U.S. President Joe Biden says he wants every American to have access to high-speed internet. VOA’s Julie Taboh has our story about the United States’ more than $40 billion-dollar investment to expand the service.
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In recent years, TV shows and movies featuring Asians, including Chinese Americans, have been on the rise, with many of them aimed at younger audiences. Students at a Taiwanese School summer camp in Washington share their thoughts on this trend. Elizabeth Lee and Graham Kanwit report.
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STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN — Sweden on Monday ordered four companies to stop using a Google tool that measures and analyzes web traffic, as doing so transfers personal data to the United States. One company was fined the equivalent of more than $1.1 million.
Sweden’s privacy protection agency, the IMY, said it had examined the use of Google Analytics by the firms following a complaint by the Austrian data privacy group NOYB (none of your business), which has filed dozens of complaints against Google across Europe.
NOYB asserted that the use of Google Analytics for web statistics by the companies resulted in the transfer of European data to the United States in violation of the EU’s data protection regulation, the GDPR.
The GDPR allows the transfer of data to third countries only if the European Commission has determined they offer at least the same level of privacy protection as the EU. A 2020 EU Court of Justice ruling struck down an EU-U.S. data transfer deal as being insufficient.
The IMY said it considers the data sent to Google Analytics in the United States by the four companies to be personal data and that “the technical security measures that the companies have taken are not sufficient to ensure a level of protection that essentially corresponds to that guaranteed within the EU.”
It fined telecommunications firm Tele2 $1.1 million and online marketplace CDON $27,700.
Grocery store chain Coop and Dagens Industri newspaper had taken more measures to protect the data being transferred and were not fined.
Tele2 had stopped using Google Analytics of its own volition, and the IMY ordered the other companies to stop using it.
IMY legal adviser Sandra Arvidsson, who led the investigation, said the agency has the rulings “made clear what requirements are placed on technical security measures and other measures when transferring personal data to a third country, in this case the United States.’
NYOB welcomed the IMY’s ruling.
“Although many other European authorities (e.g., Austria, France and Italy) already found that the use of Google Analytics violates the GDPR, this is the first financial penalty imposed on companies for using Google Analytics,” it said in a statement.
At the end of May, the European Commission said it hoped to conclude by the end of the summer a new legal framework for data transfers between the EU and the United States.
The RGPD, in place since 2018, can lead to penalties of up to $21.8 million, or 4% of a company’s global revenue.
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WIMBLEDON, ENGLAND — When Victoria Azarenka walked into Court 15 Monday morning for her first Wimbledon match in two years, she was greeted by polite clapping. When the two-time Grand Slam champion from Belarus finished off a three-set victory more than 2½ hours later, Azarenka shook her racket with her right hand and pumped her left fist, then offered a wave to the spectators who were applauding warmly.
Unlike her opponent, Yuan Yue, whose nationality was noted on the scoreboard alongside her name, Azarenka had no country listed there. That’s because players from Russia and Belarus are back competing at Wimbledon a year after they were barred by the All England Club because of the invasion of Ukraine — and, in a sort of half-measure adopted by some other sports, are deemed “neutral” athletes who officially do not represent any nation.
The war that began in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine with help from Belarus continues, but Wimbledon’s organizers announced in March they would lift their ban — about which Azarenka said in an interview that, in the big picture, “I’m not sure that it made any difference.”
While other players have flags to the left of their names on the oversized, manually operated brackets on the outside wall of Center Court, the Russians and Belarusians do not. Nor are the countries noted on official schedules or results issued by the All England Club, nor as part of graphics on TV broadcasts of matches. The Club did not allow Wimbledon to be aired on television in Russia or Belarus.
Azarenka and all other entrants from those two countries needed to — and did — sign a declaration agreeing to three stipulations: They wouldn’t be representing Russia or Belarus; they wouldn’t accept funding from those governments or companies operated by them; they wouldn’t express support for the invasion of Ukraine or the leaders of Russia or Belarus.
“It was a difficult decision, as we said when we made it earlier in the year,” All England Club CEO Sally Bolton said Monday about the reversal in policy. “We took a lot of time to think carefully about the decision we made and the impact that would have in the same way as we did last year. We think it’s the right decision for The Championships this year.”
Liudmila Samsonova, a Russian who was seeded 15th in the women’s field, said after being eliminated by Ana Bogdan of Romania 7-6 (1), 7-6 (4) Monday: “Last year was tough to accept. But this year, when they said that we were able to play, it was amazing.”
If there were questions about how Russians and Belarusians might be received upon their return, the earliest indications on Day 1 were that there was nothing out of the ordinary.
No protests. No boos. No shouts in support of Ukraine — or against the returning players. (Russian and Belarusian flags were not allowed to be brought into the tournament grounds.)
“Just like I never left, honestly. It feels good to be playing here,” Azarenka said after beating Yuan 6-4, 5-7, 6-4. “For me, personally, I experienced very good treatment. … Today, to hear people say, ‘Let’s go, Vika!’ and cheering me on was also why I play, to play in front of the crowd, to put on a good show.”
Russians who won Monday included No. 7 seed Andrey Rublev and unseeded Aslan Karatsev among the men, and No. 12 Veronika Kudermetova among the women.
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HANOI, July 3 (Reuters) – Vietnam has banned Warner Bros’ highly anticipated film “Barbie” from domestic distribution over a scene featuring a map that shows China’s unilaterally claimed territory in the South China Sea, state media reported on Monday.
