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Middle East Eye
20-06-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
On World Refugee Day, scores of families approved for resettlement in US are stuck in limbo
Friday, 20 June, marks International Refugee Day, but celebrations across the US have been muted since the Trump administration's 20 January refugee ban remains firmly in place. Since the ban was implemented, around 12,000 refugees who had security screenings and were booked for travel to the US had their flights cancelled. Another approximately 108,000 remaining refugees who had been 'conditionally approved' to come to the US remain stranded in precarious situations overseas. Only a very small number of refugees are currently being resettled and allowed to access support services under exceptions to the refugee ban. The Biden administration had announced a target of 125,000 refugees for fiscal year 2025, and according to the United Nations, there were 42.7 million refugees worldwide at the end of 2024. Refugees currently being settled in the US include dozens of white South Africans and approximately 160 refugees protected by an injunction under a lawsuit known as Pacito vs Trump. While multiple lawsuits against the ban have been, and are being filed in courts, the Pacito vs Trump case, filed by International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) in February, is one of the most significant and high-profile challenges to the refugee ban. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters The class action lawsuit filed by IRAP represents a group of nine individuals affected by the ban and several refugee resettlement agencies seeking to have the executive order and suspension of refugee-related funding declared illegal and their implementation halted. It also looks to restore vital funding to the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP). On 5 May, the Western District Court of Washington issued a compliance order to the government to process and provide resettlement support to refugees who were conditionally approved and had travel scheduled before 20 January 2025. This order covers 160 individuals who had imminent travel plans as of 20 January and will retain protection under the ruling. On 15 May, the district court also affirmed that the government must immediately resume the processing of around 11,840 vulnerable refugees who were conditionally approved for resettlement with confirmed travel plans before the executive order. Laurie Ball Cooper, vice president for US legal programmes at IRAP, affirmed that some more people may be eligible to resume their plans to come to the US. 'In addition, among the remaining - approximately 12,000 people minus the 160 - there are surely people who can meet the standard set by the Ninth Circuit of showing that they have a strong reliance interest in the travel and therefore are still protected by the injunction,' she said. 'The district court has indicated that they will set up a process using a special neutral individual [special master] to adjudicate disputes around who meets that standard and who does not. But that process hasn't started yet,' Ball Cooper said. 'Bittersweet' From the approximate 108,000 refugees who were 'conditionally approved', Ball Cooper remains optimistic that the current litigation would also be able to find them some relief. 'Our underlying litigation continues to challenge the executive order as it applies to all refugees, and so over the long term, I hope that we will prevail on those arguments and see people able to proceed to safety.' USRAP was created in 1980 by the Refugee Act of 1980 to provide a safe and legal pathway for people fleeing persecution, war, or conflict to come to the United States to either join with family or to meet foreign and humanitarian policy priorities of the US government. Despite political rhetoric that often scapegoats refugees as a burden, refugees are a fiscal success for the United States. Based on a study commissioned by the Trump administration during his first term, refugees were shown to contribute $63 billion more in federal, state, and local taxes than they had taken in services and assistance between 2005 and 2014. US grants dozens of white South Africans refugee status Read More » 'Every refugee who enters is someone who is able to pursue the life that they are meant to be able to pursue here: in many cases, to reunite with family members, to join communities that are ready to welcome them. So every single arrival is something worth celebrating, and more should be coming!' Ball Cooper added. Despite the statistical net positive that refugees bring to the US, celebrations on World Refugee Day have been bittersweet. 'I would describe observances of International Refugee Day today as mixed,' Ball Cooper said. She said that everyone in refugee communities or refugee-serving communities was continuing to take time today to celebrate the many ways refugees 'enrich our communities in the US, and the great joy it is for those of us who get to know, work with and live with refugees'. 'At the same time, it is certainly bittersweet, because there are so many tens of thousands of refugees who should be here already, and they're not because of the refugee ban,' she said. 'This is deeply sad, extremely frustrating, heartbreaking and life-threatening for many of the refugees themselves.'
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Snowflake vs. Teradata: Which Data Analytics Stock is the Smarter Buy?
