(NEW YORK) — Fitbit is recalling approximately one million smartwatches after 78 reports of burn injuries — including two reports of third-degree burns.
The recall impacts the company’s Ionic smartwatches, which were sold across the United States.
The lithium-ion battery in the smartwatch can overheat, posing a burn hazard, according to a release from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
Fitbit has received at least 115 reports in the United States of the battery in the watch overheating, with 78 reports of burn injuries in the U.S., the CPSC said. This includes two reports of third-degree burns and four reports of second-degree burns.
Consumers are advised to immediately stop using the recalled watches and contact Fitbit to receive pre-paid packaging to return the device. Upon receipt of the device, consumers will be issued a refund of $299 and receive a discount code for select Fitbit products, according to the CPSC, which said the company is voluntarily recalling the devices.
The devices were sold from September 2017 through December 2021 at various U.S. retailers. The company stopped production of the smartwatches in 2020, the CPSC said.
(NEW YORK) — LinkedIn, the career-focused social networking site, is giving job seekers a new way to describe gaps in their careers.
The site on Tuesday released a new feature, called “career breaks,” that gives users the ability to tell potential employers why they left the workforce and describe how that experience helped them grow and develop skills.
With the feature, users can choose from a drop-down menu that gives options ranging from parenting and caregiving to layoff, career transition, gap year, relocation or travel.
“The option of having listing career breaks allows you to openly embrace your time away from work on your profile, and show how the life experiences built during this time away can apply to prospective jobs,” LinkedIn said in a statement.
The new effort by LinkedIn comes as women continue to struggle to return to the workforce amid the coronavirus pandemic, during which women have disproportionately taken on more caregiving and household duties, data shows.
There are nearly 1.1 million fewer women in the labor force now compared to February 2020, according to the National Women’s Law Center, a policy-focused organization that fights for gender justice.
In January, over one million men joined the labor force, compared to 39,000 women, the NWLC reports, citing the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest jobs report.
During the pandemic, women ages 25 to 44 were almost three times as likely as men of the same age group to not be working due to child care demands, according to research from the U.S. Census Bureau and Federal Reserve.
Research from LinkedIn shows a nearly 40% spike in the length of career breaks women took in 2020 in the U.S. And the majority of women, around 61%, believe there is still a stigma attached to career breaks, according to LinkedIn.
Emma McCulloch, a mom of two, said she felt nervous about describing her career break on her resume when she decided to reenter the workforce recently after six years away caring for her sons, one of whom has cerebral palsy.
But McCulloch, of San Francisco, said she gained confidence as she saw how she was able to show potential employers that her time away made her a better employee.
“I certainly learned a lot of research skills to identify the therapies and the resources for my children,” said McCulloch, who now works as a manager for an education technology company. “And I think that personally, in my job right now, I’m much more empathetic to my employees and to the people that I work with, my colleagues, because of the experiences I had during my career break.”
Even as job seekers may believe there is still a stigma, 79% of hiring managers say they would hire a candidate with a career gap on their résumé, according to LinkedIn’s research.
Many companies are making a specific effort to bring women back to the workforce, including IBM, General Motors and JP Morgan, which are all now offering career re-entry and mentorship programs.
“We see a lot of companies raise their hands and say that attracting and retaining top women talent is a priority,” Jess Huang, a partner at McKinsey & Company, told Good Morning America. “And if you can find those companies that are really doubling down, they are likely a better fit, not just in the short-term as you’re looking to reenter and get rehired, but also in the long-term as you think about your career progression.”
(NEW YORK) — A pair of social media misinformation campaigns exploiting tensions in Russia and Ukraine were identified and disabled on Facebook over the weekend, according to two senior leaders at the social network’s parent company Meta.
One operation thwarted by Meta’s security team involved about 40 accounts described as “inauthentic” with some profile pictures suspected to have been generated artificially, Threat Disruption Director David Agranovich said Sunday night. The fictitious personas operated across the internet, the Meta employees said, including on Twitter, YouTube, Telegram and two Russian social media networks.
The campaign also included fake websites resembling news outlets that claimed to be based in Kyiv with the people behind the sites posing as news editors and expert sources.
