U.S. intelligence agencies say that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election in part through online propaganda. But a new report shows the United States was not the only target. According to the 2017 “Freedom on the Net” report, disinformation campaigns are increasing as Internet freedom declines globally. VOA’s Jesusemen Oni has the findings of the report.
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Before advanced satellites and drones started collecting military intelligence, the U.S. relied on high-flying supersonic aircraft that could quickly penetrate the airspace of adversary countries, take pictures and exit before being caught. The last of those planes, retired in 1998, still holds several world records. But now, spy planes can only be found in museums. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Last week, Somalilanders went to the polls in a historic presidential election. Officials employed advanced iris-scanning technology to identify voters and prevent duplicate ballots — the first use of such a biometric system in a national election.
For Somaliland, a breakaway region whose independence has not yet been recognized by the U.N., the scanners also made a powerful statement about its legitimacy as a nation-state.
Traditional ways to identify voters, including ID cards and indelible ink, aren’t perfect. Paper identification can be forged, and ink can be washed off. In Somaliland, concerns about duplicate voting in past elections have been well-documented, to the point that the legitimacy of the process has been questioned, according to Calestous Juma, a professor of international development at Harvard Kennedy School.
The move to iris-scanning technology is a way to thwart these concerns. It’s also a high-tech solution that vaults Somaliland ahead of more connected countries such as Nigeria and Kenya. In the latter, concerns about the transmission of electronic ballots figured prominently in the Supreme Court’s decision to annul the August election.
“When elections don’t go well, it basically generates the view that Africa is not ready for democracy,” Juma told VOA. Iris scanning helps Somaliland improve its democratic process by incorporating the best-available technology, Juma said.
Like fingerprints, everyone’s eyes are unique. But because our irises also have a highly complex pattern, they’re more reliable than other biometrics.
To establish someone’s identity, iris scanning involves capturing high-quality images of an individual’s eyes. To record the greatest detail possible, the scan uses special cameras capable of sensing both visible and infrared light. The images are then added to a database where they can be compared with any other saved images to find potential matches, indicating a duplicate.
Building public trust
Early on, Somaliland contacted researchers on the forefront of iris-scanning technology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana to ensure the feasibility of the technology. Election officials engaged in a lengthy pilot study to test different system designs and solicit feedback from the public. This transparent process built trust, Juma said.
In a test ahead of the Somaliland election, Notre Dame researchers correctly found all 457 duplicates in a large sample of images. No false positives were identified in the process — any pair of images determined to be a duplicate did, in fact, belong to the same person.
These results show a high degree of accuracy, although a small collection of images required manual verification after the software’s analysis generated inconclusive results.
The effort is particularly inspiring given Somaliland’s poverty and struggle for international recognition, according to Juma. “To me, [it’s] a demonstration to the commitment that Somaliland has to having credible elections.”
Still, biometric identification such as iris scanning isn’t without critics, and concerns about privacy loom particularly large. For the system to work, images must be stored and, to create a national registry, transmitted. That means a data breach is possible. And emerging technologies suggest individuals’ eyes could soon be scanned without their consent. So-called long-range iris scanning makes it possible to capture a scan from dozens of feet away.
New leadership
Vote counting is under way to determine Somaliland’s fifth leader since the republic broke away from Somalia in 1991. The current president, Ahmed Mohamed Mohamoud, did not seek re-election, clearing the way for one of three candidates to assume his post.
Election observers from 27 countries found isolated issues at the over 1,600 polling stations, but no problems with the iris scanners have been reported.
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Blake Shelton was named Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine, a first for any country singer, prompting “The Voice” judge to shake off his shyness about his looks.
“I’ve been ugly my whole life,” Shelton, 41, said in a statement on Tuesday. “If I can be sexy for a year, I’m taking it!”
Oklahoma native Shelton spent a decade in country music before his popularity surged in 2011 as the wise-cracking judge and mentor to aspiring singers on NBC’s reality talent competition “The Voice.” His most recent album, “Texoma Shore,” was released earlier this month.
Shelton told People he could not wait to tease his fellow “Voice” judge and Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine with his Sexiest Man title, which Levine won in 2013.
“I’m not going to treat this like Hugh Jackman or one of those guys who’s humble about it. People are going to hate me over this,” Shelton joked.
The singer told People that while he tries to stay in shape and eat healthy, he does have a weakness for snacks such as jalapeno poppers and pickles, especially when he is home in Oklahoma.
Shelton was formerly married to country singer Miranda Lambert and has been dating pop singer Gwen Stefani for the past two years. He told People that Stefani had encouraged him to accept the title of Sexiest Man Alive.
Previous title holders include Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Johnny Depp, Harrison Ford, Ryan Reynolds and David Beckham.
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Ezra Miller brings an electric energy to the superhero team-up film “Justice League,” pinballing off the more imposing presences of Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot and Ben Affleck.
They are mighty. He is fast.
Miller was first cast as Barry Allen, a.k.a. The Flash, several years ago, but “Justice League” is his most front-and-center performance yet as the fastest man alive. He’s also the best thing in the film, adding a hyper, insecure liveliness that has often been lacking from many recent, more grandiose DC Comics films.
As played by the 25-year-old, Barry is a motor-mouthed loner who, when asked by Bruce Wayne to join the League, is mostly happy to just have some friends.
Miller, who has been credited as the first out LGBT person to play a lead role in a major superhero film, has distinguished himself by playing hyper-verbal outcasts in movies big (“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”) and small (“We Need to Talk About Kevin,” “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”). Speaking by phone from London, Miller spoke with verbal gymnastics that even the Flash might struggle to keep up with.
