As national parks traveler Mikah Meyer wraps up the last leg of his journey across the western state of Utah, he appears to have saved the best for last – with visits to Bryce and Zion national parks — the last two of the five national parks that make up the ‘Mighty 5.’ He shared highlights of his experiences in some of the most stunning desert landscapes he’s seen on his epic national parks journey so far with VOA’s Julie Taboh.
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A group of Cambodian girls who recently traveled to California to compete in a mobile app competition offered inspiration for other girls worldwide to consider careers in technology.
Their pitch in Silicon Valley wasn’t a bid to be the next billion-dollar company. Instead, they want to help their country with a mobile phone application to address poverty.
“Let’s fight poverty by using our app. Don’t find customers for your product, find products for your customers,” said Lorn Dara Soucheng, 12, who led the team that created the app, Cambodian Identity Product.
“We want to increase employment for Cambodians, so there will be a reduction of Cambodian migrants to work at other countries, reducing poverty through making income and providing charity to local Cambodians,” Chea Sopheata, 11, told the judges at Google’s headquarters. Google was one of the program’s sponsors.
To participate in the Aug. 7-11 Technovation global competition, girls around the world had to build a mobile app — and a business plan — that addressed a U.N. development goal. The Cambodian girls picked poverty.
While globalization has boosted Cambodia’s economic growth, especially its tourism industry, it has also created greater economic inequality and competition. The girls think their app can help.
“We want to promote our culture to people from all over the world,” said Lorn Dara Soucheng.
At their young age, no one expects these girls to be able to solve their country’s most pressing issues quite yet. But their presence here highlighted another issue: girls in tech fields.
In the U.S. and worldwide, the number of women in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) remains low or even has dropped.
In Cambodia, just 14 percent of students in information technology were women as of 2010. It’s a situation some attribute to a lack of equal access to education and a lack of female role models.
It’s hoped that programs like Technovation can reverse that trend.
“For the first time in history, technology can really help girls have a strong voice and help us have a society that has equality,” said Tara Chklovski, founder and CEO of Iridescent, the nonprofit organization behind Technovation.
These young Cambodian girls have proved how far they can go with technology. Most come from underprivileged backgrounds but had support from teachers, mentors and family.
Cambodian American Pauline Seng, a program manager at Google, said the young coders have become role models for many other Cambodians, including herself. She didn’t get into technology until she was 23.
“There’s going to be so many people who aspire to reach this stage and also inspire other people to get involved in technology,” she said.
Although the Cambodian girls did not win the grand prize, which went to a team from Hong Kong, they were proud to have made it to Google and Silicon Valley.
After watching the male CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, speak at the closing ceremony, the girls said they believed the tech giant would one day have a female leader.
“Yes!” they said, in unison.
Whether that will come true or not, they have themselves already become the youngest role models to inspire others, one girl at a time.
Deana Mitchell contributed to this report, which originated on VOA Khmer.
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A group of young Cambodian girls recently took part in a mobile app competition for girl coders in California. Traveling from their home country to participate in the global competition, their story offers inspiration for other girls around the world to consider a career in tech. VOA’s Sophat Soeung reports from Silicon Valley.
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America is the birthplace of fast food and many of the restaurants that serve it have gained famed and fortune worldwide. Ben’s Chili Bowl in Washington is a neighborhood landmark. Its spicy sausages are loved by presidents, movie stars and locals. During its almost six-decade history, it has survived tough times, but now the family-run business is booming. VOA’s Mariia Prus and Kostiantyn Golubchik went to the famed restaurant and found out its recipe for success.
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They are being booted off or locked out of their websites. Some can no longer blog. Their electronic payment systems are being canceled. Even their music can’t be heard.
For some white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups, operating online has become much harder in the wake of last week’s “Unite the Right” protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in violent clashes between extremist groups and counterprotesters.
On Thursday, the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi and white supremacist news site and one of the organizers of last weekend’s demonstrations, was ejected from a Russian internet domain provider that was hosting its site.
