Three sisters from Irbil have won gold and silver medals in weightlifting events in the regional 2021 Arab Weightlifting Championship. While preparing for future weightlifting competitions, the three Kurdish women are inspiring young girls to step into a male dominated field. VOA’s Ahmad Zebari reports from Irbil, narrated by Namo Abdulla.
Camera: Ahmed Zebari
Produced by: Ahmed Zebari
…
The Supreme Court said Monday it will not take up the sexual assault case against comedian Bill Cosby, leaving in place a decision by Pennsylvania’s highest court to throw out his conviction and set him free from prison.
The high court declined prosecutors’ request to hear the case and reinstate Cosby’s conviction. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court last year threw out Cosby’s conviction, saying the prosecutor who brought the case was bound by his predecessor’s agreement not to charge Cosby.
As is typical, the Supreme Court did not say anything in rejecting the case. The case was included in a long list of cases the court said Monday it would not hear.
The 84-year-old Cosby became the first celebrity convicted of sexual assault in the #MeToo era when a jury in 2018 found him guilty of drugging and molesting Temple University employee Andrea Constand in 2004. A jury had previously deadlocked in Cosby’s case, resulting in a mistrial in 2017.
Cosby spent nearly three years in prison before Pennsylvania’s high court ordered his release.
The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission. Constand has done so.
…
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Lost Daughter,” “Drive My Car” and “Summer of Soul” were among the big winners at the 37th Film Independent Spirit Awards Sunday.
The ceremony hosted by Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally was held in a tent by the beach in Santa Monica, broadcast on AMC and IFC. It is the cool, casual counterpart to some of the more traditional film awards shows.
“If you don’t win, you can just walk straight into the ocean,” Offerman said.
Gyllenhaal won best feature, director and best screenplay for her adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel “The Lost Daughter.”
Through tears, Gyllenhaal said that more than anything she believes in love. She was effusive in her praise for her crew.
“You were the first people to tell me I was a director,” she said. “Thank you to Netflix — I can’t even believe this — for your support. … Nobody ever makes their first movie and comes out loving their financiers.”
“I love independent film,” Gyllenhaal added. “I grew up making independent film.”
Japan’s “Drive My Car, which has also been nominated for a best picture Oscar, picked up best international feature.
Taylour Paige won best female lead for “Zola,” which was based on a Twitter thread about a wild trip to Florida.
“Wow, I am in shock. I wrote something because I’m not eloquent and I’m drunk,” Paige said.
She thanked her grandmother who passed away on the day she got word of her nomination and Zola for, “knowing that your story was worth telling.”
Simon Rex won best male lead for playing an ex-porn star in Sean Baker’s “Red Rocket.” Rex said his career was in the dumps before Baker called him for the shoestring film.
“I’m reeling from the whole experience,” Rex said. “This is basically a glorified student film…I’m grateful and humbled.”
Mullally and Offerman got the show off to a lively start, both in three-piece suits and vests with no shirt underneath. Sarah Silverman made an appearance in a pre-taped segment offering her services as a backup host because Mullally and Offerman joined Twitter “before 2015.”
The married co-hosts said they’d hoped to be the biggest Hollywood couple in the room and were dismayed that Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard were there to upstage them.
“A-listers and indie stars? Pick a lane you greedy bastards,” Offerman said.
They acknowledged Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Offerman said he hopes “Putin (expletive) off and goes home” and implored the audience to send him off with a “Spirit Awards salute.” Many raised their hands with a middle finger.
The show’s honorary chair Kristen Stewart also spoke about the war.
“We’re compelled to stand with the people of Ukraine,” Stewart said. “We stand with the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing this war.”
Historically, the Spirit Awards are held on the Saturday afternoon before the Oscars, but this year moved up a few weeks.
“Summer of Soul” won best documentary. The film brings back to life the largely forgotten Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969.
“I’m not going to cry right now, I’m not, I’m not,” “Summer of Soul” director Questlove said.
Troy Kotsur got another boost before the Oscars, winning best supporting actor for “CODA.” He also won the Screen Actors Guild prize.
“I can feel the spirit of the arts and we can celebrate together,” Kotsur said.
“Squid Game’s” Lee Jung-jae also followed up his SAG win with a Spirit Award.
Marlee Matlin, who presented the first screenplay award to Michael Sarnoski for “Pig,” implored the screenwriters to think of deaf actors when crafting scripts.
Andrew Garfield made an appearance to present the Robert Altman Award to his friend Fran Kranz, who he acted with in a Mike Nichols play. Kranz’s debut “Mass” is a small ensemble about a mediation in the aftermath of a school shooting between parents of a victim and parents of the perpetrator.
Best supporting female went to Ruth Negga, for her turn in Rebecca Hall’s “Passing.” A technical glitch muted the first part of her virtual speech. The black-and-white Netflix film also won best cinematography, for Edu Grau
The show can sometimes serve as a preview of what will happen on Oscar night. Last year, Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland” picked up best feature and director at the Spirit Awards before going on to win the top prizes at the Oscars. “Moonlight,” “Spotlight,” “Birdman” and “12 Years a Slave” also all won at the Spirits before taking best picture at the Oscars.
Because of their production budgets, many top awards contenders this year were not eligible, including “Belfast,” “King Richard” and “The Power of the Dog.” To be considered, films must have cost less than $22.5 million to make.
…
The 50th running of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race started Sunday with 49 mushers setting their sights on Alaska’s western coast.
The race will take the mushers across Alaska’s untamed and unforgiving terrain, including two mountain ranges, the frozen Yukon River and the unpredictable Bering Sea ice.
The winner is expected to cross the finish line in the western Alaska coastal community of Nome about nine days after the start.
For the first time ever in 2021, the race did not finish in Nome because of the pandemic. Instead, the race started in Willow, went to the ghost town of Iditarod and then doubled back to Willow.