AP: From “City Island” to “Fantastic Beasts” you seem to be drawn to playing outsiders.
Miller: I’m definitely interested in what I would call Barbara McClintock’s discovery of the rebellious gene. Things advance by mutating away from their point of origin. I do think that happens on not just a cellular or genetic level but within civil society. A lot of the people who have shaped ideas and science on planet Earth have been outsiders. I feel often like an outside. It’s a fascinating type of person to portray. And I think ultimately everyone has an element of that in their experience even if their life doesn’t fully present that on first look. I think everyone can feel alienated and can both benefit by that and know the harm of that.
AP: You seem a quick-witted person. Do you identify with the Flash?
Miller: A cool idea about the Flash is that he, as he starts to move quicker and quicker with his body, he must also speed up mentally. When we shoot something in slow-motion, like we might on a Flash-inclusive movie, the way that’s done is by rolling the camera faster. You shoot more frames per second when you want to slow down the image. In the same way, the Flash, as he moves faster, has to speed up to his brain in order to slow down his perception. That’s all well and good when he’s in superhero-mode, but one of the questions of our film asks is how does that play out in social circumstances? I think there are qualities that have been detrimental to his social capacity.
AP: Were you at all concerned that a big production like this would leave less room for the kind of acting you practice?
Miller: I feel personally that if I’m struggling for integrity, I’m already lacking in it. I come from a place where instead of trying to manufacture my standards of integrity I’m trying to work in such a way that I trust in that inherently when I step to any project, whatever the scale. I want to maintain the integrity of my process. Outside of that, forget about it. It’s anyone’s game.
AP: But was there some appeal in bouncing off the more archetypal performances by Cavill, Gadot and Affleck?
Miller: Yeah, that’s one of the great joys. In a situation like this to have the immense gravity of everything — which I think is really maintained in this film — but then be in a situation where I can improvise. I can play. I can react in the way that I feel Barry might, in a way that can feel deeply human. That was exciting to me, the idea that in the age of superhero films in their absolute crescendo, you have this character who’s sort of a fan who appreciates what he’s witnessing. And to have someone who’s having really human reactions to what’s going on — to see a villain and have a panic attack — I connect with that. I think people connect with that. I think that’s where we are. In terms of realizing our true potential as superheroes, the species on the planet, we’re in amateur, novice stages. We are tripping over our own feet like Barry in this movie.
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How do you obtain the freshest, locally grown produce in a big city? For an increasing number of urbanites, the answer is to grow it yourself.
Cam MacKugler can help. MacKugler was at the recent Food Loves Tech event in Brooklyn, New York showing off Seedsheets, roll-out fabric sheets embedded with seed-filled pods.
The sheets are placed atop soil in a home planter or an outdoor garden. When watered, the pods dissolve and plants sprout in 10 days (for pea shoots) to 70 days (for dragon carrots).
The seed groupings on any given Seedsheet provide ingredients for specific dishes like salads or tacos. Pricing starts at $15 for pre-made sheets and go up to $100 for custom outdoor sheets measuring 1.2 by 2.4 meters.
“Someone that’s never gardened before might say, ‘I want to know where my food comes from but I don’t know how to do it, but I like salads so I’m going to buy the salad kit,’ ” said MacKugler, Seedsheet’s CEO and founder.
Efforts like Seedsheet come as consumers increasingly want to know where their food comes from and are more interested in socially and environmentally responsible growing methods.
MacKugler told VOA that most of the company’s sales come from urban millennials.
Comparing Seedsheets to meal kit delivery companies like Blue Apron, MacKugler said Seedsheet took an experiential and educational approach to gardening, while making it user-friendly for customers.
“I view it as a way to not only help them grow food, but also help grow their skill sets of knowing how to curate their food, how to actually bring food from seed to supper. It’s a life skill,” said MacKugler, “It’s the same thing that you get from using Blue Apron and learning how to cook.”
Consumers aren’t giving up on the convenience and low cost of packaged foods, but new products and technologies are playing a bigger role in helping them understand where their food comes from.
“Consumer education is really progressing,” said Nicole Baum, senior marketing and partnerships manager at Gotham Greens, a New York-based provider of hydroponically grown produce.
Baum said consumers were less familiar with the term “hydroponics,” growing plants in water instead of soil, when Gotham Greens started in 2011. Perceptions have since changed, and she has seen an increase in competing companies.
“We’re definitely seeing a lot more people within the space from when we first started, which is awesome,” said Baum. “I think it’s really great that other people are coming into the space and looking for ways to use technology to have more productive, efficient growth.”
Gotham Greens provides rooftop-grown leafy greens and herbs to supermarkets and top-ranked restaurants like Gramercy Tavern, which uses seasonal vegetables but also depends on the reliability of produce from urban hydroponic farms.
“When we write our menus, we know that there are staples that we can continue using,” said Gramercy Tavern sous chef Kyle Goldstein.
Companies like Smallhold were also on hand at the Food Loves Tech event to promote their mushroom mini-farms — self-contained, vertical farm units that are intended for use in commercial kitchens.
Smallhold’s mini-farms are installed and serviced by the company at restaurants, with chefs harvesting mushrooms directly on-site. Hannah Shufro, operations lead at Smallhold, said the mini-farms minimize the environmental footprint that comes with transporting and packaging produce for delivery.
“A lot of chefs these days, I think, are more concerned with sustainability” and have always been concerned with freshness, she said.
