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(CNN) -- Facebook users who haven't yet discovered the joys of FarmVille or plugged in to the sounds of Spotify will be getting an easier way to find apps that run on the site.

On Thursday, the site unveiled Facebook App Center, a clearinghouse for social apps that sounds a lot like Apple's online store. And while most will likely remain free (with some making money through in-game purchases), Facebook will also now allow paid apps on the site.

"For the over 900 million people that use Facebook, the App Center will become the new, central place to find great apps like Draw Something, Pinterest, Spotify, Battle Pirates, Viddy, and Bubble Witch Saga," Facebook's Aaron Brady wrote on the site's page for developers.

The center will be available on the Web and on both Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems. It will roll out to users over the next few weeks, according to Brady's post.


Facebook will use "a variety of signals, such as user ratings and engagement" to determine which apps are added to the App Center and which get most prominently displayed.

"Well-designed apps that people enjoy will be prominently displayed," Brady wrote. "Apps that receive poor user ratings or don't meet the quality guidelines won't be listed."

Developers are being asked to create an app detail page, that will give potential users details about the app and be accessible to Web searches.

Those pages are due by May 18, signaling that a full rollout might not happen until after then.

And in a move that mirrors Apple and Android app stores, developers will now be given the option of charging a one-time fee for their apps.

"Many developers have been successful with in-app purchases, but to support more types of apps on Facebook.com, we will give developers the option to offer paid apps," Brady wrote.

Facebook currently makes about 15% of its money through payments in games and other apps. Zynga, owners of FarmVille, Draw Something and other successful games, are responsible for the majority of those payments. Facebook takes a 30% cut of the payments.

(CNN) -- To paraphrase "The Social Network," if Abraham Lincoln had invented Facebook, he would have invented Facebook.

But in a tall tale that would have made the Great Emancipator proud, a blog post saying that he did just that was making the rounds Wednesday. And some online media outlets were quick to take the bait.

Blogger Nate St. Pierre, a consultant who works with blogs and other Web businesses to help grow their sites, posted a fantastic yarn Tuesday about stumbling upon a tombstone in Wisconsin that ultimately led him to the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois.

There, he discovered an 1845 patent filed by Honest Abe for a sort of personalized newspaper in which "every Man may have his own page, where he might discuss his Family, his Work, and his Various Endeavors."

Each page would feature a profile picture at the top left. The user's name, address and profession would appear at the top. On a sample page, Lincoln shared two poems he "liked," a short story about the Pilgrims and details about what he did that day (went to the circus).


"Put all that together on one page and tell me what it looks like to you," St. Pierre wrote. "Profile picture. Personal information. Status updates. Copied and shared material. A few longer posts. Looks like something we see every day, doesn't it?"

In short: Lincoln envisioned a paper version of Facebook, 160 years before Mark Zuckerberg.

Except for the fact that none of it is true.

"I just wanted to have fun with it," St. Pierre said Wednesday. "I've done this before. Every couple of years, I do a hoax. I knew this would go big but didn't expect those dozens of outlets to just run with it without 30 seconds of fact-checking."

For careful readers, St. Pierre's post is sprinkled with what should have been plenty of red flags.

For one, he writes that his search began after he discovered an apparent friendship between Lincoln and legendary huckster P.T. Barnum. You know, the guy widely believed to have said, "There's a sucker born every minute" and "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time." (Both of those quotes, by the way, may not have actually been said by Barnum.)

He even quotes Wikipedia's entry calling Barnum "an American showman, businessman, scam artist and entertainer, remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes."

(CNN) -- Computer applications can drive cars, fly planes, play chess and even make music.

But can an app tell a story?

Chicago-based company Narrative Science has set out to prove that computers can tell stories good enough for a fickle human audience. It has created a program that takes raw data and turns it into a story, a system that's worked well enough for the company to earn its own byline on Forbes.com.

Kristian Hammond, Narrative Science's chief technology officer, said his team started the program by taking baseball box scores and turning them into game summaries.

"We did college baseball," Hammond recalled. "And we built out a system that would take box scores and historical information, and we would write a game recap after a game. And we really liked it."

Narrative Science then began branching out into finance and other topics that are driven heavily by data. Soon, Hammond says, large companies came looking for help sorting huge amounts of data themselves.