Dallas Seavey won the 2021 race, matching musher Rick Swenson for the most wins ever with five apiece. Swenson, 71, last won in 1991 and hasn’t raced the Iditarod since 2012.
Seavey is looking to make history by becoming the first musher to hold six titles. Seavey has said he will likely take a break after this year’s race to spend time with his daughter.
There are two four-time champions in the race with Martin Buser and Jeff King. Buser is running in his 39th Iditarod, and King stepped in just days before the race started to run musher Nic Petit’s team after Petit said on Facebook he contracted COVID-19. Also in the race are 2018 winner Joar Leifseth Ulsom and 2019 winner Pete Kaiser.
Fifteen mushers signed up but withdrew from the race before it started, including Petit and the 2020 winner Thomas Waerner of Norway, who wasn’t able to secure travel documents to the U.S.
…
The fledgling Basketball Africa League tipped off its second season in Dakar, Senegal, on March 5, 2022, with a dozen men’s club teams from as many African countries vying for the 2022 BAL championship title.
Senegal’s Dakar Université Club and Guinea’s Seydou Legacy Athlétique Club faced off in the season opener. They had their eyes on the prize claimed by Egypt’s Zamalek in last year’s inaugural season.
The COVID-19 pandemic delayed the BAL’s original 2020 launch date by a year and restricted its games to two weeks in Rwanda’s capital. This season’s 38 scheduled games will extend over three months among Dakar, Kigali and Cairo.
The BAL teams have been split into two conferences: Sahara and Nile. The Sahara teams — from Guinea, Morocco, Mozambique, Rwanda, Senegal and Tunisia – will compete against each other through March 15 at the Dakar Arena. Nile teams – from Angola, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, South Africa and South Sudan — will play April 9 through 19 at Cairo’s Hassan Mostafa Indoor Sports Complex. Each conference’s top four teams will qualify for the playoffs, with a single-elimination tournament and finals at Kigali Arena May 21 to 28.
The BAL is a joint venture of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the International Basketball Federation (FIBA). It represents the NBA’s first collaboration operating a league outside North America.
“The NBA is making an investment in growing the game across the continent, broadly speaking,” NBA Africa’s president, Victor Williams, said at a February event celebrating a new NBA office in Lagos, Nigeria. Its original Africa office opened in Johannesburg in 2010.
A FIBA official said this second BAL season would “expand the scope and the entertainment value of the game” beyond the inaugural season’s two-week run in Kigali.
“Countries across Africa will see the games firsthand,” Sam Ahmedu, president of FIBA Africa Zone 3, told VOA. “It will help to also popularize the game and attract more sponsorship.”
Among BAL’s backers are companies such as Nike, Pepsi, Hennessy cognac and RwandAir.
The BAL’s parent organization, NBA Africa, has drawn strategic partners such as former president Barack Obama and investors including former NBA star Dikembe Mutombo, originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
While football is the continent’s dominant team sport, interest in hoops has been growing. CNBC has reported the NBA’s goal of making it a top sport on the continent within a decade, focusing on the continent’s predominantly young and growing population. Africa has the world’s youngest population, with 70% of those in sub-Saharan Africa under age 30, the United Nations reports.
This season, each BAL team will have one prospect from the NBA Academy Africa, a basketball training center in Saly, Senegal, for top high school-age prospects. It’s through a new program called BAL Elevate.
“There is a natural synergy between the BAL and NBA Academy Africa, and this program will provide another pathway for elite African prospects to reach their potential as players and people,” Amadou Gallo Fall, the BAL’s president, said in a press release.
A talent pipeline?
Right now, the NBA has more than 50 players who either were born in Africa or have at least one African parent, according to a BAL representative.
Those players include two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks, raised in Greece by parents from Nigeria; Joel Embiid of the Philadelphia 76ers and Pascal Siakam of the Toronto Raptors, both native Cameroonians; and Neemias Queta of the Sacramento Kings, whose parents hail from Guinea-Bissau.
Some see efforts such as the BAL or the Basketball Without Borders program as a pipeline to the NBA. Last year’s league play drew 15 NBA scouts or team representatives, the Raptors’ scouting manager, Sarah Chan, told VOA at the time.
But other hoops devotees such as Relton Booysen contend the BAL should cultivate and keep talented players on the continent.
“My opinion is that the BAL is a prize. It is a prize for anyone in Africa, in the world, to play in the BAL,” said Booysen, head coach of the Cape Town Tigers, a South African team making its league debut April 10 in Cairo against Angola’s Pedro de la Rionda club. “It’s not like you want to use the BAL to feed players for the NBA. … I believe that the BAL will grow as big as the NBA and bigger.”
Hoops as cultural diplomacy
Scott Brooks, a sociologist and associate director of Arizona State University’s Global Sport Institute, said he sees efforts such as the BAL as a form of cultural diplomacy. “This is a global kind of community when you’re talking about basketball,” he said.
“It’s not just American culture taking over. We always get a piece of other cultures coming back,” Brooks added. “That’s what really makes this exciting.”
Brooks praised programs such as Basketball Without Borders, the NBA and FIBA’s global community development and outreach program to nurture young players — not only in the sport but also in academics, health and values.
“It’s not just building athletes, it is building leaders in Africa,” said Brooks, who also lauded the BAL’s president, Amadou Gallo Fall, for playing an instrumental role in such development. “His vision is not just that they play basketball,” Brooks said, but that “they learn servantship … and they come back to the continent and help him build it.”
Participating teams hope the BAL tournament will raise their visibility and support.
For instance, the Rwanda Energy Group (REG), which qualified for this season’s competition, is relatively unknown to Kigali resident Jean de Dieu Rukundo. “I have no idea about REG, but anyway I wish them success,” he told VOA.
REG’s sports coordinator, Geoffrey Zawadi, expressed confidence in netting new admirers. He said the 5-year-old club already has won two national league trophies and “our fan base is increasing year after year.”