Shufro noted that produce starts to lose its nutritional value from the moment it’s picked or harvested. “When you’re harvesting food right out of a system that’s growing on-site, it does not get fresher than that,” she said.
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For his latest role, as an attorney who defends young people of color imprisoned without trial, Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington weighed how family dynamics played into the lives of young criminals.
“I grew up with guys who did decades (in prison) and it had as much to do with their fathers not being in their lives as it did to do with any system,” Washington said in a recent interview with Reuters about his new film, “Roman J. Israel, Esq.”
The movie, written and directed by Dan Gilroy, opens on Friday.
The actor plays the title role of a lawyer with encyclopedic knowledge.
Washington, recalling some of the people he grew up with, added: “By the time we got to 13, 14, different things happened.”
“Now I was doing just as much as they were, but they went further … I just didn’t get caught, but they kept going down that road and then they were in the hands of the system. But it’s about the formative years. You’re not born a criminal.”
The cases explored in “Roman J. Israel, Esq.” reflect a “massively important issue in our country,” director Gilroy said.
“Our prison system needs reform at a fundamental level. We have the highest incarceration rate of any place in the Western world … It’s not racially equal, it’s not socio-economically equal,” he said.
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Taylor Swift’s new album “Reputation” has sold more than one million copies in its first five days, Nielsen Music said on Tuesday, but the U.S. pop star failed to beat the record set by Britain’s Adele two years ago.
Swift’s 1.05 million U.S. sales of “Reputation” came despite the singer keeping the album from streaming services and gave her the best-selling album of 2017.
But the figure was less than half the monster sales for the debut of Adele’s “25” album, which surpassed 2.43 million copies in the first four days of release in November 2015 and smashed a 15-year-old U.S. record set by boy band NSync in 2000. Adele also initially kept “25” from streaming services.
Swift, 27, recording on Nashville-based independent label Big Machine Records, now has four albums that have sold more than one million copies in their first week — “1989,” “Red,” and “Speak Now.”
“Reputation,” her first studio album in three years, marked another transformation for Swift with songs marked by vengeance that take aim at the media and some of her haters.
Full first week sales will be available next week, when “Reputation” will top the Billboard 200 album chart.
Swift this week announced the first U.S. dates of what is expected to be a world tour to promote the album.
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There were movie stars and supermodels, TV hosts and pop stars.
But perhaps the most rapturous ovation at Glamour magazine’s annual Women of the Year awards went to 79-year-old Democratic U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters of California, who delighted the crowd — including hundreds of cheering young girls — with a rousing speech that ended on a very political note.
“Impeach him,” she exhorted the audience. “Impeach 45! Impeach 45!”
Alongside Waters, honorees at Monday evening’s ceremony, held at a theater in Brooklyn, included actress Nicole Kidman, singer Solange Knowles, late-night host Samantha Bee, model Gigi Hadid, film director Patty Jenkins, and fashion designer Maria Grazia Chiuri of Christian Dior.
Also honored were record-setting astronaut Peggy Whitson, Syrian refugee and UNICEF ambassador Muzoon Almellehan and the many organizers of the January women’s marches.
Though this was the 27th year of the Glamour awards, there was a different sensation this time around, noted Cindi Leive, Glamour’s outgoing editor-in-chief.
“There’s a feeling in the air,” she told the crowd at the beginning. She didn’t have to explain that she was referring to the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal and the subsequent cascade of allegations in Hollywood and elsewhere, with both women and men coming forward to accuse powerful men of sexual harassment, assault or misconduct.
“This is a singular moment for women,” Leive said. “I am so glad that we get to seize it.”
One of the most powerful moments in the ceremony came when the two New York Times reporters who broke the Weinstein story — Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey — took the stage to introduce a quartet of women who had experienced sexual harassment or assault.
The first to speak: Anita Hill, who has been a symbol of the fight against sexual harassment ever since she testified in 1991 against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. She hadn’t gotten the result she wanted back then, she explained — Thomas was confirmed anyway — but in just a few years, official complaints of sexual harassment skyrocketed.
“I saw that we had a chance to shift the narrative,” Hill said.
Also appearing was Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman, who came forward last week to allege she was sexually abused by a U.S. team doctor, Larry Nassar, who has been accused by more than 100 women and girls of sexual assault.
“We need answers,” Raisman said.
Kidman, accepting her award, noted it had been “an extraordinary year — we’re in uncharted territory right now.” But she said she preferred to celebrate “all of us, and what makes us, us.” She thanked her parents, and then noted that she had “an extraordinary husband,” singer Keith Urban.
“As much as I’m a strong woman, I need help and I need support,” she said.
Along with the honorees, there were plenty of high-wattage presenters: Serena Williams, for example, came to introduce her friend, Hadid, noting that the supermodel was one of only a very few people that could get her to leave her new baby, even for one night. Drew Barrymore introduced Bee, and original Wonder Woman Lynda Carter introduced “Wonder Woman” director Jenkins.
Singer-actress Zendaya, 21, introduced Waters, who clearly had fans among the young women from various girls’ organizations seated up in the balcony.
Waters told them that she didn’t just want them to vote — she wanted them to become politically active. “I want you to do everything you can to get ready to run for office,” she said.
Also exhorting the young women to action was astronaut Whitson, 57, who returned to Earth in September after 288 days in space. In all, she has spent 665 days in space — a record for a U.S. astronaut.
“I started as a farm girl in Iowa,” an emotional Whitson said. “I dreamed of being an astronaut and an explorer, and I made it.” She told the young women that it had taken 10 years of trying before she finally was accepted in the space program.
