“The Outfit,” a film noir by Academy Award winning writer Graham Moore, tells a fictional story of an expert tailor who finds himself caught up in a turf war among dangerous gangsters in 1950s Chicago. Moore, who won an Oscar for the film drama “The Imitation Game,” spoke to VOA’s Penelope Poulou about his interest in the characters in the film and how “The Outfit” resonates with today’s grim realities.
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Musher Brent Sass won the arduous Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race across Alaska on Tuesday as his team of 11 dogs dashed off the Bering Sea ice through a crowd of fans in downtown Nome.
Sass mushed down Front Street and across the finish line just before 6 a.m.
“It’s awesome, it’s a dream come true,” Sass said before he was presented the prize-winning check of $50,000, his beard and mustache partially encased in ice during the post-race interview.
“When I started mushing, my goal was to win the Yukon Quest and win the Iditarod. Checked them both off the list now,” he said.
Sass said he was “super, super, super proud” of his dog team. “It’s all on them. They did an excellent job the whole race. I asked a lot of them, and they preformed perfectly,” he said.
“Every one of these dogs I’ve raised since puppies, and we’ve been working towards this goal the whole time, and we’re here,” he said, his voice cracking. “It’s crazy.”
Fans lined the street welcoming the popular musher, who was escorted by police for the final few blocks to the famous burled arch that marked his victory.
It’s the first Iditarod win for Sass, a wilderness guide and kennel owner who was running in his seventh Iditarod. His previous best finish was third last year.
Sass took command of this year’s race early on and never was challenged, but the final stretch of the race might have been the toughest, with extreme winds blowing on the Bering Sea ice leading into Nome.
“I had to make it very interesting at the end,” Sass said.
At one point during the last few miles of the race, he took a tumble, and the sled went off the trail. He thought he was going to have to hunker down, stopping with his dogs to wait until the weather improved.
“I couldn’t see anything,” he said. “The dogs, the only reason we got out of there is because they trusted me to get them back to the trail. And once we got back to the trail, they just took off a hundred miles an hour again, and we were able to stay on the trail and get in here. It was a lot of work,” he said.
The 42-year-old native of Minnesota who moved north in 1998 to ski for the University of Alaska Fairbanks had about a 90 minute lead over the defending champion, Dallas Seavey, early Tuesday as he left the last checkpoint in Safety, which is 22 miles (35 kilometers) from Nome.
Seavey is tied with musher Rick Swenson for the most Iditarod wins ever at 5. Seavey earlier told The Associated Press that he was planning to take some time off after the race to spend with his daughter whether he won or lost it.
Sass said Seavey is “the best right now and being able to to sort of keep him at bay the whole entire race and and race against the best guy in the business, that just makes this victory even sweeter.”
Seavey toward the end of the race said he was resigned to runner-up status, telling KTUU-TV at the checkpoint in White Mountain that he couldn’t win unless something went wrong for Sass.
Seavey joked: “We’ve got a pretty solid lead over third.”
The third place musher, Jessie Holmes, was about 50 miles (80 kilometers) behind Seavey on Tuesday.
The nearly 1,000-mile (1,609-kilometer) race across Alaska began March 6 just north of Anchorage. The route took mushers along Alaska’s untamed and unforgiving wilderness, including two mountain ranges, the frozen Yukon River and Bering Sea ice along the state’s western coastline.
This is the 50th running of the race, which started in 1973. This year’s event began with 49 mushers, and five have dropped out along the trail.
Sass was the Iditarod’s rookie of the year in 2012 when he finished 13th. The next year he fell back to 22nd place, before skipping the 2014 race.
In 2015 he was disqualified when race officials found he had an iPod Touch with him on the trail, a violation of race rules banning two-way communication devices because the iPod Touch could connect to the Internet. He said he was clueless, and wanted his fans to know he had no intention of cheating.
Sass placed 16th the following year before taking a three-year break from the Iditarod. In 2020, he placed fourth and was third last year.
Sass, who lives in the tiny area of Eureka, about a four-hour drive northwest of Fairbanks, had more success in the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race.
He claimed titles in that 1,000-mile (1,609-kilometer) race between Fairbanks and Whitehorse, Yukon, in 2015, 2019 and 2020. This year, the race was shortened to smaller races on both sides of the border, with Sass winning both the 350-mile (563-kilometer) Alaska race and the 300-mile (483-kilometer) Canadian contest.
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Clarissa Ward interrupted her live TV report on Ukrainian refugees to help a distraught older man, then a woman, down a steep and explosion-mangled path, gently urging them on in their language.
A day later, Lynsey Addario, a photographer for The New York Times, captured a grim image of a Russian mortar attack’s immediate outcome: the bodies of a mother and her two children crumpled on a road, amid their suitcase, backpacks and a pet carrier.
The memorable reports illustrate both the skill and gutsiness of female journalists serving as eyewitnesses to Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and the way their presence — hard-won after overcoming ingrained notions of why women shouldn’t cover combat — has changed the nature of war reporting.
They cover the tactics of war but give equal measure to its toll.
“People are so exhausted, they can barely walk,” Ward told viewers in her report. “It’s just an awful, awful scene. And they’re the lucky ones.”
The author of “You Don’t Belong Here,” a 2021 book that profiles three pioneering women who covered the Vietnam War, said there’s “absolutely no doubt that the reporting is what I would call more humane, looking at the human side of war.”
Elizabeth Becker argues that Frances FitzGerald of the U.S., Kate Webb of Australia and Catherine Leroy of France were foundational to modern war reporting. Arriving in Southeast Asia on their own dime, without a staff job and little or no journalism experience, they broke the male grip on war reporting with daring and innovation.
Traditionally, “the coverage was the battlefield, which is important,” said award-winning journalist Becker, a 1970s Cambodian war correspondent. She said it took newcomer FitzGerald to ask, “‘OK, what does this mean in terms of the Vietnamese and the villages?'”
FitzGerald earned a 1973 Pulitzer and other honors for “Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam,” and her 2017 work, “The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America,” was short-listed for the National Book Award.
In major 20th-century conflicts before Vietnam, including World War II and the Korean War, women faced military obstacles and professional bias. Reporter-novelist Martha Gellhorn famously stowed away on a hospital ship to cover the WWII D-Day landing in France after she and other female journalists were denied frontline access.
