Day: November 14, 2017

UN: Syria Formally Joins Paris Climate Agreement

Syria has formally joined the 2015 Paris deal aimed at slowing climate change, the United Nations said on Tuesday, leaving the United States as the only country opposed to the pact.

Syria, racked by civil war, and Nicaragua were the only two nations outside the 195-nation pact when it was agreed in 2015.

Nicaragua’s left-wing government, which originally denounced the plan as too weak, signed up last month.

Syria announced last week that it intended to join.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters in New York that Syria had submitted instruments of accession to the Paris climate deal and that the move would enter into force for the country on Dec. 13.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who has expressed doubts that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are the prime cause of global warming, announced in June that he intended to pull out and instead promote U.S. coal and oil industries.

Overall, the Paris agreement seeks to limit a rise in temperatures to “well below” two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, ideally 1.5.

The U.N.’s weather agency said on Monday that this year is on track to be the second or third warmest since records began in the 19th century, behind a record-breaking 2016, and about 1.1 Celsius (2F) above pre-industrial times.

more

Space Delivery: Astronauts Get Ice Cream, Make-own Pizzas

Astronauts got a mouth-watering haul with Tuesday’s Earth-to-space delivery — pizza and ice cream.

A commercial supply ship arrived at the International Space Station two days after launching from Virginia. Besides NASA equipment and experiments, the Orbital ATK capsule holds chocolate and vanilla ice cream for the six station astronauts, as well as make-your-own flatbread pizzas.

Astronauts always crave pizza in orbit, but it’s been particularly tough for Italy’s Paolo Nespoli. He’s been up there since July and has another month to go.

Nespoli used the space station’s robot arm to grab the cargo ship, as they zoomed 260 miles above the Indian Ocean.

Besides flatbread, the capsule contains all the makings of a good Earth pizza: sauce, cheese, pepperoni, anchovy paste, tomatoes, pesto, olive oil and more.

Astronauts also get a hankering for cold treats, thus the big frozen shipment of ice cream cups, ice cream sandwiches, ice cream bars and frozen fruit bars.

In all, the capsule contains nearly 4 tons of cargo. It’s named the S.S. Gene Cernan in honor of the last man to walk on the moon, who died in January.

The experiments include mealworms and micro clover, sent up by high school students.

The supply ship will remain at the space station until the beginning of December, when it’s cut loose with a load of trash. It will hover close to the orbiting lab as part of an experiment, then several mini satellites will be released and it will burn up in the atmosphere on re-entry.

SpaceX, NASA’s other prime shipper, will make a delivery next month.

more

AFI, Library of Congress Celebrate 50 Yrs of Film Preservation

In a star-studded night in Washington, the American Film Institute and the Library of Congress celebrated 50 years of partnership in film preservation.  Actor Morgan Freeman, American Film Institute founder George Stevens and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi were among the celebrities honoring half a century of partnership between the AFI and the Library of Congress.

“I think the AFI is important to all of us because its number one goal is the preservation of American film,” said Academy Award winner Freeman.  He attended the event as a representative of the American Film Institute.

When the AFI began its preservation process in 1967, less than 1/10th of the American films made in the early 20th century had survived, says George Stevens, the Institute’s founder.  “Working with the Library of Congress, we did a great search and rescue operation and recovered films.  The Library has reproduced them in safety film stock, so now, there are 37,000 motion pictures in the AFI Collection here at the Library of Congress,” he said proudly.

Stevens started his painstaking film preservation process when he was in Washington, D.C., working at the U.S. Information Agency, VOA’s parent agency at the time.  He worked under U.S. broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow.  “I ran the motion picture division and worked with my colleague John Chancellor and Henry Loomis, who ran the Voice of America.  So, I am a former part of your family,“ he said with a smile.

Special treatment

Apart from the AFI Collection, hundreds of thousands of other old films are stored at the Library of Congress facility in Culpeper, Virginia.  This is an ongoing preservation process, says the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, the first woman to hold the post in 60 years.

“Early films and some that are rare and really in terrible physical shape are preserved for posterity, and so our Packard campus in Culpeper, Virginia, has special vaults to preserve films.”