VOA will partner for a second season with the BAL, broadcasting 31 games across its extensive radio network in Africa. That includes select games in English, French, Portuguese, Kinyarwanda and Wolof. New this year, VOA and the BAL will collaborate on additional programming including weekly podcasts from Dakar, Cairo and Kigali that will air across VOA and BAL online platforms. Games will be livestreamed at NBA.com and TheBAL.com.
This report originated in VOA’s Africa Division. Contributors include: Joad Jose Santarita, Portuguese Service; Edward Rwema, Central Africa Service; Yacouba Ouedraogo and Tresor Matondo, French to Africa Service; and Mike Mbonye, English to Africa Service.
…
Walter R. Mears, who for 45 years fluidly and speedily wrote the news about presidential campaigns for The Associated Press and won a Pulitzer Prize doing it, has died. He was 87.
“I could produce a story as fast as I could type,” Mears once acknowledged — and he was a fast typist. He became the AP’s Washington bureau chief and the wire service’s executive editor and vice president, but he always returned to the keyboard, and to covering politics.
Mears died Thursday at his apartment in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, eight days after being diagnosed with multiple forms of cancer, said his daughters Susan Mears of Boulder, Colorado, and Stephanie Mears of Austin, Texas, who were with him.
They said he was visited on his last night by a minister, with whom he discussed Alf Landon, the losing Republican presidential candidate in 1936, a year after his birth.
Mears’ ability to find the essence of a story while it was still going on and to get it to the wire — and to newspapers and broadcasters around the world — became legend among peers. In 1972, Timothy Crouse featured Mears in The Boys on the Bus, a book chronicling the efforts and antics of reporters covering that year’s presidential campaign.
Crouse recounted how, immediately after a political debate, a reporter from The Boston Globe called out to the man from AP: “Walter, what’s our lead? What’s the lead, Walter?” The question became a catchphrase among political reporters to describe the search for the most newsworthy aspect of an event — the lead. “Made me moderately famous,” Mears cracked in 2005.
It was a natural question. Mears had to bang out stories about campaign debates while they were still underway. Newspaper editors would see his lead on the wire before their own reporters filed their stories. So it was defensive for others on the press bus to wonder what Mears was leading with, and to ask him.
Early in his Washington career, he was assigned to write updates on the 1962 congressional elections. His bureau chief asked a senior colleague to size up how Mears worked under pressure and report back. “Mears writes faster than most people think,” the evaluator wrote, then, tongue in cheek, “and sometimes faster than he thinks.”
“Walter’s impact at the AP, and in the journalism industry as a whole, is hard to overstate,” said Julie Pace, AP executive editor and senior vice president. “He was a champion for a free and fair press, a dogged reporter, an elegant chronicler of history and an inspiration to countless journalists, including myself.”
Kathleen Carroll, a former AP executive editor, said he taught generations of journalists “how to watch and listen and ask and explain.”
“Walter was also a wonderful human being,” she said. “He loved his family — being a grandfather was one of the great joys of his life. He loved golf and the Red Sox, in that order. He loved politics and he loved the AP.”
Mears didn’t seem to mind being known as a pacesetter. “I came away with a slogan not of my making, but one that stuck for the rest of my career,” he recalled in his 2003 memoir, Deadlines Past. Over four decades, Mears covered 11 presidential campaigns, from Kennedy-Nixon in 1960 to Bush-Gore in 2000, as well as the political conventions, the campaigns, debates, the elections and, finally, the pomp and promise of the inaugurations.
In tribute, Jules Witcover, who covered politics for The Sun in Baltimore, said Mears combined speed and accuracy with an eye for the telling detail.
“His uncanny ability to cut to the heart of any story and relate it in spare, lively prose showed the way for a generation of wire service disciples, and he did so with a zest for the nomad’s life on the campaign trail,” Witcover said.
At other times in his career, Mears served AP as Washington bureau chief and as the wire service’s primary news executive, the executive editor in the New York headquarters. But he missed writing and went back to it.
He left once, to be Washington bureau chief for The Detroit News, but returned to AP nine months later. “I couldn’t take the pace,” he said. “It was too slow.”
In 1977 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his work covering the election in which Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated a sitting president, Gerald R. Ford, who had inherited his office through the resignation in disgrace of Richard M. Nixon.
It was the Pulitzer, not the Crouse catchphrase, for which Mears thought he would be remembered. Asked to address a later crop of Pulitzer winners, he told them they would never have to wonder what would be the first words of their obituaries: They would be, he said, “Pulitzer Prize-winning.”
Winning his Pulitzer, Mears said, was “the sweetest moment in a career that is like no other line of work.”
In his lead paragraphs, Mears captured the essence of events, not just the words but the music.
When the 1968 Democrats, in a convention held in the midst of antiwar rioting on the streets of Chicago, finally chose their nominee, he wrote: “Hubert H. Humphrey, apostle of the politics of joy, won the Democratic presidential nomination tonight under armed guard.”
When, earlier that year, a gunman killed John Kennedy’s brother: “Robert F. Kennedy died of gunshot wounds early today, prey like his president brother to the savagery of an assassin.”
And, in 1976, when former peanut farmer Carter took the presidency from its accidental occupant: “In the end, the improbable Democrat beat the unelected Republican.”
Said Terry Hunt, former AP White House correspondent and deputy bureau chief in Washington: “You can’t talk about Walter without using the word legendary. He was a brilliant writer, astonishingly fast, colorful and compelling.”
David Espo, former special correspondent and assistant Washington bureau chief agreed. “No one ever wrote faster or with more clarity, nor worked harder and made it look easier than Walter did,” he said. “He took care to mentor those less talented than he, in other words, all of us.”
Mears was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, and grew up in Lexington, the son of an executive of a chemical company. He graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1956 and within a week joined the AP in Boston.