The French news agency AFP quoted a statement from Alexander Zharov, the head of Russia’s telecommunications watchdog Roskomnador, calling on the domain provider to stop hosting Daily Stormer.
The Daily Stormer had recently turned to the Russian firm after being knocked offline by its U.S. providers, first GoDaddy, then Google.
As of Thursday night, the Daily Stormer was not online.
Resisting the role of censor
While tech firms have been under government pressure to crack down on state-sponsored terrorist groups, they have mostly resisted efforts to play the censor when it comes to who uses their services. Their terms of use guidelines often outline restrictions, but they have traditionally declined to police offensive content.
That laissez-faire approach appeared to be changing after last weekend’s demonstrations prompted by the rally’s violence and the recognition that extremist groups rely on a host of digital services to organize.
But the shift comes with great ambivalence.
Potentially dangerous moves
CloudFlare, which makes websites secure and fast, decided to stop serving the Daily Stormer. But it wasn’t an easy decision, wrote Matthew Prince, the firm’s chief executive.
“Someone on our team asked after I announced we were going to terminate the Daily Stormer: ‘Is this the day the internet dies?’”
On Thursday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit that advocates for civil liberties in the digital world and one that has stood with tech companies in its battles with the U.S. government on surveillance, criticized the tech companies’ actions.
“We strongly believe that what GoDaddy, Google and Cloudflare did here was dangerous,” the organization wrote in a statement on its blog.
Tech companies, with few competitors, increasingly have more power to control online speech, EFF wrote, and “the consequences of their decisions have far-reaching impacts on speech around the world.”
“Every time a company throws a vile neo-Nazi site off the Net, thousands of less visible decisions are made by companies with little oversight or transparency,” EFF added.
Cutting off financial services
While Google, GoDaddy and Cloudflare refused to host the Daily Stormer site, other extremist groups and supporters were affected in other ways, such as where they could stay, how they exchanged money and the music they listened to.
Ahead of the protests, Airbnb banned users from staying in Charlottesville if it appeared they were coming for the protests.
PayPal said it does not allow groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazi groups engaged in “activities that promote hate, violence or racial intolerance” to use its service for processing payments. Apple Pay also pulled its services for groups selling far-right merchandise.
Spotify removed “hate bands” from its service.
WordPress, the blogging platform, cut off access to its site for Vanguard America, a group associated with James Fields, who allegedly drove his vehicle into a crowd of counterprotesters. He is charged with second-degree murder in the death of one woman and injuring nearly two dozen other people.
GoFundMe, a crowdfunding site, took down campaigns for assisting in Fields’ legal defense.
Prince, of CloudFlare, wrote that making the decision to boot the Daily Stormer could change how the firm handles other takedown requests.
“Make no mistake, it will be a little bit harder for us to argue against a government somewhere pressuring us into taking down a site they don’t like,” he said.
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Walt Disney Co. is developing a “Star Wars” standalone movie based on the beloved character of Obi-Wan Kenobi, the wise and noble Jedi master, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety reported Thursday.
The Hollywood trade publications cited unnamed sources as saying that the project was in the early stages of development by Disney and Lucasfilm.
The project has no script yet, but British filmmaker Stephen Daldry, best known for 2000’s ballet movie “Billy Elliott,” is in early talks to direct it, the publications said.
Disney declined to comment.
Han Solo movie, too
Disney bought “Star Wars” creator George Lucas’ Lucasfilm in 2012 in a $4 billion deal and announced a new trilogy of films following the space saga as well as three standalone “Star Wars” projects that focus on stories outside of the central tale of the Skywalker family.
Disney debuted the first standalone “Star Wars” story with 2016’s “Rogue One,” which featured new characters and a storyline tied loosely to the ongoing saga.
A Han Solo movie is in production featuring a younger version of the freewheeling space smuggler played by Harrison Ford in the original “Star Wars” trilogy of films.
Who will play Kenobi?