Two hours away from Washington, at the Library’s large film preservation facility, nitrate film vault manager George Willeman explains the challenges involved in saving older nitrate films from destruction.  “The nitric acid that makes up the film begins to break down the film after so many years, especially if there is something wrong with it, such as if it wasn’t processed right, it was badly produced or it was in bad storage conditions.  Like very humid or very hot.  And the film will begin to liquefy.  It looks like a coffee cake after a while.”

Nitrate films are highly flammable and especially unstable when they deteriorate.  So, it is important they are kept in the cool environment of an underground place that was originally built as a storage facility for the Federal Reserve Bank and as a Cold War nuclear bunker “in case Russia were to drop the bomb on Washington, D.C.,” Willeman says.  “They also had a dormitory here where it could run into place for two years while the radiation was outside.”

After the end of the Cold War, the space was sold to the Library of Congress.  With the help of philanthropist David Packard, the Library enhanced the underground space and built the Packard Campus to accommodate its ever-increasing film collection.

At the facility, technicians make prints of the damaged nitrate films and transfer them onto a sturdier polyester-type film material, which if stored properly can last for centuries.  And then there is the digital conversion which, as Morgan Freeman notes, reaches wider audiences on a multi-platform basis, including streaming.  “Not only are they archiving these movies, they are also circulating to television channels, television stations.  Movies are movies.  The only big difference between when you were growing up and I was growing up and now is you don’t have to go into the movie theater to see it.”

But George Willeman says digital preservation may be an oxymoron.

 

“How do you save digital material? ‘Cause digital as a rule is very iffy.  You have only a couple of different ways you can store it, you can store it magnetically or optically or on a card, but none of those are permanent.  Something can disrupt them and the stuff is gone.”

Whether stored in their original format or restored on newer film or digitally, the important thing is that these films are kept for posterity, says filmmaker Lesli Linka Glatter.  “Film is a huge part of our history.  And, if we don’t cherish it and preserve it, it will not be with us.  So, we have to do that,” she stresses.  “The fact that AFI has been so dedicated to that is essential and extraordinary.”

more

About 15 Percent of US Federal Agencies Detected Kaspersky on Networks

About 15 percent of U.S. federal agencies have reported some trace of Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab software on their systems, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official told Congress on Tuesday.

Jeanette Manfra, assistant secretary for cybersecurity at DHS, told a U.S. House of Representatives panel that 94 percent of agencies had responded to a directive ordering them to survey their networks to identify any use of Kaspersky Lab products.

The Trump administration in September ordered civilian U.S. agencies to remove Kaspersky Lab from their networks, saying it was concerned the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm was vulnerable to Kremlin influence and that using its anti-virus software could jeopardize national security.

Kaspersky Lab has repeatedly denied the allegations.

Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama.

more

Freedom on the Internet 2017

more

With China in Shadows, Japan Seeks to Advance Economic Power

Japan is stepping up aid and investment in Southeast Asia to help its multinationals do business across the continent while vying with political rival China for long-term influence over smaller neighboring countries.

The wealthy Asian nation is helping build a train line near Manila, a seaport in Cambodia and new support for the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal following the U.S. withdrawal in January — to name just three recent offers for Southeast Asia.

This week Prime Minister Shinzo Abe attended the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summits in Manila to meet leaders of 10 association member states. They agreed to enhance a 9-year-old ASEAN-Japan trade agreement.

The super-modern Asian nation hopes to secure a hassle-free, land-and-sea transit route as far as Africa, Abe’s spokesman Norio Murayama said. Southeast Asia is along the route. Japan, Asia’s second largest economy after China, looks to the smaller countries for land, cheap labor and resources, as well.

“For Japan, the country surrounded by the sea, a maritime order is extremely important,” Murayama told a news conference at the events in Manila.

“But maritime order, it’s faced with a number of threats, including piracy, terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and natural disaster, so we need to promote the idea to remove this kind of threat and create this area for international and public space that bring about stability and prosperity equal to all the countries,” he said.

Shipping lanes, factory bases

Japanese investment in Southeast Asia’s six biggest countries averaged $20 billion per year from 2011 to 2016, more than double the average annual flows from 2006 to 2010, DBS Bank estimates.