The U-shaped “nine-dash line” is used on Chinese maps to illustrate its claims over vast areas of the South China Sea, including swathes of what Vietnam considers its continental shelf, where it has awarded oil concessions.
“Barbie” is the latest movie to be banned in Vietnam for depicting China’s controversial nine-dash line, which was repudiated in an international arbitration ruling by a court in The Hague in 2016. China refuses to recognize the ruling.
In 2019, the Vietnamese government pulled DreamWorks’ animated film “Abominable”and last year it banned Sony’s action movie “Unchartered” for the same reason. Netflix also removed an Australian spy drama “Pine Gap” in 2021.
“Barbie,” starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, was originally slated to open in Vietnam on July 21, the same date as in the United States, according to state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper.
“We do not grant license for the American movie ‘Barbie’ to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line,” the paper reported, citing Vi Kien Thanh, head of the Department of Cinema, a government body in charge of licensing and censoring foreign films.
Warner Bros. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Vietnam and China have long had overlapping territorial claims to a potentially energy-rich stretch in the South China Sea. The Southeast Asian country has repeatedly accused Chinese vessels of violating its sovereignty.
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Indiana Jones, and executives at the Walt Disney Co. and Lucasfilm, made a somewhat dispiriting discovery this weekend. Moviegoers didn’t rush to the theater in significant numbers to see “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and say goodbye to Harrison Ford as the iconic archaeologist.
The film, reportedly budgeted north of $250 million, came in on the lower end of projections with $60 million in ticket sales from 4,600 North American theaters, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Including $70 million from international showings in 52 markets, “Dial of Destiny” celebrated a $130 million global opening. It easily earned the No. 1 title but was not the high-rolling sendoff for one of modern cinema’s most iconic actor/character pairings that anyone hoped. Disney is projecting that it will make $82 million domestically through the fourth of July holiday and $152 million globally.
“Dial of Destiny” is the long-delayed fifth installment in the Steven Spielberg/George Lucas-created adventure series that began in 1981, and the first Spielberg himself hasn’t directed. Veteran James Mangold stepped in to take the reins overseeing the Spielberg-approved script, which finds an older Dr. Jones retiring from his university job and swept up on a new adventure with his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge).
“It’s impressive that a franchise that’s over 40 years old is No. 1 at the box office. But there’s no question there were higher hopes for the debut of this movie,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “This is Indiana Jones. This is a summer movie icon.”
The film had its splashy premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, with a fitting celebration of Ford, who has said this was his last time playing the character.
But then it was hit with lukewarm reviews. This was an unexpected and unwelcome hurdle, considering it was coming after the maligned fourth film, 2008’s “Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” Another contributing snag was that a significant portion of the target audience, older viewers, don’t tend to buy many tickets on opening weekend for big blockbusters. But even “Crystal Skull,” budgeted at a reported $185 million, managed to gross over $790 million.
“Sometimes reviews don’t matter, but the sentiment coming out of Cannes was very powerful,” Dergarabedian said. “It set off a narrative where people were already feeling disappointed, and they hadn’t even seen it.”
Second place went to “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” with $11.5 million, bringing its domestic total to around $340 million. “Elemental” landed in third place with $11.3 million.
Aside from “Dial of Destiny,” the weekend’s other main new opener was the animated “Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken,” which debuted in sixth place with $5.2 million.
“Dial of Destiny’s” underwhelming debut comes just a few weeks after both Warner Bros.’ “The Flash” and Disney/Pixar’s “Elemental” had lackluster openings in North America. “Elemental,” like Indy 5, also premiered at Cannes to middling reception.
And yet, “Elemental” in its three weeks in theaters has held on much better than “The Flash,” which plummeted again to $5 million, bringing its domestic total to $99.3 million. Disney also saw similarly promising holds with “The Little Mermaid,” now at over $280 million domestically and “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3″ which has grossed over $345 million. After the holiday, Disney will be responsible for nearly half of the summer box office earnings.
“The entire story isn’t told on the opening weekend,” Dergarabedian said.
Disney has a “clear weekend” ahead with no competing blockbusters, when studio heads can reasonably hope for more families and older audiences to buy tickets. But things will only get more challenging for “Dial of Destiny” in the coming weeks with a crowded July. “Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning Part I” opens on July 12, followed by “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” on July 21.
“The ups and downs at the box office are giving us whiplash,” Dergarabedian said. “And we’re still on the cusp of some of the biggest movies of the summer.”
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” $60 million.
“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” $11.5 million.
“Elemental,” $11.3 million.
“No Hard Feelings,” $7.5 million.
“Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” $7 million.
“Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken,” $5.2 million.
“The Little Mermaid,” $5.2 million.
“The Flash,” $5 million.
“Asteroid City,” $3.8 million.
“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” $1.8 million.
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SYDNEY — China rallied to claim its first women’s basketball Asia Cup title since 2012 as it beat five-time defending champion Japan 73-71 in an epic final on Sunday.
Trailing at halftime it appeared China may fall for a third consecutive time in a title game as reigning champion Japan scored the last 14 points of the first half to lead by nine points.
Led by player of the tournament center Xu Han, China seized the momentum early in the third quarter and took what proved a match-winning lead late in the game to end its 12-year wait for a gold medal in front of a large crowd in Sydney.