Leive, who announced in September that she was leaving Glamour after 16 years, said at a dinner following the ceremony that she had never seen women as energized as they are now, with the current, expanding conversation on sexual misconduct by powerful men.
“Something has shifted in the very molecules in the air,” she said.
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A new independent study places Pakistan among the top four countries, including Brazil, Mexico and Syria, where people have been murdered in each of the last three years for writing about sensitive subjects online.
The annual “Freedom on the Net” report, released Tuesday by U.S.-based Freedom House, is based on an assessment of internet freedom in 65 countries, accounting for 87 percent of internet users worldwide. The latest study primarily focused on developments between June 2016 and May 2017.
The research declared Pakistan “not free” for a sixth consecutive year, noting internet freedom has deteriorated due to violence and intimidation related to social media activists.
“Internet shutdowns, a problematic cybercrime law, and cyberattacks against government critics contributed to the ongoing deterioration. Political speech online is vulnerable to restriction as Pakistan enters an election year in 2018,” the report noted.
The most frequent targets, it says, seem to be online journalists and bloggers covering politics, corruption and crime, as well as people who express religious views that may contrast with or challenge the views of the majority.
The study went on to conclude that perpetrators of the reprisal attacks remained unknown “but their actions often aligned with the interests of politically powerful individuals or entities.”
The report documented incidents of violence and intimidation during the research period. The government of Pakistan has not commented on the findings.
In June, a Pakistani court sentenced to death earlier this year an internet user, Taimoor Raza, for committing blasphemy on Facebook. In April, university student Mashal Khan was killed in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province by a mob who accused him of posting blasphemous content online.
Khan’s murder sparked widespread outrage across Pakistan. An anti-terrorism court is hearing the lynching case against 57 suspects indicated by the court.
“Such attacks often succeed in silencing more than just the victim, encouraging wider self-censorship on sensitive issues like religion. The state’s failure to punish perpetrators of reprisal attacks for online speech perpetuates a cycle of impunity,” according to the report.
The Pakistani government enacted the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act in August 2016, introducing stronger censorship and surveillance powers with inadequate oversight, say critics.
Earlier this year, five bloggers known for criticizing the powerful military and religious militancy were abducted for few weeks. One of them later told media a government institution had detained and tortured him. Authorities had distanced themselves from the alleged abductions.
Tuesday’s report also criticized the government for the prolonged suspension of mobile internet services in parts of Pakistan, including the violence-plagued northwestern federally administered tribal areas, where security forces have been conducting anti-militancy operations.
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About 15 percent of U.S. federal agencies have reported some trace of Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab software on their systems, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official told Congress on Tuesday.
Jeanette Manfra, assistant secretary for cybersecurity at DHS, told a U.S. House of Representatives panel that 94 percent of agencies had responded to a directive ordering them to survey their networks to identify any use of Kaspersky Lab products.
The Trump administration in September ordered civilian U.S. agencies to remove Kaspersky Lab from their networks, saying it was concerned the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm was vulnerable to Kremlin influence and that using its anti-virus software could jeopardize national security.
Kaspersky Lab has repeatedly denied the allegations.
Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama.
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Comic and podcast host Chelsea Shorte is onstage on a cold Wednesday night in a small restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia. She is telling her mostly female audience about her transition from improv comedy to standup.
“I got tired of being cast as people’s moms even though I was 23,” she says. “If you’ve ever done improv with men, you’ll understand.”
The women gathered at the restaurant did understand. Most of them were aspiring comics who attended to network with one another, in an effort to skirt the roadblocks set up by a male-dominated entertainment industry.
Long before last week’s allegations of sexual harassment by comedian Louis C.K. emerged, journalist Nell Scovell wrote a 2009 Vanity Fair piece in response to a sex scandal centered around her former boss, late-night talk show host David Letterman.
“At this moment,” the article began, “there are more females serving on the United States Supreme Court than there are writing for ‘Late Show with David Letterman’ [and competitors],’The Jay Leno Show’, and ‘The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien’ combined. Out of the 50 or so comedy writers working on these programs, exactly zero are women. It would be funny if it weren’t true.”
Space for women
Comedian and entrepreneur Victoria Elena Nones founded the Women in Comedy network, which was behind Wednesday night’s networking event.
“I thought it was really important to provide a space for women to come together,” Nones says. “We see a lot of improv troupes and smaller groups of women who band together or do all-female open mics, but there was no national and international network of support.”
Nones founded her network in Chicago in 2015 and it now has chapters in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Washington. She says she hopes the group will help women find and support each other as they make their own places in a field notorious for sexism and sometimes outright hostility toward women.
Actress and comic Diane Chernansky of Los Angeles says she was recently startled to realize one of her own jokes reflected the way women are often treated in the standup industry, where she often found herself the only woman, or one of a couple of women, in a comedy lineup full of men.
“It’s very difficult to sit there and listen to lots of men talk about women in general and how horrible we are,” Chernansky says.
One night while she waited to follow another woman comic at the mic, the emcee asked her how she would like to be described.
Chernansky quipped, “I’ll be the next pair of breasts to come to the stage.”
Later, at a roundtable of female comics, Chernansky realized, “Holy crap, I said that about myself” — and, she acknowledges, about the other woman performing. “If anyone else had said that about me, I’d be offended.”
The unhealthy dynamic manifests in the numbers, as collected by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.
The number of female writers on the top 250 films of any year from 1998 to the present has stayed about the same, at 13 percent. Of directors on 2016’s top 250 films, only 7 percent were women. Only 2 percent of those top 250 films employed 10 or more women in the cast.