Newspaper reporter Marguerite Higgins, who had covered WWII, was ordered out of Korea by a U.S. officer when war broke out in 1950, a decision she successfully appealed to Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Higgins earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1951 for her acclaimed reporting, with the jury noting she was “entitled to special consideration by reason of being a woman, since she had to work under unusual dangers.”
Women went on to excel in reporting on the Vietnam War, including Edith M. Lederer of The Associated Press, who was the first woman assigned full-time to its staff there and is now AP’s chief United Nations correspondent. Their numbers increased in subsequent conflicts, including Ukraine — where newspapers, online sites and other media outlets are well-represented by female reporters, known by name if not by their on-camera reporting.
War reporting is “a sense of mission, it’s a sense of purpose, it’s a sense of being able to tell a story,” said Christiane Amanpour, the London-born chief international anchor for CNN. “And women are really very good at it, it seems.”
It’s also a matter of logic, said Holly Williams, the Istanbul-based correspondent for CBS News on assignment in Ukraine.
“I’m acutely aware of the fact that if you don’t tell women’s stories, you’re missing at least half of the picture,” said the Australian-born Williams, who has reported on conflicts in Asia, Europe and the Middle East and worked for BBC News.
Ward, who also has hopscotched across those regions, worked for CBS News prior to joining CNN and, before that, was based in Moscow and Beijing for ABC News.
“Often women do have a different perspective on war, and for a long time that was not really at the forefront of a lot of coverage,” Ward said. She strives to include “the humanity behind the story, the experience of ordinary people who are living in war zones. To me, that is equally as important as the military component.”
The prominence of TV correspondents and the reach of their outlets adds to their impact. Oprah Winfrey offered online praise of network reporters “risking their lives to show the world the truth,” singling out Ward as a “fierce, unshakable and outstanding journalist.”
Many of their male colleagues also contribute nuanced reporting, as ABC News veteran Martha Raddatz and others noted. But Raddatz recalls a not-so-distant time when men tended to “love the equipment, love the airplanes.”
Ward and other female journalists tip their cap to their predecessors, including FitzGerald and the late Martha Gellhorn, whose reporting stretched from WWII to the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989-90. They also praise recent trailblazers, including Amanpour.
Her decades of conflict reporting include the 1991 Gulf War, subsequent clashes in the Middle East region and, in southeastern Europe, the deadly 1992-96 siege of Sarajevo during the war between Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“I think my generation and myself, we were perhaps the last line of the rare woman foreign correspondent,” Amanpour said. In every form of media it’s “exploded into a very female friendly profession.”
But parity has yet to be achieved in pay, Amanpour said. Or in all journalism jobs, according to Ward.
The growing number of female TV correspondents belies “a fairly male-dominated profession in general,” Ward said. “Don’t forget, the person in front of the camera is one person. Then you have, for TV, four people holding the camera, behind the camera, and most of them are still men.”
In journalism overall, men retain a numerical advantage over women even in a changing media industry. according to “The Missing Perspectives of Women in News,” a 2020 report from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Despite progress, “the majority of journalists in newsrooms globally are men,” the report said, citing several multi-country studies.
Female reporters face additional challenges in non-democratic countries and some regions, Amanpour said.
“They come under a huge amount of societal pressure in many parts of the developing world, and certainly in the Islamic world and other areas of what I call the patriarchy,” she said. “It’s very difficult, but they’re doing it and coming out into this profession more and more, and I really applaud them.”
The presence of women reporting in Ukraine is set against a backdrop of traditional roles and expectations, with women and children allowed to flee war’s violence while men are required to stay behind and defend their country.
Yonat Friling, a Jerusalem-based senior producer for Fox News Channel who worked in Ukraine with correspondent Trey Yingst, is aware of how attitudes can vary. In 2004, she was on the international desk for an Israeli TV channel when she asked her boss to switch her to field producer.
“He told me, ‘This is a job for men. Only men can do that,'” recalled the Israeli native. “Then I left, I joined Fox (in 2005). And on several occasions, including this time, I keep texting him, ‘A job for men? Yeah, right.'”
The Ukraine assignment proved deeply emotional for Friling. When she recently joined the stream of refugees leaving Kyiv, it was a reminder of grandparents who fled Nazism and Soviet occupiers in Europe in the 1940s.
“I saw children and women, and I (saw) my grandparents in their faces. … I know how much this is going to influence their whole life and the next generations,” she said.
Raddatz, who covered early refugee evacuations and returned to Ukraine on Friday, realizes how much has changed for her and her female colleagues over the years. The chief global affairs correspondent for ABC News covered the Bosnian crisis in the late 1990s and has focused on Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I remember in Iraq, I always thought that if something happened to me, it (the reaction) would be, ‘How could she do that, go over there when she has two children?’ whereas they would never say that with a guy,” she said. “Now, I don’t think they would do that.”
Family needs and concerns add to the burden of war reporting.
NBC News correspondent Erin McLaughlin said that before Russia struck at Ukraine, the threat of what might happen made her parents worry more than they had over her previous assignments, including in Iraq.
“My brother went to stay with them for the weekend because they were so nervous,” McLaughlin said. “It was really tough, but at the same time they understand that this is my calling. It’s an important job, and someone needs to do it.”
Ward, married and with two children, said her work takes an inevitable toll.
“It’s my son’s 4th birthday today, which has been really hard to miss,” Ward said at the end of another draining day in Ukraine, her voice emotional. “There’s the entire juggling act — you’re FaceTiming with your kids and there’s air raid sirens and bombs going off in the distance.”
“I’m not going to pretend this isn’t hard. But I also wouldn’t be anywhere else right now,” she said.
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Facebook owner Meta Platforms FB.O will help train Australian political candidates on aspects of cyber security and coach influencers to stop the spread of misinformation in a bid to boost the integrity of an upcoming election, it said on Tuesday.
Australia has not yet set a date for its next election, which is due by May. Authorities are already on high alert for electoral interference, having previously highlighted foreign interference attempts aimed at all levels of government and targeting both sides of politics.