Xu finished with a match-defining 26 points and 10 rebounds to complete the feat of recording a double-double in every game of the tournament. Siyu Wang scored 17 points.
Maki Takada led Japan with 17 points and four rebounds, with Saki Hayashi scoring 12 points for Japan.
China’s title follows its silver medal at the women’s basketball World Cup, also held in Sydney, late last year.
Japan and China met in the 2019 and 2021 title games with the Japanese prevailing in both to claim their fourth and fifth titles.
Earlier Saturday, host nation Australia claimed its third consecutive bronze medal as it cruised past New Zealand 81-59 to repeat its result from Bengaluru, India in 2019 and Amman, Jordan in 2021.
Alice Kunek contributed a team high 19 points and Anneli Maley completed a double-double of 11 points and 11 rebounds, while Tess Madgen scored 14 points with five rebounds and three steals for the Opals.
The eight-team regional tournament doubled as qualifying for next year’s Olympics, with the semifinalists — Japan, Australia, China and New Zealand — qualifying for Paris 2024.
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Airline passengers who have endured tens of thousands of weather-related flight delays this week could face a new source of disruptions starting Saturday, when wireless providers are expected to power up new 5G systems near major airports.
Aviation groups have warned for years that 5G signals could interfere with aircraft equipment, especially devices using radio waves to measure distance from the ground and which are critical when planes land in low visibility.
Predictions that interference would cause massive flight groundings failed to come true last year, when telecom companies began rolling out the new service. They then agreed to limit the power of the signals around busy airports, giving airlines an extra year to upgrade their planes.
The leader of the nation’s largest pilots’ union said crews will be able to handle the impact of 5G, but he criticized the way the wireless licenses were granted, saying it had added unnecessary risk to aviation.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg recently told airlines that flights could be disrupted because a small portion of the nation’s fleet has not been upgraded to protect against radio interference.
Most of the major U.S. airlines say they are ready. American, Southwest, Alaska, Frontier and United say all of their planes have height-measuring devices, called radio altimeters, that are protected against 5G interference.
The big exception is Delta Air Lines. Delta says 190 of its planes, which include most of its smaller ones, still lack upgraded altimeters because its supplier has been unable to provide them fast enough.
The airline does not expect to cancel any flights because of the issue, Delta said Friday. The airline plans to route the 190 planes carefully to limit the risk of canceling flights or forcing planes to divert from airports where visibility is low because of fog or low clouds.
The Delta planes that have not been retrofitted include several models of Airbus jets. The airline’s Boeing jets have upgraded altimeters, as do all Delta Connection planes, which are operated by Endeavor Air, Republic Airways and SkyWest Airlines, the airline said.
JetBlue did not respond to requests for comment but told The Wall Street Journal it expected to retrofit 17 smaller Airbus jets by October, with possible “limited impact” some days in Boston.
Wireless carriers including Verizon and AT&T use a part of the radio spectrum called C-Band, which is close to frequencies used by radio altimeters, for their new 5G service. The Federal Communications Commission granted them licenses for the C-Band spectrum and dismissed any risk of interference, saying there was ample buffer between C-Band and altimeter frequencies.
When the Federal Aviation Administration sided with airlines and objected, the wireless companies pushed back the rollout of their new service. In a compromise brokered by the Biden administration, the wireless carriers then agreed not to power up 5G signals near about 50 busy airports. That postponement ends Saturday.
AT&T declined to comment. Verizon did not immediately respond to a question about its plans.
Buttigieg reminded the head of trade group Airlines for America about the deadline in a letter last week, warning that only planes with retrofitted altimeters would be allowed to land under low-visibility conditions. He said more than 80% of the U.S. fleet had been retrofitted, but a significant number of planes, including many operated by foreign airlines, have not been upgraded.
“This means on bad-weather, low-visibility days in particular, there could be increased delays and cancelations,” Buttigieg wrote. He said airlines with planes awaiting retrofitting should adjust their schedules to avoid stranding passengers.
Airlines say the FAA was slow to approve standards for upgrading the radio altimeters and supply-chain problems have made it difficult for manufacturers to produce enough of the devices. Nicholas Calio, head of the Airlines for America, complained about a rush to modify planes “amid pressure from the telecommunications companies.”
Jason Ambrosi, a Delta pilot and president of the Air Line Pilots Association, accused the FCC of granting 5G licenses without consulting aviation interests, which he said “has left the safest aviation system in the world at increased risk.” But, he said, “Ultimately, we will be able to address the impacts of 5G.”
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Elon Musk announced Saturday that Twitter would temporarily restrict how many tweets users could read per day, in a move meant to tamp down on the use of the site’s data by artificial intelligence companies.
The platform is limiting verified accounts to reading 6,000 tweets a day. Non-verified users — the free accounts that make up the majority of users — are limited to reading 600 tweets per day.
New unverified accounts would be limited to 300 tweets.
The decision was made “to address extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation” by third-party platforms, Musk said in a tweet Saturday afternoon, as some users quickly hit their limits.
“Goodbye Twitter” was a trending topic in the United States following Musk’s announcement.
Twitter would soon raise the ceiling to 8,000 tweets per day for verified accounts, 800 for unverified accounts and 400 for new unverified accounts, Musk said.
Twitter’s billionaire owner did not give a timeline for how long the measures would be in place.