Snowflake SNOW and Teradata TDC are major players in the cloud analytics industry. While Snowflake provides a cloud-based platform that helps organizations store, manage and analyze large volumes of data using AI and machine learning, Teradata offers a hybrid cloud platform that combines data analytics, AI and data management to support enterprise workloads across cloud and on-premise a MarketsandMarkets report, the global cloud analytics market was valued at $35.7 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow to $118.5 billion by 2029 at a CAGR of 27.1%. Both SNOW and TDC are well-positioned to benefit from this growing market, as businesses across industries increase spending on data-driven decision-making and AI-powered SNOW or TDC, which of these cloud data analytics stocks has the greater upside potential?Let's find out. Teradata has been benefiting from strong cloud Annual Recurring Revenues (ARR) growth. In the first quarter of 2025, public cloud ARR rose 16% year over year to $606 million. Cloud now accounts for 42% of total ARR, up from 35% in the year-ago quarter, reflecting steady adoption of its hybrid AI and hybrid cloud innovations have been noteworthy. In March 2025, it launched Enterprise Vector Store to support agentic AI and Retrieval-Augmented generation applications. Integrated with NVIDIA's NeMo Retriever, the platform enables real-time insights from structured and unstructured data, enhancing enterprise-scale on the momentum, in May 2025, Teradata partnered with Fivetran to automate data pipelines from more than 700 sources into VantageCloud. The collaboration has been simplifying low-code integration and accelerating trusted AI adoption for enterprise completed the IRAP assessment at the PROTECTED level, validating VantageCloud Lake's capability to support sensitive workloads across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This has strengthened TDC's position in the public sector and compliance-sensitive growing partner base, including major cloud providers like AWS, Azure and GCP and global system integrators such as Accenture, Deloitte, Infosys, TCS, Wipro and Cognizant, continues to reinforce its enterprise reach and cloud ecosystem. Snowflake has been witnessing strong enterprise adoption and growing platform utilization. As of April 30, 2025, the company had 606 customers contributing more than $1 million in trailing 12-month product revenue. Product revenues grew 26% year over year, while the net revenue retention rate held steady at 124%, indicating higher spend among existing expanding portfolio has been noteworthy. Offerings like Apache Iceberg, Hybrid Tables, Polaris, Cortex LLM and ML functions have helped the company attract new clients and deepen existing relationships. The total customer base stood at 11,578 (as of April 30, 2025), increasing from 11,159 as of Jan. 31, 2025. This included 754 of the Forbes Global 2000, contributing 41% of the first quarter fiscal 2025 revenue of $1 billion, up 26% year over has further enhanced its platform with the launch of Cortex AI+SQL, SnowConvert, Intelligence Agent and Data Science Agent. These tools simplify cloud modernization, natural language querying and AI-driven workflows for enterprise users, including non-technical enterprises like Canva have been leveraging Snowflake's AI Data Cloud to personalize user experiences and accelerate data-driven decision-making. More than 4,000 customers use Snowflake's AI and ML capabilities weekly, implying its strong product market fit and leadership in AI-native cloud analytics. In the year-to-date period, SNOW shares have rallied 36.8%, outperforming TDC shares, which have plunged 28.2%. The outperformance in SNOW stock is driven by strong AI-led product momentum, robust customer additions and an expanding partner decline in TDC's performance can be attributed to macroeconomic headwinds, cautious enterprise spending in Europe, and weakness in consulting demand. Image Source: Zacks Investment Research Currently, SNOW shares are overvalued, as suggested by a Value Score of F, while Teradata shares are trading cheap with a Value Score of terms of forward 12-month Price/Sales, Snowflake shares are trading at 14.49X, higher than TDC's 1.3X. Image Source: Zacks Investment Research The Zacks Consensus Estimate for SNOW's fiscal 2026 earnings is pegged at $1.06 per share, which has declined by 7.8% over the past 30 days. The figure indicates a 27.71% increase year over year. Snowflake Inc. price-consensus-chart | Snowflake Inc. Quote The Zacks Consensus Estimate for TDC's 2025 earnings is pegged at $2.16 per share, down by 3 cents over the past 30 days. This indicates a 10.7% decrease year over year. Teradata Corporation price-consensus-chart | Teradata Corporation Quote Both Snowflake and Teradata are well-positioned in the enterprise data and cloud analytics space. However, Snowflake's rising expenses, intensified competition from Databricks, higher GPU-related AI investments and stretched valuation raise near-term concerns. Meanwhile, Teradata is benefiting from strong cloud ARR growth, expanding AI capabilities and strategic partnerships with Microsoft, Google and NVIDIA. Its hybrid cloud architecture offers greater deployment flexibility, giving it an edge in complex enterprise environments. With a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy), Teradata stands out as the stronger pick compared to Snowflake, which carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Teradata Corporation (TDC) : Free Stock Analysis Report Snowflake Inc. (SNOW) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research ( Zacks Investment Research Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Opinion: Ottawa needs a new industrial innovation policy