“We’ll stay vigilant to emerging threats and take additional steps, if necessary, to prevent abuse on our platform while also empowering people in Australia to use their voice by voting,” Josh Machin, the company’s Australian chief of public policy, said in a statement that is to be posted online.
The social media giant added that it had drafted in a university to help with fact-checking operations in Australia and would require disclosure of the names of those paying for election-related advertisements, in what it called its most comprehensive election strategy.
The steps show how social media firms are seeking to combat online distortion and abuse of information during the lead-up to an election, a time when such efforts are typically at their most heated.
The Facebook Protect security program for high-profile individuals launched in Australia in December, with the company vowing to work with election officials and political parties to offer training for candidates on its policies and tools and ways to keep safe.
To avert hacking, it will prompt candidates to upgrade security to two-factor authentication. The company said it would also coach influencers, or those who earn advertising income from online commentary, to spot fake news.
People seeking to run election-related ads will need to furnish government-issued identification, as well as mandatory disclosures of funding sources for them, it said.
Ads by unauthorized parties, without funding disclosure, would be taken down and stored in a public archive for seven years, it added.
RMIT University, which joined Meta’s third-party fact-checking effort, said it would review posts the company identified as potential misinformation and try to verify them via interviews with primary sources and checks of public data.
“A continuing focus of our work is to identify the super spreaders of misinformation and the ecosystems in which they operate,” said RMIT FactLab Director Russell Skelton in a statement. “High impact misinformation disrupts evidence-based public policy and debate and so it is crucial we gain a better understanding of what drives this.”
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Leon Schwarzbaum, a survivor of the Nazis’ death camp at Auschwitz and a lifelong fighter for justice for the victims of the Holocaust, has died. He was 101.
Schwarzbaum died early Monday in Potsdam near Berlin, the International Auschwitz Committee reported on its website. No cause of death was given.
“It is with great sadness, respect and gratitude that Holocaust survivors around the world bid farewell to their friend, fellow sufferer and companion Leon Schwarzbaum, who in the last decades of his life became one of the most important contemporary witnesses of the Shoah,” the committee said.
Schwarzbaum was the only one of his family to survive the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and a subcamp Sachsenhausen, the Auschwitz committee said.
He became known to a wider audience when film director Hans Erich Viet made a movie in 2018 about his life. “The Last of the Jolly Boys” was shot with Schwarzbaum himself at original locations.
Schwarzbaum was born in 1921 to a Polish-Jewish family in Hamburg in northern Germany. He grew up in Bedzin, Poland, from where the family was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 after the ghetto there was dissolved.
After the war, he lived in Berlin for many years where he worked as an art and antiques dealer. He was married twice, but had no children, daily newspaper Bild reported.
Well into his 90s, Schwarzbaum still appeared on German television to speak about the unbearable sufferings he lived through at Auschwitz and the other concentration camps he was deported to. He also visited schools in Germany regularly to tell the children about his life.
“Especially in his last years, Leon Schwarzbaum was driven again and again by the urge to remember his parents who were murdered in Auschwitz and all the other victims of the Holocaust. He spoke on their behalf,” said Christoph Heubner, the Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee.
“But he was also driven by his anger at the fact that so few SS perpetrators ever saw the inside of a German courtroom,” Heubner added, referring to the Nazis’ brutal paramilitary organization.
In 2016, he gave testimony at the trial against former Auschwitz death guard Reinhold Hanning in Germany.
In an 2019 interview with the Associated Press at his Berlin apartment, which was covered with paintings and old back-and-white pictures of his 35 relatives who perished in the Holocaust, Schwarzbaum expressed deep worry about the reemergence of antisemitism across Europe.
“If things get worse, I would not want to live through such times again,” he said. “I would immigrate to Israel right away.”
In a letter of condolence to Schwarzbaum’s widow, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that “we are losing a wonderful human being and an important eyewitness to history.”
“Leon Schwarzbaum experienced himself what it means when a criminal regime suspends human rights and human dignity,” Steinmeier said, praising him for testifying about “Germany’s darkest period” after the war and warning about the dangers of far-right extremism and xenophobia.
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American actor William Hurt, known for much-loved films such as “The Big Chill” and “A History of Violence,” has died at age 71, US media reported Sunday.
Multiple outlets cited Hurt’s son, Will, who said in a statement: “It is with great sadness that the Hurt family mourns the passing of William Hurt, beloved father and Oscar winning actor, on March 13, 2022, one week before his 72nd birthday. He died peacefully, among family, of natural causes.”
The actor had been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer in May 2018, but his son’s statement did not specify whether the disease contributed to Hurt’s passing.
Hurt built his reputation on his willingness to play quirky and unusual characters such as a Russian police officer in “Gorky Park” (1983), a wealthy and aloof husband in Woody Allen’s “Alice” (1990) and a man seeking to build a machine that would benefit blind people in “Until the End of the World” (1991).
His first film role was as an obsessed scientist in Ken Russell’s 1980 film “Altered States.” Appearing opposite Kathleen Turner in “Body Heat” in 1981 turned him into a sex symbol, and he won the best actor Oscar in 1985 for playing a gay prisoner in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”
Hurt was also nominated for Oscars as a teacher of deaf students in “Children of a Lesser God” (1986) and as a slow-witted television anchorman in “Broadcast News” (1987).
For his second Academy Award, Hurt played a Philadelphia mobster in David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence.” He appears in the film for only about 10 minutes, but he made a huge impact with critics, who praised his “creepy” and “funny” character.
In recent years, Hurt made himself known to younger moviegoers through his turn in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Thaddeus Ross, a blustering general who was present on the day Bruce Banner became the Hulk.
In addition to “The Incredible Hulk,” Hurt’s character appeared in four Marvel films including “Captain America: Civil War,” “Avengers: Infinity War,” “Avengers: Endgame” and “Black Widow.”
Hurt was born March 20, 1950 in Washington, DC, but as his father was a U.S. diplomat, he traveled widely as a child.
After his parents divorced, his mother married Henry Luce III, the heir to the Time-Life empire, and moved to New York.
Hurt stayed close by, studying theology at Tufts University before enrolling at the renowned Juilliard School of performing arts in New York.
Despite his spreading fame, Hurt did not settle in Hollywood but set up his home in Oregon. In interviews, he had shown he was uneasy with stardom.