The operation was connected to a campaign previously detected and taken down by Facebook in April 2020. At the time, the activity was found to have come from Russia, the Donbas region and two media organizations in Crimea.
“The campaign had a very limited following across its presence online,” Agranovich said.
When Meta took action against the accounts, they had fewer than 4,000 followers on Facebook and fewer than 500 on Instagram, Agranovich said. The security team did not say how many total impressions or views the inauthentic posts received.
Another operation involved the specific targeting of Facebook accounts belonging to members of the Ukrainian military, as well as politicians and a journalist. The profiles were used to share YouTube videos portraying Ukrainians as weak and surrendering to Russia, which Facebook said was done by compromising the accounts likely through personal email. One video appeared to show Ukrainian soldiers coming out of a forest waving a white flag.
The Meta employees did not disclose the total number of compromised accounts, only referring to them as “a handful.” They also did not reveal the names behind the accounts, citing privacy concerns.
While Facebook described the number of accounts affected as minimal, the phishing operation that led to the compromise was reportedly widespread and attributed by cybersecurity researchers to a previously known misinformation campaign called “Ghostwriter.”
“Ghostwriter has previously targeted the NATO alliance, seeking to erode support for the organization,” said Ben Read, director of Cyber Espionage Analysis at the cybersecurity firm Mandiant. “I wouldn’t be surprised if similar operations were seen in the near future.”
Mandiant has linked the “Ghostwriter” campaign to the Belarusian military, and concerns remain over the exploitation of Ukrainians’ personal data.
“Leaking misleading, or fabricated documents taken from Ukrainian entities could be leveraged to promote Russia- and Belarus-friendly narratives,” Read said.
ABC News has tracked the spread of disinformation related to Ukraine and Russia across online forums and social media networks.
In one example, a video that appeared to show a man with his leg blown off was shared by a Russian separatist militia on Telegram last week. The stump of the man’s leg was blurred.
“Ukrainian punishers continue the genocide of the civilian population of Donbass,” the video’s caption read.
But other, unblurred videos of the scene show the man was, in fact, an amputee. There is no blood and the attachment for a prosthetic leg is clearly visible.
At Meta, Facebook has increased its fact-checking capacity in Russia and Ukraine and added new features to protect Ukrainians and help them lock down their accounts and check privacy settings. Meta will now also extend some of those features to Russia in an effort to protect the increased targeting of Russian protesters, the company announced.
Earlier this week, Russian state media was barred from running ads or monetizing the platform.
In response to calls for Meta to shut down Facebook and Instagram in Russia, Vice President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg said the company does not want to restrict services for Russians who are protesting and organizing against the war.
“The Russian Government is already throttling our platform to prevent these activities,” Clegg said in Tweet Sunday. “We believe turning off our services would silence important expression at a crucial time.”
(WASHINGTON) — The Biden administration on Monday emphasized the drastic nature of economic sanctions levied again Russia over the weekend in which the U.S. and allies targeted Russia’s Central Bank, preventing the Kremlin from accessing any of its more than $600 billion in reserves in the U.S., or in U.S. dollars in foreign countries.
The sanctions also target Russia’s National Wealth Fund and the Ministry of Finance, and officials said it was clear from the beginning of the Ukraine invasion that Russian President Vladimir Putin was planning to use Central Bank assets to mitigate any sanctions.
“Today’s announcement that prohibit transactions with the Central Bank of Russia in the National Wealth Fund will significantly hinder their ability to do that, and inhibit their access to hundreds of billions of dollars in assets from our actions alone, they will not be able to access assets that are either in United States are in U.S. dollars,” officials told reporters.
“This fund and its leadership are symbols of deep seated rushing corruption and influence peddling globally … and it’s known to be intimately connected to kleptocracy at the highest levels of the Russian government,” an official added.
“Our strategy — to put it simply — is to make sure that the Russian economy goes backwards, as long as President Putin decides to go forward with his invasion of Ukraine,” a senior administration official said.
Officials explained the sanctions — a major step for the Biden administration — were announced over the weekend when it became clear it was necessary to move before the markets opened Monday.