By John Lester Too many Canadian innovators sell their intellectual property to foreigners rather than commercialize their inventions in this country. That's bad for Canadian productivity. Ottawa should: move some of its support for R&D over to commercialization and scale-up, improve access to risk capital for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that innovate, and reduce taxes on successful innovation. Support for R&D performed by SMEs is currently too generous. Federal and provincial tax credits reduce firms' cost of performing R&D almost 40 per cent. And about 3,000 of the 17,000 firms claiming tax credits also get financial support from the federal government's Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP). That double dip raises their average subsidy rate to a staggering 65 per cent. The fiscal cost of IRAP is approximately $400 million — on top of about $2.1 billion for the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) program for SMEs. R&D creates knowledge that has effects extending beyond the firm performing it, so a well-designed R&D subsidy program could make Canadians richer. But, as I show in a recent paper, topping up federal and provincial tax credits with IRAP subsidies actually makes Canadians poorer. The high subsidy rates reduce the hurdle rate for investment, which encourages entrepreneurs to undertake some projects that have very low commercial value — which means IRAP support fails a benefit-cost test. Even worse, IRAP's business model results in administrative expenses that are about 15 per cent of the financial assistance provided to firms. The corresponding figure for SR&ED is about 3 percent. The social costs arising from investing in projects with low commercial value and high administrative expenses are about 40 per cent larger than the spillover benefits from the new knowledge created. Encouraging projects with a minus 40 per cent return is a serious waste of public money. IRAP's mandate is to create wealth. Ottawa should restructure it to support commercialization and scale-up rather than R&D. IRAP's knowledgeable Industrial Technology Advisors are well-placed to identify promising inventions. IRAP could authorize financial assistance that firms would repay as their commercialization generated profits, thus substantially reducing the program's net fiscal cost. Providing money only to Canadian firms and making them pay it back immediately if they sell to foreigners would encourage keeping intellectual property in Canada. The federal Liberals' election platform contained two new initiatives to improve small innovative firms' access to risk capital: flow-through shares and increased funding for venture capital. Firms performing R&D can't deduct their expenses until they're profitable. Issuing shares to people or businesses that do have taxable income they can deduct such expenses against is a way to realize the assistance right away. But because most purchasers of flow-through shares face a higher tax rate than SMEs, they cost governments more than if firms were able to deduct expenses as they are incurred. And the benefit to firms is eroded by the costs of setting up and selling the shares. A better approach would be a tax credit for investors in innovative startups. This would help fill a gap in Canada's risk capital market at the seed stage and in the lower tier of venture capital (VC) — deals worth up to $5 million. In addition to eliminating the costs associated with shares, a tax credit would attract more capital from sophisticated investors, who often provide advice as well as money. The Liberals also proposed to increase funding for the VC activities of the Business Development Bank, which would be helpful if focused on the higher tier of VC financing — deals of $20 million and up. The dominance of U.S. suppliers in this tier means many smaller firms either sell their IP in the U.S. or go there to commercialize and scale up. Finally, the rewards to successful commercialization in Canada need to be higher. The Trudeau government's announced but not yet implemented Canadian Entrepreneurs' Incentive, which cuts capital gains tax on the sale of shares in innovative SMEs, is a good idea but does not go far enough. Taxing capital gains earned on the sale of shares amounts to double taxation. Innovations increase expected profits and raise the market value of an enterprise, which gives rise to a capital gain on the sale of shares. But these profits are also subject to tax when distributed as dividends. So the effect is double taxation. Opinion: Here's one growth problem we can fix without money Opinion: Resources, yes, but don't give up on the knowledge economy just yet The federal government should therefore gradually eliminate capital gains tax on shares that R&D-performing startups sell to Canadian residents. To keep the focus on successful firms, it should finance the initiative by phasing out the special lower corporate income tax rate SMEs pay. John Lester, fellow-in-residence at the C.D. Howe Institute, is an executive fellow at the School of Public Policy, University of Calgary. Sign in to access your portfolio
Associated Press
14-05-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
ColorTokens Slashes Federal Compliance Timelines and Enhances Container Security with RapidFort