About 35 percent of Japan’s global aid was going to Southeast Asia as of 2011.

Tokyo particularly wants open shipping lanes, said Jeffrey Kingston, author and history instructor at Temple University Japan. It may worry that Beijing will try for total control over navigation in the South China Sea, which it claims over the objections of four Southeast Asian counties.

“Southeast Asia is vitally important to Japan in terms of resources, in terms of geopolitical position, the major trade routes connecting Japan to the Middle East and Africa,” Kingston said. “A lot of Japanese investment, a lot of factories’ offshore operations [are] located there.”

At international events, government officials hold talks to figure out who needs help where in Southeast Asia. They offered last month to help the Philippines rebuild a city torn by fighting with Muslim rebels, to name one example.

Japan ultimately hopes to help set rules for Asia, Kingston said, as ASEAN does for its bloc covering 630 million people. “Japan wants to be at the heart of shaping the rules for the emerging regional order,” he said.

Japanese direct aid worldwide increased 12.7 percent last year over 2015 to $10.37 billion. Japan has also expanded the mandate for that aid, including “human security” and “sustainable development” based on individual country needs, according to its Foreign Ministry’s website.

Disputes with China

China and Japan still face unresolved issues from World War II as well as dispute over islets in the East China Sea. China has regularly sent ships and planes near those islands since 2013 to assert its claim.

The East China Sea issue, plus wariness about Beijing’s grip on the South China Sea — a separate dispute not involving Japan — have prompted Tokyo to factor in freedom of navigation, rule of law and security when making aid calculations, analysts believe.

Japanese assistance usually comes piecemeal and through government as well as private sources, different from the sudden, massive offers that China has been able to offer over the past half-decade.

China’s showpiece is the $900 billion, four-year-old “One Belt, One Road” infrastructure building campaign across Eurasia.

Southeast Asia is receptive

ASEAN noticed the support of Japan as well as South Korea at the Nov. 13 and 14 summits in Manila, said Emmanuel Leyco, undersecretary of the Philippine Department of Social Welfare and Development.

“I think to a large extent both countries, although they’re not part of the ASEAN, they have been very, very supportive of the initiatives of ASEAN,” Leyco said on the sidelines of the summits Monday. “They support our activities, not necessarily direct funding, but they have activities that are in line with what the ASEAN is doing.”

The Japanese role in Southeast Asia will be more obvious as U.S. President Donald Trump lacks comparable outreach, said Stephen Nagy, senior associate political science professor at International Christian University in Tokyo.

Trump told ASEAN leaders in Manila he wants more “fair trade” in the region, short of a program to supply a range of aid or investment.

“Japan plays an important role here as a supporting pillar of an evolving strategic partnership in the region to balance China’s expanding economic, diplomatic and security footprint in the region,” Nagy said.

 

more

Rise in Teen Suicide, Social Media Coincide; Is There Link?

An increase in suicide rates among U.S. teens occurred at the same time social media use surged and a new analysis suggests there may be a link.

Suicide rates for teens rose between 2010 and 2015 after they had declined for nearly two decades, according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Why the rates went up isn’t known.

The study doesn’t answer the question, but it suggests that one factor could be rising social media use. Recent teen suicides have been blamed on cyberbullying, and social media posts depicting “perfect” lives may be taking a toll on teens’ mental health, researchers say.

“After hours of scrolling through Instagram feeds, I just feel worse about myself because I feel left out,” said Caitlin Hearty, a 17-year-old Littleton, Colorado, high school senior who helped organize an offline campaign last month after several local teen suicides.

“No one posts the bad things they’re going through,” said Chloe Schilling, also 17, who helped with the campaign, in which hundreds of teens agreed not to use the internet or social media for one month.

The study’s authors looked at CDC suicide reports from 2009-15 and results of two surveys given to U.S. high school students to measure attitudes, behaviors and interests. About half a million teens ages 13 to 18 were involved. They were asked about use of electronic devices, social media, print media, television and time spent with friends. Questions about mood included frequency of feeling hopeless and considering or attempting suicide.