The day before, Musk had announced that it would no longer be possible to read tweets on the site without an account.
Much of the data scraping was coming from firms using it to build their AI models, Musk said, to the point that it was causing traffic issues with the site.
In creating AI that can respond in a human-like capacity, many companies feed them examples of real-life conversations from social media sites.
“Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,” Musk said.
“Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” he said.
“It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation,” he said.
Twitter is not the only social media giant to have to wrangle with the rapid acceleration of the AI sector.
In mid-June, Reddit raised prices on third-party developers that were using its data and sweeping up conversations posted on its forums.
It proved a controversial move, as many regular users also accessed the site via third-party platforms and marked a shift from previous arrangements where social media data had generally been provided for free or a small charge.
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If you logged onto social media over the past few months, you may have seen it – a video of the Russian Embassy on a gray, overcast day in Washington with the sounds of passing cars and buses in the background.
A man’s voice asks in English, “Do you want to change your future?” Russian subtitles appear on the bottom of the screen and the narrator makes note of the first anniversary of “Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine.”
As somber music begins to play, the camera pans to the left and takes the viewer down Wisconsin Avenue, to the Adams Morgan Metro station and on through Washington, ending at FBI headquarters, a few blocks from the White House.
“The FBI values you. The FBI can help you,” FBI Assistant Director Alan Koehler says as the video wraps up, Russian subtitles still appearing on the screen. “But only you have the power to take the first step.”
The video, put out by the FBI’s Washington Field Office, first appeared as a posting on the field office’s Twitter account on February 24. Another five versions started the same day as paid advertisements on Facebook and Instagram, costing the bureau an estimated $5,500 to $6,500.
That money may seem like a pittance for a government agency with an annual budget of more than $10 billion, but it was not the first nor the last time the FBI spent money to court Russian officials.
The video is part of an expansive, long-running campaign by the FBI to use social media advertisements to recruit disgruntled Russian officials stationed across the United States and beyond, in part to sniff out Americans who have betrayed their country in order to aid Moscow.
A VOA analysis finds the FBI has paid tens of thousands of dollars, at minimum, to multiple platforms for social media ads targeting Russian officials, with the pace of such ad buys increasing just before and then after Moscow launched its latest invasion of Ukraine.
Multiple former U.S. counterintelligence officials who spoke to VOA about the FBI’s efforts described the advertising as money well spent.
The FBI wants to find well-placed Russian officials who can “help identify where American spies may be,” said Douglas London, a three-decade veteran of the CIA’s Clandestine Service.
“It seeks Russian agents to catch and convict American spies and Russian illegals,” he told VOA, describing the mission as a part of the bureau’s DNA.
Another veteran CIA official, Jim Olson, agreed, telling VOA the goal of the FBI’s outreach to Russian officials is unmistakable.
“I call that hanging out the shingle,” said Olson, a former counterintelligence chief.
“For every American traitor, every American spy, there are members of that intelligence service who know the identity of that American or know enough about what the production is to give us a lead in doing the identification,” Olson said.
‘All available tools’
The FBI declined to comment directly on its decision to spend several thousand dollars to run the two-minute-long video as an ad on Facebook and Instagram, simply saying it “uses a variety of means” to gather intelligence.
“The FBI will evaluate all available tools to protect the national security interests of the United States,” the FBI’s Washington Field Office told VOA in an email. “And we will use all legal means available to locate individuals with information that can help protect the United States from threats to our national security.”
Some of the FBI’s earlier forays into social media advertising did get some public attention, first in October 2019 and then again in March of last year.
However, a review of publicly available data indicates the bureau’s use of social media for counterintelligence is more expansive than previously understood.
According to data in the Meta Ad Library, which contains information on Facebook and Instagram ads dating back to May 2018, the FBI and its field offices have so far spent just under $40,000 on ads targeting Russian speakers, generating as many as 6.9 million views.
While most of the ads targeted specific locations, like Washington and New York, some were seen much further afield, getting views across much of the United States and even in countries like Spain, Poland, Nigeria, France and Croatia.
It would also appear the FBI’s paid ads ran on platforms other than Meta.
Nicholas Murphy, a 20-year-old second-year student at Georgetown University in Washington, was in his dorm room last March searching for news about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when he saw an ad on YouTube, the video-sharing social media platform owned by Google.
“[It was] just text with a kind of a strange like background to it … all in Russian,” said Murphy, a Park City, Utah, native who does not speak Russian and who used a translator app to decipher the ad.
“At the time I didn’t know if it was coming from the Russian government, if it was coming from our government, if it was kind of propaganda, if it was fake,” Murphy told VOA. “It conjured up a lot of thoughts about Russian influence over Facebook ads in the [2016 U.S.] election.”
Murphy said he came across the ad another two to three times over the ensuing weeks. And, it turned out, he was not alone. A handful of other students were also starting to see some of the ads, including a couple of classmates in a Russian literature class.
Just how many ads the FBI paid to run on YouTube, or via Google, is unclear.
A search of Google’s recently launched Ad Transparency Center shows the FBI paid to run the Russian language version of its two-minute-long video most recently on April 28. But the database only shows information for the past 30 days and Google says it does not share information on advertiser spending.
It is also unclear whether the FBI paid to run any ads on Twitter in addition to pushing out information through its own Twitter accounts. Twitter responded to an email from VOA requesting information with its now standard poop emoji.