Kenobi, a recluse played by the late British actor Alec Guinness, was the mentor to Luke Skywalker and introduced the young warrior to the Force in the first “Star Wars” movie in 1977. Kenobi was later killed by his old pupil, the evil Darth Vader.
Actor Ewan McGregor played the character in the second trilogy of “Star Wars” films from 1999 to 2005. The Hollywood Reporter said no actor was attached to the standalone project.
“Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” Disney’s first installment of the new trilogy in the revamped franchise, brought back beloved characters Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo as well as introducing a new generation. It took in more than $2 billion at the world box office after its 2015 release.
The next film, “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” is scheduled for release in December.
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The late American entertainer Johnny Cash was a country music legend who embraced all races and religions.
His children say they were “sickened” to see his name on the T-shirt of a white supremacist who marched through Charlottesville last Saturday.
In a message posted on social media, Cash’s five children call their father “a man whose heart beat with the rhythm of love and social justice.”
Humanitarian awards
They say Cash would have been “horrified at even a casual use of his name or image for an idea or a cause founded in persecution and hatred.”
The Cashes say their father was the proud recipient of humanitarian awards from groups including the Jewish National Fund and United Nations. He was a champion for the rights of Native Americans, protested the Vietnam War, and stood up for the poor.
They said Cash chose love over hate and asked that his name be kept away from “destructive and hateful ideology.”
Deep bass, shy manner
Cash was known for his deep bass voice, black stage outfits, and a somewhat shy manner.
His signature songs include I Walk the Line, Folsom Prison Blues, Ring of Fire, and the humorous A Boy Named Sue.
Cash sold tens of millions of records before he died in 2003.
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A U.S. researcher says she has developed automated ways to identify links between online sex trafficking ads and the digital currency Bitcoin, techniques that may help locate children being sold for sex.
Law enforcement and anti-trafficking groups could use the methods to investigate Backpage.com, an online classified advertising site where sex ads can be found, according to a statement by the University of California Berkeley, where the research was based.
About 1.5 million people in the United States are victims of trafficking, mostly for sexual exploitation, according to anti-trafficking groups.
Most sex trafficking victims are children, and most are advertised or sold online, according to a U.S. Senate subcommittee report released this year.
Algorithms do the digging
The new research uses an algorithm that analyzes writing styles to identify authors and could be applied to online trafficking ads, Rebecca Portnoff, its lead author, said Thursday.
A second algorithm can use time stamps to trace ad payments to accounts, known as wallets, at Bitcoin, a web-based digital currency that allows money to move quickly and anonymously.
Comparing time stamps of ad purchases on Bitcoin and time stamps and information on Backpage ads could help identify who is paying for them, said Portnoff, a UC Berkeley doctoral candidate in computer science who developed the techniques as part of her dissertation.
“Where previously you might have five different phone numbers that you had no idea were connected, when you can see that they all came from the same wallets, that the same person paid for them, that’s a concrete sign that these five phone numbers are all related to each other,” she said.
“I knew this was an issue that law enforcement was especially interested in,” she added.
Boost for law enforcement
Having automated style and time stamp analyses to identify sex ads by authors and Bitcoin owners is significant, said Damon McCoy, a New York University Tandon School of Engineering assistant professor of computer science and engineering and a co-author of the research.
“Any technique that can surface commonalities between ads and potentially shed light on the owners is a big boost for those working to curb exploitation,” McCoy said in a statement.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has said more than 70 percent of the reports it gets of trafficked children involve Backpage, based in Dallas, Texas.
Backpage did not respond to a request for comment.
The findings will be published by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, UC Berkeley said.
It said the work was funded by the Amazon Web Services Cloud Credits for Research Program, the technology and security firm Giant Oak, Google, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education.
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The sounds of thundering hooves and a roaring crowd have filled Siena’s Piazza del Campo almost every year since the mid-1600s.
The passion that surrounds the bareback horse race between riders from competing city districts — the Palio di Siena — is palpable to the point of sometimes being violent.