The researchers didn’t examine circumstances surrounding individual suicides. Dr. Christine Moutier, chief medical officer at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, said the study provides weak evidence for a popular theory and that many factors influence teen suicide.

The study was published Tuesday in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.

Data highlighted in the study include:

-Teens’ use of electronic devices including smartphones for at least five hours daily more than doubled, from 8 percent in 2009 to 19 percent in 2015. These teens were 70 percent more likely to have suicidal thoughts or actions than those who reported one hour of daily use.

-In 2015, 36 percent of all teens reported feeling desperately sad or hopeless, or thinking about, planning or attempting suicide, up from 32 percent in 2009. For girls, the rates were higher – 45 percent in 2015 versus 40 percent in 2009.

-In 2009, 58% of 12th grade girls used social media every day or nearly every day; by 2015, 87% used social media every day or nearly every day. They were 14% more likely to be depressed than those who used social media less frequently.

“We need to stop thinking of smartphones as harmless,” said study author Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University who studies generational trends. “There’s a tendency to say, ‘Oh, teens are just communicating with their friends.’ Monitoring kids’ use of smartphones and social media is important, and so is setting reasonable limits, she said.

Dr. Victor Strasburger, a teen medicine specialist at the University of New Mexico, said the study only implies a connection between teen suicides, depression and social media. It shows the need for more research on new technology, Strasburger said.

He noted that skeptics who think social media is being unfairly criticized compare it with so-called vices of past generations: “When dime-store books came out, when comic books came out, when television came out, when rock and roll first started, people were saying ‘This is the end of the world.'”

With its immediacy, anonymity, and potential for bullying, social media has a unique potential for causing real harm, he said.

“Parents don’t really get that,” Strasburger said.

more

FDA Approves First Digital Ingestion Tracking System Med

The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first drug in the United States with a digital ingestion tracking system, in an unprecedented move to ensure that patients with mental illness take the medicine prescribed for them.

 

The drug Abilify MyCite was developed by Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. The drug Abilify was first approved by the FDA in 2002 to treat schizophrenia, and the ingestible sensor, made by Proteus Digital health, was approved for marketing in 2012. The FDA said in a statement Monday that the digitally enhanced medication “works by sending a message from the pill’s sensor to a wearable patch.”

 

“Being able to track ingestion of medications prescribed for illness may be useful for some patients,” said Dr. Mitchell Mathis, director of the division of Psychiatry Products in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “The FDA supports the development and use of new technology in prescription drugs and is committed to working with companies to understand how this technology might benefit patients and prescribers.”

 

Green-lighting the new medication, however, came with some caveats. Among them, the FDA said it was important to note that Abilify MyCite’s labeling asserts “the ability of the product to improve patient compliance with their treatment regimen has not been shown.”

 

“Abilify MyCite should not be used to track drug ingestion in ‘real-time’ or during an emergency,” the statement said, “because detection may be delayed or may not occur.”

 

In a portion of the statement that appeared to address privacy concerns, the FDA said the wearable patch that comes with the medication “transmits the information to a mobile application so that patients can track the ingestion of the medication on their smart phone. Patients can also permit their caregivers and physician to access the information through a web-based portal.”

 

In a statement issued last May at the time the FDA accepted submission of product for review, Otsuka Pharmaceutical, Ltd. of Toyko and Proteus Digital, of Redwood City, California, said that “with the patient’s consent, this information could be shared with their health care professional team and selected family and friends, with the goal of allowing physicians to be more informed in making treatment decisions that are specific to the patient’s needs.”

 

The companies said the Proteus Ingestible sensor “activates when it reaches stomach fluids and communicates with the patch.”

 

The FDA said the product is designed for the treatment of schizophrenia, acute treatment of manic and mixed episodes associated with a bipolar disorder and for use as an add-on treatment for depression in adults.”

more

Using Laughter to Drive Home Tough Lessons About Sexual Violence

Dr. Gail Stern is funny. And she uses that in her work, teaching college students, members of the military, business people and others how to prevent sexual violence.

Stern says she began doing standup comedy as a teenager and found that getting people to laugh also got them to open up about difficult topics. “There’s something deeper there than just being funny,” she says.