“We learned over the course of the weekend from our allies and partners was the Russian Central Bank was attempting to move assets and there would be a great deal of assets starting on Monday morning from institutions around the world. So, we took these that we’re taking these actions in a way that they will be effective immediately,” an official said.
Officials said the “actions represent the most significant actions the U.S. Treasury has taken against an economy of this size, and assets of this size,” noting the Russian Central Bank is many times larger than Iran’s or Venezuela’s.
Officials wouldn’t specify how much of the $630 billion “rainy day fund” would be affected, but noted the U.S. knows that the Russian Central Bank has its assets diversified around the world.
“What we’ve done today is not only preventing them from using those dollars in the United States, but preventing them from being able to use those dollars in other places like Europe or Japan to defend their currency and prop up their institutions. And our – our goal was to make sure that not only would they not have access to dollars, but also not have access to other currencies,” an official said.
On the energy front, officials said they have multiple interests in keeping energy out of the sanctions packages for now: “A — because we want to support the global economic recovery, but B — because we don’t want prices to spike for the benefit of President Putin as a major energy exporter.”
Officials said over the long term, the U.S. and allies will look to degrade Russia’s capacity to be a leading energy supplier, perhaps working to keep it from developing energy technologies.
(TULSA, Oklahoma) — A community of Black entrepreneurs are shaking up the tech and innovation ecosystem and forming a new hub for digital creators, developers and investors based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Founders building companies from the city say it boasts a pipeline of fresh and diverse talent, an enterprising yet collegial support system, and offers a cost of living that will make any Bay Area or New York-based startup envious.
For some, there is also the importance of building back the storied “Black Wall Street” that was violently taken from people that looked like them, in Tulsa, just a century ago. Some 300 people were killed and thousands wounded when a mob of white vigilantes, harboring resentment towards their thriving Black neighbors, eviscerated the well-to-do Greenwood district and burned down 35 acres of commercial and residential property.
The legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre, erased from many history books for generations, still looms large over Black business leaders choosing to rebuild along the streets that haunt survivors every day over what “could have been.”
“The Tulsa Race Massacre isn’t a footnote in a history book for us. We live with it every day and the thought of what Greenwood was and what it could have been,” massacre survivor and World War II veteran Hughes Van Ellis told lawmakers when testifying last May over the debt that America owes.
Carrying the weight of this history, a new generation of Black entrepreneurs are also looking toward the future — and seeking to build up new generational wealth.
Here are the stories of nine Black entrepreneurs reimagining the future of Tulsa through investments in tech, solving problems for consumers through innovation and blazing a trail for the next generation of Black business executives.
‘Don’t give up’: Chandler Malone, CEO, Bootup
Malone helms an app and website that launched in December 2020 called Bootup and has lived in Tulsa since December 2019.
“We do two things, we help companies solve their talent pipeline gaps by giving them access to the fastest growing talent pool of tech talent right now, and that’s the non-traditionally trained talent market,” Malone told ABC News. “But then we also help individuals increase their access to economic mobility, through access to jobs in tech, even if they don’t have a college degree or certifications like that.”
To date, Malone said they have placed over 320 people in their first jobs in tech. This is important for the community, he said, because, “At the end of the day, tech provides the most upside, economically.”
“The racial wealth gap has not gotten any better,” he said. “And there’s really no industry where someone can start a company, and have a multi-billion dollar business in just a couple years outside of tech.”
The history and spirit of “Black entrepreneurship is incredibly strong” in Tulsa specifically, according to Malone, which is why it has been so important for him and his team to show “what can be accomplished” for the next generation.
‘It’s a full community effort’: Edna Martinson, co-founder, Boddle
Martinson, the co-founder of game-ified education platform Boddle, said she hopes to use her company to “address the issues of learning gaps in elementary classrooms” and get more children “inspired to love learning.”
“I’ve seen personally, what a good education can do to help propel you in life,” Martinson said. “And I want to help kids also be inspired to learn and get that good quality education.”
Martinson moved to Tulsa in August 2020, saying she was inspired by the people she met during visits and “not only the history, but what is being done to rebuild in Tulsa, especially around resources for Black entrepreneurs.”