“I’m not comfortable with all this. I’m not comfortable with walking the red carpet in a tuxedo and seeing all the women with their boobs pushed up and all the men dressed as penguins,” he told one interviewer.
His private life, however, read like something straight out of Hollywood.
Hurt married aspiring actress Mary Beth Supinger after finishing his studies at Tufts and followed her to London to study drama. They divorced on their return to New York.
In the late 1980s, he was sued by a former live-in love, ballet dancer Sandra Jennings, who is the mother of one of his sons.
He had two other sons from another marriage and a daughter, Jeanne, from a relationship with French actress Sandrine Bonnaire.
Hurt spoke fluent French and was also an avid private pilot.
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Sci-fi epic “Dune” took four early prizes from a field-leading 11 nominations as the British Academy Film Awards returned Sunday with a live, black-tie ceremony after a pandemic-curtailed event in 2021.
Acting nominees Benedict Cumberbatch and Lady Gaga were among the stars walking the red carpet at London’s Royal Albert Hall before a ceremony hosted by Australian actor-comedian Rebel Wilson.
Last year’s event was largely conducted online, with only the hosts and presenters appearing in person. This year, stars were gathering in the shadow of Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine.
Krishnendu Majumdar, chairman of the British Film Academy, known as BAFTA, opened the show with a message of support for Ukraine.
“We stand in solidarity with those who are bravely fighting for their country and we share their hope for a return to peace,” he said.
After that came the glitz, with 85-year-old diva Shirley Bassey and a live orchestra performing “Diamonds Are Forever” to mark the 60th anniversary of the James Bond films.
“Bond is turning 60, and his girlfriends are turning 25,” joked host Wilson, who toned down her usual bawdy material for the ceremony’s early-evening TV broadcast on the BBC.
Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune,” starring Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya, has 11 nominations including best film, cinematography and original score.
The space saga set on a desert planet took awards early in the ceremony for visual effects, sound, Greig Fraser’s cinematography and Hans Zimmer’s score.
Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog,” set in 1920s Montana and starring Cumberbatch as a ranch owner, has eight including best director and best film.
If Campion takes the directing trophy she will be only the third female winner in that category, but the second in two years after Chloe Zhao for “Nomadland” in 2021.
Kenneth Branagh’s semi-autobiographical “Belfast,” the story of a childhood overshadowed by Northern Ireland’s violent “Troubles,” has six nominations including best film. Daniel Craig’s final 007 thriller, “No Time to Die,” Steven Spielberg’s musical “West Side Story” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s coming-of-age drama “Licorice Pizza” has five nominations apiece.
Best-picture nominees are “Dune,” “The Power of the Dog,” “Belfast,” “Licorice Pizza” and disaster comedy “Don’t Look Up.”
The separate category of best British film comprises “After Love,” “Ali & Ava,” “Belfast,” “Boiling Point,” “Cyrano,” “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” “House of Gucci,” “Last Night in Soho,” “No Time to Die” and “Passing.”
The contenders for best actor are Cumberbatch, Adeel Akhtar for “Ali & Ava,” Mahershala Ali for “Swan Song,” Stephen Graham for “Boiling Point,” Leonardo DiCaprio for “Don’t Look Up” and Will Smith for “King Richard.”
Leading actress nominees are Lady Gaga for “House of Gucci,” Alana Haim for “Licorice Pizza,” Emilia Jones for “Coda,” Renate Reinsve for “The Worst Person in The World,” Joanna Scanlan for “After Love” and Tessa Thompson for “Passing.” The category is the most unpredictable of the night, with acclaimed performances by Kristen Stewart in the Princess Diana biopic “Spencer” and Olivia Colman in “The Lost Daughter” overlooked for nomination.
The British awards are usually held a week or two before the Academy Awards and have become an important awards-season staging post. This year’s Oscars take place March 27.
The British film academy has expanded its voting membership and shaken up its rules in recent years in an attempt to address a glaring lack of diversity in the nominations. In 2020, no women were nominated as best director for a seventh consecutive year, and all 20 nominees in the lead and supporting performer categories were white.
Awards organizers say they are committed to supporting new talent, and this year all the performers in the supporting actor category are first-time nominees. They include Woody Norman for “C’mon C’mon” — at 11 years old the youngest nominee of the year — and Ariana DeBose, who plays Anita in “West Side Story.”
The celebration of cinema was subdued, with many attendees reflecting on the war raging on the other side of Europe.
Cumberbatch wore a lapel badge in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. He said it was to oppose the “megalomaniac” Russian President Vladimir Putin “raining down terror” on Ukraine.
“It’s a very scary and sad time,” he said on the red carpet. “Although this is a gesture, and people can say it’s hollow, it’s just something I can do tonight” — along with pressuring British politicians to take in more refugees from the war.
Jonas Poher Rasmussen, director of the animated feature “Flee,” the story of an Afghan refugee, said it was “surreal” to be at an awards show when “the world is burning.”
But he said images of the millions driven from their homes in Ukraine underscored the message that “these stories need to be told.”
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Brent Sass continued to lead the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on Sunday, but he must hold off the defending champion as mushers have reached the Bering Sea coast and its treacherous ice.
Sass breezed through the checkpoint in the village of Shaktoolik on Sunday morning, staying only eight minutes. The village is 1,213 kilometers (754 miles) into the nearly 1,609-kilometer (1,000-mile) race, and the winner is expected to cross the finish line in Nome on Tuesday or Wednesday.
According to GPS trackers each musher carries, Sass had a lead of just over 16 kilometers (10 miles) on Dallas Seavey, who tied Rick Swenson for the most Iditarod victories at five with his 2021 Iditarod win.
But the GPS data on the race’s Iditarod Insider website also showed Seavey running at a faster clip even though he is mushing with two fewer dogs than the 12 Sass has in harness.
Aaron Burmeister was in third place, but about 64 kilometers (40 miles) behind Seavey.
Sass picked up another award late Saturday when he was the first musher to reach the Gold Coast. Among the prizes presented to him in the community of Unalakleet was 28.35 grams (one ounce) of gold nuggets, worth about $2,000.