The race, held twice a year in July and August, is contested by 10 riders, each representing one of the city’s 17 contrade, or parishes, racing around a makeshift earth track in the square.
The lure of local glory means that the rivalries between riders and fans is fierce.
Violence between rival supporters is not unknown but, for the winning jockey and his contradaioli, or parish members, a win is a cause for major celebration.
“When you win the Palio, inside the parish there’s an explosion of joy and madness which is something incredible, all the contradaioli standing in the street, singing and crying,” said Massimo Castagnini, an official with Onda parish.
With the three-lap race lasting around only 90 seconds, the rest of the day is filled with pomp and pageantry. It features an elaborate parade and ceremony, with members of each of the contrade in medieval garb, toting flags and coats of arms.
“The day of the Palio, there’s really a big tension, the time goes too slowly for us,” said Castagnini. “You just want to go in the square, stay with your people and thinking that will be the right time for your victory.”
If victory is beyond a rider’s grasp, the next best thing is preventing a rival from winning — and to that end, almost anything, including punching and kicking other riders, is permitted.
This year’s race, run on Wednesday afternoon, was won by Carlo Sanna of the Onda parish, who was carried on the shoulders of supporters after his victory.
The race began after a local aristocrat banned bullfighting in 1590. It was replaced with buffalo races, before the first race of Palio races was held in mid-1600s.
With riders frequently thrown from their horses, and horses regularly suffering serious injuries, animal rights groups have called for the race to be banned. Around 50 horses died in the event between 1970 and 2015, according to Italy’s Anti-Vivisection League, an animal rights group.
However, change appears unlikely anytime soon, as the race is tightly woven into the city’s cultural and social fabric.
“It’s not just the race,” said Castagnini. “When you are born in a contrada, your people will take you from baptism till the end of your days.”
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From the sky over occupied Europe to an elephants stable in India and to its final resting place in an air museum in England, this was the 100-year journey for one of the world’s first strategic bombers. And the last part was the most astonishing because the planes’ remains, found in India, were almost beyond recognition. VOA’s George Putic has the story.
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Silicon Valley joined a swelling backlash against neo-Nazi groups in the United States on Wednesday as more technology companies removed white supremacists from their services in response to weekend violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Social media networks Twitter and LinkedIn, music service Spotify and security firm CloudFlare were among the companies cutting off services to hate groups or removing material that they said spread hate.
Earlier in the week, Facebook, Alphabet and GoDaddy also took steps to block hate groups.
The wave of internet crackdowns against white nationalists and neo-Nazis reflected a rapidly changing mindset among Silicon Valley firms on how far they are willing to go to police hate speech.
Tech companies have taken down violent propaganda from Islamic State and other militant groups, in part in response to government pressure. But most internet companies have traditionally tried to steer clear of making judgments about content except in cases of illegal activity.
CloudFlare, which protects some 6 million websites from denial-of-service attacks and hacking, on Wednesday afternoon dropped coverage of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer.
“I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the internet,” CloudFlare founder and Chief Executive Matthew Prince said in an email to employees.
CloudFlare is well-known for defending even the most distasteful websites, and services like it are essential to the functioning of websites.
Daily Stormer helped organize the weekend rally in Charlottesville where a 32-year-old woman was killed and 19 people were injured when a man plowed a car into a crowd protesting the white nationalist gathering.
Daily Stormer has been accessible only intermittently the past few days after domain providers GoDaddy and Google Domains, a unit of Alphabet, said they would not serve the website.
By Wednesday, Daily Stormer had moved to a Russia-based internet domain, with an address ending in .ru. Later in the day, though, the site was no longer accessible at that address.
Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin said on a social network used by many of his supporters, Gab, that his site would be back soon.
“The CloudFlare betrayal adds another layer of super complexity. But we got this,” he said. He could not immediately be reached for further comment.
Prince, the CloudFlare chief executive, said in an interview that despite his decision he was conflicted, because it could become harder to resist pressure from governments to censor.
