Tag: business group

As her first day of school under Taliban rule approached, Sajida Hussaini was hopeful. Her father, a teacher for 17 years, and her mother had instilled in her and her siblings the value of education, and now she was one year away from graduating high school.

Even though the Taliban had taken over the country last summer, marking an end to many of the rights she and other Afghan girls had enjoyed all their lives, the regime had announced that it would reopen schools on March 23 and permit girls to attend.

But when Sajida and her classmates arrived at the school’s front gate, administrators informed them that girls beyond sixth grade were no longer allowed to enter the classrooms. Many of the girls broke into tears. “I will never forget that moment in my life,” Sajida said. “It was a dark day.”

Sajida was among a million or so girls in Afghanistan who were preparing to return to their classrooms after an eight-month hiatus. With the Taliban out of power in the early decades of the 21st century, girls and women across the country had gained new freedoms that were suddenly thrust back into question when the fundamentalist group swept through Kabul in August. In early statements to the international community, the Taliban signaled that it would loosen some of its policies restricting women’s rights, including the education ban. But that has not been the case, and when the day to reopen schools came, it dawned on Sajida and

Top officials at the Department of Homeland Security have been planning to tell Mexico that a controversial Trump-era border policy enacted during the pandemic may come to an end as soon as April, which could lead to an increase of immigrants coming to the border and a strain on resources, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The existence of such planning, which was revealed in a draft document, comes as the Biden administration deals with the fallout of two federal court orders on the border policy known as Title 42, which has been met with rebukes from Senate Democrats and immigrant advocates who have long argued it is illegal.

Former president Donald Trump first cited Title 42 as a way to contain the coronavirus by expelling immigrants at the border and blocking them from access to the US asylum system. Some immigrants are quickly expelled to Mexico, and others are flown back to their home countries. President Joe Biden has continued to enforce the policy during court challenges, expelling people at the border more than 1 million times in the process.

But a pair of court rulings — including one in which a judge ordered the continuation of immigrant children being turned back at the border — along with an already evolving federal response to the pandemic within the US could spell the end of the policy. One senior DHS official told BuzzFeed News that the agency has been planning for the end of Title 42. And the draft

Blania described a futuristic world awash in Orbs of varying shapes and sizes, where each person would be assigned a unique and anonymized code linked to their iris that they could use to log in to a host of web and blockchain-based applications.

Blania did not rule out the possibility that Worldcoin would charge a fee for providing this service, but the startup primarily plans to make money through the appreciation of its currency. “You distribute a token to as many people as you can,” Blania said. Because of that, the “utility of the token increases dramatically” and the “price of the token increases.”

Key to all of this technology is the Orb itself, and the contract that Orb operators sign underlines the company’s focus on stress-testing it. “Your role is to help us evaluate the Orbs and how people interact with them,” the contract says. “You should think of yourself as a product tester.”

Blania told BuzzFeed News that the company was primarily using its field tests to see how the Orbs performed in different environments — from Kenya’s heat to Norway’s freezing cold. “In Kenya where there was like, 40-degree heat, and just the reflection on the Orb is something we have never seen here in Germany in the office,” Blania said.

Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the ambiguity about Worldcoin’s goals is troublesome. “The question is, is this a digital currency company, or is this a data broker?” he said.