In those days, news was written on typewriters and transmitted on teletypes. “They were slow and they clattered,” Mears once wrote, “but the din was music to me.”
His first assignment was far from the din. He single-handedly covered the Vermont Legislature. “It was fun covering a citizen legislature with a representative from every hamlet in the state” — 276 of them, he recalled years later, including one elected by his townspeople to keep the fellow from being eligible for welfare.
Mears covered John F. Kennedy in 1960 whenever Kennedy campaigned in New England and covered Barry Goldwater’s hapless race against Lyndon Johnson four years later. He was back at it every presidential year, even after he retired in 2001.
On election night, 2008, he wrote an analysis of Barack Obama’s victory, and the challenge before him.
“Obama is the future,” he wrote, “and it begins now, in troubled times, for a president-elect with a costly agenda of promises that would be difficult to deliver in far better economic circumstances.”
No cheerleading from Mears there. He didn’t believe in reporters expressing political opinions and he kept his own to himself. Although he got to know the candidates he covered, sometimes shared after-hour drinks and played golf with them, he always addressed them by their titles.
He considered a distance between newsperson and newsmaker to be appropriate. He once explained: “I can’t really say I ever felt close to any of them, maybe because I always felt that there’s a line there, there’s sort of a reserve that I think needs to be maintained because you’re not covering a friend. You’re covering somebody who’s trying to convince the American people to give him the most important job they’ve got at their command.”
After retiring, Mears taught journalism for a time at the University of North Carolina and made his home there, in Chapel Hill.
His wife, Frances, died in January 2019. His first wife and their two children were killed in a house fire in 1962. Mears directed that a portion of his ashes be distributed with Frances’ remains and the rest in Massachusetts with those of his first wife and two children lost in the fire.
…
Russia’s blocking of Facebook is a symptom of its broader effort to cut itself off from sources of information that could imperil its internationally condemned invasion of Ukraine, experts say.
The often-criticized social network is part of a web of information sources that can challenge the Kremlin’s preferred perspective that its assault on Ukraine is righteous and necessary.
Blocking of Facebook and restricting of Twitter on Friday came the same day Moscow backed the imposition of jail terms on media publishing “false information” about the military.
Russia’s motivation “is to suppress political challenges at a very fraught moment for (Vladimir) Putin, and the regime, when it comes to those asking very tough questions about why Russia is continuing to prosecute this war,” said Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Russia thus joins the very small club of countries barring the largest social network in the world, along with China and North Korea.
Moscow was expected to quickly overpower its neighbor but the campaign has already shown signs that it could go longer and could lead to the unleashing of its full military ferocity.
“It’s a censorship tool of last resort,” Feldstein added. “They are pulling the plug on a platform rather than try to block pages or use all sorts of other mechanisms that they traditionally do.”
Earlier this week independent monitoring group OVD-Info said that more than 7,000 people in Russia had been detained at demonstrations over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Web monitoring group NetBlocks said Russia’s moves against the social media giants come amid a backdrop of protests “which are coordinated and mobilized through social media and messaging applications.”
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.
‘No access to truth’
Since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine last week, Russian authorities have stepped up pressure against independent media even though press freedoms in the country were already rapidly waning.
In this context, Facebook plays 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.
Natalia Krapiva, tech legal counsel at rights group Access Now, said social media has been a place where independent, critical voices have been talking about the invasion.
“Facebook is one of the key platforms in Russia,” she said, adding that its loss is “a devastating blow to access to independent information and for resistance to the war.”
Russia has been hit with unprecedented sanctions from the West over the invasion, but also rejections both symbolic and significant from sources ranging from sporting organizations to U.S. tech companies.
Facebook’s parent Meta and Twitter however have engaged on the very sensitive issue of information by blocking the spread of Russian state-linked news media.
Russia’s media regulator took aim at both, with Roskomnadzor accusing Facebook of discrimination toward state media.
Big U.S. tech firms like Apple and Microsoft have announced halting the sale of their products in Russia, while other companies have made public their “pauses” of certain business activities or ties.
On Friday U.S. internet service provider Cogent Communications said it had “terminated its contracts with customers billing out of Russia.”
The Washington Post reported Cogent has “several dozen customers in Russia, with many of them, such as state-owned telecommunications giant Rostelecom, being close to the government.”
It’s exactly the kind of measure Ukrainian officials have been campaigning heavily for as they ask Russia be cut off from everything from Netflix to Instagram.
Yet experts like Krapiva worry about what that would mean for dissenting or critical voices inside Russia.
“There’s a risk of people having no access to truth,” she said.
“Some Ukrainians have been calling for disconnecting Russia from the internet, but that’s counterproductive to disconnect civil society in Russia who are trying to fight.”
…
Formed in a fury to counter Russia’s blitzkrieg attack, Ukraine’s hundreds-strong volunteer “hacker” corps is much more than a paramilitary cyberattack force in Europe’s first major war of the internet age. It is crucial to information combat and to crowdsourcing intelligence.
“We are really a swarm. A self-organizing swarm,” said Roman Zakharov, a 37-year-old IT executive at the center of Ukraine’s bootstrap digital army.
Inventions of the volunteer hackers range from software tools that let smartphone and computer owners anywhere participate in distributed denial-of-service attacks on official Russian websites to bots on the Telegram messaging platform that block disinformation, let people report Russian troop locations and offer instructions on assembling Molotov cocktails and basic first aid.
Zahkarov ran research at an automation startup before joining Ukraine’s digital self-defense corps. His group is StandForUkraine. Its ranks include software engineers, marketing managers, graphic designers and online ad buyers, he said.
The movement is global, drawing on IT professionals in the Ukrainian diaspora whose handiwork includes web defacements with antiwar messaging and graphic images of death and destruction in the hopes of mobilizing Russians against the invasion.