“I love how it’s a full community effort, from all these different organizations and entrepreneurial support systems,” she added. “Being a part of that is pretty special — when you’re in a place where there is alignment and mission, and everybody’s on the same page and realizes how a thriving Black community can help Tulsa as a whole community thrive as well.”
‘You cannot do it alone’: Chantelle Lott, CEO, Bounceless
Lott, who has been based in Tulsa for some 20 years now, creates patented activewear and sport bras for fuller-busted women — a subset of consumers often overlooked by the athletic wear industry.
“Right now, there’s not a lot on the market for us,” Lott told ABC News. “So our mission is really just to make sure that women have the support that they need, and to know that bust size is not a barrier to their physical fitness.”
“Rebuilding Tulsa, rebuilding Greenwood, that was a passion of mine since I got here,” Lott said of building her company in Tulsa. “It’s a great experience to really contribute to the history and those who came before us, and to also pass it on to future generations.”
As one of the few Black woman business leaders in the tech sector, Lott says she sees representation as crucially important.
“Because if you can’t see it, you don’t believe it, you don’t see yourself in it,” she said of representation in tech. “So I do believe that is important for Black founders or individuals, even youth, to make sure that they can see themselves in the places that they normally don’t.”
‘We still have that spirit, and it still lives on’: Jayvin Washington, founder and CEO, BiteWay
Washington, founder of the nutrition science-driven meal prep firm BiteWay, told ABC News that she grew up in Tulsa and considers it home — which is why she says it is so important for her to stay and build her business there.
“It’s important to have my business in Tulsa because of, of course, the history and the spirit of entrepreneurship that lies here,” Washington said.
“Black Wall Street was a phenomenal, like extraordinary time and place that we had here in Tulsa. And it was destroyed, but it wasn’t taken from us,” she said. “We still have that spirit, and it still lives on. We’re able to use that energy, and to rebuild and reconstruct what was always here in the first place.”
While she was initially interested in pursuing a career in the pharmaceutical industry, Washington said she felt called to the food industry as an easier way to help people in her community lead healthy lifestyles through nutrient-packed meals.
Lastly, Washington said she hopes that she can open doors for the next generation just by showing them that someone who looks like them can be a leader in corporate America.
“For me, it’s very important to be that role model or be the representation for little Black girls and Black boys that aspire to be an entrepreneur or just, even if they want to work in the corporate world,” she told ABC News. “They are able to do it, they have it in their bloodline.”
‘Access is incredible here’: Kene Onuorah, co-founder and CEO, Comme Homme
Onuorah hails from Raleigh, North Carolina, and his parents are from Nigeria. He founded Comme Homme as a tech-oriented service for men experiencing hair loss something he said he has dealt with at a relatively young age.
“We’re building Comme Homme for the two-thirds of all American men that deal with hair loss, about 50 million men to help them embrace their natural evolution,” he said.
In addition to creating an online community for men experiencing hair loss, “We use augmented reality technology to actually help men who were dealing with hair loss, visualize themselves in an authentic manner with a shaved head,” Onuorah said.
Being in Tulsa, “really helped us to continue to be revitalized and reinvigorated,” based on the city’s past, he said.
He said the city also provides resources he needs for his startup.
“It’s really easy to get access to network, it’s really easy to get access to capital, and really easy to talk to the people that can really push your business forward. There’s something special about Tulsa, the access is just incredible here,” he said.
‘Great to be in the midst’ of Tulsa’s ‘revival’: Chris Davis, founder and CEO, Fansub
After receiving a full scholarship to Duke University where he played football for four years, Davis said he pursued a professional football career before co-founding FanSub — a platform that allows creators and entertainers to engage with fans through livestream activations, marketing campaigns and other high-tech ways.
The Atlanta native said that his interest in the tech startup scene there led to his collaboration with former Miami Dolphins player Brandon King on FanSub.
He said that he, King and FanSub’s two other co-founders, Cameron Williams and Michael Lombardi were looking for a “network to help us grow the business,” and they found out about the Tulsa startup accelerator program.