He’s previously been awarded several cash prizes, artwork and a gourmet meal for being the first musher to reach checkpoints dotting the trail from the Anchorage area to the Gold Rush town of Nome.
Sass turned down the gourmet meal, however, because he didn’t have time to eat it.
The world’s most famous sled dog race began with 49 mushers on March 6 in Willow, about 121 kilometers (75 miles) north of Anchorage. Since then, four have withdrawn from the race.
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For many Ukrainians, staying online has been daunting as Russia attacks telecoms and power supplies, but some people, like Oleg Kutkov, a software and communications engineer, are testing out a new way to stay connected.
In a FaceTime interview with VOA Mandarin from Kyiv, Kutkov held up the components of the two-part terminal needed to connect via Starlink, an internet constellation of some 2,000 satellites operated by billionaire Elon Musk’s private firm SpaceX, one of a growing number of enterprises supporting Ukraine.
The Starlink dish and modem setup is easy to use, according to Kutkov, who is in his mid-30s.
“You just place the receptor outside, power on, wait a few minutes, and then you can go online without any additional tuning,” he told VOA Mandarin on Monday.
Kutkov said, “Our government is communicating with citizens using social (media) channels, and we are getting all the information from them on the internet. Not from TV or radio, but the internet. So [having connectivity] is very important.”
Skylink arrived in Ukraine with next-generation speed. On Feb. 26, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation, tweeted to Musk, “while you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand.”
Hours later, Musk tweeted that Ukraine would soon have Starlink service and despite criticism that he was using the crisis as a marketing stunt, the hardware began arriving there on Feb. 28.
Fedorov tweeted on March 9 that a second shipment of Starlink equipment had arrived as the situation in Ukraine continued to deteriorate.
According to NetBlocks, a London-based organization tracking internet outages around the world, several major cities in southern Ukraine, including Kherson and Mariupol, have experienced severe internet disruption due to attacks on infrastructure and power supplies.
In other areas, including Kharkiv and Kyiv, internet connections were disrupted as Russian troops launched cyber assaults targeting financial and government websites in Ukraine.
And even though Musk has cautioned the Skylink connection is being used by Russia to target users, Kutkov has been sharing his experiences with the service on Twitter. He told VOA Mandarin that he has received requests for support from across the country, including from ordinary citizens, companies and even those in the military.
“Ukraine is a highly digitized country,” Kutlov said. “We have everything online.”
SpaceX is one of a growing number of private companies that began taking an active role in supporting Ukraine in the fight against Russia almost as soon as Russia began missile and artillery attacks on Feb. 24.
Mobile phone carriers including T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon have waived charges for calls and texts to and from Ukraine.
Tesla is allowing any electric vehicles to use its charging stations along the borders of Ukraine with Poland and Hungary.
Airbnb, the online marketplace for lodging, stepped up to organize free short-term accommodation for 100,000 refugees from Ukraine.
Google and Facebook have banned Russian state media from their European platforms while working with European governments to combat the spread of disinformation from the Kremlin. Twitter began labeling all tweets containing content from Russian state-affiliated media outlets on Feb. 28.
As of Friday, more than 340 companies have announced their withdrawal from Russia’s economy in protest of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, according to the Yale School of Management.
Russia has threatened to counter that exodus by nationalizing foreign-owned businesses that have decided to flee the country in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
Eli Dourado, a senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University, told VOA Mandarin the reason that so many private companies have taken action is that Russia’s invasion has “shocked and disgusted much of the world.”
He said the circumstances of the conflict have left a lot of people feeling that “it’s almost pure good versus evil.”
Abishur Prakash, co-founder and geopolitical futurist at the Center for Innovating the Future, a Toronto-based advisory firm, said one of the reasons Western corporations, especially tech companies, are taking sides is “because the global landscape has now permanently shifted.”
“The West is trying to permanently decouple from Russia, and Western tech firms are more than complying,” said Prakash, author of The World Is Vertical: How Technology Is Remaking Globalization, in an emailed response to VOA Mandarin. “There is a tacit acceptance in the boardrooms of technology companies that Russia has become ‘off limits.'”
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Many athletes are already looking forward to the 2026 Winter Olympics to be held in Italy. Asian American athletes are sure to be well represented there, thanks in part to a new athletic alliance designed to get Asian Americans into the Games. VOA’s Jessica Stone reports.
Camera: Jessica Stone Produced by: Jessica Stone Video editor: Keith Lane
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From the three-light traffic signal, refrigerated trucks, automatic elevator doors, color monitors for desktop computers, to the shape of the modern ironing board, the clothes wringer, blood banks, laser treatment for cataracts, home security systems and the super-soaker children’s toy, many objects and services Americans use every day were invented by Black men and women.
These innovators were recognized for their inventions, but countless other inventors of color have gone largely unrecognized. Others are completely lost to history.
“There were some instances where Black inventors would compete with Alexander Graham Bell, with Thomas Edison, where their inventions were really just as good and just as transformative, but they just did not have access to the capital,” says Shontavia Johnson, an entrepreneur and associate vice president for entrepreneurship and innovation at Clemson University in South Carolina. “They did not have access to all these different systems that the United States puts in place to support inventors.”
Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the lightbulb, but it was Lewis Latimer, the son of formerly enslaved people, who patented a new filament that extended the lifespan of lightbulbs so they wouldn’t die out after a few days. Latimer got a patent for his invention in 1882, something countless Black innovators in the generations before him were unable to do.
Free Black citizens could obtain patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, but enslaved Black people could not. Slavery wasn’t abolished until 1865, with the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Prior to that, the inventions of Black innovators were often claimed by their enslavers or other white people.
Modern-day research suggests that was the case with the technology behind the cotton gin — a device that separated cotton seeds from their fibers. It was largely innovated by enslaved Black people, but a white man named Eli Whitney obtained the patent for the invention.
“We often count our country as being this place where innovation and entrepreneurship thrive,” Johnson says. “But when you completely exclude a group of people from access to the patent system, … exploiting their invention, then the natural result of that is, you look at the most important inventors and innovators in American history … and they pretty much are your stereotypical white male inventor, not because other people have not been innovative, too, it’s just these folks have been excluded from the patent system.”