The FBI itself refused to provide details regarding the scope of its social media advertising efforts although the Washington Field Office did acknowledge to VOA via email that it uses “various social media platforms.”
The Washington Field Office also defended its use of social media advertising despite indications that the ads themselves, like the one seen by Georgetown University student Nicholas Murphy, do not always reach the intended audience.
“The FBI views these efforts as productive and cost effective,” the FBI’s Washington Field Office told VOA. The office declined to be more specific about whether any spies have been identified as a result of the ads.
“Russia has long been a counterintelligence threat to the U.S. and the FBI will continue to adapt our investigative and outreach techniques to counter that threat and others,” it said. “We will use all legal means available to locate individuals with information that can help protect the United States from threats to our national security.”
The Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to calls or emails from VOA seeking comment about the FBI’s use of social media advertisements to target Russian officials in the U.S. But Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov did respond to a March 2022 article by The Washington Post about FBI efforts to send ads to cell phones outside the Russian Embassy in Washington.
“Attempts to sow confusion and organize desertion among the staff of @RusEmbUSA are ridiculous,” Antonov was quoted as saying in a tweet by the embassy’s Twitter account.
Some former U.S. counterintelligence officials, though, argue Russia has reason to be worried.
“I think people will come out of the woodwork,” said Olson, the former CIA counterintelligence chief.
FBI agents “see what we all see, and that is that there must be a subset of Russian intelligence officers, SVR officers, GRU officers, who are disillusioned by what’s going on,” he told VOA.
“I think some good Russians are embarrassed, shocked, ashamed of what Putin is doing in Ukraine, killing brother and sister Slavs. And I think that there will be people who would like to strike back against that.”
London, the longtime CIA Clandestine Services official and author of The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence, likewise believes the FBI’s persistent efforts to reach disgruntled Russians on social media will pay off.
“Generally, the Russians who have worked with us have done so out of patriotism … they were upset with the government,” he said.
And the Russian officials that the FBI hopes to reach just need a bit of nudge.
“They’re aiming this at Russians who are already there mentally but just haven’t crossed,” London said, adding it is not a coincidence that many of the FBI ads show Russians exactly how to get in touch, whether via encrypted communication apps like Signal or by walking right up to the bureau’s front door.
“They’re not doing metaphors here,” he said. “They don’t want anything subject to interpretation.”
Even the language used by the FBI appears to be designed to build trust.
“It’s very much not native,” according to Bradley Gorski, with Georgetown University’s Department of Slavic Languages.
But given the overall quality of the language in the ads, Gorski said it is quite possible all of it is intentional.
“It might be a canny strategy on their part,” he said of the FBI. “If they are reaching out to Russian speakers and want to both communicate with them but let them know who is communicating with them is not a Russian speaker, but is a sort of American doing their best, then this kind of outreach with a little bit stilted, though correct, Russian might communicate that actually better than fully native sort of fluent speech.”
Whether the FBI’s spending on social media advertisements is achieving the desired results is hard to gauge. Public metrics such those provided by social media companies like Meta can give a sense of how many people are seeing the ads, and where they are, but do not shed much light on who is ultimately interacting with the ads to the point of a response.
When pressed, FBI officials tell VOA only that the bureau views the ad campaigns as productive.
Others agree.
“Relative to the hardcore military aid the U.S. has provided, that’s a small chunk of change,” said Jason Blazakis, a senior research fellow at The Soufan Center, a global intelligence firm.
And Blazakis, who also directs the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, thinks the FBI’s social media ads might be having an impact even if few Russian officials ever come forward with information.
“Part of it is also messaging to the broader Russian public,” he told VOA, pointing to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “There is this influence operational component to it, part of this PR [public relations] battle that is happening on the periphery of the conflict.”
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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. said Friday that a cybersecurity incident involving one of its IT hardware suppliers has led to the leak of the vendor’s company data.
“TSMC has recently been aware that one of our IT hardware suppliers experienced a cybersecurity incident that led to the leak of information pertinent to server initial setup and configuration,” the company said.
TMSC confirmed in a statement to Reuters that its business operations or customer information were not affected following the cybersecurity incident at its supplier Kinmax.
The TSMC vendor breach is part of a larger trend of significant security incidents affecting various companies and government entities.
Victims range from U.S. government departments to the UK’s telecom regulator to energy giant Shell, all affected since a security flaw was discovered in Progress Software’s MOVEit Transfer product last month.
TSMC said it has cut off data exchange with the affected supplier following the incident.
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FIFA revealed eight different armbands highlighting social causes that sides will be able to wear at the women’s World Cup as world football’s governing body seeks to avoid a row that erupted at last year’s men’s World Cup.
Captains from a number of European countries, including England and Germany, planned to wear a “OneLove” armband in rainbow colors in Qatar in support of LGBTQ rights.
However, they abandoned that stance after being threatened with sporting sanctions just days before the tournament kicked off.
The armband had widely been viewed as a symbolic protest against laws in Qatar, where homosexuality is illegal.
The “unite for inclusion” armband for the women’s World Cup is similar in style to the one outlawed with the words alongside a heart shape in rainbow colors.
Other causes highlighted include gender equality, ending violence against women, hunger and the rights of indigenous people.
Captains will be able to wear a different armband for each match corresponding to the cause being promoted or support one cause for the entire tournament.