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 14, 2025-- RapidFort, the fastest growing cybersecurity company securing the global software supply chain, has partnered with ColorTokens Inc., a pioneer in Zero Trust security and leader in microsegmentation, to strengthen its containerized infrastructure security and optimize its federal compliance efforts. By leveraging RapidFort's platform, ColorTokens notably reduced its attack surface by 77%, minimizing its security risks and improving security operations. 'RapidFort has measurably strengthened the security of both our cloud‑hosted SaaS platform and our on‑premise product,' said Harish Akali, CTO of ColorTokens, 'It's hardened container images, continuous scanning, and clear remediation guidance have cut our vulnerability backlog and supplied the evidence we needed to fast‑track FedRAMP, IRAP, and other certification audits.' Like many organizations who enter the federal marketplace, ColorTokens was challenged by diverse third-party base images and complex DevSecOps workflows. The constant need to maintain stringent federal compliance standards, including FIPS and STIG, required a solution that would reduce vulnerabilities without overburdening engineering resources. RapidFort helped ColorTokens address these challenges by: 'Far too often, organizations must divert critical resources to remediate vulnerabilities and meet compliance requirements, rather than advancing core business priorities,' said Mehran Farimani, CEO of RapidFort. 'By leveraging the RapidFort platform to optimize vulnerability management and minimize their security risks, ColorTokens was able to secure their software faster and with less strain on their teams, reducing the burden of meeting stringent federal compliance requirements.' RapidFort, already available through Platform One, Tradewind Marketplace, AWS Marketplace, Microsoft Azure Marketplace, Google Cloud Marketplace, and Carahsoft, provides a reliable and efficient pathway for organizations looking to enter the federal marketplace and drive growth in the government sector. For more information about the RapidFort platform, please visit: About RapidFort RapidFort offers a cybersecurity platform that streamlines and secures modern infrastructure. Their innovative approach allows organizations to continuously monitor and minimize their software attack surface, ultimately improving their security posture and operational efficiency. RapidFort empowers development and security teams with a free tier and free community images, making it easy to get started with secure software development. Learn more about RapidFort at View source version on CONTACT: Cole Christy LaunchTech Communications 619-972-9836 [email protected] KEYWORD: UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA CALIFORNIA INDUSTRY KEYWORD: SOFTWARE INTERNET DATA MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY LOGISTICS/SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT TRANSPORT OTHER TECHNOLOGY SECURITY SOURCE: RapidFort Copyright Business Wire 2025. PUB: 05/14/2025 09:30 AM/DISC: 05/14/2025 09:31 AM
Business Wire
14-05-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
ColorTokens Slashes Federal Compliance Timelines and Enhances Container Security with RapidFort
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- RapidFort, the fastest growing cybersecurity company securing the global software supply chain, has partnered with ColorTokens Inc., a pioneer in Zero Trust security and leader in microsegmentation, to strengthen its containerized infrastructure security and optimize its federal compliance efforts. By leveraging RapidFort's platform, ColorTokens notably reduced its attack surface by 77%, minimizing its security risks and improving security operations. 'RapidFort has measurably strengthened the security of both our cloud‑hosted SaaS platform and our on‑premise product,' said Harish Akali, CTO of ColorTokens, 'It's hardened container images, continuous scanning, and clear remediation guidance have cut our vulnerability backlog and supplied the evidence we needed to fast‑track FedRAMP, IRAP, and other certification audits.' Like many organizations who enter the federal marketplace, ColorTokens was challenged by diverse third-party base images and complex DevSecOps workflows. The constant need to maintain stringent federal compliance standards, including FIPS and STIG, required a solution that would reduce vulnerabilities without overburdening engineering resources. RapidFort helped ColorTokens address these challenges by: Deploying FIPS and STIG aligned pre-hardened, near-zero CVE images for Ubuntu, Redis, Golang, and Reducing vulnerabilities through intelligent runtime profiling and automated removal of unused software components, dramatically reducing exposure and cutting down on manual patching efforts. Embedding RapidFort's runtime-aware scanner into CI/CD pipelines, providing continuous visibility, real-time vulnerability insights, and proactive control. Accelerating compliance readiness by three months using built-in benchmarking and STIGing tools, simplifying the path to federal certifications like FedRAMP. 'Far too often, organizations must divert critical resources to remediate vulnerabilities and meet compliance requirements, rather than advancing core business priorities,' said Mehran Farimani, CEO of RapidFort. 'By leveraging the RapidFort platform to optimize vulnerability management and minimize their security risks, ColorTokens was able to secure their software faster and with less strain on their teams, reducing the burden of meeting stringent federal compliance requirements.' RapidFort, already available through Platform One, Tradewind Marketplace, AWS Marketplace, Microsoft Azure Marketplace, Google Cloud Marketplace, and Carahsoft, provides a reliable and efficient pathway for organizations looking to enter the federal marketplace and drive growth in the government sector. For more information about the RapidFort platform, please visit: About RapidFort RapidFort offers a cybersecurity platform that streamlines and secures modern infrastructure. Their innovative approach allows organizations to continuously monitor and minimize their software attack surface, ultimately improving their security posture and operational efficiency. RapidFort empowers development and security teams with a free tier and free community images, making it easy to get started with secure software development. Learn more about RapidFort at