Minorities don’t fare any better. And the heavily male culture of the entertainment industry has a strong effect on what is expected of women — and minorities — in the industry.
Sexual harassment & labor abuse
Hollywood thrives on promises, notes E.C. McCarthy, who recently wrote a Washington Post piece that said predatory behavior in the entertainment industry is not limited to sexual harassment, or to performers. The promise of support in a difficult industry often paves the way for all kinds of abuse of power, she says.
“Harassment is one of the many ways to keep people feeling insecure, desperate, and willing to work for free,” McCarthy writes, after detailing one of numerous incidents in which a producer tried to take credit for a script she wrote. “Sexual harassment and labor abuse coexist as ugly forces in this business, and women overwhelmingly bear the brunt.”
McCarthy wrote that when she first became a writer in Hollywood, she assumed the imbalance of sexism would die out with the older generation of men in power. Instead, she says, now she gets it from men her own age. “The culture is thriving,” she writes.
“I get extremely frustrated when I walk into a room and feel like a piece of meat,” said Minka Wiltz, a black actress and activist in Atlanta, Georgia. She struggles not only with the stereotype of being a woman, but also being an African-American woman who is often asked to portray a stereotype.
“I’ve been asked to be ‘sassier,'” she says. Conversely, “I’ve been asked to ‘tone it down’ when I’ve [only] said five words.”
Wiltz says today’s entertainment culture suffers from “a sickness of manipulation.” She says the way to improve the situation, is for marginalized people to help each other tell their stories — the stories about women, people of color, LGBT and even disabled people — that are overlooked by the mainstream entertainment industry.
Pervasive problem
The problem is so pervasive that even Atlanta, a majority-black city, had no black theater collective until Wiltz and some colleagues starting working on one a few years ago.
Specialized groups, though, are nothing new in the entertainment industry.
Deaf West Theater, based in North Hollywood, in 2013 and 2015 sent productions of the musicals “Big River” and “Spring Awakening,” respectively, to Broadway theaters, winning wide acclaim.
The small Ivy Theatre Company in New York makes diversity its mission, casting women and minorities in shows that explore issues relevant to those communities. Most recently, the Ivy mounted the show “A Real Boy,” about two puppets who adopt a human son. The show is written by Stephen Kaplan, a gay man who is raising an adopted son with his husband.
In Chicago, a thriving improv comedy scene lends itself to scores of improv troupes in various combinations, including an Asian-American group called “Stir-Friday Night,” which has kick-started the careers of Korean-American actor Steven Yeun and Indian-American Danny Pudi.
One of their recent shows skewered mainstream Hollywood for casting of white actress Scarlett Johannsen in The Ghost in the Shell, playing a Japanese cyborg. The name of the show: 8 Angry Asians, Starring Scarlett Johansson.
In conservative Spartanburg, South Carolina, the state’s first gay theater company, Proud Mary, just finished a major production, “I Am My Own Wife,” about a real-life transgender German woman who survived both the Nazi and the East German regimes.
Wiltz, the Atlanta-based actress, says these groups and many others are supporting the work that the mainstream entertainment industry overlooks.
“I really hope that people realize you have no more excuses for your own success,” she says. “I want people to realize that the Hollywood myth, like the American myth, is just that. You can create your own story.”
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Around the world, Internet freedom is deteriorating, with some governments taking down their mobile Internet service, restricting live video streaming and employing a digital army of pro-government commentators.
These are some of the findings of “Freedom on the Net 2017,” an annual report by Freedom House, a global non-profit that tracks democracy and freedom around the world.
According to the report, which covered June 2016 to May 2017, about half of the 65 countries assessed – which covers about 87 percent of all the people online globally – saw their Internet freedoms decline, with the Ukraine, Egypt and Turkey showing the most notable one-year erosion of freedoms. China remained the world’s worst abuser of Internet freedom, followed by Syria and Ethiopia, the report said.
Sanja Kelly, director of the Freedom on the Net project at Freedom House, said the decline of Internet freedoms has coincided with the rise of Internet access worldwide and people increasingly turning to the Internet to promote democratic reforms and greater human rights.
“One of the reasons why we are seeing greater restrictions is precisely because some of the leaders in authoritarian countries, in particular, have discovered the power of the Internet and are trying to come up with innovative methods to suppress that,” she said.
Until recently, some governments in Africa and other parts of the world didn’t pay much attention to the Internet, focusing instead on traditional media, such as broadcast. That focus shifts when Internet penetration reaches 20 to 30 percent of the population, she said.
“Suddenly the governments start taking note and we start seeing propaganda actions,” she said.
Countries such as Zambia and Gambia have shut down mobile access to the Internet, particularly around elections.
“Shutting down mobile Internet is such a blunt measure,” she said. “It really signals the government is willing to take it to the next level.”
Some other key findings of the report:
• Online manipulation tactics played a role in elections in 18 countries.
• Governments in 30 countries promoted distorted online information, up from 23 the previous year, employing tools such as paid commentators and false news sites.
• Half of all Internet shutdowns were focused on mobile connectivity, with most shutdowns happening in areas populated with ethnic or religious minorities. In October 2016, the Ethiopian, government shut down mobile networks for nearly two months as part of a state of emergency amid antigovernment protests. Belarus disrupted mobile connectivity to prevent livestreamed images from reaching mass audience. Bahrain has issued a specific law that news websites are prohibited from using live video on their websites.