“The caveat was that we would have to move to Tulsa,” to participate in the program, Davis said. Once they arrived, he said they began to learn more about the city’s history. It’s “really great to be right in the midst of history in a revival of this city,” Davis said. “There’s more to this opportunity than the accelerator program, it’s also a way for us to be a part of … this rejuvenation of Tulsa, Black Wall Street in Greenwood,” he added.
‘Get back what was taken’: Carlanda McKinney, founder and CEO, Bodify
McKinney comes from an “entrepreneurial family,” she said. So when she became frustrated after constantly receiving incorrectly sized clothes purchased online, then having to go through the hassle of sending them back, she went into “problem solver” mode, she said, and launched Bodify, a tech platform for finding the right clothes online for one’s body type and size.
And she said Tulsa is the perfect place to build her business.
“What brought me to Tulsa, really, it grew from a visit,” said McKinney and that her grandparents would bring her and her sisters to Tulsa every summer from her home in Kansas City. “I really could see myself there,” she said.
The MBA graduate said she kept hearing about the business opportunities opening up in Tulsa through networking in her hometown.
“I heard more than a few times, you should really check out what’s going on in Tulsa, that ecosystem is building up,” she said.
She said she applied for the Tulsa accelerator program for startups and was accepted. “And that sort of sealed the deal,” she said about setting up shop in Tulsa.
“More importantly though, I think what’s happening here, particularly around Black and brown founders is incredibly impactful because of everything that happened with Greenwood,” she said.
“I’m super excited to be a part of, even if it’s some small way, of sort of helping people get back what was taken,” McKinney said.
‘Didn’t see any other place that I would go’: Ambrose Midget, founder, Fresh Fabrics
Born and raised in Tulsa, Midget’s startup Fresh Fabrics is a mobile, same-day laundry service, with technology at its center.
With her business, Midget says she aims to “take laundry to the next level” and discussed her excitement at growing her business in her hometown.
“I just didn’t see any other place that I would go … to start my company,” she said.
Midget spoke about what launching a startup in Tulsa meant to her as a Black woman.
“Black women, we actually lead the entrepreneur world, as far as startups … but we’re the least funded and the least that tend to get support and resources,” she said.
The startup program in Tulsa, Midget said, is “a great opportunity” to work with a program “that believes in Black and brown people … and especially me as a Black woman,” she said.
We ‘feel all the love’: Marc LaManque, Troy Smith, Andres Gonzalez, co-founders, Cadenzo
LaManque, Smith and Gonzalez say they met at the University of Oklahoma and began working on their business while they were students there. For them, there was no question that Tulsa was an ideal place to launch their startup, Cadenzo, which is a digital booking platform for entertainers and venues.
“Being in a place where they’re providing guidance, mentorship, resources, advisers … everything that we need for three young first-time founders to start their company,” LaManque said about the Tulsa program for startups. “We just feel all the love,” he said.
Smith said these resources have helped them build Cadenzo into a “platform that enables communities to truly revel in wherever space that they occupy and enable their culture and enable their enjoyment of music and entertainment.”
And that fact that they are building their startup outside of traditional tech hub hotspots has been an advantage, Gonzalez said.
“If you think about traditional tech hubs — New York, Bay Area — you walk outside and you bump in a startup every five steps. It’s a lot easier here, and especially with the whole community, being very supportive,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — The stock market has been up and down this week amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and while we are likely to see more volatility in Wall Street in the days ahead, experts say the main effect of this crisis in the U.S. will be at the gas pump.
The national average price for gas is inching its way towards $4 a gallon. And, as ABC News’ Deirdre Bolton explains, “the effects could be even more wide ranging than just gas for your car.”
“The price of airline tickets may also go higher if carriers pass the extra cost of higher jet fuel onto passengers,” Bolton says. “Home heating prices are likely to rise, as well, as are food prices even from their current pandemic highs, since transporting food costs more as diesel for the trucks will be more expensive.”
(NEW YORK) — U.S. stock futures are down ahead of Thursday’s opening bell amid ongoing attacks on Ukraine by Russia.
As of 8:30 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down more than 800 points.
Meanwhile, U.S. crude oil prices topped $100 a barrel on Thursday morning, sending gasoline prices to an average of $3.54 a gallon, according to the American Automobile Association.