“Both our nations are scared of a single man — (Russian President Vladimir) Putin,” said Zakharov. “He’s just out of his mind.” Volunteers reach out person-to-person to Russians with phone calls, emails and text messages, he said, and send videos and pictures of dead soldiers from the invading force from virtual call centers.
Some build websites, such as a “site where Russian mothers can look through (photos of) captured Russian guys to find their sons,” Zakharov said by phone from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.
The cyber volunteers’ effectiveness is difficult to gauge. Russian government websites have been repeatedly knocked offline, if briefly, by the DDoS attacks, but generally weather them with countermeasures.
It’s impossible to say how much of the disruption — including more damaging hacks — is caused by freelancers working independently of but in solidarity with Ukrainian hackers.
A tool called “Liberator” lets anyone in the world with a digital device become part of a DDoS attack network, or botnet. The tool’s programmers code in new targets as priorities change.
But is it legal? Some analysts say it violates international cyber norms. Its Estonian developers say they acted “in coordination with the Ministry of Digital Transformation” of Ukraine.
A top Ukrainian cybersecurity official, Victor Zhora, insisted at his first online news conference of the war Friday that homegrown volunteers were attacking only what they deem military targets, in which he included the financial sector, Kremlin-controlled media and railways. He did not discuss specific targets.
Zakharov did. He said Russia’s banking sector was well fortified against attack but that some telecommunications networks and rail services were not. He said Ukrainian-organized cyberattacks had briefly interrupted rail ticket sales in western Russia around Rostov and Voronezh and knocked out telephone service for a time in the region of eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014. The claims could not be independently confirmed.
A group of Belarusian hacktivists calling themselves the Cyber Partisans also apparently disrupted rail service in neighboring Belarus this week seeking to frustrate transiting Russian troops. A spokeswoman said Friday that electronic ticket sales were still down after their malware attack froze up railway IT servers.
Over the weekend, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, announced the creation of an volunteer cyber army. The IT Army of Ukraine now counts 290,000 followers on Telegram.
Zhora, deputy chair of the state special communications service, said one job of Ukrainian volunteers is to obtain intelligence that can be used to attack Russian military systems.
Some cybersecurity experts have expressed concern that soliciting help from freelancers who violate cyber norms could have dangerous escalatory consequences. One shadowy group claimed to have hacked Russian satellites; Dmitry Rogozin, the director general of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, called the claim false but was also quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying such a cyberattack would be considered an act of war.
Asked if he endorsed the kind of hostile hacking being done under the umbrella of the Anonymous hacktivist brand — which anyone can claim — Zhora said, “We do not welcome any illegal activity in cyberspace.”
“But the world order changed on the 24th of February,” he added, when Russia invaded.
The overall effort was spurred by the creation of a group called the Ukrainian Cyber Volunteers by a civilian cybersecurity executive, Yegor Aushev, in coordination with Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. Aushev said it numbers more than 1,000 volunteers.
On Friday, most of Ukraine’s telecommunications and internet were fully operational despite outages in areas captured by invading Russian forces, said Zhora. He reported about 10 hostile hijackings of local government websites in Ukraine to spread false propaganda saying Ukraine’s government had capitulated.
Zhora said presumed Russian hackers continued trying to spread destructive malware in targeted email attacks on Ukrainian officials and — in what he considers a new tactic — to infect the devices of individual citizens. Three instances of such malware were discovered in the runup to the invasion.
U.S. Cyber Command has been assisting Ukraine since well before the invasion. Ukraine does not have a dedicated military cyber unit. It was standing one up when Russia attacked.
Zhora anticipates an escalation in Russia’s cyber aggression — many experts believe far worse is yet to come.
Meantime, donations from the global IT community continue to pour in. A few examples: NameCheap has donated internet domains while Amazon has been generous with cloud services, said Zakharov.
…
The Russian war on Ukraine is also happening online, as people share images from around Ukraine. Caught in the middle are U.S. technology firms, which have taken steps to curtail Russian propaganda and make changes for Ukrainians’ safety. But it’s a fine line to walk as VOA’s Michelle Quinn reports.
Produced by: Matt Dibble
…
International Women’s Day, celebrated on March 8, aims to focus global attention on the state of women when it comes to gender equality, bias, stereotypes and discrimination. Its goal is to make the world more diverse, equitable and inclusive for them. VOA’s Laurel Bowman has that story.
…
Software giant Microsoft announced Friday that it is suspending “all new sales of Microsoft products and services in Russia” over that country’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Like the rest of the world, we are horrified, angered and saddened by the images and news coming from the war in Ukraine and condemn this unjustified, unprovoked and unlawful invasion by Russia,” the company said in a statement.
The company added that it was ‘stopping many aspects of our business in Russia in compliance with governmental sanctions decisions.’
Many companies have announced they are ending or limiting their activity in Russia. Some companies include Apple, Nike and Dell Technologies.
Microsoft added that it will continue to work with Ukraine to protect the country from Russian cyberattacks, noting it already had during an attack on a “major Ukrainian broadcaster.”
“Since the war began, we have acted against Russian positioning, destructive or disruptive measures against more than 20 Ukrainian government, IT and financial sector organizations,” Microsoft said. “We have also acted against cyberattacks targeting several additional civilian sites. We have publicly raised our concerns that these attacks against civilians violate the Geneva Convention.”
Some information in this report comes from Reuters.
The arts may be a luxury many children of underprivileged families can’t afford, but at the Sitar Arts Center in Washington, D.C., it’s available to all who want to participate. VOA’s Virginia Gunawan reports. Camera – Laurentius Wahyudi.
…
A consortium of U.S. states announced on Wednesday a joint investigation into TikTok’s possible harm to young users of the platform, which has boomed in popularity, especially among children.
Officials across the United States have launched their own investigations and lawsuits against Big Tech giants as new national regulations have failed to pass, partly because of partisan gridlock in Congress.