This deliberate early exclusion of Black inventors from the patent system and, in large part, the pantheon of great American inventors, was rooted in racist assumptions about the intellectual inferiority of Black people, according to Rayvon Fouché, a professor of American studies at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana.
“Invention was seen as this God-given ability. So, as you can imagine, all the perceptions, ideas about masculinity, maleness, power [and] authority are all wrapped into this vision of inventiveness,” says Fouché, who also leads the National Science Foundation’s Social and Economic Sciences Division. “The inherent understanding of what an inventor is and was and could be — the framing of that term — eliminated the possibility for all Black folks and all marginalized people.”
Other barriers Black inventors historically faced included less access to equal education, systematic exclusion from professional scientific and engineering
societies, limited access to wealthy investors and mainstream banks for start-up capital to commercialize their inventions, and racial violence.
Black inventors were also less involved in patenting activity between 1870 and 1940, during times of lynchings, race riots and segregation laws in the United States.
There were also the Black creators who came up with innovations that didn’t necessarily fit the traditional ideas of inventiveness.
“For much of our history, when we think about the word ‘invention,’ it’s sort of freighted with these white, Eurocentric notions of what that means,” says Eric Hintz, a historian with the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “Often, the traditional definition of ‘invention’ is something like a machine that saves human labor or animal labor, that does some task more efficiently.”
That kept certain innovations by Black people from being recognized by the patent system.
“[The patent system] is built on this model that basically assumes innovation is desirable when it’s tied to commercial benefit. But if it is rooted in community survival or the needs of society, that is not worthy of protection, and we see that in the law,” Johnson says. “There are certain types of things that are patentable, and certain things that are not patentable, and that is a distinction that I do think leaves a lot of people out of the ecosystem.”
A New York DJ known as Grandmaster Flash pioneered the use of record turntables as an instrument by using his fingers to manipulate the sounds backward and forward or to slow it down. He had an innovative style of mixing records and blending beats that pioneered the art of deejaying, but he holds no patents.
“Black people have been doing lots of creative, innovative things,” Fouché says. “We can think about all kinds of technological creative things within the context of hip-hop and music production and art in other ways. But of course, the patent office is driven by techno-scientific innovation. And I think part of it is, for me, to open up the conversation of what inventiveness is and can be.”
Museum collections have historically excluded the contributions of marginalized people, a failing the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center readily acknowledges.
“Definitely the Smithsonian and other libraries and museums have been complicit over the decades, over the centuries, of privileging white inventors in the things that we collect,” says Hintz. “We have a ton of stuff on Edison and Tesla [electricity] and Steve Jobs [innovator of Apple products and devices] and whomever, but it’s incumbent on us now to make sure that we’re preserving the stories of Madam C.J. Walker, Grandmaster Flash, Lonnie Johnson — who invented the Super Soaker, of Patricia Bath, an ophthalmologist who invented a way of eradicating cataracts.”
Walker, America’s first self-made female millionaire, built her fortune with a line of hair care products for Black women. Black people also invented the clothes dryer, the automatic gear shift in vehicles, the modern toilet, lawn sprinkler, peanut butter and potato chips.
But the innovation gap persists. African Americans and women still participate at each stage of the innovation process at lower rates than their male and white counterparts.
“How do you get more Black kids, girls [and] marginalized people into these pathways that have been traditionally white, middle class and male?” Fouché says, emphasizing the importance of sparking children’s imaginations, despite any obstacles.
“I’m more interested in saying, ‘Well, what do you want to do? How do you want to change the world? What are the things that are meaningful to you?’ and just impressing upon people the limitless opportunities. … So, don’t limit the possibilities.”
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U.S. authorities have broadly expanded the use of a smartphone app during the coronavirus pandemic to ensure immigrants released from detention will attend deportation hearings, a requirement that advocates say violates their privacy and makes them feel they’re not free.
More than 125,000 people — many of them stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border — are now compelled to install the app known as SmartLink on their phones, up from about 5,000 less than three years ago. It allows officials to easily check on them by requiring the immigrants to send a selfie or make or receive a phone call when asked.
Although the technology is less cumbersome than an ankle monitor, advocates say tethering immigrants to the app is unfair considering many have paid bond to get out of U.S. detention facilities while their cases churn through the country’s backlogged immigration courts. Immigration proceedings are administrative, not criminal, and the overwhelming majority of people with cases before the courts aren’t detained.
Advocates said they’re concerned about how the U.S. government might use data culled from the app on immigrants’ whereabouts and contacts to round up and arrest others on immigration violations.
“It’s kind of been shocking how just in a couple of years it has exploded so quickly and is now being used so much and everywhere,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, senior campaign director for the Latino rights organization Mijente. “It’s making it much easier for the government to track a larger number of people.”
The use of the app by Immigration and Customs Enforcement soared during the pandemic, when many government services went online. It continued to grow as President Joe Biden called on the Department of Justice to curb the use of private prisons. His administration has also voiced support for so-called alternatives to detention to ensure immigrants attend required appointments such as immigration court hearings.
Meanwhile, the number of cases before the long-backlogged U.S. immigration court system has soared to 1.6 million. Immigrants often must wait for years to get a hearing before a judge who will determine whether they can stay in the country legally or should be deported.
Since the pandemic, U.S. immigration authorities have reduced the number of immigrants in detention facilities and touted detention alternatives such as the app.
The SmartLink app comes from BI Inc, a Boulder, Colorado-based subsidiary of private prison company The GEO Group. GEO, which runs immigration detention facilities for ICE under other contracts, declined to comment on the app.
Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, declined to answer questions about the app, but said in a statement that detention alternatives “are an effective method of tracking noncitizens released from DHS custody who are awaiting their immigration proceedings.”
In recent congressional testimony, agency officials wrote that the SmartLink app is also cheaper than detention: it costs about $4.36 a day to put a person on a detention alternative and more than $140 a day to hold someone in a facility, agency budget estimates show.
Advocates say immigrants who spent months in detention facilities and were released on bond are being placed on the app when they go to an initial meeting with a deportation officer, and so are parents and children seeking asylum on the southwest border.
Initially, SmartLink was seen as a less intensive alternative to ankle monitors for immigrants who had been detained and released, but it is now being used widely on immigrants with no criminal history and who have not been detained at all, said Julie Mao, deputy director of the immigrant rights group Just Futures. Previously, immigrants often only attended periodic check-ins at agency offices.
