quarter of global population used site daily in December

    Quarter of global population used site daily in December

    The number of people using Facebook daily grew to an average of two billion in December – about a quarter of the world’s population.

    The bigger-than-expected growth helped drive new optimism about the company, which has been under pressure as its costs rise and advertising sales slump.

    Shares in parent company Meta surged more than 15% in after-hours trade as boss Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 the “year of efficiency”.

    He said he was focused on cost cuts.

    “We’re in a different environment now,” he said, pointing to the firm’s revenue, which declined in 2022 for the first time in its history after years of double-digit growth. 

    “We don’t anticipate that that’s going to continue, but I also don’t think it’s going to go back to the way it was before.”

    Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, announced a major restructuring last year, including reducing office space and cutting 11,000 jobs or about 13% of staff.

    The firm said those moves cost it $4.6bn last year – hitting its profits, which were almost cut in half. It still brought it in $23.2bn in profit for the year.

    “2022 was a challenging year but I think we ended it having made good progress,” Mr Zuckerberg said. 

    In the three months to December, the firm said revenue was $32.2bn, down 4% year-on-year. 

    But that was better than many analysts had expected. 

    Meta alarmed investors last year when it posted the first-ever decline in daily Facebook users in its history and signaled it was focusing investments on virtual reality, known as the metaverse. 

    But in December, the number of users on the site daily was up 4% from a year earlier, adding users even in Europe and the US, and Canada. 

    Meta said the number of people active across all of its apps each day was up 5% year-on-year. 

    Mr Zuckerberg said the company was making progress with its video product – Reels – which it has been focused on as it faces off with rivals such as TikTok, which have gained traction, especially among younger users. 

    Mr Zuckerberg said those efforts were starting to pay off, and ad dollars were starting to follow users to the videos.

    Investors seized on the company’s forecast of lower costs and stronger sales than expected in the months ahead, helping send shares higher. 

    The company also said it would spend an extra $40bn to buy back shares, which dropped sharply last year amid investor doubts about the direction of the company.

  • The images that reveal male fears

    The images that reveal male fears

    Three new exhibitions explore how the femme fatale in art reflects evolving anxieties writes Cath Pound.

     The figure of the femme fatale is one of the defining literary and artistic motifs of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Artists were drawn to historical archetypes of female seduction such as Cleopatra or Lucrezia Borgia, characters from Old Testament stories including Salome, Judith, and Delilah, or mythical figures such as Circe, Helen of Troy, and Medea. Others were conjured from their male author’s imagination – Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, Émile Zola’s Nana, and Frank Wedekind’s Lulu being some of the most notable.

    Her emergence is frequently seen as a response to anxieties arising from profound social change as women pushed for greater economic, political, and educational rights, challenging the established patriarchal order. Middle-class women who sought education were, according to the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, likely to damage their reproductive organs, turning them into monstrosities who threatened the survival of the human race. Fear of contagious diseases such as syphilis was another factor, with working-class prostitutes being seen as contemporary femmes fatales who could lure their clients to their doom.

    The 19th-Century image of the femme fatale was largely shaped by the Pre-Raphaelites in images such as Edward Burne Jones’ The Beguiling of Merlin (1872-77) or Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1866-68). The latter sees the disobedient first wife of Adam transformed into a vain bohemian beauty admiring her luscious locks in a hand mirror.

    Were they responding to a trend or instrumental in shaping the narrative? “I think both,” says Carol Jacobi, curator of Tate Britain’s forthcoming exhibition The Rossettis. “They were responding to social trends, both the reactionary ones and the whole idea of the ‘fallen woman’, and also the women in their circle who were the New Women. At the same time, I think Rossetti creates a new visual language for the femme fatale that brings it to the mainstream and was picked up by a lot of other artists.”

  • Europe grew faster than the US last year. 

    Europe grew faster than the US last year. 

    Europe’s stock markets have beaten Wall Street by the biggest margin in more than three decades over recent months as its economy looks set to dodge a recession many thought inevitable just a few weeks ago.

    Since late September, European market benchmarks have risen by 20 percentage points more than Wall Street — the largest outperformance seen in a four-month period in the past 30 years. 

    Though over the past two weeks, Europe’s stocks have posted slightly smaller gains than US equities, this has done “little to erode their outperformance since September,” Graham Secker, chief European equity strategist at Morgan Stanley, told CNN. 

    The overall rise is a reversal of a 15-year trend that has seen US stock indices, flush with fast-growing tech companies, consistently beat those across the Atlantic.

    “It had been quite a sharp turnaround and the sharpest in a while,” Thomas Mathews, senior markets economist at Capital Economics, told CNN.

    In a note earlier this month, Morgan Stanley said the reversal was driven by a combination of falling gas prices and better-than-expected economic data in Europe, as well as China’s swift reopening.

    Similarly, Mathews at Capital Economics noted that the “steady outperformance” of European stocks can be dated back to a decline in European wholesale gas prices from their all-time high reached in late August. Europe’s benchmark gas contract is now trading at €57 ($62) per megawatt hour, sharply down from the peak of €346 ($375) per megawatt hour.

    Consumer price inflation in the region has also ticked down in recent months. In the countries that use the euro, inflation fell from a record high of 10.6% in October to 8.5% in January, preliminary data from the EU statistics office showed on Wednesday. 

    More broadly, investors have been encouraged by Europe’s economic resilience over the past year. GDP in the eurozone grew 3.5% in 2022 — more than in the United States or China — including a slight expansion in the final quarter, according to a preliminary estimate by the EU statistics office.

  • The big picture: the messy and magical reality of motherhood

    The big picture: the messy and magical reality of motherhood

    Hungarian photographer Andi Gáldi Vinkó’s playful portrait of her child, part of series on becoming a parent, combines humour and intimacy.

    o say the subject of Andi Gáldi Vinkó’s book is a diary of motherhood doesn’t get anywhere near to the fleshy, playful vulnerability of her pictures. Titled Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back, the Hungarian photographer’s journal is a kind of traveller’s tale from the magical and estranging foreign land of childbirth. “When I realised I was pregnant,” she writes, by way of introduction, “I had no idea what awaited me. How messy and how raw, how unpredictable and how out of control motherhood really was compared to the images I had in my mind from films, photos, paintings done by men.”

    Her images take you deep into that out-of-control place, her body no longer all her own, colonised by other dramatic forces. Her camera watches it all swell, as she pictures befores and afters: “Then I was an emerging artist, travelling around and going to art fairs and exhibitions and openings. Now I am a mother of two working on borrowed time hoping the years I’ve lost to mothering can be written into my CV without guilt and shame.”

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