“Football unites the world and our global events, such as the FIFA Women’s World Cup, have a unique power to bring people together and provide joy, excitement and passion,” said FIFA President Gianni Infantino.
“After some very open talks with stakeholders, including member associations and players, we have decided to highlight a series of social causes – from inclusion to gender equality, from peace to ending hunger, from education to tackling domestic violence – during all 64 matches at the FIFA Women’s World Cup.”
The women’s World Cup, which will be hosted by Australia and New Zealand, begins on July 20.
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Alan Arkin, the wry character actor who demonstrated his versatility in everything from farcical comedy to chilling drama as he received four Academy Award nominations and won an Oscar in 2007 for “Little Miss Sunshine,” has died. He was 89.
His sons Adam, Matthew and Anthony confirmed their father’s death through the actor’s publicist on Friday. “Our father was a uniquely talented force of nature, both as an artist and a man,” they said in a statement.
A member of Chicago’s famed Second City comedy troupe, Arkin was an immediate success in movies with the Cold War spoof “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming” and peaked late in life with his win as best supporting actor for the surprise 2006 hit “Little Miss Sunshine.” More than 40 years separated his first Oscar nomination, for “The Russians are Coming,” from his nomination for playing a conniving Hollywood producer in the Oscar-winning “Argo.”
In recent years he starred opposite Michael Douglas in the Netflix comedy series “The Kominsky Method,” a role that earned him two Emmy nominations.
“When I was a young actor people wanted to know if I wanted to be a serious actor or a funny one,” Michael McKean tweeted Friday. ‘I’d answer ‘Which kind is Alan Arkin?’ and that shut them up.”
Arkin once joked to The Associated Press that the beauty of being a character actor was not having to take his clothes off for a role. He wasn’t a sex symbol or superstar, but was rarely out of work, appearing in more than 100 TV and feature films. His trademarks were likability, relatability and complete immersion in his roles, no matter how unusual, whether playing a Russian submarine officer in “The Russians are Coming” who struggles to communicate with the equally jittery Americans, or standing out as the foul-mouthed, drug-addicted grandfather in “Little Miss Sunshine.”
“Alan’s never had an identifiable screen personality because he just disappears into his characters,” director Norman Jewison of “The Russians are Coming” once observed. “His accents are impeccable, and he’s even able to change his looks. … He’s always been underestimated, partly because he’s never been in service of his own success.”
While still with Second City, Arkin was chosen by Carl Reiner to play the young protagonist in the 1963 Broadway play “Enter Laughing,” based on Reiner’s semi-autobiographical novel.
He attracted strong reviews and the notice of Jewison, who was preparing to direct a 1966 comedy about a Russian sub that creates a panic when it ventures too close to a small New England town. In Arkin’s next major film, he proved he could also play a villain, however reluctantly. Arkin starred in “Wait Until Dark” as a vicious drug dealer who holds a blind woman (Audrey Hepburn) captive in her own apartment, believing a drug shipment is hidden there.
He recalled in a 1998 interview how difficult it was to terrorize Hepburn’s character.
“Just awful,” he said. “She was an exquisite lady, so being mean to her was hard.”
Arkin’s rise continued in 1968 with “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” in which he played a sensitive man who could not hear or speak. He starred as the bumbling French detective in “Inspector Clouseau” that same year, but the film would become overlooked in favor of Peter Sellers’ Clouseau in the “Pink Panther” movies.
Arkin’s career as a character actor continued to blossom when Mike Nichols, a fellow Second City alumnus, cast him in the starring role as Yossarian, the victim of wartime red tape in 1970’s “Catch-22,” based on Joseph Heller’s million-selling novel. Through the years, Arkin turned up in such favorites as “Edward Scissorhands,” playing Johnny Depp’s neighbor; and in the film version of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” as a dogged real estate salesman. He and Reiner played brothers, one successful (Reiner), one struggling (Arkin), in the 1998 film “The Slums of Beverly Hills.”
“I used to think that my stuff had a lot of variety. But I realized that for the first twenty years or so, most of the characters I played were outsiders, strangers to their environment, foreigners in one way or another,” he told The Associated Press in 2007.
“As I started to get more and more comfortable with myself, that started to shift. I got one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever gotten from someone a few days ago. They said that they thought my characters were very often the heart, the moral center of a film. I didn’t particularly understand it, but I liked it; it made me happy.”
Other recent credits included “Going in Style,” a 2017 remake featuring fellow Oscar winners Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, and “The Kominsky Method.” He played a Hollywood talent agent and friend of Douglas’ character, a once-promising actor who ran an acting school after his career sputtered.
He also was the voice of Wild Knuckles in the 2022 animated film “Minions: The Rise of Gru.”
Arkin also directed the film version of Jules Feiffer’s 1971 dark comedy “Little Murders” and Neil Simon’s 1972 play about bickering old vaudeville partners, “The Sunshine Boys.” On television, Arkin appeared in the short-lived series “Fay” and “Harry” and played a night court judge in Sidney Lumet’s drama series “100 Centre Street” on A&E. He also wrote several books for children.
Born in New York City’s borough of Brooklyn, he and his family, which included two younger brothers, moved to Los Angeles when he was 11. His parents found jobs as teachers, but were fired during the post-World War II Red Scare because they were Communists.
