Newsletter Archive

VIDEO: We might be living in the internet age, but more than 19 million Americans still don’t have wifi at home. Garrett County, Maryland, was one rural region that didn’t have service until local leaders came up with an innovative plan to use old TV signals to provide access to the internet.

Copy and paste is basically what tech startups are doing in Vietnam; which pretty much means they copy a business model from another country and paste it into the domestic market. With low costs and an educated population, Vietnam has the key ingredients for tech success. That’s prompted the government to offer support to young companies in the form of  co-working spaces, technical equipment and low interest rates, in hopes of sparking a homegrown startup craze.

Four school dropouts in Malawi are on the cusp of kung fu movie fame. The four acrobats produced an action flick on their neighborhood streets using a borrowed camera and a borrowed iPad. To their surprise, a trailer for The Town Monger is generating lots of buzz online. The men are self-taught and say they learned by watching Jackie Chan movies and videos of Cirque de Soleil. Now several regional TV networks have expressed an interest in buying rights to their film.

The only camp on mainland Greece where refugees and migrants are still living in tents — in a stripped-out factory — is expected to close next month. The scheduled closure of Derveni comes as Greece shifts from crisis mode to a long-term approach of managing a new population of more than 50,000 people. VOA meets camp residents who are anxious about an uncertain future.

The specter of separatist movements springing up across the continent haunts EU leaders who are closely watching the independence bid by Catalan secessionists in Spain. With Brexit and surging anti-EU populist nationalism, the last thing the bloc’s leaders want are breakaways and possible border disputes roiling the European Union and financial markets.

A search for America’s history is the quest that draws antique hunters to vintage objects. Despite a national fascination with the shiny and new, there are some Americans — mostly younger people — who are happy to see old treasures in new hands.