With her creative partner, Christian Murphy, Stern has spent the past 20 years developing Catharsis Productions, which stages live shows and also offers educational videos that help people question their assumptions about sexual assault and acceptable behavior.

The program reaches people, she says, because it “gives people permission to acknowledge ridiculous behavior simply by laughing.” And the laughter, she says, helps the audience get involved without feeling like they’re on the hot seat.

Stern says the current sex scandals plaguing Hollywood, politics and the media have not changed much about the way Catharsis programs are taught.

Before this, she notes, there were sex scandals involving others: basketball star Kobe Bryant, comedian Bill Cosby, or presidential candidates. “If it comes up in conversation,” she says, “we address it.”

One benefit that today’s landslide of sexual harassment allegations has provided: more conversation. For better or worse, Stern says, “It seems like the rest of the world is catching up to where our field has been for decades.”

Training sessions

When Stern or any of the company’s 28 educators conduct a session called “Sex Signals,” they include an interview scene.

“Before, in older versions of [the show], the educator was interviewing the accused rapist,” Stern says. “The audience would always blame the victim. Now that we interview the ‘bystander,’ the whole audience realizes they are bystanders.”

In a video clip summarizing a “Beat the Blame Game” session, an instructor asks the audience, “When someone says they are sexually assaulted, realistically, what kind of attention do they get?”

She answers herself: “It’s usually pretty negative.”

The instructor is light-hearted, energetic. Her college-age audience is engaged, answering and laughing at her jokes.

The session explains to students how victim-blaming works, using a less anxiety-producing analogy such as bike theft.

“Victim-blaming is that tendency to try to solve a problem after it’s already happened,” another instructor says in the same video. “So, if your bike is stolen, there’s a chance that you have a really helpful friend who loves you dearly, who’s gonna say, ‘Yeah, but did you lock your bike up right? Did you put it in a bad neighborhood?’ And when they ask those questions, they may not even realize that what they’re doing is implicating you in the crime of which you were a victim.”

Ultimately, the goal of the session is to create a community where a victim can come forward without fear if she or he has been sexually assaulted. “Because who are they afraid of?” the first instructor asks her audience. “Us. They’re afraid of us.”

more

Skirting the Skirt-chasers in Mainstream Entertainment

Comic and podcast host Chelsea Shorte is onstage on a cold Wednesday night in a small restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia. She is telling her mostly female audience about her transition from improv comedy to standup.

 

“I got tired of being cast as people’s moms even though I was 23,” she says. “If you’ve ever done improv with men, you’ll understand.”

The women gathered at the restaurant did understand. Most of them were aspiring comics who attended to network with one another, in an effort to skirt the roadblocks set up by a male-dominated entertainment industry.

Long before last week’s allegations of sexual harassment by comedian Louis C.K. emerged, journalist Nell Scovell wrote a 2009 Vanity Fair piece in response to a sex scandal centered around her former boss, late-night talk show host David Letterman.

 

“At this moment,” the article began, “there are more females serving on the United States Supreme Court than there are writing for ‘Late Show with David Letterman’ [and competitors],’The Jay Leno Show’, and ‘The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien’ combined. Out of the 50 or so comedy writers working on these programs, exactly zero are women. It would be funny if it weren’t true.”

Space for women

Comedian and entrepreneur Victoria Elena Nones founded the Women in Comedy network, which was behind Wednesday night’s networking event.

“I thought it was really important to provide a space for women to come together,” Nones says. “We see a lot of improv troupes and smaller groups of women who band together or do all-female open mics, but there was no national and international network of support.”

Nones founded her network in Chicago in 2015 and it now has chapters in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Washington. She says she hopes the group will help women find and support each other as they make their own places in a field notorious for sexism and sometimes outright hostility toward women.

Actress and comic Diane Chernansky of Los Angeles says she was recently startled to realize one of her own jokes reflected the way women are often treated in the standup industry, where she often found herself the only woman, or one of a couple of women, in a comedy lineup full of men.

“It’s very difficult to sit there and listen to lots of men talk about women in general and how horrible we are,” Chernansky says.

One night while she waited to follow another woman comic at the mic, the emcee asked her how she would like to be described.