“We were dirt poor so I couldn’t afford to go to the movies often,” he told the AP in 1998. “But I went whenever I could and focused in on movies, as they were more important than anything in my life.”
He studied acting at Los Angeles City College; California State University, Los Angeles; and Bennington College in Vermont, where he earned a scholarship to the formerly all-girls school.
He married a fellow student, Jeremy Yaffe, and they had two sons, Adam and Matthew.
After he and Yaffe divorced in 1961, Arkin married actress-writer Barbara Dana, and they had a son, Anthony. All three sons became actors: Adam starred in the TV series “Chicago Hope.”
“It was certainly nothing that I pushed them into,” Arkin said in 1998. “It made absolutely no difference to me what they did, as long as it allowed them to grow.”
Arkin began his entertainment career as an organizer and singer with The Tarriers, a group that briefly rode the folk musical revival wave of the late 1950s. Later, he turned to stage acting, off-Broadway and always in dramatic roles.
At Second City, he worked with Nichols, Elaine May, Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara and others in creating intellectual, high-speed impromptu riffs the fads and follies of the day.
“I never knew that I could be funny until I joined Second City,” he said.
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LA PAZ, BOLIVIA – Chinese and Russian companies will invest more than $1.4 billion in the extraction of lithium in Bolivia, one of the countries with the largest reserves of the mineral used in electric car batteries, the government in La Paz said Friday.
China’s Citic Guoan and Russia’s Uranium One Group — both with a major government stake — will partner with Bolivia’s state-owned YLB to build two lithium carbonate processing plants, Bolivian President Luis Arce said at a public event.
Lithium is often described as the “white gold” of the clean-energy revolution, a highly coveted component of mobile phones and electric car batteries.
“We are consolidating the country’s industrialization process,” Arce said.
Bolivia, which claims to have the world’s largest deposits, in January also signed an agreement with Chinese consortium CBC to build two lithium battery plants.
The country’s energy ministry said in a statement that each of the two new plants would have the capacity to produce up to 25,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate per year.
Construction will begin in about three months.
China and Russia are among Bolivia’s main lithium buyers.
Lithium is mostly mined in Australia and South America.
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A screenwriters’ strike in Hollywood has been going on for two months, grinding scripted TV production basically to a halt and costing California millions in losses each day. Angelina Bagdasaryan has more in this story, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: Vazgen Varzhabetian
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Meta Platforms’ Oversight Board on Thursday called for the suspension of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen for six months, saying a video posted on his Facebook page had violated Meta’s rules against violent threats.
The board, which is funded by Meta but operates independently, said the company erred in leaving up the video and ordered its removal from Facebook.
Meta, in a written statement, agreed to take down the video but said it would respond to the recommendation to suspend Hun Sen after a review.
A suspension would silence the prime minister’s Facebook page less than a month before an election in Cambodia, although critics say the poll will be a sham due to Hun Sen’s autocratic rule.
The decision is the latest in a series of rebukes by the Oversight Board over how the world’s biggest social media company handles rule-breaking political leaders and incitement to violence around elections.
The company’s election integrity efforts are in focus as the United States prepares for presidential elections next year.
The board endorsed Meta’s 2021 banishment of former U.S. President Donald Trump – the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination – after the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot, but criticized the indefinite nature of his suspension and urged more careful preparation for volatile political situations overall.
Meta reinstated the former U.S. president earlier this year.
Last week, the board said Meta’s handling of calls for violence after the 2022 Brazilian election continued to raise concerns about the effectiveness of its election efforts.
Hun Sen’s video, broadcast on his official Facebook page in January, showed the prime minister threatening to beat up political rivals and send “gangsters” to their homes, according to the board’s ruling.
Meta determined at the time that the video fell afoul of its rules, but opted to leave it up under a “newsworthiness” exemption, reasoning that the public had an interest in hearing warnings of violence by their government, the ruling said.
The board held that the video’s harms outweighed its news value.
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Members of the U.N.’s cultural agency are gathering Thursday for the start of two days of meetings in Paris that are expected to include a vote to accept the return of the United States to the organization.
The United States withdrew in 2018 complaining of anti-Israel bias and mismanagement at the agency.
Before leaving, the U.S. was UNESCO’s largest single donor, providing about one-fifth of the agency’s overall funding.
U.S. officials said earlier this month that the desire to return to UNESCO was motivated by concerns about China’s influence in policymaking at the agency, particularly regarding artificial intelligence and technology education.
As part of the proposed return plan, the Biden administration has requested $150 million in funding for 2024 UNESCO dues and arrears.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Geoffrey Hinton, one of the so-called godfathers of artificial intelligence, on Wednesday urged governments to step in and make sure that machines do not take control of society.
Hinton made headlines in May when he announced he had quit Google after a decade of work to speak more freely on the dangers of AI, shortly after the release of ChatGPT captured the imagination of the world.
The highly respected AI scientist, who is based at the University of Toronto, was speaking to a packed audience at the Collision tech conference in the Canadian city.
The conference brought together more than 30,000 startup founders, investors and tech workers, most looking to learn how to ride the AI wave and not hear a lesson on its dangers.
“Before AI is smarter than us, I think the people developing it should be encouraged to put a lot of work into understanding how it might try and take control away,” Hinton said.
“Right now there are 99 very smart people trying to make AI better and one very smart person trying to figure out how to stop it taking over and maybe you want to be more balanced,” he said.
