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President Obama says he wants consumers around the world buying more products stamped, "Made in the U.S.A."

That's one reason he's pushing a controversial Asian trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Obama has chosen a curious setting to make his pitch for the trade agreement this week. He'll be speaking Friday at the Beaverton, Ore., headquarters of the Nike Corporation.

"All of their footwear, all of their clothing is produced in contract factories in places like Vietnam and Indonesia and China," said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a watchdog group that monitors overseas factories.

"Nike is one of the companies that helped perfect the sourcing model that now defines production in footwear and garments and other major light manufacturing sectors. And it's a model based on cheap labor and poor working conditions," Nova said.

Nike, which had $28 billion in sales last year, did not respond to telephone and email requests for comment.

After a burst of bad publicity in the 1990s, Nike tried to clean up factory abuses such as child labor. But the company's most recent report on "sustainable business performance" acknowledges nearly a third of the factories making its products fall short of Nike's own standards. Hours and wages are the most common complaints.

That raises eyebrows of critics who ask why the president would choose such a setting to make the case for his Asia-Pacific trade deal. The administration says the proposed agreement is designed to raise labor standards in the 12 participating countries including Vietnam, the No. 1 source for Nike shoes.

"The president believes that by raising labor standards and raising environmental standards throughout the Asia-Pacific region, that will level the playing field for American businesses," said White House spokesman Josh Earnest. "No longer will companies be able to gain an unfair advantage by capitalizing on low labor standards."

When Nike first blazed the trail of offshore manufacturing in the 1960s, more than 90 percent of the shoes Americans wore were still made domestically. But since then, nearly every other American shoemaker has followed Nike's path, and today more than 99 percent of our shoes are imported, mostly from China, Vietnam and Indonesia.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, who represents Nike's home state of Oregon, is one of the leading supporters of the trade deal. He wrote a letter two years ago arguing there's no justification for the tariffs levied on imported shoes, now that there's virtually no domestic manufacturing left to protect. Shoe tariffs totaled $2.7 billion last year, of which about $460 million was for shoes from countries covered by the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Supporters say lowering those tariffs would give a boost to the shoe design and marketing jobs that are still located in the United States.

"It will help us design more shoes. It will help us sell more shoes. And when we're selling more shoes, we're creating more jobs throughout the supply chain," said Matt Priest, president of the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America, an industry trade group.

Indeed, the Asia-Pacific trade deal is less about defending labor-intensive manufacturing than promoting intellectual property, services and agriculture sectors where the U.S. has a competitive advantage. But that raises a question: Why doesn't the president's West Coast pitch for the trade deal take him to a movie studio or a rice farm — businesses where the products still say "Made in the U.S.A."?

Looking for new growth and promising better restaurant experiences for customers, McDonald's President and CEO Steve Easterbrook is changing how the chain manages global markets and plans to boost the number of franchised restaurants.

"The reality is, our recent performance has been poor," Easterbrook said in a video released Monday. "The numbers don't lie. Which is why, as we celebrate 60 years of McDonald's, I will not shy away from resetting this business."

McDonald's will change the way it organizes global markets, putting leaders in charge of four main groups. The new structure relies less on geography and more on market maturity and growth prospects:

The United States: more than 40 percent of operating income in 2014.

International Lead Markets: Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the U.K., where established markets represent another 40 percent of operating income.

High-Growth Markets: China, Italy, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands (10 percent of operating income).

Foundational Markets: Around 100 markets, which will mostly be franchised (independently owned).

Calling it "a global turnaround," Easterbrook, who was named CEO in January — after a year in which global sales and revenue decreased — said McDonald's will become a "modern progressive burger company."

Its slump has also led McDonald's to tinker with its menu — including the addition last month of a $5 burger. NPR's Marilyn Geewax reported for The Salt:

"McDonald's has been struggling in recent years to keep pace with fast-casual chains like Five Guys and Chipotle Mexican Grill.

"So the fast-food giant is testing different menu options to lure back customers. Starting later this month, McDonald's diners will be able to choose a $4.99 sandwich — the Sirloin Third Pound burger."

Other changes Marilyn covered included a new range of toppings, all-day breakfast and new pastries, such as a bundt cake.

Aside from the promises of better food with better service, Easterbrook's video address was also notable for his ability to keep his eyes open for long periods of time without blinking. By our count, in one stretch, he went nearly a minute without closing his eyes.

McDonald's

Both stock and bond markets had already been having a rough week, and then on Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen added to the jitters.

She warned that stock valuations are "generally quite high," and that "there are potential dangers there."

So if you happen to be an investor who wants to buy low and sell high (and really, who doesn't?), then you might take Yellen's comment as a suggestion that it's time to sell.

And that's just what happened: Measures of U.S. stock prices all slipped — down about 0.7 percent by midday.

