"the US foreign ministry" ?
What the hell is that? The US has nothing called the Foreign Ministry. Did you mean the State Department?
A leaked internal report details how Ericsson paid hundreds of millions of pounds to Islamic State terrorists in Iraq, substantiating earlier reports that the company was paying intermediaries to buy off ISIS on its behalf. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) revealed over the weekend that the …
For all that corruption is wholly unknown in places such as Washington, American State governments, and Westminster --- and if proposed severely punished --- they really should understand it is a necessary payment in some parts of the world; and if deplored, not something to get excited about.
Plus some small corruption ( not that this was small --- but an exceptional situation ) is preferable to tightening up too strongly, as with an engine.
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It's horrible ISIS benefited but I can't blame Ericsson for doing what it had to do.
Ericsson didn't have to do anything. There is no universal rule saying a region has to have a mobile network so badly its worth bribing actual terrorists to get things done. After all the infrastructure would have benefited them anyway so strategically they probably could have negotiated a deployment without a hefty bribe.
My previous employer got bought by Ericsson and all us TUPE'd staff had to then start doing their online staff courses - many of which were all about anti-corruption, whistle blowing and being generally good-moral-ethical employees.
It seemed really odd as I had no business dealings in my role, never negotiated deals with clients, never got offered any freebies etc etc.
It's a box ticking exercise in most companies these days, like many of the other course we all do, like "lone working" and "working at height" where 99% of the course is irrelevant to 99% of the participants. I do have day to day contact with customers, but I'm in no position to do anything where a construed bribe or gift would have any effect on my or the client.
Luckily, most of these courses are online video courses and you can just drag the video scroll bar across to the end of the video, glance at the summary slide and get a pass mark, using your common sense, experience and maybe remembering a few bullet points, at the end of course quiz, all in 5-10 minutes for a "1 hour" course. My boss was ragging on me a few months ago for not being up to date on my "required" courses so I set aside some time over Christmas and did about 10 of them in about an hour. Easy if you've already done them before, most are "required" to be renewed every 12 or 24 months and they tend not to change.
> our internal training is delivered in web based formats that don't allow skipping ahead or faster playback speeds
Not explicitly allowed, of course. But what just might do it is hitting F12, clicking Console, and typing something like:
document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 4.0;