“You don’t have to play this game too many moves out to see how risky this is going to be,” Prince said. “‘What about this site? What about this site?'”
Only the biggest companies will be able to navigate the varying laws in different countries, he added. “We’ve lost a lot of the fight for a free and open internet.”
Twitter on Wednesday suspended accounts linked to Daily Stormer. The company said it would not discuss individual accounts, but at least three affiliated with the Daily Stormer led to pages saying “account suspended.”
The social network prohibits violent threats, harassment and hateful conduct and “will take action on accounts violating those policies,” the company said in a statement.
Larger rival Facebook, which unlike Twitter explicitly prohibits hate speech, has taken down several pages from Facebook and Instagram in recent days that it said were associated with hate speech or hate organizations. It also took down the event page that was used to promote and organize the “Unite the Right” rally.
“With the potential for more rallies, we’re watching the situation closely and will take down threats of physical harm,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Wednesday.
Facebook also said it had removed accounts belonging to Chris Cantwell, a web commentator who has described himself as a white nationalist and said on his site that he had attended the Charlottesville rally. Cantwell’s YouTube account also appeared to have been terminated.
Cantwell could not immediately be reached for comment.
LinkedIn, a unit of Microsoft, suspended a page devoted to Daily Stormer and another page belonging to a man associated with the site, Andrew Auernheimer. LinkedIn declined to comment. Reddit this week eliminated one of its discussion communities that supported the Unite the Right rally, saying that the company would ban users who incite violence.
Spotify, based in Sweden, said it was in the process of removing musical acts from its streaming service that had been flagged as racist “hate bands” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Illegal content or material that favors hatred or incites violence against race, religion, sexuality or the like is not tolerated by us,” the company said in a statement, adding that record companies should also be held responsible.
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Fresh off winning her first Oscar, actress Emma Stone ousted Jennifer Lawrence on Wednesday to claim the top spot on Forbes’ 2017 list of the world’s highest-paid actresses.
Stone, 28, who won best actress for her role as a struggling actress in “La La Land,” made $26 million in pre-tax earnings, according to Forbes’ calculations over a 12-month period from June 2016 to June 2017.
She outpaced Jennifer Aniston, 48, who came in at No. 2 this year with earnings of $25.5 million, with residual income still coming in from the television sitcom “Friends” and endorsement deals with brands such as SmartWater and Emirates Airline.
Lawrence, 27, who topped the Forbes list for two consecutive years, dropped to No. 3 this year with earnings of $24 million, almost half of her prior year’s earnings of $46 million.
The actress, who has spoken out on equal pay for women in Hollywood, saw her earnings dip this year after the conclusion of the “Hunger Games” franchise, but continues to make money from movie deals and an endorsement deal with fashion brand Christian Dior.
Forbes compiles its annual celebrity earnings lists from box office and Nielsen data, as well as from interviews with industry insiders.
The top-10 list also includes Charlize Theron, Emma Watson and Melissa McCarthy. Forbes said no stars from Asia made the cut this year.
Forbes said the cumulative total earned by the world’s top ten highest-paid actresses — $172.5 million — was down 16 percent from the previous year.
Last year, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson topped Forbes’ list of highest-paid actors at $64.5 million, more than double the amount made by Stone this year. Forbes is expected to release its list of top-earning male actors later this week.
Thousands upon thousands of cans are filled with beer, capped and washed, wrapped into six-packs, and boxed at dizzying speeds — 1,500 a minute, to be exact — on humming conveyor belts that zip and wind in a sprawling factory near Tokyo.
Nary a soul is in sight in this picture-perfect image of Japanese automation.
The machines do all the heavy lifting at this plant run by Asahi Breweries, Japan’s top brewer. The human job is to make sure the machines do the work right, and to check on the quality the sensors are monitoring.
“Basically, nothing goes wrong. The lines are up and running 96 percent,” said Shinichi Uno, a manager at the plant. “Although machines make things, human beings oversee the machines.”