“We’re very concerned that that is going to be used as the excessive standard for everyone who’s in the immigration system,” Mao said.
While most people attend their immigration court hearings, some do skip out. In those cases, immigration judges issue deportation orders in the immigrants’ absence, and deportation agents are tasked with trying to find them and return them to their countries. During the 2018 fiscal year, about a quarter of immigration judges’ case decisions were deportation orders for people who missed court, court data shows.
Advocates questioned whether monitoring systems matter in these cases, noting someone who wants to avoid court will stop checking in with deportation officers, trash their phone and move, whether on SmartLink or not.
They said they’re concerned that deportation agents could be tracking immigrants through SmartLink more than they are aware, just as commercial apps tap into location data on people’s phones.
In the criminal justice system, law enforcement agencies are using similar apps for defendants awaiting trial or serving sentences. Robert Magaletta, chief executive of Louisiana-based Shadowtrack Technologies, said the technology doesn’t continually track defendants but records their locations at check-ins, and that the company offers a separate, full-time tracking service to law enforcement agencies using tamperproof watches.
In a 2019 Congressional Research Service report, ICE said the app wasn’t continually monitoring immigrants. But advocates said even quick snapshots of people’s locations during check-ins could be used to track down friends and co-workers who lack proper immigration authorization. They noted immigration investigators pulled GPS data from the ankle monitors of Mississippi poultry plant workers to help build a case for a large workplace raid.
For immigrants released from detention with ankle monitors that irritate the skin and beep loudly at times, the app is an improvement, said Mackenzie Mackins, an immigration attorney in Los Angeles. It’s less painful and more discreet, she said, adding the ankle monitors made her clients feel they were viewed by others as criminals.
But SmartLink can be stressful for immigrants who came to the U.S. fleeing persecution in their countries, and for those who fear a technological glitch could lead to a missed check-in.
Rosanne Flores, a paralegal at Hilf and Hilf in Troy, Michigan, said she recently fielded panicked calls from clients because the app wasn’t working. They wound up having to report in person to immigration agents’ offices instead.
“I see the agony it causes the clients,” Flores said. “My heart goes out to them.”
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High in the U.S. Rocky Mountains, skiers race through an obstacle course pulled by riders on horseback in a decades-long tradition that is part skiing and part rodeo. VOA correspondent Scott Stearns has our story from Leadville, Colorado.
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Facebook said Thursday that because of the invasion of Ukraine, it has temporarily eased its rules regarding violent speech.
Moscow’s internationally condemned invasion of its neighbor has provoked unprecedented sanctions from Western governments and businesses, but also a surge of online anger.
“As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders,'” Facebook’s parent company Meta said in a statement.
“We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians,” it added.
Facebook made its statement after a Reuters report, citing the firm’s emails to its content moderators, which said the policy applies to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine.
Facebook and other U.S. tech giants have moved to penalize Russia for the attack on Ukraine, and Moscow has also moved to block access to the leading social media network as well as Twitter.
Russia thus joins the small club of countries barring the largest social network in the world, along with China and North Korea.
Since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine last month, Russian authorities also have stepped up pressure against independent media.
Blocking of Facebook and restricting of Twitter last week came the same day Moscow backed the imposition of jail terms on media publishing “false information” about the military.
In this context, Facebook had played a key information distribution role in Russia, even as it endures withering criticism in the West over matters ranging from political division to teenagers’ mental health.
The war is, meanwhile, taking place during a period of unprecedented crackdown on the Russian opposition, with has included protest leaders being assassinated, jailed or forced out of the country.
Big U.S. tech firms like Apple and Microsoft have announced halting the sale of their products in Russia, while other companies have paused certain business activities or ties.
Ukrainian officials have been campaigning heavily for Russia to be cut off from everything from Netflix to Instagram.
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Actor Jussie Smollett, onetime star of the TV drama Empire, was sentenced in a Chicago court to 30 months’ probation and 150 days in jail on Thursday for staging a hate crime against himself.
Smollett, 39, was also ordered to pay $120,000 in restitution and fined $25,000 by Cook County Circuit Court Judge James Linn.
Smollett was found guilty by a jury in December of five of the six felony disorderly conduct counts he faced, one for each time he was accused of lying to police.
Prosecutors said Smollett, who is Black and gay, lied to police when he told them he was accosted on a dark Chicago street by two masked strangers in January 2019.
Smollett claimed the attackers threw a noose around his neck and poured chemicals on him while yelling racist and homophobic slurs and expressions of support for former U.S. President Donald Trump.
Police arrested the actor a month later, saying he paid two brothers $3,500 to stage the attack in an effort to raise his show business profile. He eventually pleaded not guilty to six counts of felony disorderly conduct.
His case took an unexpected turn in spring 2019 when the Cook County state’s attorney’s office dropped a 16-count indictment against him in exchange for Smollett’s forfeiting his $10,000 bond without admitting wrongdoing.
The dismissal drew criticism from then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago’s police superintendent, who called the reversal a miscarriage of justice.
In 2019, a special prosecutor assigned to the case recommended charging Smollett again and a grand jury returned an indictment.
Smollett’s acting career declined after the incident. He lost his role as a singer-songwriter in the final season of Empire, a Fox television hip-hop drama that ended a five-year run in 2020.
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Twitter says it has created a version of its microblogging service that can be used by Russians despite the regular version of the service being restricted in the country.
The service will be available via a special “onion” URL on the darkweb that is accessible only when using a Tor browser.
Onion URLs and Tor have long been used by those seeking to work around censorship as well as those who are involved in illegal activities on the darkweb.
The announcement of the new site was made by a software engineer who does work for Twitter.
“This is possibly the most important and long-awaited tweet that I’ve ever composed.
“On behalf of @Twitter, I am delighted to announce their new @TorProject onion service,” wrote Alec Muffett.
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A Ukrainian man charged last year with conducting one of the most severe ransomware attacks against U.S. targets has been extradited to the United States and made a court appearance Wednesday, the U.S. Justice Department said.