AI could deepen inequality, says Hinton
Hinton warned that the risks of AI should be taken seriously despite his critics who believe he is overplaying the risks.
“I think it’s important that people understand that this is not science fiction, this is not just fearmongering,” he insisted. “It is a real risk that we must think about, and we need to figure out in advance how to deal with it.”
Hinton also expressed concern that AI would deepen inequality, with the massive productivity gain from its deployment going to the benefit of the rich, and not workers.
“The wealth isn’t going to go to the people doing the work. It is going to go into making the rich richer and not the poorer and that’s very bad for society,” he added.
He also pointed to the danger of fake news created by ChatGPT-style bots and said he hoped that AI-generated content could be marked in a way similar to how central banks watermark cash money.
“It’s very important to try, for example, to mark everything that is fake as fake. Whether we can do that technically, I don’t know,” he said.
The European Union is considering such a technique in its AI Act, a legislation that will set the rules for AI in Europe, which is being negotiated by lawmakers.
‘Overpopulation on Mars’
Hinton’s list of AI dangers contrasted with conference discussions that were less over safety and threats, and more about seizing the opportunity created in the wake of ChatGPT.
Venture Capitalist Sarah Guo said doom and gloom talk of AI as an existential threat was premature and compared it to “talking about overpopulation on Mars,” quoting another AI guru, Andrew Ng.
She also warned against “regulatory capture” that would see government intervention protect the incumbents before it had a chance to benefit sectors such as health, education or science.
Opinions differed on whether the current generative AI giants, mainly Microsoft backed OpenAI and Google, would remain unmatched or whether new actors will expand the field with their own models and innovations.
“In five years, I still imagine that if you want to go and find the best, most accurate, most advanced general model, you’re probably going to still have to go to one of the few companies that have the capital to do it,” said Leigh Marie Braswell of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.
Zachary Bratun-Glennon of Gradient Ventures said he foresaw a future where “there are going to be millions of models across a network much like we have a network of websites today.”
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PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA — Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, a devoted and very active user of Facebook — on which he has posted everything from photos of his grandchildren to threats against his political enemies — said Wednesday that he would no longer upload to the platform and would instead depend on the Telegram app to get his messages across.
Telegram is a popular messaging app that also has a blogging tool called “channels.” In Russia and some neighboring countries, it is actively used both by government officials and opposition activists for communicating with mass audiences. Telegram played an important role in coordinating unprecedented anti-government protests in Belarus in 2020, and it currently serves as a major source of news about Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Hun Sen, 70, who has led Cambodia for 38 years, is listed as having 14 million Facebook followers, though critics have suggested a large number of them are merely “ghost” accounts purchased in bulk from so-called “click farms,” an assertion the long-serving prime minister has repeatedly denied. The Facebook accounts of Joe Biden and Donald Trump by comparison boast 11 million and 34 million followers, respectively, though the United States has about 20 times the population of Cambodia.
Hun Sen officially launched his Facebook page on September 20, 2015, after his fierce political rival, opposition leader Sam Rainsy, effectively demonstrated how it could be used to mobilize support. Hun Sen is noted as a canny and sometimes ruthless politician, and he has since then managed to drive his rival into exile and neutralize all his challengers, even though Cambodia is a nominally democratic state.
Controversial remarks
Hun Sen said he was giving up Facebook for Telegram because he believed the latter would be more effective for communicating. In a Telegram post on Wednesday, he said it would be easier for him to get his message out when traveling in other countries that officially ban Facebook use, such as China, the top ally of his government. Hun Sen has 855,000 followers so far on Telegram, where he appears to have started posting in mid-May.
It is possible, however, that Hun Sen’s social media loyalty switch has to do with controversy about remarks he posted earlier this year on Facebook that in theory could see him get at least temporarily banned from the platform very soon.
In January, speaking at a road construction ceremony, he decried opposition politicians who accused his ruling Cambodian People’s Party of stealing votes.
“There are only two options. One is to use legal means and the other is to use a stick,” the prime minister said. “Either you face legal action in court, or I rally [the Cambodian] People’s Party people for a demonstration and beat you up.” His remarks were spoken on Facebook Live and kept online as a video.
Perhaps because of heightened consciousness about the power of social media to inflame and trigger violence in such countries as India and Myanmar, and because the remarks were made ahead of a general election in Cambodia this July, complaints about his words were lodged with Facebook’s parent company, Meta.
Facebook’s moderators declined to recommend action against Hun Sen, judging that his position as a national leader made his remarks newsworthy and therefore not subject to punishment despite their provocative nature.
However, the case was forwarded in March to Meta’s Oversight Board, a group of independent experts that is empowered to render an overriding judgment that could limit Hun Sen’s Facebook activities. They are expected to issue a decision on Thursday. The case is being closely watched as an indicator of where Facebook will draw the line in countries with volatile political situations.
Hun Sen said his Facebook account would remain online, but that he would no longer actively post to it. He urged people looking for news from him to check YouTube and his Instagram account as well as Telegram and said he had ordered his office to establish a TikTok account to allow him to communicate with his country’s youth.
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U.S. President Joe Biden says he wants to make sure that every American has access to high-speed internet. VOA’s Julie Taboh has our story about the United States’ more than $40 billion-dollar investment to expand the service. (Videographer: Adam Greenbaum; Produced by Julie Taboh, Adam Greenbaum)
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