The debate over machines snatching jobs from people is muted in Japan, where birth rates have been sinking for decades, raising fears of a labor shortage. It would be hard to find a culture that celebrates robots more, evident in the popularity of companion robots for consumers, sold by the internet company SoftBank and Toyota Motor Corp, among others.
Japan, which forged a big push toward robotics starting in the 1990s, leads the world in robots per 10,000 workers in the automobile sector — 1,562, compared with 1,091 in the U.S. and 1,133 in Germany, according to a White House report submitted to Congress last year. Japan was also ahead in sectors outside automobiles at 219 robots per 10,000 workers, compared with 76 for the U.S. and 147 for Germany.
‘Lifetime employment’
One factor in Japan’s different take on automation is the “lifetime employment” system. Major Japanese companies generally retain workers, even if their abilities become outdated, and retrain them for other tasks, said Koichi Iwamoto, a senior fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry.
That system is starting to fray as Japan globalizes, but it’s still largely in use, Iwamoto said.
Although data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show digitalization reduces demand for mid-level routine tasks — such as running assembly lines — while boosting demand for low- and high-skilled jobs, that trend has been less pronounced in Japan than in the U.S.
The OECD data, which studied shifts from 2002 to 2014, showed employment trends remained almost unchanged for Japan.
That means companies in Japan weren’t resorting as aggressively as those in the U.S. to robots to replace humans. Clerical workers, for instance, were keeping their jobs, although their jobs could be done better, in theory, by computers.
That kind of resistance to adopting digital technology for services also is reflected in how Japanese society has so far opted to keep taxis instead of shifting to online ride hailing and shuttle services.
‘Human harmony with machines’
Still, automation has progressed in Japan to the extent the nation has now entered what Iwamoto called a “reflective stage,” in which “human harmony with machines” is being pursued, he said.
“Some tasks may be better performed by people, after all,” said Iwamoto.
Kiyoshi Sakai, who has worked at Asahi for 29 years, recalls how, in the past, can caps had to be placed into machines by hand, a repetitive task that was hard not just on the body, but also the mind.
And so he is grateful for automation’s helping hand. Machines at the plant have become more than 50 percent smaller over the years. They are faster and more precise than three decades ago.
Gone are the days things used to go wrong all the time and human intervention was needed to get machines running properly again. Every 10 to 15 minutes, people used to have to go check on the products; there were no sensors back then.
Glitches are so few these days there is barely any reason to work up a sweat, he added with a smile.
Like many workers in Japan, Sakai doesn’t seem worried about his job disappearing. As the need for plant workers nose-dived with the advance of automation, he was promoted to the general affairs section, a common administrative department at Japanese companies.
“I remember the work being so hard. But when I think back, and it was all about delivering great beer to everyone, it makes me so proud,” said Sakai, who drinks beer every day.
“I have no regrets. This is a stable job.”
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Tom Cruise broke his ankle while performing a stunt on the set of the upcoming Mission: Impossible 6, causing production on the film to go on hiatus while the actor recovers, Paramount Pictures said in a statement Wednesday.
Paramount, a unit of Viacom, said the action movie, from one of its biggest franchises, remains on schedule to open on July 27, 2018.
Cruise, 55, who is known for doing his own stunts, was seen in a video on celebrity news website TMZ trying to jump between the roofs of two high-rise buildings and landing hard against a wall during filming in London at the weekend. He was later seen limping off the set.
“During production on the latest Mission: Impossible film, Tom Cruise broke his ankle while performing a stunt. Production will go on hiatus while Tom makes a full recovery,” Paramount said. “Tom wants to thank you all for your concern and support and can’t wait to share the film with everyone next summer.”
Paramount did not say how long production would be delayed.
Hollywood trade paper Variety said filming could be halted anywhere from six weeks to three months while Cruise recovers.
Variety said the actor also injured his hip.
Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, in which Cruise reprised his role as agent Ethan Hunt, made more than $680 million at the worldwide box office in 2015, according to movie tracker BoxOfficeMojo.com
Cruise has carved out a career as one of Hollywood’s top-earning and longest-running action stars, much of it built on his reputation for doing his own stunts, including swinging around a Dubai skyscraper and hanging off a plane as it taxied down a runway and took off.
“I just don’t sleep, I just keep going,” he told Reuters in 2015 while promoting Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation.
Mission: Impossible 6 director Christopher McQuarrie told Britain’s Empire magazine in an interview posted Wednesday that the production schedule would be rearranged to shoot around Cruise while he recovers.
McQuarrie said that he did not know how long the immediate hiatus would be and that there were still seven or eight weeks left of filming.
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The organizers of New York’s annual Tribeca Film Festival are launching a standalone television event to recognize the vast and varied content now available on broadcast, cable and streaming platforms.
Organizers said on Wednesday the inaugural three-day Tribeca TV Festival will take place on Sept. 22-24 in New York, and is aimed at bringing new shows and returning favorites to the public.
The lineup for the festival includes screenings and celebrity talks for the return of comedy Will & Grace, the upcoming season premieres of dramas Queen Sugar, Designated Survivor and Gotham, and the world premiere of Look But With Love, a virtual reality series about life in Pakistan.
More than 400 scripted TV shows are currently produced every year in the United States across traditional broadcast and cable networks and services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, leading to what has been dubbed a “golden age of television.”
“Ten years ago, we wouldn’t have needed a TV festival. Now, with the change in the TV landscape, both the quality and quantity of shows, it makes sense,” actor Robert De Niro, who co-founded the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002 to rejuvenate lower Manhattan, said in a statement.
De Niro is among a plethora of Oscar-winning stars, including Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Michael Douglas who are making waves on the small screen.
De Niro is competing in September for his first Emmy Award for his role as disgraced financier Bernard Madoff in HBO television film The Wizard of Lies.
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Serbia offered a 10-year-old migrant from Afghanistan, who has been nicknamed “Little Picasso” because of his talent for painting, and his family citizenship on Wednesday, after they spent eight months in a refugee camp while seeking to reach Switzerland.
Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic made the offer to Farhad Nouri, which also included a job for his father, upon meeting the five-member family in his office. Nouri’s drawings and photographs were put on display last week in what was also a charity event to raise money for a Serbian boy recovering from brain tumor surgery.
Nouri and his family left their home in Afghanistan two years ago. Upon their arrival in Serbia, Nouri joined art classes organized by aid groups, and his talent soon turned him into a local celebrity.
“I know for how long you have travelled and that you want to go to Switzerland,” Vucic said. “But if you decide to stay, we will give you the citizenship now.”
The family is among some 5,000 migrants who have been stranded in Serbia after fleeing wars and poverty in their homelands. They have been unable to move on toward Western Europe, which has sought to curb the influx of migrants.
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Ireland’s finance minister rejected the European Commission’s demand that it retroactively collect 13 billion euros in taxes from Apple, saying this was not Dublin’s job in an interview with Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ) newspaper.
In the interview, extracts from which the FAZ published on Wednesday, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe said the tax rules from which Apple benefited had been available to all and not tailored for the U.S. technology giant. They did not violate European or Irish law, he added.
“We are not the global tax collector for everybody else,” the paper quoted him as saying. The European Commission last year ruled that Apple paid so little tax on its Ireland-based operations that it amounted to state aid.
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Canadian financial regulators have approved the public sale of a new digital currency in the country’s first official endorsement of money created independently of the government or central banks, company officials said on Wednesday.
Produced with digital encryption techniques, cryptocurrencies like Montreal-based impak Coin allow users to create their own money supply – with potentially significant impacts for how wealth and property rights are controlled.
Impak Coin has already raised more than C$1.5 million ($1.18 million) for the new currency and plans to launch an Initial Coin Offering – or a public sale of the digital money – this month.