• In 30 countries, there have been physical reprisals for online speech, up from 20 countries in the prior year.
Not long ago, some of these online suppression techniques were mostly employed by China and Russia. “The extent to which these techniques are being used and the number of countries where they are present is something in itself new,” said Kelly.
“It seems like these techniques are spreading and some of the authoritarian countries like China and Russia are actually exporting these techniques,” Kelly said. “And some of the authoritarian regimes around the world are learning from example.”
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A proposal by the U.S. Senate to change the way shares in startup companies are taxed incited panic and dread in Silicon Valley on Monday, with startup founders and investors warning of nothing less than the demise of their industry should the proposal become law.
The provision in the Senate’s tax reform plan, which appeared to catch the industry by surprise, involves the treatment of employee stock options. These options give the holder the right to purchase shares in the future at a set price and can be very valuable if a company does well and the share price increases.
Options are often a major portion of the compensation for startup employees and founders, who take lower salaries in anticipation of a big payout if their startup takes off. Options typically vest over a four-year period.
Senate Republicans have now proposed taxing those stock options as they vest and before startup employees have the opportunity to cash them in, resulting in annual tax bills that could easily climb into the tens of thousands of dollars, say startup founders and venture capitalists.
“If there were a single piece of legislation to adversely affect startups, it would be this,” said Venky Ganesan, managing director at venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. “Everyone is freaked out.”
Justin Field, vice president of government affairs at the National Venture Capital Association, said that the Senate’s proposed tax change would be “crippling” to the startup industry.
How far the provision gets remains to be seen. The National Venture Capital Association was successful in getting a similar proposal removed from the House tax bill, although it “didn’t fully appreciate” the Senate’s intention to add the tax provision, Field said.
The association also helped to steer lawmakers away from a proposal discussed late last year to tax venture capitalists’ profits on investments at a higher rate.
Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, a member of the Senate Committee on Finance, has filed an amendment to repeal the provision in the tax bill, according to his spokesman.
A new proposal
Under current tax code, employees are taxed only when they exercise their options. Options are exercised when the price they were granted at–known as the strike price–is lower than the share price, and some shares can then be sold to pay the taxes.
But the Senate proposal would require startup employees to pay regular income tax on the value gain of their stock options even before they are exercised. These options are illiquid assets, and cannot be spent or saved.
“What this would mean is every month, when your equity compensation vests a little bit, you will owe taxes on it even though you can’t do anything with that equity compensation,” Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures, wrote on his blog Monday.
For instance, if a startup employee receives stock options at a dollar per share, and the shares increase in value by $1 every year during the four-year vesting period, the employee would have to pay income tax on $1 per share after the first year, pay again on the $1 increase in value after the second year, and so on.
When that employee owns hundreds of thousands and even millions of shares, that is a hefty bill to pay. And there is always the risk the startup will eventually fail.
“This reform will force the average employee to pay taxes on that bet well before they even know if it’s a winning ticket,” said Amanda Kahlow, founder and executive chairman of marketing data startup 6sense.
For startup founders in particular, such a tax bill could be ruinous.
“It would mean that I would have to sell the company,” said Shoaib Makani, founder and chief executive of long-haul trucking startup KeepTruckin. “I have zero net worth aside from the common stock I hold in the company. It would be impossible. I would be in default.”
Some executives in the startup industry, however, have pushed for companies to move toward bigger salaries so employees are not so dependent on options to buy a house or pay for other large expenses. And when startups suffer valuation cuts, employees can end up with worthless options.
The Senate’s proposal came as a revenue-generating measure to help offset tax breaks in the bill. A spokesman for Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican and chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, did not respond to requests for comment and other Republicans on the committee were not immediately available.
A spokeswoman for Senator Ron Wyden, the committee’s ranking member and a Democrat, said he was aware of concerns that the provision would limit startups’ ability to attract talent.
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Amazon.com has bought the global television rights to “The Lord of the Rings,” the company said on Monday, in what may be its biggest and most expensive move yet to draw viewers to its streaming and shopping club Prime.
Amazon said it will produce a multi-season series that explores new storylines preceding author J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first installment in the famed fantasy trilogy.
Three movies made of the trilogy in the early 2000s, filmed in New Zealand by director Peter Jackson, garnered nearly $3 billion at the box office and 17 Academy Awards.
Amazon acquired the rights from the Tolkien Estate and Trust but did not say how much it paid for them. The estate, HarperCollins and the films’ distributor New Line Cinema will help Amazon produce the television series.
The project underscores a shift in Amazon’s video programming. Its studio started in 2010 with a focus on unique shows beloved by critics, such as “Transparent,” about a father coming out as transgender to his family.
That was a winning formula for attracting Hollywood talent, awards and buzz, though not Prime subscribers around the world.
Now, Amazon is looking for a dramatic show that could be a hit globally, much like HBO’s popular fantasy series “Game of Thrones.” It is going head to head with Netflix, Hulu and others to bid for top content.
This puts Amazon in uncharted territory, with higher production costs expected.
Amazon justifies its spending on programming as a way to draw new sign-ups to Prime, whose members buy more goods more often from the world’s largest online retailer.
“Amazon Prime heads to Middle Earth,” Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said in a Twitter post.
Although “The Lord of the Rings” is the most famous work to emerge from Tolkien’s pen, he wrote much else, including prequel “The Hobbit” – also made into a movie trilogy by Jackson – and the denser “The Silmarillion.” The Amazon series will delve into some of Tolkien’s work that the movies did not explore.