Chernansky quipped, “I’ll be the next pair of breasts to come to the stage.”

Later, at a roundtable of female comics, Chernansky realized, “Holy crap, I said that about myself” — and, she acknowledges, about the other woman performing. “If anyone else had said that about me, I’d be offended.”

The unhealthy dynamic manifests in the numbers, as collected by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.

The number of female writers on the top 250 films of any year from 1998 to the present has stayed about the same, at 13 percent. Of directors on 2016’s top 250 films, only 7 percent were women. Only 2 percent of those top 250 films employed 10 or more women in the cast.

Minorities don’t fare any better. And the heavily male culture of the entertainment industry has a strong effect on what is expected of women — and minorities — in the industry.

Sexual harassment & labor abuse

Hollywood thrives on promises, notes E.C. McCarthy, who recently wrote a Washington Post piece that said predatory behavior in the entertainment industry is not limited to sexual harassment, or to performers. The promise of support in a difficult industry often paves the way for all kinds of abuse of power, she says.

“Harassment is one of the many ways to keep people feeling insecure, desperate, and willing to work for free,” McCarthy writes, after detailing one of numerous incidents in which a producer tried to take credit for a script she wrote. “Sexual harassment and labor abuse coexist as ugly forces in this business, and women overwhelmingly bear the brunt.”

McCarthy wrote that when she first became a writer in Hollywood, she assumed the imbalance of sexism would die out with the older generation of men in power. Instead, she says, now she gets it from men her own age. “The culture is thriving,” she writes.

“I get extremely frustrated when I walk into a room and feel like a piece of meat,” said Minka Wiltz, a black actress and activist in Atlanta, Georgia. She struggles not only with the stereotype of being a woman, but also being an African-American woman who is often asked to portray a stereotype.

“I’ve been asked to be ‘sassier,'” she says. Conversely, “I’ve been asked to ‘tone it down’ when I’ve [only] said five words.”

Wiltz says today’s entertainment culture suffers from “a sickness of manipulation.” She says the way to improve the situation, is for marginalized people to help each other tell their stories — the stories about women, people of color, LGBT and even disabled people — that are overlooked by the mainstream entertainment industry.

Pervasive problem

The problem is so pervasive that even Atlanta, a majority-black city, had no black theater collective until Wiltz and some colleagues starting working on one a few years ago.

Specialized groups, though, are nothing new in the entertainment industry.

Deaf West Theater, based in North Hollywood, in 2013 and 2015 sent productions of the musicals “Big River” and “Spring Awakening,” respectively, to Broadway theaters, winning wide acclaim.

The small Ivy Theatre Company  in New York makes diversity its mission, casting women and minorities in shows that explore issues relevant to those communities. Most recently, the Ivy mounted the show “A Real Boy,” about two puppets who adopt a human son. The show is written by Stephen Kaplan, a gay man who is raising an adopted son with his husband.

In Chicago, a thriving improv comedy scene lends itself to scores of improv troupes in various combinations, including an Asian-American group called “Stir-Friday Night,”  which has kick-started the careers of Korean-American actor Steven Yeun  and Indian-American Danny Pudi.

One of their recent shows skewered mainstream Hollywood for casting of white actress Scarlett Johannsen in The Ghost in the Shell, playing a Japanese cyborg. The name of the show: 8 Angry Asians, Starring Scarlett Johansson.

In conservative Spartanburg, South Carolina, the state’s first gay theater company, Proud Mary, just finished a major production, “I Am My Own Wife,” about a real-life transgender German woman who survived both the Nazi and the East German regimes.

Wiltz, the Atlanta-based actress, says these groups and many others are supporting the work that the mainstream entertainment industry overlooks.

“I really hope that people realize you have no more excuses for your own success,” she says. “I want people to realize that the Hollywood myth, like the American myth, is just that. You can create your own story.”

more

Countries Crack Down on Speech Online, Says Report

Around the world, Internet freedom is deteriorating, with some governments taking down their mobile Internet service, restricting live video streaming and employing a digital army of pro-government commentators.

These are some of the findings of “Freedom on the Net 2017,” an annual report by Freedom House, a global non-profit that tracks democracy and freedom around the world.