The consortium of eight states will look into the harm TikTok can cause to its young users and what the company knew about such possible harm, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said a statement.
Leading the investigation is a coalition of attorneys general from California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee and Vermont.
The investigation will focus, among other things, on TikTok’s techniques to boost young user engagement, including efforts to increase the frequency and duration of children’s use.
“We don’t know what social media companies knew about these harms and when,” Bonta said in a statement.
“Our nationwide investigation will allow us to get much-needed answers and determine if TikTok is violating the law in promoting its platform to young Californians,” he added.
TikTok’s short-form videos have boomed in popularity with the youngest users, prompting growing concern from parents over the potential that their children could develop unhealthy use habits or be exposed to harmful content.
TikTok welcomes investigation
The platform welcomed the investigation as a chance to provide information on its efforts to protect users.
“We care deeply about building an experience that helps to protect and support the well-being of our community,” TikTok’s statement said.
“We look forward to providing information on the many safety and privacy protections we have for teens,” it added.
Social media’s impact on young users came under renewed scrutiny last year when Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked a trove of internal company documents raising questions over whether it had prioritized growth over users’ safety.
The documents were given to lawmakers, a consortium of journalists and U.S. regulators by Haugen, who has become a figurehead of criticism of the leading social media platform.
Despite media attention on the issue and hearings before U.S. lawmakers, no new rules have gotten close to being enacted on the national level.
States have instead proceeded with their own efforts to look into Big Tech companies.
For example, a consortium of U.S. states announced a joint probe in November of Instagram’s parent company, Meta, for promoting the app to children despite allegedly knowing its potential for harm. The consortium of attorneys general, states’ top law enforcers and legal advisers, included some of the same states as Wednesday’s probe, like California and Florida.
Instagram sparked fierce criticism for its plans to make a version of the photo-sharing app for younger users. It later halted development.
…
With the threat of financial sanctions looming, Chelsea’s Russian owner Roman Abramovich confirmed Wednesday he is trying to sell the Premier League club he turned into an elite trophy-winning machine with his lavish investment.
The speed of Abramovich’s pending exit from Chelsea is striking as he was trying to instigate a plan this past weekend to relinquish some control in order to keep the club under his ownership.
But as Russia’s war on Ukraine entered a seventh day, pressure was growing on the British government to include him among the wealthy Russians to be targeted in sanctions.
“In the current situation, I have therefore taken the decision to sell the club, as I believe this is in the best interest of the club, the fans, the employees, as well as the club’s sponsors and partners,” Abramovich said in a statement.
Abramovich said he will not be asking to be repaid 1.5 billion pounds ($2 billion) in loans he has granted the club during 19 years of injecting cash to elevate the team into one of the most successful in Europe. The Blues won the Club World Cup for the first time last month — in front of Abramovich in Abu Dhabi — after securing a second Champions League title last year.
“I have instructed my team to set up a charitable foundation where all net proceeds from the sale will be donated,” he said. “The foundation will be for the benefit of all victims of the war in Ukraine.”
…
Kenyan refugee aid group RefuSHE is hosting a virtual international fashion show in East Africa for female refugees. Organizers say the show’s proceeds will go toward helping female refugees fleeing conflict in East and Central Africa. Brenda Mulinya reports from Nairobi, Kenya. Videographer and producer: Amos Wangwa
…
Some of America’s best-known companies including Apple, Google, Ford, Harley-Davidson and Exxon Mobil rebuked and rejected Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, under steady pressure from investors and consumers decrying the violence.
Late Tuesday, Apple said it had stopped sales of iPhones and other products in Russia, adding that it was making changes to its Maps app to protect civilians in Ukraine.
Tech firms including Alphabet’s Google dropped Russian state publishers from their news, and Ford Motor, with three joint venture factories in Russia, told its Russian manufacturing partner it was suspending operations in the country. Motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson suspended shipments of its bikes.
Exxon wants out of Russia
Exxon Mobil Corp said it would discontinue operations in Russia and was taking steps to exit the Sakhalin-1 venture, following in the steps of British energy giants Shell and BP, Russia’s biggest foreign investor.
Many corporations have been unusually clear in their condemnation of Russia.
“We are deeply concerned about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and stand with all of the people who are suffering as a result of the violence,” Apple said in a statement.
The steady drum beat of companies taking a stance increased later in the day as rockets struck major cities in Ukraine.
“Ford is deeply concerned about the invasion of Ukraine and the resultant threats to peace and stability. The situation has compelled us to reassess our operations in Russia,” Ford said, adding to several days of announcements by global car companies.
“We deplore Russia’s military action that violates the territorial integrity of Ukraine and endangers its people,” said Exxon, adding it will not invest in new developments in Russia.
Boeing suspends support program
Boeing suspended parts, maintenance and technical support services for Russian airlines, a Politico reporter tweeted. The U.S. planemaker suspended major operations in Moscow and will also temporarily closed office in Kyiv, the tweet said. Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Restrictions from the West have hit the Russian economy hard, with the ruble falling as much as a third to a record low. Financial isolation is rising as shipping companies say they will not serve Russian ports.
The U.S. government is expected to ban Russian flights from American airspace as soon as Wednesday, government and industry officials told Reuters.
And a boom of investor interest in environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors is making it more difficult for those companies that sit on the sidelines.
Russian companies are in particular peril with such Western investors, since they often are not open to talks to change their behavior, said TJ Kistner, vice president at Segal Marco Advisors, a large U.S. pension consultant.
Investors continue to leave
Western investors may respond by pulling out.
“The only course of action for many is simply divestment,” Kistner said.
Moscow has responded by temporarily curbing foreign investors from selling Russian assets.
Big Tech companies also are continuing efforts to stop Russian forces from taking advantage of their products.
Apple said it had blocked app downloads of some state-backed news services outside of Russia.