“Amazon is committed to producing super high quality, recognized, branded entertainment,” said Wedbush Securities industry analyst Michael Pachter. “That’s a departure from shows like ‘Transparent’ and ‘Catastrophe.'”
“By definition this will be expensive,” he added.
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Alphabet’s Google in the last few months has begun removing from YouTube extremist videos that do not depict violence or preach hate, YouTube said Monday, a major policy shift as social media companies face increasing pressure from governments.
The new policy affects videos that feature people and groups that have been designated as terrorist by the U.S. or British governments but lack the gory violence or hateful speech that were already barred by YouTube.
A YouTube spokesperson, who asked not to be named for security reasons, confirmed the policy in response to questions. The company would not specify when the policy went into effect.
As YouTube terms already barred “terrorists” from using the service, the new policy keeps out videos uploaded by others that militants likely would try to distribute if they could have accounts, according to the spokesperson.
Hundreds of videos of slain al-Qaida recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki lecturing on the history of Islam, recorded long before he advocated violence against the United States, were among those removed under the new policy, the spokesperson said.
Governments and human rights groups have pressed YouTube for years to crack down on extremist videos. They argue that the propaganda radicalized viewers and contributed to deadly terror attacks.
British Home Secretary Amber Rudd amplified the pressure during visits with tech companies in Silicon Valley in July and a speech in Washington, D.C., last week. European Union and U.S. lawmakers this year have threatened consequences for tech companies if concerns are not addressed.
Legislation could resemble a German law approved in June to fine social media companies 50 million euros ($57 million) if hateful postings are not promptly removed.
Looking for balance
YouTube said discussions with outside experts prompted the new policy, but it was unclear why the company decided to act only recently. In June, the company announced that “inflammatory religious or supremacist content” that did not violate its policies would be allowed with warning labels and a restriction making them ineligible for ad revenue.
At the time, Google General Counsel Kent Walker said in a blog post, “We think this strikes the right balance between free expression and access to information without promoting extremely offensive viewpoints.”
The latest step goes farther and was praised by critics such as Paul Barrett, deputy director of the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.
“If the terrorist is in the business of recruiting and inciting people to make violent attacks, you’ve got to the draw the line” against any of their content, Barrett said.
Blurry lines
The new policy does not affect news clips or educational videos about terrorism. But YouTube will not always have an easy time distinguishing, experts said, pointing to tactics such as overlaying extremist commentary on news footage to get around censors.
YouTube has resisted imposing more editorial control because it fears making it harder for important videos to get a wide audience, Juniper Downs, YouTube’s global director of public policy, told a San Francisco conference sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League on Monday.
“We will lose something very valuable if we completely transform the way these platforms work,” she said during a panel discussion.
Internet freedom advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have urged tech companies to be cautious and transparent in responding to government pressure.
YouTube is relying on government lists of terrorists and terrorist groups for enforcement. Content moderators check the listings and make removal decisions after fielding reports from an automated system, users or partner organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and The Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
Al-Awlaki, whom the U.S. killed in a 2011 drone strike, was designated a terrorist by the U.S. Treasury the year prior.
The New York Times first reported the removal of al-Awlaki videos.
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Peace never reigns in the pages of DC Comics. There’s always a world to be saving, a cataclysm to avert. The making of the DC superhero team-up film “Justice League” was hardly any more tranquil.
Made in the wake of the disappointment surrounding its predecessor, “Batman v Superman,” and the critically-panned “Suicide Squad,” “Justice League” was, like a jetliner given new wings in midair, retooled on the fly. Warner Bros. sought to lighten the tone of Zack Snyder’s grandiose and muscle-bound DC universe – a much-publicized pivot that came just as tragedy was striking.
Snyder, the “300” filmmaker, had overseen this latest series of DC movies starting with “Man of Steel,” but he stepped down after “Justice League” had been shot following the death of his daughter. Joss Whedon, the “Avengers” director known for snappy dialogue who had already been helping to punch up the script, was brought in steer the film through post-production and two months of reshoots. (He’s credited as co-writer.)
Writer Geoff Johns and producer Jon Berg had already been brought in to brighten “Justice League” and overhaul the wider DC slate with a more optimistic tone.
But that’s not been all. Ben Affleck, who stars as Batman, withdrew from directing a stand-alone Batman film, while also combating criticism over his behavior with women in the past. Whedon, himself, was called a hypocrite for espousing feminist ideals by his ex-wife, Kai Cole. Jason Momoa had to apologize for a 2011 joke about rape and “Game of Thrones.”
And just weeks before release, Warner Bros. severed ties with one of the film’s chief financiers, Brett Ratner’s RatPac-Dune company, after sexual assault allegations were leveled against Ratner. Gal Gadot, who plays Wonder Woman, has reportedly insisted Ratner have no connection with any future Wonder Woman film.
“Justice League” is the kind of production that, one suspects, its makers will celebrate the release of with a stiff drink.
“I’ve probably had a stiff drink along the way,” producer Charles Roven says, chuckling. “It’s been different in the sense that we’ve had some sadness along the happy-joy of making the movie. But for the most part it’s been an incredibly positive experience.”
Now, Warner Bros. and DC are hoping that the finished “Justice League,” which opens Friday, doesn’t show any Frankenstein-like scars from its tumultuous creation.
“The goal is to make sure when you’re watching the movie, it all feels cohesive,” says Roven, the veteran producer of “The Dark Knight” trilogy. “That imprint that Joss had, some aspect of it is going to come out in the direction, but the actors are already pretty much down the road on their arcs. Let’s just say 80, 85 percent of the movie is what was originally shot. There’s only so much you can do with other 15, 20 percent of the movie.”