According to the report, which covered June 2016 to May 2017, about half of the 65 countries assessed – which covers about 87 percent of all the people online globally – saw their Internet freedoms decline, with the Ukraine, Egypt and Turkey showing the most notable one-year erosion of freedoms. China remained the world’s worst abuser of Internet freedom, followed by Syria and Ethiopia, the report said.

Sanja Kelly, director of the Freedom on the Net project at Freedom House, said the decline of Internet freedoms has coincided with the rise of Internet access worldwide and people increasingly turning to the Internet to promote democratic reforms and greater human rights.

“One of the reasons why we are seeing greater restrictions is precisely because some of the leaders in authoritarian countries, in particular, have discovered the power of the Internet and are trying to come up with innovative methods to suppress that,” she said.

Until recently, some governments in Africa and other parts of the world didn’t pay much attention to the Internet, focusing instead on traditional media, such as broadcast. That focus shifts when Internet penetration reaches 20 to 30 percent of the population, she said.

“Suddenly the governments start taking note and we start seeing propaganda actions,” she said.

Countries such as Zambia and Gambia have shut down mobile access to the Internet, particularly around elections.

“Shutting down mobile Internet is such a blunt measure,” she said. “It really signals the government is willing to take it to the next level.”

Some other key findings of the report:

• Online manipulation tactics played a role in elections in 18 countries.

• Governments in 30 countries promoted distorted online information, up from 23 the previous year, employing tools such as paid commentators and false news sites.

• Half of all Internet shutdowns were focused on mobile connectivity, with most shutdowns happening in areas populated with ethnic or religious minorities. In October 2016, the Ethiopian, government shut down mobile networks for nearly two months as part of a state of emergency amid antigovernment protests. Belarus disrupted mobile connectivity to prevent livestreamed images from reaching mass audience. Bahrain has issued a specific law that news websites are prohibited from using live video on their websites.

• In 30 countries, there have been physical reprisals for online speech, up from 20 countries in the prior year.

Not long ago, some of these online suppression techniques were mostly employed by China and Russia. “The extent to which these techniques are being used and the number of countries where they are present is something in itself new,” said Kelly.

“It seems like these techniques are spreading and some of the authoritarian countries like China and Russia are actually exporting these techniques,” Kelly said. “And some of the authoritarian regimes around the world are learning from example.”

more

Tough Critter May Hold Clues to Fighting Cancer

The naked mole rat is a unique animal, and to most people one ugly little creature. These rodents live most of their life underground and are nearly blind. But what makes them really attractive to scientists is they are cancer free. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.

more

Citizen Scientists Gather Data on Dead Seabirds

Hundreds of volunteers are patrolling beaches on the West Coast of the United States to monitor the number of dead birds that wash ashore. The multi-state monitoring program helps tell a larger story about seabird deaths and the health of coastal environments. Faith Lapidus reports

more

Silicon Valley Blasts US Senate Proposal to Tax Startup Options

A proposal by the U.S. Senate to change the way shares in startup companies are taxed incited panic and dread in Silicon Valley on Monday, with startup founders and investors warning of nothing less than the demise of their industry should the proposal become law.

The provision in the Senate’s tax reform plan, which appeared to catch the industry by surprise, involves the treatment of employee stock options. These options give the holder the right to purchase shares in the future at a set price and can be very valuable if a company does well and the share price increases.

Options are often a major portion of the compensation for startup employees and founders, who take lower salaries in anticipation of a big payout if their startup takes off. Options typically vest over a four-year period.

Senate Republicans have now proposed taxing those stock options as they vest and before startup employees have the opportunity to cash them in, resulting in annual tax bills that could easily climb into the tens of thousands of dollars, say startup founders and venture capitalists.

“If there were a single piece of legislation to adversely affect startups, it would be this,” said Venky Ganesan, managing director at venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. “Everyone is freaked out.”

Justin Field, vice president of government affairs at the National Venture Capital Association, said that the Senate’s proposed tax change would be “crippling” to the startup industry.

How far the provision gets remains to be seen. The National Venture Capital Association was successful in getting a similar proposal removed from the House tax bill, although it “didn’t fully appreciate” the Senate’s intention to add the tax provision, Field said.