According to an August 2021 indictment, Yaroslav Vasinskyi accessed the internal computer networks of several victim companies and deployed Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware to encrypt the data on their computers, the Justice Department said in a statement.
Vasinskyi was allegedly responsible for the July 2021 ransomware attack against Florida software provider Kaseya, the department said.
Reuters could not reach a representative of Vasinskyi. Kaseya did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
The Ukrainian national was accused in the indictment of breaking into Kaseya over the July 4 weekend last year and simultaneously distributing with accomplices REvil ransomware to as many as 1,500 Kaseya customers, encrypting their data and forcing some to shut down for days, the Justice Department said.
While most of the 1,500 businesses paralyzed as a result around the globe faced limited concerns, the disruption was felt keenly in places such as Sweden, where hundreds of supermarkets had to close because their cash registers were inoperative, and New Zealand, where schools and kindergartens were knocked offline.
Vasinskyi was charged in the indictment with breaking into the victim companies and installing encryption software developed by the core REvil ransomware hacking group. REvil directly handled the ransom negotiations and split the profits with Vasinskyi and other affiliates. This model allowed the notorious ransomware gang to extort numerous companies for cryptocurrency.
Vasinskyi was arrested in Poland in October. The Justice Department charged him and a Russian late last year.
U.S. law enforcement authorities transported Vasinskyi to Dallas, Texas, where he arrived March 3, the Justice Department said Wednesday.
REvil was involved in an attack last year against top global meat processor JBS S.A.
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Major League Baseball canceled more games on Wednesday and pushed back Opening Day until April 14 after talks on a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with players stalled again.
MLB locked out its players in December after failing to reach terms on a CBA and had canceled the first week of the regular season.
“Regrettably, after our second late-night bargaining session in a week, we remain without a deal,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement. “Because of the logistical realities of the calendar, another two series are being removed from the schedule, meaning that Opening Day is postponed until April 14.
“We worked hard to reach an agreement and offered a fair deal with significant improvements for the players and our fans,” Manfred added. “I am saddened by this situation’s continued impact on our game and all those who are a part of it, especially our loyal fans.”
MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), which represents the players, remain far apart on issues like luxury tax, minimum salaries and an international draft, according to media reports.
The 2022 season was scheduled to begin on March 31, and this year marks the first missed MLB games because of a labor dispute since the players’ strike of 1994-1995.
That work stoppage forced a premature end to one season, delayed the start of the next year’s and turned off fans, with attendance plummeting when play finally resumed.
“In a last-ditch effort to preserve a 162-game season, this week we have made good-faith proposals that address the specific concerns voiced by the MLBPA and would have allowed the players to return to the field immediately,” Manfred said.
The MLBPA said in a statement that the MLB’s decision to cancel additional games was “completely unnecessary.”
“After making a set of comprehensive proposals to the league earlier this afternoon, and being told substantive responses were forthcoming, players have yet to hear back,” the MLBPA said in a statement on Twitter. “Players want to play and we cannot wait to get back on the field for the best fans in the world.”
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A bipartisan group of lawmakers has written a letter asking the Department of Justice to determine whether online retailer Amazon engaged in obstruction of Congress during an investigation of the company’s competitive practices.
The letter said the company had “engaged in a pattern and practice of misleading conduct” that suggested it had sought to influence or obstruct an investigation into how it operates.
The House Judiciary Committee conducted a 16-month probe into how Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook operated.
During the investigation, lawmakers focused on Amazon’s use of private-label products and collection of third-party data.
Amazon allegedly copied popular products in India and then manipulated search results to increase the sales of its own products, Reuters reported.
The committee’s letter to DOJ alleges Amazon made untrue or misleading statements when asked about those practices. It also said Amazon refused to provide evidence that would “either corroborate its claims or correct the record,” according to the 24-page letter.
“It appears to have done so to conceal the truth about its use of third-party sellers’ data to advantage its private-label business and its preferencing of private-label products in search results — subjects of the Committee’s investigation,” according to the letter, which was signed by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler, House Antitrust Subcommittee Chair David Cicilline, and Democratic and Republican committee members.
“As a result, we have no choice but to refer this matter to the Department of Justice to investigate whether Amazon and its executives obstructed Congress in violation of applicable federal law,” the letter added.
Amazon told CNBC that “there’s no factual basis for this, as demonstrated in the huge volume of information we’ve provided over several years of good faith cooperation with this investigation.”
When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos testified to the committee in July 2020, he said the company prevents Amazon employees from using seller data but could not say it had never happened.
Lawmakers said investigations by news organizations like Reuters and The Wall Street Journal contradicted Bezos’ testimony, as well as testimony of other Amazon employees.
“Amazon attempted to clean up the inaccurate testimony through ever-shifting explanations of its internal policies and denials of the investigative reports,” the lawmakers said. “The committee uncovered evidence from former Amazon employees, and former and current sellers, that corroborated the reports’ claims.”
“After Amazon was caught in a lie and repeated misrepresentations, it stonewalled the committee’s efforts to uncover the truth,” the letter said.
Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
U.S. golfing great Tiger Woods will be formally inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame Wednesday night at a ceremony in Florida.
Woods’ 14-year-old daughter Sam, who was born the day after he finished second at the 2007 U.S. Open, will formally introduce him at the new headquarters of the PGA Tour in Ponte Verde Beach.
The 46-year-old Woods dominated his sport from the moment he turned professional in 1996, becoming the first Black golfer to win a major event when he won The Masters the following year. He has since won 15 major titles, putting him second only to fellow American great Jack Nicklaus, and is tied with another golfing legend, Sam Snead, for the most PGA Tour victories with 82.
His career has been interrupted by numerous back and leg injuries which have required several surgeries. The worst of his injuries occurred last year when he suffered serious fractures to his lower right leg and damage to his ankle and foot when the vehicle he was driving sped off a road outside of Los Angeles.
Woods announced last February that he will “never” play full time on the PGA Tour again due to his injuries, but he appeared with his son Charlie at a team tournament where they finished in second place.
Also being inducted in Wednesday’s ceremonies are retired PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchen, three-time U.S. Women’s Open champion Susie Maxwell Berning, and Marion Hollins, a 1920s amateur champion who later became an influential golf course architect and developer.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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