Many analysts already had been pointing out that stock prices, relative to corporate earnings, have been higher than their historic norms. So that could mean markets are headed for a rough ride as prices fall back into line with more typical valuations.

But Yellen also called attention to the big picture, noting that while prices might be due for a correction, financial markets are functioning well. "Risks to financial stability are moderated, not elevated at this point," she said.

Yellen made her observations in a discussion with International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde during an event organized by the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Their conversation came at a time when global markets have been jarred by worries about interest rates, oil prices and economic growth. A lot of investors worry because they are seeing oil prices bouncing up to their highest levels this year at more than $61 a barrel. Also, U.S. interest rate likely will go up soon.

And hiring this spring may be coming in weaker than expected. Private U.S. payrolls rose by only by 169,000 jobs in April, according to a report Wednesday by payroll processor Automatic Data Processing and forecasting firm Moody's Analytics. Most economists had expected to see about 205,000 new jobs added last month.

There are wildcards out there, too. Just one example: Greece may not be able to make some massive debt repayments that are due soon.

But before you sell anything based on Yellen's advice, remember she and the Fed made similar remarks last July about some stocks: "Valuation metrics in some sectors do appear substantially stretched — particularly those for smaller firms in the social media and biotechnology industries."

And in the nine months following those remarks, increases in the value of such stocks helped drive the Nasdaq Composite Index up about an additional 13 percent.

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Married to a smartphone, this device can detect the Lao lao worm. Daniel A. Fletcher, UC Berkeley hide caption

itoggle caption Daniel A. Fletcher, UC Berkeley

Married to a smartphone, this device can detect the Lao lao worm.

Daniel A. Fletcher, UC Berkeley

Smartphones aren't simply an amazing convenience. In Africa they can be used to make a life-saving diagnosis. In fact, scientists are hoping to use a souped-up smartphone microscope to help them eradicate a devastating disease called river blindness.

Onchocerciasis, as the disease is also known, is caused by a parasite that's spread by flies. Thirty years ago, it was simply devastating in parts of Africa, like Mali.

"We went out to villages where 40 to 50 percent of the adults were blind," says Dr. Gary Weil, a parasitic disease specialist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Worldwide, 300,000 people are blind as a result of this parasite, according to the World Health Organization.

That situation changed dramatically when researchers discovered that a veterinary medicine called ivermectin could prevent river blindness in people. Since 1987, drug-maker Merck has donated more than a billion doses of this drug to fight river blindness and a related disease. The drug is given both as a preventive and after someone is diagnosed.

"The ivermectin has had an amazing effect," Weil says. There's a massive campaign under way to use the drug to eradicate river blindness entirely with an annual dose.

But there's a problem. In some areas, people are also infected by another parasite, a worm called Loa loa. And if someone has a raging Loa loa infection and you give them ivermectin, that can occasionally prove deadly.

The workaround has been to look for Loa loa worms in people before giving them the drug.

"The traditional way of making the measurement involves taking blood smears, looking at them under a conventional microscope by a trained individual, and counting [the worms] manually," says Daniel Fletcher, a bioengineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "And that's a far too laborious and long process to be used in a mass drug-administration program, which is what they were running."

Fletcher has been working on novel ways to use iPhones as the centerpiece of inexpensive, portable microscopes. One day he got a call from Dr. Thomas Nutman at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, asking Fletcher if he could develop a device that could quickly and reliably detect Loa loa in a drop of blood.

The worms don't make this job easy. They hide out in the lungs and "are only present in the bloodstream between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.," Fletcher says. "The tests all have to be done during that time frame, so being quick is really important."

Fletcher's group at Berkeley set to work, and came up with way to detect the squirming motion of those worms when they emerge and circulate in the blood. They report their advance in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

"The phone does pretty much everything," Fletcher says. A health worker collects a pin-prick of blood in a small glass tube and pushes it into a compact and inexpensive microscope adapter that connects to the iPhone.

"You press one button, 'go,' and the phone controls the movement of the sample, controls taking of a video and controls analysis and reporting of the results."

In three minutes, start to finish, the process can tell the health worker whether it's safe to give the person ivermectin. But even producing an answer every three minutes still only translates to 40 results per day per phone, since the tests can only be run during a two-hour period. That's much faster than the conventional method, but the numbers are still daunting.

Weil says it seems useful on a smaller scale, but "I don't see it how it could be scaled up to the scale of tens of millions of people" who currently live in areas where both the Loa loa worm and the river blindness parasite live.

"And it wouldn't just be a one-time test," Weil adds, "since the treatment for river blindness is a once-a-year treatment, every year they would have to be tested."

The real solution, Weil says, is to find a drug that can safely kill both parasites at the same time. Researchers are working on that right now.

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