Microsoft earlier said it would remove Russian state-owned media outlet RT’s mobile apps from its Windows App store and ban ads on Russian state-sponsored media. Google barred RT and other Russian channels from receiving money for ads on websites, apps and YouTube videos, similar to a move by Facebook.
…
The invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces has ignited responses from arts and cultural institutions around the world, which are canceling performances by Russian artists, many of whom are supporters of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Cannes Film Festival, an invitation-only event that previews top-quality films from more than 80 countries, announced that no Russian delegations will be welcome this year, following the continued conflict between Ukraine and Russia. The festival is set to begin in May.
“Unless the war of assault ends in conditions that will satisfy the Ukrainian people, it has been decided that we will not welcome official Russian delegations nor accept the presence of anyone linked to the Russian government,” festival organizers said in a statement released Tuesday.
The festival may allow individual Russian filmmakers but has not stated whether their films will be permitted to compete.
The European Broadcasting Union, producers of Eurovision, declared that Russia will no longer be allowed to enter acts for the popular Eurovision Song Contest. The decision came after recent recommendations by the contest’s governing body, the Reference Group, which underscored the values of the broadcasting union.
Broadcasters from Iceland, Norway, Finland and the Netherlands had requested that Russia be barred from the contest.
Valery Gergiev, chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and a Putin ally, was dismissed after refusing to condemn the Russian president’s actions in Ukraine.
The internationally renowned conductor has had many of his concerts canceled and has been dropped by his management company.
The Edinburgh International Festival, where Gergiev served as an honorary president, requested his resignation, saying, “Edinburgh is twinned with the city of Kyiv, and this action is being taken in sympathy with, and support of, its citizens.”
Some artists oppose the global trend of cultural sanctions against Russia.
French artist Ségolène Haehnsen Kan maintains a solo exhibition of her paintings in Moscow at the Surface Lab Art Gallery.
“Art shouldn’t be prevented by war,” she told Artnet News. “It’s important for Ukrainian artists to know that artists in Russia support them.”
Major League Baseball has canceled opening day, with Commissioner Rob Manfred announcing Tuesday the sport will lose regular-season games over a labor dispute for the first time in 27 years after acrimonious lockout talks collapsed in the hours before management’s deadline.
Manfred said he is canceling the first two series of the season that was set to begin March 31, dropping the schedule from 162 games to likely 156 games at most. Manfred said the league and union have not made plans for future negotiations. Players won’t be paid for missed games.
“My deepest hope is we get an agreement quickly,” Manfred said. “I’m really disappointed we didn’t make an agreement.”
After the sides made progress during 13 negotiating sessions over 16 1/2 hours Monday, the league sent the players’ association a “best and final offer” Tuesday on the ninth straight day of negotiations.
Players rejected that offer, setting the stage for MLB to follow through on its threat to cancel opening day.
“Not a particularly productive day today,” Manfred said.
At 5:10 p.m., Manfred issued a statement that many fans had been dreading: Nothing to look forward to on opening day, normally a spring standard of renewal for fans throughout the nation and some in Canada, too.
The ninth work stoppage in baseball history will be the fourth that causes regular season games to be canceled, leaving Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium as quiet in next month as Joker Marchant Stadium and Camelback Park have been during the third straight disrupted spring training.
“The concerns of our fans are at the very top of our consideration list,” Manfred said.
The lockout, in its 90th day, will plunge a sport staggered by the coronavirus pandemic and afflicted by numerous on-field issues into a self-inflicted hiatus over the inability of players and owners to divide a $10 billion industry. By losing regular-season games, scrutiny will fall even more intensely on Manfred, the commissioner since January 2015, and Tony Clark, the former All-Star first baseman who became union leader when Michael Weiner died in November 2013.
“Manfred gotta go,” tweeted Chicago Cubs pitcher Marcus Stroman.
Past stoppages were based on issues such as a salary cap, free-agent compensation and pensions. This one is pretty much solely over money.
This fight was years in the making, with players angered that payrolls decreased by 4% from 2015 through last year, many teams jettisoned a portion of high-priced veteran journeymen in favor of lower-priced youth, and some clubs gave up on competing in the short term to better position themselves for future years.
The sport will be upended by its second shortened season in three years. The 2020 schedule was cut from 162 games to 60 because of the pandemic, a decision players filed a grievance over and still are litigating. The disruption will create another issue if 15 days of the season are wiped out: Stars such as Shohei Ohtani, Pete Alonso, Jake Cronenworth and Jonathan India would be delayed an extra year from free agency.
Players would lose $20.5 million in salary for each day of the season that is canceled, according to a study by The Associated Press, and the 30 teams would lose large sums that are harder to pin down. Members of the union’s executive subcommittee stand to lose the most, with Max Scherzer forfeited $232,975 for each regular-season day lost, and Gerrit Cole $193,548.
Scherzer and free-agent reliever Andrew Miller were present for talks. Both stopped to sign autographs for fans as they left Roger Dean Stadium, the vacant spring training home of the St. Louis Cardinals and Miami Marlins where negotiations have been held since the start of last week.
The first 86 games of the 1973 season were canceled by a strike over pension negotiations, the 1981 season was fractured by a 50-day midseason strike over free agency compensation rules that canceled 713 games, and a strike that started in August 1994 over management’s attempt to gain a salary cap canceled the final 669 games and led to a three-week delay of the 1995 season, when schedules were cut from 162 games to 144.
Players and owners entered deadline day far apart on many key issues and unresolved on others. The most contentious proposals involve luxury tax thresholds and rates, the size of a new bonus pool for pre-arbitration players, minimum salaries, salary arbitration eligibility and the union’s desire to change the club revenue-sharing formula.
While the differences had narrowed in recent days, the sides remained apart, with how far apart depending on the point of view.
MLB proposed raising the luxury tax threshold from $210 million to $220 million in each of the next three seasons, $224 million in 2025 and $230 in 2026. Players asked for $238 million this year, $244 million in 2023, $250 million in 2024, $256 million in 2025 and $263 in 2026.