"I think the place where this technology is absolutely essential is the area that's loosely referred to as big data," Hammond said. "So almost every company in the world has decided at one point that in order to do a really good job, they need to meter and monitor everything."
Computer Assisted Writing
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Narrative Science hasn't disclosed how much money is being made or whether a profit is being turned with the app. The firm employs about 30 people. At least one other company, based in North Carolina, is working on similar technology.

Meanwhile, Hammond says Narrative Science is looking to eventually expand into long form news stories.

(CNN) -- The leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council will hold a meeting Monday in Saudi Arabia to discuss transforming their six nations into a union, similar to the European Union.

The idea of the GCC nations to integrate into one entity -- and replace what exists now as simply a cooperative -- was first floated by Saudi Arabia in December. Monday's meeting in Riyadh will lay out the timetable for it.

The GCC is comprised of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

"The threats of all kinds require the hard works of the GCC countries to shift from a current formula of cooperation to a union formula acceptable to the six countries," Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said last month.

He didn't specify what threats he was referring to. But some analysts have said the GCC move could be an effort to counter the growing influence of Shiite Iran.

The GCC was formed in 1981, soon after Iran instituted a Shiite theocracy and went to war with primarily Sunni Iraq.

Iran and Iraq have enjoyed closer ties in recent years, especially as Iraq's Shia Muslim majority has solidified its power in the absence of former leader Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim.

After U.S. forces pulled out of Iraq last year, Tehran has expanded military and security cooperation with Baghdad.

Also, GCC member Bahrain blames Iran for fueling the anti-government unrest that continues to roil the country. Tehran has denied involvement.

Bahrain is a predominantly Shiite country, ruled by a Sunni royal family.

(Mashable) -- If you're one of the millions who purchased an iPod between Sept. 12, 2006, and March 31, 2009, you might be in for a surprising email. It states that you're being enlisted in a class-action lawsuit against Apple — though you do have the right to recuse yourself.

The class-action lawsuit was originally filed by a customer in January 2005 and was ignited by the creation of the music service Harmony. Back in 2004, the company RealNetworks created Harmony as a digital rights management (DRM) translation service. It allowed users to play songs downloaded from the RealPlayer music store on Apple's iPod.

But as any iPod user knows, songs must be loaded onto iTunes to be played on Apple's devices. That's because Apple created an iPod firmware update not too long after the announcement of Harmony, which blocked it and other music services from uploading songs to the iPod.

The customer filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company of unfairly blocking competition. Now, years later, it's gaining steam.

Though RealNetworks has nothing to do with this case, the . District Court for the Northern District of California gave the lawsuit class-action status in November 2011. The website ipodlawsuit.com, which details the entire case, explains:

"The lawsuit claims that Apple violated federal and state laws by issuing software updates in 2006 for its iPod that prevented iPods from playing songs not purchases on iTunes. The lawsuit claims that the software updates caused iPod prices to be higher than they otherwise would have been."

By Ryan Cooper, CNN

(Jupiter, Florida and Scottsdale, Arizona) - A growing number of Major League Baseball players are coming together to make every pitch, home run and strikeout count in the fight against child trafficking.

The players are pledging to donate money for each of their on-field achievements this season to the Free 2 Play campaign, a platform for the California-based Not For Sale non-profit group.

"A lot of Americans are shocked to hear that there are 30 million people living in slavery today, and [many] of those are children," Dave Batstone, Not For Sale's co-founder, said. "So we decided to create a program that not just releases a child from slavery, but provides them a new future."

Jeremy Affeldt, a relief pitcher for the San Francisco Giants, has been one of the most vocal athletes raising money and awareness for Not For Sale. Last season, he pledged $250 for every strikeout he pitched.


Affeldt has been recruiting teammates and other teams' ball players to join the fight.

"This is an opportunity for us as ball players to join together as one team, to support something that's very, very important," Affeldt said.

This season, at least 17 players from MLB have signed up to Team Free 2 Play, with more expected to join the effort.

Josh Collmenter, a pitcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks, said he wanted to take part after hearing Affeldt and Batstone speak about the global problem of modern-day slavery.

"It is definitely something I wanted to make sure I did to give back to the community and be a role model and help out where I can," he said.

By Richard Stearns, special to CNN

This February, I visited Cambodia, where my heart was broken by the evils of the sex trade in that country. Too often there is an acceptance of prostitution that leads to a male culture that believes sex with virgins improves health has created an epidemic of young girls and boys trafficked into the cities. Roughly 30,000 young women and men in that country (some estimates are as high as 100,000) are trapped in slavery. When imprisoned in the brothels, these young women and men serve roughly 700 people every year.