The association also helped to steer lawmakers away from a proposal discussed late last year to tax venture capitalists’ profits on investments at a higher rate.

Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, a member of the Senate Committee on Finance, has filed an amendment to repeal the provision in the tax bill, according to his spokesman.

A new proposal

Under current tax code, employees are taxed only when they exercise their options. Options are exercised when the price they were granted at–known as the strike price–is lower than the share price, and some shares can then be sold to pay the taxes.

But the Senate proposal would require startup employees to pay regular income tax on the value gain of their stock options even before they are exercised. These options are illiquid assets, and cannot be spent or saved.

“What this would mean is every month, when your equity compensation vests a little bit, you will owe taxes on it even though you can’t do anything with that equity compensation,” Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures, wrote on his blog Monday.

For instance, if a startup employee receives stock options at a dollar per share, and the shares increase in value by $1 every year during the four-year vesting period, the employee would have to pay income tax on $1 per share after the first year, pay again on the $1 increase in value after the second year, and so on.

When that employee owns hundreds of thousands and even millions of shares, that is a hefty bill to pay. And there is always the risk the startup will eventually fail.

“This reform will force the average employee to pay taxes on that bet well before they even know if it’s a winning ticket,” said Amanda Kahlow, founder and executive chairman of marketing data startup 6sense.

For startup founders in particular, such a tax bill could be ruinous.

“It would mean that I would have to sell the company,” said Shoaib Makani, founder and chief executive of long-haul trucking startup KeepTruckin. “I have zero net worth aside from the common stock I hold in the company. It would be impossible. I would be in default.”

Some executives in the startup industry, however, have pushed for companies to move toward bigger salaries so employees are not so dependent on options to buy a house or pay for other large expenses. And when startups suffer valuation cuts, employees can end up with worthless options.

The Senate’s proposal came as a revenue-generating measure to help offset tax breaks in the bill. A spokesman for Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican and chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, did not respond to requests for comment and other Republicans on the committee were not immediately available.

A spokeswoman for Senator Ron Wyden, the committee’s ranking member and a Democrat, said he was aware of concerns that the provision would limit startups’ ability to attract talent.

more

Amazon to Produce ‘Lord of the Rings’ TV Series

Amazon.com has bought the global television rights to “The Lord of the Rings,” the company said on Monday, in what may be its biggest and most expensive move yet to draw viewers to its streaming and shopping club Prime.

Amazon said it will produce a multi-season series that explores new storylines preceding author J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first installment in the famed fantasy trilogy.

Three movies made of the trilogy in the early 2000s, filmed in New Zealand by director Peter Jackson, garnered nearly $3 billion at the box office and 17 Academy Awards.

Amazon acquired the rights from the Tolkien Estate and Trust but did not say how much it paid for them. The estate, HarperCollins and the films’ distributor New Line Cinema will help Amazon produce the television series.

The project underscores a shift in Amazon’s video programming. Its studio started in 2010 with a focus on unique shows beloved by critics, such as “Transparent,” about a father coming out as transgender to his family.

That was a winning formula for attracting Hollywood talent, awards and buzz, though not Prime subscribers around the world.

Now, Amazon is looking for a dramatic show that could be a hit globally, much like HBO’s popular fantasy series “Game of Thrones.” It is going head to head with Netflix, Hulu and others to bid for top content.

This puts Amazon in uncharted territory, with higher production costs expected.

Amazon justifies its spending on programming as a way to draw new sign-ups to Prime, whose members buy more goods more often from the world’s largest online retailer.

“Amazon Prime heads to Middle Earth,” Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said in a Twitter post.

Although “The Lord of the Rings” is the most famous work to emerge from Tolkien’s pen, he wrote much else, including prequel “The Hobbit” – also made into a movie trilogy by Jackson – and the denser “The Silmarillion.” The Amazon series will delve into some of Tolkien’s work that the movies did not explore.

“Amazon is committed to producing super high quality, recognized, branded entertainment,” said Wedbush Securities industry analyst Michael Pachter. “That’s a departure from shows like ‘Transparent’ and ‘Catastrophe.'”

“By definition this will be expensive,” he added.

more