MLB proposed $25 million annually for a new bonus pool for pre-arbitration players, and the union dropped from $115 million to $85 million for this year, with $5 million yearly increases.
MLB proposed raising the minimum salary from $570,500 to $675,000 this year, with increases of $10,000 annually, and the union asked for $725,000 this year, $745,000 in 2023, $765,000 in 2024 and increases for 2025 and 2026 based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners.
Avalanche forecasters use a slew of technology to predict avalanche risk and help lovers of backcountry winter sports to be prepared. From Boulder Colorado, Shelley Schlender reports. Video editors – Shelley Schlender, Luis Da Costa.
…
As Russia’s war in Ukraine plays out for the world on social media, big tech platforms are moving to restrict Russian state media from using their platforms to spread propaganda and misinformation.
Google announced Tuesday that it’s blocking the YouTube channels of those outlets in Europe “effective immediately” but acknowledged “it’ll take time for our systems to fully ramp up.”
Other U.S.-owned tech companies have offered more modest changes so far: limiting the Kremlin’s reach, labeling more of this content so that people know it originated with the Russian government, and cutting Russian state organs off from whatever ad revenue they were previously making.
The changes are a careful balancing act intended to slow the Kremlin from pumping propaganda into social media feeds without angering Russian officials to the point that they yank their citizens’ access to platforms during a crucial time of war, said Katie Harbath, a former public policy director for Facebook.
“They’re trying to walk this very fine line; they’re doing this dance,” said Harbath, who now serves as director of technology and democracy at the International Republican Institute. “We want to stand up to Russia, but we also don’t want to get shut down in the country. How far can we push this?”
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, announced Monday that it would restrict access to Russia’s RT and Sputnik services in Europe, following a statement by European Union President Ursula von der Leyen over the weekend that officials are working to bar the sites throughout the EU.
Google followed Tuesday with a European ban of those two outlets on YouTube.
The U.S. has not taken similar action or applied sanctions to Russian state media, leaving the American-owned tech companies to wrestle with how to blunt the Kremlin’s reach on their own.
The results have been mixed.
RT and other Russian-state media accounts are still active on Facebook in the U.S. Twitter announced Monday that after seeing more than 45,000 tweets daily from users sharing Russian state-affiliated media links in recent days, it will add labels to content from the Kremlin’s websites. The company also said it would not recommend or direct users to Russian-affiliated websites in its search function.
Over the weekend, the Menlo Park, California-based company announced it was banning ads from Russian state media and had removed a network of 40 fake accounts, pages and groups that published pro-Russian talking points. The network used fictitious persons posing as journalists and experts, but didn’t have much of an audience.
Facebook began labeling state-controlled media outlets in 2020.
Meanwhile, Microsoft announced it wouldn’t display content or ads from RT and Sputnik, or include RT’s apps in its app store. And Google’s YouTube restricted Russian-state media from monetizing the site through ads, although the outlets are still uploading videos every few minutes on the site.
By comparison, the hands-off approach taken by TikTok, a Chinese platform popular in the U.S. for short, funny videos, has allowed pro-Russian propaganda to flourish on its site. The company did not respond to messages seeking comment.
One recent video posted to RT’s TikTok channel features a clip of Steve Bannon, a former top adviser to ex-President Donald Trump who now hosts a podcast with a penchant for misinformation and conspiracy theories.
“Ukraine isn’t even a country. It’s kind of a concept,” Bannon said in the clip, echoing a claim by Russian President Vladimir Putin. “So when we talk about sovereignty and self-determination it’s just a corrupt area where the Clintons have turned into a colony where they can steal money.”
Already, Facebook’s efforts to limit Russian state media’s reach have drawn ire from Russian officials. Last week, Meta officials said they had rebuffed Russia’s request to stop fact-checking or labeling posts made by Russian state media. Kremlin officials responded by restricting access to Facebook.
The company has also denied requests from Ukrainian officials who have asked Meta to remove access to its platforms in Russia. The move would prevent everyday Russians from using the platforms to learn about the war, voice their views or organize protests, according to Nick Clegg, recently named the company’s vice president of global affairs.
“We believe turning off our services would silence important expression at a crucial time,” Clegg wrote on Twitter Sunday.
More aggressive labeling of state media and moves to de-emphasize their content online might help reduce the spread of harmful material without cutting off a key information source, said Alexandra Givens, CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based non-profit.
“These platforms are a way for dissidents to organize and push back,” Givens said. “The clearest indication of that is the regime has been trying to shut down access to Facebook and Twitter.”
Russia has spent years creating its sprawling propaganda apparatus, which boasts dozens of sites that target millions of people in different languages. That preparation is making it hard for any tech company to mount a rapid response, said Graham Shellenberger at Miburo Solutions, a firm that tracks misinformation and influence campaigns.
“This is a system that has been built over 10 years, especially when it comes to Ukraine,” Shellenberger said. “They’ve created the channels, they’ve created the messengers. And all the sudden now, we’re starting to take action against it.”
Redfish, a Facebook page that is labeled as Russian-state controlled media, has built up a mostly U.S. and liberal-leaning audience of more than 800,000 followers over the years.
The page has in recent days posted anti-U.S. sentiment and sought to down play Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, calling it a “military operation” and dedicating multiple posts to highlighting anti-war protests across Russia.
One Facebook post also used a picture of a map to highlight airstrikes in other parts of the world.
“Don’t let the mainstream media’s Eurocentrism dictate your moral support for victims of war,” the post read.
Last week, U.S. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia sent letters to Google, Meta, Reddit, Telegram, TikTok and Twitter urging them to curb such Russian influence campaigns on their websites.
“In addition to Russia’s established use of influence operations as a tool of strategic influence, information warfare constitutes an integral part of Russian military doctrine,” Warner wrote.
…