I interviewed a young woman named Ruse (not her real name) who had spent three years in a Cambodian brothel before being rescued and sent to World Vision’s Trauma Recovery Center in Phnom Penh.

Ruse’s story was heartbreaking. Her family was extremely poor, and when she was just 13, her mother became very ill and needed medical attention. Her father had left, and she had two smaller siblings as well. The family desperately needed money. Ruse told me, “My virginity was the most valuable possession my family had.”

The life Ruse led for the next three years defies all sense of human dignity. She was originally sold for $400 and then found herself captive in a brothel. Ultimately, a police raid set her free, and World Vision was able to help her with psychological recovery and job training. Today Ruse has a small apartment and a job as a nanny.

The suffering of Ruse and tens of thousands like her needs to end. However, the U.S. Congress is stalling on a bill that would go a long way toward locking up those who buy and sell human beings as well as preventing trafficking and providing treatment to its victims.

The centerpiece of American action opposing modern day slavery is the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). The bill helps and encourages governments like Cambodia’s to toughen laws against traffickers — including prosecuting here in the United States any American citizen who sexually exploits a child overseas. An innovative feature of the Senate version of the bill is that it allows the U.S. to partner with NGOs and foreign governments to achieve the greatest possible impact. World Vision works in Cambodian villages were trafficking is a huge problem, and we educate parents, teachers and children on the dangers of this trade in human beings and how they can prevent it.

Editor’s Note: On CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360," correspondent Deborah Feyerick reported on controversy surrounding the nationwide classified-advertising website Backpage.com. While working on the broad problem of sex trafficking, she and producer Sheila Steffen became aware of the website's adult section and how prosecutors say it's being used by some pimps to peddle girls online.

By Deborah Feyerick and Sheila Steffen, CNN

Go to Backpage.com, choose any city in any state, then click on the adult section of the nationwide classified ads website.

Young women wearing almost nothing pose provocatively. One of the first advertisements I open shows a girl in lacy black underwear. Her eyes are downcast, and she appears much younger than 19, the age stated in her ad.

No one checks whether it's true - not the ages or the identities of these young women. Someone else is clearly taking the picture. The pose appears unnatural, forced.

The text next to her photo reads, "Choke me. Spank me. Pull my hair. Do Whatever You Want...I don't Care - 19." The young woman promises "a time you will NEVER forget."

It's hard to know whether this alleged 19-year-old is doing this because she wants to or because she's being coerced. That's another thing the website doesn't check.


Although many ads are placed by consenting adults, others are not and stories are rampant of young girls seduced online by men who turn out to be pimps or sex-traffickers.

I'm struck by how young some of these girls look: 18-year-olds look 15 or 16. Nineteen-year-olds look 17. As it turns out, prosecutors across the country are seeing an increase in cases (50 in 22 states recently) of underage girls being sold for sex on Backpage.com.

With an increased focus on sex trafficking in the U.S., prosecutors want the site's adult service ads removed, calling it a hub for the sex trade. In Minnesota, Ramsey County Attorney John Choi says, "When we get a case involving trafficking or prostitution, usually the story is going to start on Backpage.com."


Armed with a fistful of these ads, I ask Backpage.com's lawyer (and chief defender) Liz McDougall how she would feel if she saw her own daughter selling herself in one of these ads.

Her response is immediate, "I would be horrified ... my heart goes out to those mothers and to their daughters who are victims of exploitation."

Yet it's happening every day.

We meet Violet in a neighborhood just outside St. Paul, Minnesota. The pretty blonde married young. Her high-spirited, 14-year-old daughter later ran away and was missing for three years. Prosecutors say the girl was prostituted by a man she met at a bus stop who gave her food and a couch to sleep on and then advertised her for sex on Backpage.com to "pay him back."

Violet, who asked we changed her name to protect her family, said, "The worst part was the torture I had to hear about. You know the torture she endured from different people along the way."

McDougall says the website is not the problem.

Kathmandu, Nepal (CNN) – Twenty-one-year-old Ramila Syangden weeps uncontrollably as she clutches her 10-month-old baby. She sits and watches as the pyre where her husband’s body will be cremated is set alight in the open Nepalese air.

Syangden never considered one of the potential consequences of her husband’s decision to work abroad. Now she can’t ignore it.

Hours before the Buddhist cremation ceremony she watched the coffin, with her husband’s body inside, arrive on a flight from Saudi Arabia where he had worked.