Russia, which announced early Thursday that military operations have begun in Ukraine, is the world’s third-largest oil producer.
(NEW YORK) — The housing market has been unforgiving to first-time buyers like Kirstin Harris.
“You have to be so competitive,” she told ABC News. “By the time we even like a house to put in an offer, it’s already gotten an offer that’s been accepted.”
Harris and her family are trying to purchase their first home in Virginia. But like many other buyers nationwide, she’s facing surging prices and bidding wars — fueled by strong demand and a lack of available homes.
“The new inventory that I’m seeing coming on has been increased by about $50,000,” she said.
In a cutthroat and pricey market, aspiring homeowners now face a new challenge: rising interest rates.
At its meeting next month, the Federal Reserve is set to increase borrowing costs by raising interest rates as part of an attempt to cool surging inflation.
“Basically, we have inflation because there’s too much demand in the economy for the available supply,” Brookings Institution senior fellow David Wessel told ABC News. “So the whole point of the Fed is to slow the increase in demand. They want fewer people to borrow and they want people who borrow to borrow less.”
Interest rates have already been rising in anticipation of the Fed’s announcement.
The rate on a 30-year-fixed mortgage spiked above 4 percent this month for the first time in nearly three years. According to consumer financial services company Bankrate, that means someone borrowing $300,000 to buy a home today is paying $143 more every month than in November, when rates were closer to 3 percent.
“It definitely makes it more unaffordable,” Washington, D.C.-based realtor Roger Taylor told ABC News.
Rates are still low by historical standards; a 30-year-fixed mortgage rate was near 5 percent in mid-2018.
But Taylor said first-time homebuyers already overwhelmed by sky-high home prices are trying to lock in a purchase now before rising rates increase up their monthly payments even more.
“We saw that a large number of people started giving us calls in January because of these rate increases,” he said, adding the typically-busy spring housing market “came early.”
Real estate brokerage Redfin reported 55 percent of homes that went under contract in the past month had an accepted offer within two weeks on the market. Taylor said many houses sell in a matter of hours.
“It’s insane,” he said. “Right now inventory is really low and competition is pretty high.”
The intense competition is only making it more difficult for a generation of first-time buyers to get a foothold in the housing market.
Thirty-four-year-old C.J. Reaves moved from Virginia to Georgia when the pandemic hit and his work as a digital live operator went remote, hoping to buy his first home.
“The homes have increased at least 30 to 50 thousand [dollars],” Reaves told ABC News. “I feel like to be comfortable and not live check to check, I think I’m going to move more in a cheaper area and so I can live comfortably.”
He’s now looking for a home in North Carolina.
“I was supposed to go see one home, and I thought that was going to be the home,” he said. “Literally it was gone by the time I sent it to my realtor.”
Reaves added he’s keeping a close watch on how rising rates could affect his monthly payments if he is able to put in an offer.
“You must be paying attention to interest rates, he said. “Or, you know, you could find yourself in a hole.”
(NEW YORK) — Wall Street is jittery as tensions continue to escalate between Russia and Ukraine.
On Tuesday, stocks were down, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing 482.57 points lower, a decrease of 1.42%. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq also took a hit, falling 44.11 points and 166.55 points, respectively.
“People are feeling it in their 401(k)s and in their retirement savings,” says ABC News’ Rebecca Jarvis.
But, she notes, consumers are also feeling the impact of the crisis overseas at the pump.
“[P]rices up overnight again, now $3.54 a gallon is the national average — up 20 cents over the last month,” Jarvis says. “And we were already dealing with inflation coming into this — that is why the market has been jittery for some time, and it continues to feel jittery and cautious.”
Ahead of Wednesday’s opening bell, stock futures were up across the board.
(NEW YORK) — Gas prices are continuing to soar with no relief in sight.
The national average price per gallon now stands at $3.53, the highest it’s been since 2014, and experts expect that number to keep going up.
So what can you do to save some money the next time you need to fill up your tank? ABC News’ Gio Benitez appeared on Good Morning America Wednesday to share some tricks you can use at the pump:
