Christmas is not Christmas, for some people, unless there are colorful lights and decorations. Some homes have spectacular outdoor displays. VOA’s Deborah Block takes us to Alexandria, Virginia, to show us a couple of houses with over-the-top Christmas spirit.
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There is a new word in the English language that all internet users should learn, because it may define the next stage in global financial transactions. It may not be translatable to many other languages so it may become an international term, much like “computer” or “internet,” used and understood around the world. The word is “blockchain,” and VOA’s George Putic explains its meaning.
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A Hollywood actor originally from West Africa recently announced that he is an undocumented immigrant and a recipient of DACA. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, enacted under the Obama administration, allows undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as children to live and work legally, in what was meant to be a temporary solution. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the story of actor Bambadjan Bamba, and why he is revealing his immigration status now.
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PBS television suspended broadcasts of Tavis Smiley’s late-night talk show because of what it calls “troubling allegations” against him.
“The inquiry uncovered multiple credible allegations of conduct that is inconsistent with the values and standards of PBS,” a network statement said late Wednesday.
PBS did not specify the complaints against Smiley.
But the show business newspaper Variety says they include alleged sexual relations between Smiley and a number of female employees who say they believed their jobs depended on whether they had sex with him.
Variety says others described Smiley as verbally abusive and that he created a threatening work environment.
The host has not yet commented on the allegations.
Smiley’s Los Angeles-based interview series began in 2004 and airs on a number of public television stations.
He is the latest of a number of well-known celebrities who have been fired or suspended from their jobs because of allegations of sexual misconduct.
Alabama Republican Roy Moore’s loss in Tuesday’s special election to the U.S. Senate is believed to be in part because of charges that he dated and sexually molested teenage girls in the 1970s.
Two Democratic members of Congress, Senator Al Franken and Representative John Conyers, resigned last week over such charges.
A number of women have renewed charges first made last year that President Donald Trump sexually harassed them in the 1970s, leading to calls from some in Congress for an investigation or that he resign.
Sexual misconduct charges cost television hosts Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose their jobs, and actor Kevin Spacey and comedian Louis C.K. have also been accused of inappropriate behavior.
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Microsoft on Wednesday rolled out new features on its Bing search engine powered by artificial intelligence, including one that summarizes the two opposing sides of contentious questions, and another that measures how many reputable sources are behind a given answer.
Tired of delivering misleading information when their algorithms are gamed by trolls and purveyors of fake news, Microsoft and its tech-company rivals have been going out of their way to show they can be purveyors of good information — either by using better algorithms or hiring more human moderators.
Second-place search engine
Microsoft is also trying to distinguish its 2nd-place search engine from long-dominant Google and position itself as an innovator in finding real-world applications for the latest advances in artificial intelligence.
“As a search engine we have a responsibility to provide answers that are comprehensive and objective,” said Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for AI products.
Bing’s new capabilities are designed to give users more confidence that an answer is correct and save them time so they don’t have to click through multiple links to validate it themselves.
“You could be asking, ‘Is coffee good for you?’ We know that there are no good answers for that,” Ribas said. But the new search features side-by-side opposing perspectives. One source emphasizes coffee’s ability to increase metabolism and another shows it can raise blood pressure. Similar questions can also be asked on more sensitive topics, such as whether the death penalty is a good idea.
Digestible doses
On more complicated questions — is there a god? — Bing doesn’t have enough confidence to provide a pro-con perspective. But on questions that involve numbers, it boils information down into digestible doses. Iraq, for instance, is described as “about equal to the size of California.”
Search engines have evolved since Google took the lead at the turn of the 21st century, when rankings were based on “link analysis” that assigned credibility to sites based on how many other sites linked to them. As machines get better at reading and summarizing paragraphs, users expect not just a list of links but a quick and authoritative answer, said Harry Shum, who leads Microsoft’s 8,000-person research and AI division. To test its technology, the company has compared its machine-reading skills to the verbal score on the SAT.
“We are not at 800 yet, but we bypassed President Bush a long time ago,” Shum jokes.
Sophisticated searches
The demand for more sophisticated searches has also grown as people have moved from typing questions to voicing them on the road or in their kitchen.
“If you use Bing or Google nowadays you recognize that more and more often you’ll see direct answers on the top of search result pages,” Shum said. “We’re getting to the point that for probably about 10 percent of those queries we’ll see answers.”
Shum is hesitant to over-promise Bing’s new features as an antidote to the misinformation flooding the internet.
“At the end of the day, people have their own judgments,” he said.
The search engine features were announced along with updates to Microsoft’s voice assistant Cortana and a new search partnership with the popular online forum Reddit.
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One of the world’s rarest records has resurfaced — several vinyl copies of Prince’s “Black Album,” which the eccentric pop legend had demanded destroyed 30 years ago.
Recordmecca, a collector’s site owned by a former executive on Prince’s Warner Brothers label, on Wednesday was selling a coveted sealed vinyl copy of the album for $15,000.
The Purple Rain star, then at the height of his fame, in December 1987 sought to release music like no one had attempted before — sending it to stores completely secretly, without his name or any art on it.
Warner, with which he had legendary feuds, discouraged Prince but eventually relented and ordered the pressing of the vinyl — which has no actual title but was informally called the “Black Album” for its blank, dark cover.
But Prince soon afterward declared that he had a spiritual revelation that the album was “evil” and demanded the destruction of all copies.
Warner largely succeeded in seizing and destroying the more than 500,000 copies at their factories. But Recordmecca owner Jeff Gold, who worked with Prince at Warner, said he was recently contacted by a fellow former executive who came upon five copies.
Gold said that the executive, who requested anonymity, had been sending records to his own daughter, who had bought a first turntable amid vinyl’s rebirth.
Sifting through his collection, the executive discovered two envelopes distributed within Warner. Inside were five copies of the “Black Album.”
“For 30 years, the two mailers had sat unopened among their other boxed-up vinyl,” Gold wrote.
The former executive decided to sell three copies. Gold was offering one copy online, saying he already sold another one directly and would list the third one later.
Gold said he would attach certificates of authenticity.
Prince in late 1994 finally released the “Black Album” on limited-edition CDs and cassettes but not vinyl, making the record a holy grail for record collectors.
Prince resented Warner’s constraints and in the 1990s changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol in hopes of getting out of contractual conditions.
He finally made peace with Warner in 2014 in a deal that gave him control over his classic albums. He died two years later at his Paisley Park estate in Minnesota from an accidental overdose of painkillers.
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The White House said Wednesday the U.S. government needs a major overhaul of information technology systems and should take steps to better protect data and accelerate efforts to use cloud-based technology.
“Difficulties in agency prioritization of resources in support of IT modernization, ability to procure services quickly, and technical issues have resulted in an unwieldy and out-of-date federal IT infrastructure,” the White House said in a report.
The report outlined a timeline over the next year for IT reforms and a detailed implementation plan. The report said one unnamed cloud-based email provider has agreed to assist in keeping track of government spending on cloud-based email migration.
President Donald Trump in April signed an executive order creating a new technology council to overhaul the U.S. government’s information technology systems.
The report said the federal government must eliminate barriers to using commercial cloud-based technology. “Federal agencies must consolidate their IT investments and place more trust in services and infrastructure operated by others,” the report found. Government agencies often pay dramatically different prices for the same IT item, the report said, sometimes three or four times as much.
Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Corp’s Google and Intel Corp are making big investments in the fast-growing cloud computing business.
A 2016 U.S. Government Accountability Office report estimated the U.S. government spends more than $80 billion on IT annually but said spending has fallen by $7.3 billion since 2010.
In 2015, there were at least 7,000 separate IT investments by the U.S. government. The $80 billion figure does not include Defense Department classified IT systems and 58 independent executive branch agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency.
The GAO report said U.S. government IT investments “are becoming increasingly obsolete: many use outdated software languages and hardware parts that are unsupported.”
The GAO report found some agencies are using systems that have components that are at least 50 years old.
Agencies typically buy their own IT systems independently, the White House said Wednesday. A “lack of common standards and lack of coordination drives costly redundancies and inefficiencies.”
The White House said in June that most of the government’s 6,100 data centers can be consolidated and moved to a cloud-based storage system.
Various U.S. government systems have been the target of hacking and data breaches in recent years. In September, the Securities and Exchange Commission, America’s chief stock market regulator, said cybercriminals may have used data stolen last year.
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Actor Bambadjan Bamba may be on the verge of stardom because of his role in the upcoming comic book superhero film Black Panther. But lately, he has been making headlines by revealing a secret he has kept for many years.
“I’m a black immigrant … and I’m undocumented,” said Bamba who plays a military leader in Black Panther.
Bamba who has film and TV credits under his belt, said he was a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. An administrative program set up during the administration of former President Barack Obama, DACA gives undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as children temporary protection from deportation and lets them legally live and work in the country. But even with DACA protection, navigating Hollywood has been sometimes frustrating for Bamba.
“There were really a lot of opportunities missed because sometimes I get scripts and offers from outside the country, and I can’t go. Sometimes there are movies that are shooting in Canada, and I can’t even audition,” he said.
Even when an acting job comes his way, Bamba has found much of Hollywood to be unfamiliar with DACA.
“They’re like, ‘What is DACA?’ ” Then I tell them what DACA is. They’re like, ‘You know what, do you have a green card? Where is your passport?’ I’m like, I don’t have any of that. All I have is what the government requires for me to work legally,” Bamba said.
The decision to make his immigration status public comes with professional risks, but Bamba said not speaking out might be worse.
“I decided honestly to share my story when the [Trump] administration decided that they wanted to end DACA. I just knew that there were no other options for me — so either go out fighting or go out in fear.”
Bamba’s story
When Bamba was 10, his parents left their home in Ivory Coast in West Africa. The times were turbulent.
“When the first president passed away, the situation in Ivory Coast became very unpredictable, became a little crazy.” Bamba said. “The country was divided for a long time. There was a civil war. Thousands of people died. I had friends that died. I had family that died.”
The Bamba family moved to the South Bronx in New York City. He learned English by listening to hip-hop and watching television. He was a popular teenager in high school, known for his acting skills. His immigration status did not become an issue until it was time for college.
“So I started applying to different schools, and that’s when I found out that my financial aid didn’t get approved or doesn’t work out. So that’s when I had the conversation with my parents, and they kind of told me,” he said.
Bamba worked his way through college as a cabdriver in New York City, and eventually found work in Hollywood.
Trump, DACA and Hollywood
“You have some absolutely incredible kids, I would say, mostly,” President Donald Trump said in February in reference to DACA recipients, known informally as “Dreamers.” “They were brought here in such a way — it’s a very, very tough subject. We’re going to deal with DACA with heart.”
But in September, the president rescinded the DACA program and gave Congress until March to produce a legislative solution.
“Mr. President, you made a promise to the Dreamers. You told us that you will find a solution for us. So, we just want to hold you accountable to do that,” Bamba said.
A petition through the organization Define American asks Hollywood to support undocumented immigrants such as Bamba.
“I think Hollywood could do so much more just because of the power that we have in the media to shift the conversation.” Bamba continued, “[It is] the studios and the big production companies that I’m trying to encourage to have more skin in the game. You hire so many immigrants.”
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Iconic singer Nina Simone and New Jersey rockers Bon Jovi lead the 2018 class of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, which includes four first-time nominees.
The Cars, as well as first-time contenders Dire Straits, The Moody Blues and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, also are part of the 2018 class announced Wednesday. They will be inducted on April 14, in Cleveland, Ohio.
The six inductees were chosen from a group of 19 nominees, including Radiohead, who were expected to enter in the Rock Hall in their first year of eligibility, but didn’t make it.
Tharpe, a pioneering guitarist who performed gospel music and was known to some as “the godmother of rock ‘n’ roll,” will be inducted with the “Award for Early Influence.” She died in 1973. The other five acts will be inducted as performers.
The jazzy and soulful Simone, also a first-time nominee, was a leader in pushing for civil rights and influenced the likes of Alicia Keys and Aretha Franklin before her death in 2003.
The Cars, founded in Boston in 1976, combined New Wave and classic rock sounds. This year marked the band’s third nomination.
Bon Jovi, first nominated in 2011 and again this year, have sold more than 120 million albums and launched No. 1 hits with “Livin’ on a Prayer,” ”You Give Love a Bad Name,” ”Bad Medicine” and “I’ll Be There for You.”
Rock Hall voters have recently opened their hearts to progressive rockers, which benefited “Nights in White Satin” singers The Moody Blues. English rockers Dire Straits, which includes brothers Mark and David Knopfler, blended blues into their music.
Each year, between five and seven acts usually make it into the Rock Hall following a vote by 1,000 people, including performers, music historians and industry experts. Fans also were able to vote on the Rock Hall’s website. All of the inductees had to have released their first recording no later than 1992 to be eligible.
The 33rd annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony will be held at Public Auditorium. Tickets will go on sale in January and the event will later air on HBO and be heard on SiriusXM Radio.
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A new report finds growing levels of E-waste pose significant risks to the environment and human health and result in huge economic losses for countries around the world. Lisa Schlein reports for VOA from the launch of the International Telecommunication Union report in Geneva.
The global information society is racing ahead at top speed. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) reports nearly half of the world uses the internet and most people have access to mobile phones, laptops, televisions, refrigerators and other electronic devices.
But ITU E-waste Technical Expert, Vanessa Gray, said the ever-increasing expansion of technology is creating staggering amounts of electronic waste.
“In 2016, the world generated a total of 44.7 million metric tons of e-waste—that is, electronic and electrical equipment that is discarded,” Gray said. “So, that basically everything that runs on a plug or on a battery. This is equivalent to about 4,500 Eiffel Towers for the year.”
The report found Asia generates the greatest amounts of E-waste, followed by Europe and the Americas. Africa and Oceania produce the least.
Gray warned improper and unsafe treatment and disposal of e-waste pose significant risks to the environment and human health. She noted that low recycling rates also result in important economic losses, because high value materials – including gold, silver, copper – are not recovered.
“We estimate that the value of recoverable material contained in the 2016 e-waste is no less than $55 billion US, which is actually more than the Gross Domestic Product in many of the world’s countries,” Gray said.
The report calls for the development of proper legislation to manage e-waste. It says a growing number of countries are moving in that direction. Currently, it says 66 percent of the world population, living in 67 countries, is covered by national e-waste management laws.
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‘Food Fraud’ costs the food and beverage industry an estimated $30 billion every year. Food fraud is the deliberate substitution or misrepresentation of food products for economic gain. It can be as harmless as selling watered down olive oil, or as dangerous as substituting starch or plastic for rice. But a new laser test developed in Italy can spot the fakes with incredible accuracy. VOAs’ Kevin Enochs reports.
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Every year hundreds of the most famous names in high tech gather on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or M.I.T, for the EmTech Conference, an opportunity to discover future trends in technology that will drive the new global economy. This report by VOA Russsian Service reporter Evgeny Maslov is narrated by Bob Leverone.
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Director Sebastian Lelio feels that A Fantastic Woman has gone beyond the cinematic experience with its social message, to a great extent thanks to the performance of its star, Daniela Vega.
The film follows Marina, a transgender woman who, after the passing of her older lover, is mistreated by his family and the police officers investigating his death. It is Chile’s selection for the Academy Awards and on Monday was nominated for a Golden Globe Award in the best foreign film category.
“I am very proud of Daniela, of how she faced the challenge of a movie that not only meant an absolute leading role … that goes through an emotional spectrum, but that in addition flies, faces windstorms, sings two operatic arias. In short, it’s a polytonal role of great complexity and she … didn’t have much experience, so it was an all-or-nothing betting,” Lelio told The Associated Press in a phone interview shortly after the Globes nominations were announced.
“It was very beautiful to see how she gave herself completely and played this character with such complexity and beauty,” he added about Vega, whose performance has received Oscars buzz. If she is nominated next month, it would be the first Oscar nomination for a transgender actress.
“Somehow Daniela’s presence and the power that her body brings are the heart of the movie and it has been very nice and exciting to witness how she has become a voice not only of the movie but a sort of symbol of everything that is fragile, cornered,” said Lelio. “In some ways this is when cinema surpasses cinema and gets in the social fabric, and that is very powerful.”
A winner in Berlin
A Fantastic Woman debuted last February at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Teddy Award for best feature film as well as the Silver Bear for its screenplay, written by Lelio and Gonzalo Maza. Among other honors, it has also been nominated at the Independent Spirit Awards.
Lelio is in Los Angeles filming an English version of his acclaimed 2013 film Gloria, starring Oscar-winner Julianne Moore.
“It has been very exciting to be able to revisit what’s universal in the story and see a performer as powerful as Julianne Moore playing this role,” he said.
For now, he is savoring the Globes nomination, where A Fantastic Woman will compete against Angelina Jolie’s First They Killed My Father (Cambodia), In the Fade (Germany/France), Loveless (Russia) and The Square (Sweden/Germany/France).
“It’s a joy for the team, for everyone who made this movie, to be among this select group of such powerful movies that have been selected,” the director said.
As for Vega, he said: “I spoke to her this morning and she was very happy with the news. She is already getting her dress.”
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Seven-year-old Brooklynn Prince is sitting in a darkened TV studio with lights, cameras and control panels all around her. “Mission to Mars, mission to Mars,” she says. “This is Apollo.”
Brooklynn, the cheerful star of “The Florida Project,” has indeed lifted off. Her performance as Moonee, a brash, trouble-making pipsqueak living with her mom (Bria Vinaite) in a low-rent Orlando motel, may be the most spirited thing of 2017. Brooklynn is the exuberant energy at the center of one the year’s most acclaimed films, and some believe she should be the youngest Oscar nominee ever. Brooklynn included.
“I really want to be nominated,” she says. “Even if I get close to nominated, that’s a real honor.”
But she’d also — maybe even more so — really like to meet Emma Watson and Elle Fanning.
“They have been my girls for years,” she says.
None of the year’s breakthrough performers has enjoyed their moment more than Brooklyn. She has shot a selfie with Gary Oldman, shaken hands with Adam Sandler and met Margot Robbie, whom she confirms was “super-duper nice.”
“I never thought I would have this chance,” Brooklynn says. “It’s this crazy little movie that’s everywhere.”
She has Instagramed, Snapchatted and tweeted her adventures, from the Cannes Film Festival to the recent Gotham Awards, by borrowing her parents’ phones. She carries pins for homeless awareness with her to give away as a way to magnify the message of “The Florida Project.”
“I’ve always said: It doesn’t matter how small you are or what age you are to change the world. You can get into the business anytime. I was two when I got into the business,” says Brooklynn, the veteran. “Now I know that this is really what I want. My mom and dad aren’t pushing me for this. It’s what I want. Acting is, like, my life and I want to keep doing it forever.”
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“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” won warm reviews from most critics on Tuesday, a day before the latest installment in the sci-fi saga begins hitting movie theaters worldwide in what is projected to be the biggest-grossing movie of 2017.
The Walt Disney Co. movie received four or five stars from most reviewers, along with praise for its energy and emotion. “The Last Jedi” scored a 94 percent “fresh” rating on aggregator site RottenTomatoes.com.
The film, arriving in movie theaters from Dec. 13, picks up from 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” which took in more than $2 billion at the global box office to become the third-biggest-grossing movie of all time.
Written and directed by Rian Johnson, “The Last Jedi” kicks off with the Resistance fighting Supreme Leader Snoke’s First Order, which is trying to take control of the galaxy.
The movie features the final appearance of Carrie Fisher, who plays the franchise’s Princess Leia. The actress died at age 60 last December, weeks after completing filming.
Numerous critics including The Hollywood Reporter felt that at 2-1/2 hours, the movie’s run time was a little too long. But the Hollywood Reporter added, “there’s a pervasive freshness and enthusiasm to Johnson’s approach that keeps the film, and with it the franchise, alive, and that is no doubt what matters most.”
The London Times newspaper deemed it the best “Star Wars” movie yet, calling it a “film of wit and wonder, of eye-gouging visual spectacle, and one that is buttressed by entirely unexpected, and frequently devastating, emotional power.”
Entertainment Weekly said “The Last Jedi” was a “triumph with flaws,” while USA Today said it was “a stellar entry” in the “Star Wars” franchise.
The Washington Post praised the film’s “irreverent humor and worshipful love for the original text.”
Variety was among a handful of less enthusiastic reviews, calling the film “ultimately a disappointment.” CNN said “Last Jedi” felt “like a significant letdown, one that does far less than its predecessor to stoke enthusiasm for the next leg in the trilogy.”
Before the reviews were out, Boxoffice.com projected that “Last Jedi” would haul in $185 million to $215 million in North America in its first weekend, which would rank as one of the biggest film debuts in history.
Disney said in November that Johnson will oversee a new trilogy of “Star Wars” films that will not follow the Skywalker saga, which George Lucas kicked off in 1977.
Russia’s Olympic Committee agreed on Tuesday to support its athletes who choose to compete in next year’s Winter Games in South Korea as neutrals following a ban on the Russian national team.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) last week banned Russia from the Games, due to take place in Pyeongchang in February, for what it called “unprecedented systematic manipulation” of the anti-doping system.
But it left the door open for Russian athletes with a clean history of non-doping to be invited to compete as neutrals under an Olympic flag, not a Russian one.
President Vladimir Putin said last week Russia would not prevent its athletes from competing, dismissing calls by some for a boycott, and a Russian Olympic official said on Monday most Russian athletes still wanted to attend.
The Russian committee (ROC) agreed on its position at a meeting on Tuesday attended by sporting figures including the national men’s hockey team, figure skaters, speed skaters and the presidents of winter sports federations.
“All the participants were of the same opinion — our sportsmen need to go to Korea, need to compete, achieve victory for the glory of Russia, for the glory of our motherland,” ROC President Alexander Zhukov said.
Zhukov said Russia would do its best to support Russian athletes competing under a neutral flag and hold serious talks with the IOC in the near future to discuss the problems and practicalities of the arrangement.
He did not say what form this support would take.
“Russian sportsmen have stated their readiness to take part in the Olympic Games, despite the difficult conditions and decision of the IOC, which is undoubtedly unfair in many ways,” he said.
Zhukov added that Russia would also support the athletes who had decided not to compete in Pyeongchang.
Senior Russian Olympic official Vitaly Smirnov, who heads Russia’s state-backed anti-doping commission, said the country had made the “right decision” not to boycott.
“A boycott is not a solution,” Smirnov said. “That [would mean] new sanctions and problems for our athletes.”
In recent weeks, more than 30 Russian athletes who competed at the 2014 Sochi Games have been banned for life from the Olympics for allegedly breaching anti-doping rules.
And the IOC slapped lifetime bans on six Russian female ice hockey players a few hours after the Russian announcement Tuesday.
Russian authorities have vehemently denied any state support for doping and have pledged to cooperate with international sports bodies to counter the use of banned performance-enhancing drugs.
Russia’s athletics federation, paralympic committee and anti-doping agency RUSADA remain suspended over doping scandals.
‘Olympic Athlete from Russia’
Sitting in the front row of the Russian Olympic Committee auditorium ahead of the meeting, hockey star Ilya Kovalchuk said he would not mind competing at the Games as an “Olympic Athlete from Russia,” the term the IOC uses to designate the Russians who will go to Pyeongchang.
“We are athletes from Russia, after all,” Kovalchuk told reporters. “They took the flag away but they can’t take away our honor and our conscience.”
Kovalchuk, one of the first to call for athletes to compete in Pyeongchang after the IOC ban, thanked authorities for taking the opinions of athletes into consideration.
“Thank you for having heard us, for having believed us,” Kovalchuk said. “I think that every athlete who takes part in the Olympic Games in Pyeonchang will do everything possible.”
Olympic fencer Sofya Velikaya, chair of the ROC’s athletes commission, called on the Russian public to respect athletes’ decisions to go to Pyeongchang amid concerns that some could be branded traitors for agreeing to compete without the country’s flag.
“The athletes will show their love for their motherland and their patriotism through their results, through their accomplishments and medals,” Velikaya said.
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President Donald Trump signed into law on Tuesday legislation that bans the use of Kaspersky Lab within the U.S. government, capping a months-long effort to purge the Moscow-based antivirus firm from federal agencies amid concerns it was vulnerable to Kremlin influence.
The ban, included as part of broader defense policy spending legislation that Trump signed, reinforces a directive issued by the Trump administration in September that civilian agencies remove Kaspersky Lab software within 90 days. The law applies to both civilian and military networks.
“The case against Kaspersky is well-documented and deeply concerning. This law is long overdue,” said Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who led calls in Congress to scrub the software from government computers. She added that the company’s software represented a “grave risk” to U.S. national security.
Kaspersky Lab has repeatedly denied that it has ties to any government and said it would not help a government with cyber espionage. In an attempt to address suspicions, the company said in October it would submit the source code of its software and future updates for inspection by independent parties.
U.S. officials have said that step, while welcomed, would not be sufficient.
In a statement on Tuesday, Kaspersky Lab said it continued to have “serious concerns” about the law “due to its geographic-specific approach to cybersecurity.”
It added that the company was assessing its options and would continue to “protect its customers from cyber threats (while) collaborating globally with the IT security community to fight cybercrime.”
On Tuesday, Christopher Krebs, a senior cyber security official at the Department of Homeland Security, told reporters that nearly all government agencies had fully removed Kaspersky products from their networks in compliance with the September order.
Kaspersky’ official response to the ban did not appear to contain any information that would change the administration’s assessment of Kaspersky Lab, Krebs said.
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A major U.S. electronic retailer says it wants to help immigrant and underprivileged teens gain the technology skills they’ll need for the job market.
Best Buy, in partnership with a local nongovernmental organization known as the Brian Coyle Center, has opened a tech center in Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside area. The center provides after-school computer classes for teens in the area, many of whom come from East African immigrant families.
The company plans to open 60 such centers nationwide by 2020. Trish Walker, the president of service for Best Buy, said the aim is to train a million teens each year to help them be prepared for tech-related jobs.
“Here, teens can learn so many skills, from coding to web programming, music production, 3-D design, editing, fashion design, getting leadership skills, entrepreneurship, mentoring from others,” Walker said at the opening ceremony for the center. “Great stuff to be able to prepare the teens for workforce for the future. Eighty percent of the future [jobs] are tech-related.”
Hamza Nur is a Somali youth who spent four years learning at the first Minneapolis-area Best Buy tech center, where he learned how to digitally edit and draw.
“I learned so much, and am grateful,” Nur said at the ceremony. “I think this is a great idea that we can all learn from. I think the idea of tech center is pretty great one, because it lets all the youth of Cedar have a great experience with technology.”
Abdirahman Mukhtar, the youth program director at the Brian Coyle Center, says the center gives young people a positive outlet through which to channel their energy, and it helps to keep them away from drugs and gangs, which have been recurring problems in the area.
“The time of the program is after-school time, and it’s [then] that a youth has free time and can commit negative habits,” he told VOA’s Somali service.
Minneapolis is home to the United States’ largest communities of Somali and East African immigrants, most of whom came to the U.S. because of armed conflicts in their home countries.
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A reality TV show that celebrates honest civil servants in corruption-plagued countries has grown to reach new audiences in Mali and Liberia and aims to enlist the public’s help in fighting graft, the organizers said.
Integrity Idol asks the public to nominate model civil servants and then vote for their favorite by text message after the finalists appear on national TV and radio.
The show launched in Nepal in 2014 and has since spread to Pakistan, Nigeria, Mali and Liberia.
