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SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — A former Netflix executive was sentenced Tuesday to 2 1/2 years in federal prison for taking bribes and kickbacks from tech companies to approve lucrative contracts with the streaming giant.
Michael Kail, 52, of Los Gatos also was ordered to forfeit $700,000 and pay a $50,000 fine, the U.S. attorney’s office said in a statement.
“Bribery and kickbacks are pernicious crimes that stifle Silicon Valley’s culture of competitive innovation,” acting U.S. Attorney Stephanie M. Hinds said in the statement.
Kail is a former Netflix vice president who oversaw the company’s internet technology department. Prosecutors alleged that Kail accepted more than $500,000 in kickbacks — as well as valuable stock options — in exchange for approving millions of dollars in contracts for nine tech companies seeking to do business with Netflix between February 2012 and July 2014.
In April, Kail was convicted of 28 counts of fraud and money laundering.
Netflix prohibits its employees from having conflicts of interest and requires them to disclose actual or apparent conflicts of interest and to report gifts from people or entities seeking to sell to the company, authorities said.
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COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Pirates are suspected of taking six hostages from a container ship in international waters in the Gulf of Guinea this week, Denmark’s military said.
While sailing off West Africa on an international anti-piracy mission, the Danish navy frigate HDMS Esbern Snare responded Monday to information that a container ship was under attack near Bioko Island off Equatorial Guinea.
NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Mayor-elect Eric Adams named Keechant Sewell, a Long Island police official, as the city’s next police commissioner, making her the first woman to lead the nation’s largest police force.
Adams, himself a former New York police captain, introduced Sewell on Wednesday as his barrier-breaking choice for one of the most high-profile and powerful jobs in his upcoming administration.
PINE RIDGE, S.D. (AP) — Middle schooler Rarity Cournoyer stood at the heart of the Red Cloud Indian School campus and chanted a prayer song firmly and solemnly in the Lakota language — in a place where past generations of students were punished for speaking their mother tongue.
Her classmates stood around her at a prayer circle designed with archetypes of Native American spirituality, with a circular sidewalk representing a traditional medicine wheel, crossed by sidewalks pointing to the four cardinal directions.
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