In interviews, Roven and cast members pledged their loyalty to Snyder and his vision for the franchise, one they say incorporated a changing tone before Whedon’s involvement. (Neither filmmaker was made available for interview. Each has stayed silent publicly since Snyder’s departure.)
Batman
“Zack from the time that I first met with him said, ‘Look, Batman makes the DC world dark. The DC world has to be created as something dark,”’ says Ezra Miller, who plays Barry Allen aka the Flash). “He said what’s great now is that the League gets to bring Batman out of this darkness. That was always Zack’s vision. That was the intention from the beginning.”
The film, Miller says, has “a wonderful collision of tone” that he considers “a testament to both the strength of Zack’s vision and the generosity of Joss’s commitment.”
It’s also a turning point in the larger DC cinematic world.
“Justice League” finds Affleck’s Bruce Wayne, in the wake of Superman’s apparent death, gathering together the League to fight a new enemy. That means pushing not just Wonder Woman to the fore, but also Miller’s Flash, Momoa’s Aquaman and Ray Fisher’s Cyborg.
“It was very clear that the tone of the movie was different than ‘Batman v Superman,'” says Gadot. “Henry (Cavill), Ben and I had a wonderful addition with Ezra and Jason and Ray (that) just stirred everything up.”
Gadot and “Wonder Woman” are a big reason for optimism in the franchise, following its critically acclaimed, zeitgeist-grabbing $412.6 million box office success domestically. Though the epicenter of DC Comics has always revolved around Batman and Superman, that’s starting to change.
Matt Reeves has taken over the Batman movie, but he’s starting fresh on the screenplay, making a release date several years off. That leaves open the possibility of further changes, even potentially Affleck’s casting. “From everything I know, he’s going to play that Batman,” said Roven. “They’re retooling the script, so I can’t really say anything for certain.”
What’s next?
The Superman sequel “Man of Steel 2” also isn’t coming anytime soon, if at all. Roven says there’s no script but “various story ideas” are being kicked around.
On the front burner, however, is “Aquaman,” scheduled for release in December 2018, a Wonder Woman sequel due in 2019 (with director Patty Jenkins returning) and a Cyborg movie. Whedon is also prepping a Batgirl movie.
“Justice League,” a team-up movie, will be followed by solo efforts.
“One of the things that’s really important to us with all of these DC movies is making sure that while they make sense, one from the other – because they’re in a certain way linked – we also want to make sure that the audience is hopefully excited by the fact that you don’t know exactly where you’re going to go.”
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The maker of Barbie says it will sell a doll modeled after Ibtihaj Muhammad, an American fencer who competed in last year’s Olympics while wearing a hijab.
Mattel says the doll will be available online next fall. The doll is part of the Barbie “Shero” line that honors women who break boundaries. Past dolls have included gymnast Gabby Douglas and “Selma” director Ava DuVernay.
Muhammad said on Twitter that she was “proud” that young people will be able to play with “a Barbie who chooses to wear hijab!”
Muhammad, the first American to compete at the Olympics while wearing a hijab, won a bronze medal in fencing at the 2016 Rio Games.
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Italian state museums are on track for another record-setting year in 2017 in terms of visitors and revenue, with the outdoor Colosseum in Rome and Pompeii near Naples topping the Culture Ministry’s most-visited and most-lucrative list.
The ministry on Monday issued a three-year review of its revolutionary decision to bring in non-Italian directors for some of the gems of its national museum network, and to give the institutions greater autonomy. The results were significant: an 18.5 percent increase in the number of visitors nationwide from 2013-2016, and a 38.4 percent increase in revenue — or about 48.5 million — to 175 million euros last year.
Culture Minister Dario Franceschini said the ministry’s reforms “are starting to bear fruit.” He praised a continued “radical inversion of trends,” with visitor numbers already up 9.4 percent and revenues up 13.5 percent in the first nine months of 2017.
With more UNESCO heritage sites than any other country, Italy’s outdoor cultural patrimony is one of its biggest draws — Rome’s Colosseum and Forum, the lagoon city of Venice and the Roman amphitheater of Siracusa to name a few. Fresco-filled churches and basilicas, many in quaint Medieval hilltop towns, are other favored tourist destination.
Traditional museums often play second fiddle to such extraordinary sites and frequently pale in comparison to their counterparts in world capitals in terms of multilingual labeling, educational activities and lucrative licensing opportunities.
Franceschini sought to change that by overhauling the museum system in 2014 and bringing in a handful of foreign directors: The German Eike Schmidt runs the Uffizi, British James Bradburne heads Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera and French Sylvain Bellenger runs the Capodimonte in Naples.
The Culture Ministry is responsible for 439 of Italy’s 4,834 museums, so a small fraction of Italy’s artistic, archaeological, historical museums. But it runs some of the most important ones.
Overall, the Colosseum was consistently the greatest draw over the last three years, with some 6.68 million visitors in 2016.
The Pompeii complex last year outpaced Florence’s Uffizi Gallery to take second place, after seeing a 37-percent increase in visitors in the 2013-2016 period.
But the greatest increase was registered by the National Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria, which went from 11,500 visitors in 2013 to 210,598 last year — a 1,728-percent spike.
The exponential growth is thanks to a new home for the collection and new display space for the Riace Bronzes, two bronze nude males that are considered the best examples of classic Greek art. The bronzes, believed to date from the 5th century BC, were discovered in 1972 at the bottom of the Ionian sea.
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