The paperwork says the 36-year old committed suicide there. Not a single person gathered for the cremation ceremony believes it.

“I don’t think so. He said he would go abroad, see the place, earn as much as he could for the children and come back. I think somebody killed him,“ his wife said.


She may never know exactly what happened to him. But the family says he had every reason to live. He was a retired police officer collecting a pension. He was healthy and he’d been working in Saudi Arabia for less than a month without any complaints.

“When my son went I thought that he would earn money for the family but his dead body came back instead,” his father, Sonam Singh Bomjang, said.

He can’t believe his son died this way, especially considering he survived being shot by Maoists while serving as a Nepali police officer.




The family's story is not at all unusual. Nepal is one of the poorest countries on earth. With little work available, an estimated 1,300 Nepalese citizens go abroad for work every single day. But every day some return in coffins.

“On an average per day, two to three coffins are coming back to Nepal mostly from the Gulf countries,” said sociologist Ganesh Gurung, a member of Nepal’s government task force for foreign labor reform.

The official reason for the deaths vary, but once the bodies make it to Nepal the cause of death is rarely if ever investigated further.

Gurung says Nepalese workers attracted by good money abroad often face awful problems. The most common complaint: workers do not get what they were promised. But the complaints can be far worse, particularly for women who work as maids in homes.

“They have experienced physical exploitation, sexual exploitation, and we have received many girls coming back with children from their employers,” Gurung said.

We met one such maid. Not even her own family knows the pain she has suffered. Kumari is seven months pregnant and said the baby inside her is a product of rape. The father, she says, is her former employer in Kuwait.

For a year-and-a-half Kumari said she was paid the equivalent of $144 a month but then the pay stopped and the beatings started.

“My landlord would beat me, they (he and his wife) both would beat me. My body would ache. I bore that beating for a long time but stayed,” she said in tears.

Then one day, she said, the beating came with something else; rape.

She said the landlord came home when the rest of the family was out, and called her into the bathroom while she was folding clothes in another room. When she refused he came to her.

“He beat me up. First he covered my mouth so I could not scream. After he did that (raped me) I asked for my passport. He wouldn’t give it to me,” she said her voice breaking.

Madrid (CNN) -- Chanting "they don't represent us," tens of thousands in Madrid railed early Sunday against Spain's government and austerity cuts -- venting their anger on the first anniversary of the so-called May 15 protest movement.

Many ignored a government deadline to disperse by Saturday night from the central Puerta del Sol plaza, prompting police to clear the square by 5 a.m. on Sunday (11 p.m. on Saturday ET), the interior ministry said.

About 30,000 attended the Madrid protest, and 18 were detained for resisting arrest or disorderly conduct, the ministry said.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, demonstrators were a loud and vibrant presence in the square -- as a large number of police, stationed at a nearby government building and along side streets, looked on and let them be.

Throngs of like-minded demonstrators also gathered over the weekend in Barcelona and about 80 other cities around Spain.

Barcelona saw about 22,000 protesters, while Valencia had 8,000 and Seville had 2,000, authorities said. All the demonstrations were cleared by Sunday morning, the interior ministry said.

The coordinated events marked the return of the "indignados" -- or the outraged, as the protesters became known -- who led Europe's first serious and significant grassroots movement against austerity and government budget cuts.

Similar demonstrations decrying governments' attempts to get their budgets in order, sometimes by slashing public funding, later emerged elsewhere around Europe.

In Madrid this weekend, marchers from the north, south, east and west descended on Puerta del Sol plaza on Saturday evening.

For hours, demonstrators shouted, jumped, sang and waved white handkerchiefs. Their most dramatic moment, though, may have been their quietest: when they held their hands aloft, silently, in a "silent shout" before erupting in cheers.

The crowd is expected to return. The government has approved three more days of protests in Madrid, meaning similar scenes could play out into the middle of the week.

The number of demonstrators in Madrid over the weekend appeared to be slightly fewer than those who had gathered in the same spot -- in what's known as ground zero of the movement -- a year earlier.

Back then, protesters encamped in Madrid and other cities made their voices heard. The tens of thousands of people who turned out in the initial days grew to an estimated 6 million protesters over the following months, in a nation of 46 million people.

Since then, Occupy camps around the world have come and gone.

The new protests organized by the May 15 movement are different in at least one key respect: a new conservative government is now in control, having taken over in December.