In finals this weekend in the West African nations of Liberia and Mali, a nursing instructor and a teacher were voted the winners from among thousands of nominees.
“There are lots of challenges to being a person of integrity in Liberia,” said winner Rebecca Scotland, a nursing teacher in Liberia’s capital Monrovia.
Corruption is so common in Liberia and across the region that patients even bribe nurses to ensure they receive the proper medicine and care, she said.
“Sometimes my colleagues push me away because I have integrity. They say I am hard to deal with, that I won’t change,” she said in an interview with Integrity Idol.
She plans to create a network with other winners to boost honesty and transparency in the public sector, she told Reuters following the award.
Liberia is in the midst of an election to replace President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf that has been delayed by allegations of fraud. The Supreme Court cleared it for a runoff last week.
The country ranked 90th out of 176 countries on watchdog Transparency International’s global corruption perception index last year, while Mali ranked 116th.
In Mali, politicians are sometimes arrested for graft but avoid penalties because the judges are also corrupt, said Moussa Kondo, who launched Integrity Idol there last year.
“We want to show young generations that there’s another way to become famous, without getting rich,” he told Reuters.
Mali’s winner Mahamane Mahamane Baba teaches at a public high school in Timbuktu and organizes literacy classes in his free time.
The show has grown quickly in both countries, said its organizers at U.S.-based organization Accountability Lab.
In Mali, people made 3,011 nominations for Integrity Idol this year compared to 2,850 last year, said Kondo.
Liberians submitted 4,689 nominations this year, more than three times the number when the show started in 2015, while the reach of the campaign through radio and TV stations has grown eight-fold to over 4 million people.
“Especially given the difficult situation with electoral politics at the moment, it is inspiring to see so many people discussing and voting for government officials with integrity,” said Lawrence Yealue, director of Liberia’s Accountability Lab.
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Social media giant Facebook said on Tuesday it would start booking advertising revenue locally instead of re-routing it via its international headquarters in Dublin although the move is unlikely to result in it paying much more tax.
Corporate taxation has become a hot-button topic in the wake of revelations of tax avoidance schemes by multinationals which have led to calls for companies to pay more tax while Europe has begun exploring options for taxing digital giants.
Facebook Chief Financial Officer Dave Wehner said the company had decided to move to a local selling structure in countries where it has an office to support sales to local advertisers.
“In simple terms, this means that advertising revenue supported by our local teams will no longer be recorded by our international headquarters in Dublin, but will instead be recorded by our local company in that country,” Wehner said in a blog post.
Tuesday’s announcement follows Facebook’s April 2016 shift to recording revenues from its large U.K. sales customers in Britain which resulted in an increase in the tax it paid.
“We believe that moving to a local selling structure will provide more transparency to governments and policy makers around the world who have called for greater visibility over the revenue associated with locally-supported sales in their countries,” Wehner said.
The European Commission is working on legislative proposals, expected in March, to increase taxes on multinational digital companies, who are accused of paying too little in the EU by booking profits in low-tax countries where they have their EU headquarters, like Ireland and Luxembourg.
Among the options the EU executive is considering to raise taxes quickly on tech giants is a levy on revenues from advertising, according to an EU document published in September.
Other short-term options are a tax on turnovers of digital firms and a withholding tax on electronic transactions. Wehner said Facebook would implement the change throughout 2018 and aim to complete it by the first half of 2019.
Facebook’s recent experience in Britain suggests that the move will not lead to the company paying significantly more in tax.
Facebook reported a dramatic rise in revenues and profits reported in the UK for 2016 and had a 2.5 million pound ($3.34 million) tax bill against racking up tax credits in previous years.
However, while the change did lead to an increase in the tax it paid, Facebook still enjoyed a low effective tax rate.
That’s because, even with this measure, Facebook declares relatively little profit in Britain. It reported a profit margin of under 7 percent for 2016 in Britain, compared to a group wide margin of around 45 percent for the year.
Much of the profit linked to U.K. sales is reported elsewhere are a result of inter-group transactions worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
($1 = 0.7491 pounds)
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