By allowing people to create a new currency, the project aims to reduce the power of big banks in determining how property rights are managed and money is created, said Paul Allard, chief executive of impak Finance, the social enterprise behind the project.
“It is up to communities to decide how to manage a currency, it is not only for the government to decide,” Allard told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
‘No need for government’
Throughout modern history governments have had control over how money is created and the power to enforce contracts and determine how goods and services are transferred.
Cryptocurrencies – through blockchain, the information storage and database system they use – have challenged that power, said Simon Trimborn, a professor at the Free University of Berlin who studies digital networks.
“The link between cryptocurrencies and individual property rights is the information storage and transaction system behind cryptocurrencies, the blockchain,” Trimborn told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“It is a database which can guarantee property rights while there is no need for relying on a company or government.”
Contracts are made digitally between peers and transactions are often conducted without government oversight, reducing the state’s power over the market.
The move by financial authorities to approve the sale of the digital money means “confidence and trust for investors”, said Jean-Philippe Vergne, a professor at the Ivey Business School in Ontario, Canada, who studies cryptocurrencies.
“We are observing a profound change in the nature of capitalism,” Vergne told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “For the first time we have a technology that allows us to remove intermediaries such as government or central banks.”
Digital impact
Impak Finance hopes to raise up to C$10 million from its first sale of coins. Users who buy the new currency will be able to spend it via a mobile wallet connected to their phones.
More than 500 businesses have signed up to accept the new currency when it launches, Allard said.
He expects that will grow into the thousands as the project develops a “critical mass” of users, leading to more buyers and sellers making transactions.
Users will be able to exchange impak coins for traditional money which will be credited to their accounts after an initial waiting period in order to stop speculators from causing volatility in the currency’s value, Allard said.
Impak Finance will initially keep 40 percent of the money invested in the new currency as reserves in order to have cash on hand if users want to exchange it for traditional money.
Only businesses adhering to social and environmental standards are able to use the currency, said Allard, who hopes consumers interested in ethical purchasing will be attracted to the plan.
The “impact economy” – a small but growing sector that seeks to put the achievement of social good at the center of business – is expected to grow by more than 15 percent next year in North America, Allard said.
New type of property
Impak Finance will be entering a crowded market of new digital currencies, analysts said.
Following the growth of bitcoin, the most well known cryptocurrency, there are now more than 1,000 similar digital currencies being traded over the internet, said Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University in the United States.
Most of these new digital offerings, however, are used for speculation – investors hoping the currency will gain popularity and then rise in value – rather than buying and selling tangible goods and services, Narayanan said.
“People are trying to get the state out of money and various forms of property,” Narayanan told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “regulators and law enforcement are trying to adapt to a new technological development.”
($1 = 1.2707 Canadian dollars)
Egypt’s antiquities ministry says that archaeologists have discovered three tombs dating back more than 2,000 years, from the Ptolemaic Period.
The discovery was made in the Nile Valley province of Minya south of Cairo, in an area known as al-Kamin al-Sahrawi.
Tuesday’s statement by the ministry says the unearthed sarcophagi and clay fragments suggest that the area was a large necropolis from sometime between the 27th Dynasty and the Greco-Roman period.
One of the tombs has a burial shaft carved in rock and leads to a chamber where anthropoid lids and four sarcophagi for two women and two men were found. Another tomb contains two chambers; one of them has six burial holes, including one for a child.
Excavation work for the third tomb is still underway.
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Daniel Craig will return for a fifth go-around as James Bond.
The actor confirmed reports he would reprise his role as the suave British spy for “Bond 25” during an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on Tuesday night.
The announcement is a reversal for Craig, who told Time Out London in 2015 he’d rather slash his wrists than do another Bond film.
Craig chalks up that comment as “a stupid answer” and tells Colbert he “couldn’t be happier” to return to the role.
Craig breathed new life into the Bond franchise when he took over as 007 for 2006’s “Casino Royale.”
“Bond 25” hits theaters in November 2019.
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