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U.S. House Republicans expect to introduce bills later this week that would bar states from setting their own rules for self-driving cars and take other steps to remove obstacles to putting such vehicles on the road, a spokeswoman said.

The legislative action comes as major automakers are joining forces with auto suppliers and other groups to prod Congress into action.

Last month, a U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce subcommittee held a hearing on a Republican draft package of 14 bills that would allow U.S. regulators to exempt up to 100,000 vehicles a year per manufacturer from federal motor vehicle safety rules that prevent the sale of self-driving vehicles without human controls.

Blair Ellis, a spokeswoman for the committee, said on Monday it was likely that legislation would be introduced this week and a formal hearing on the bills would occur next week.

Republican U.S. Representative Robert Latta said last month he hoped to win committee approval of a bipartisan legislative package by the end of July.

The draft measures would bar states from setting self-driving rules and prevent the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from pre-approving self-driving car technologies.

Democrats say the NHTSA must play a more aggressive role in mandating self-driving car safety.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a group representing General Motors Co, Volkswagen AG, Toyota Motor Corp and others, and the Association of Global Automakers, representing major foreign automakers including Honda Motor Co and Hyundai Motor Corp, are forming the Coalition for Future Mobility to press Congress to act.

The group, which includes the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association, National Federation of the Blind and Securing America’s Future Energy, a group of corporate officials and retired military leaders, plans to begin airing radio ads on Tuesday portraying the legislation as “liberating innovation for self-driving vehicles.”

GM, Alphabet Inc., Tesla Inc., and others have been lobbying Congress to pre-empt rules under consideration in California and other states that could limit self-driving vehicle deployment.

The administration of former Democratic President Barack Obama last year unveiled voluntary guidelines on self-driving cars. President Donald Trump’s transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, has said she plans to quickly update those.
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Every now and then, it pays to revisit abandoned methods for using a waste product of an industrial process. Researchers in Scotland found a profitable way to use byproducts of whiskey production to power cars, without any modifications to the engines. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Investigators said Monday that targets of high-tech spying in Mexico included an international group of experts backed by the Organization of American States who had criticized the government’s probe into the disappearance of 43 students.

Previous investigations by the internet watchdog group Citizen Lab found that the spyware had been directed at journalists, activists and opposition politicians in Mexico. But targeting foreign experts operating under the aegis of an international body marks an escalation of the scandal, which so far involves 19 individuals or groups.

“This must be investigated to find out who sent these messages, because they could put at risk a lot of contacts and sources,” said former Colombian prosecutor Angela Buitrago, a member of the group of experts.

Buitrago said she and another expert, Carlos Beristain, received the messages.

“I didn’t open it because I am used to spying,” Buitrago said. “When you work in a prosecutors’ office, a government office, there are strange messages and you pass them on to the analysts.”

Beristain said the spying attempt “may be a more serious crime given the diplomatic protected status that we had in order to carry out our work.”

A report released by the University of Toronto-based cyber-sleuths found that someone sent emails with links to the spyware to the International Group of Independent Experts, named by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The experts had been critical of the government’s investigation into the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers college in Guerrero state — a politically sensitive incident that deeply embarrassed the government.

Jose Eguiguren Praeli, the president of Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, called the revelations “extremely worrying.”

“There should be an investigation that is completely independent and impartial, to find out who carried out the supposed espionage and who ordered it,” he said.

Cellphone becomes eavesdropper

While the Mexican government bought such software, it’s not clear who used it. Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto last week dismissed allegations that his government was responsible and promised an investigation. Arely Gomez, who was attorney general at the time some of the hacking attempts occurred but now heads the country’s anti-corruption agency, said Thursday that her office had intelligence tools “like any other attorney general’s office in Mexico and anywhere else in the world.”

“During my term, they were always applied in accordance with the legal framework,” Gomez said.

The spyware, known as Pegasus, is made by the Israel-based NSO Group, which says it sells only to government agencies for use against criminals and terrorists. It turns a cellphone into an eavesdropper, giving snoopers the ability to remotely activate its microphone and camera and access its data.

The spyware is uploaded when users click on a link in email messages designed to pique their interest.

Citizen Lab said the spyware attempts against the international experts occurred in March 2016 as the group was preparing its final, critical report on the government investigation into the disappearances.

“In March 2016 a phone belonging to the GIEI group received two messages designed to trick the recipient into clicking. The two messages related to the purported death of a relative,” the group reported.

It was unclear if the link was opened or the phones were compromised.

The 43 students from a rural teachers college in Guerrero state were detained by local police in the city of Iguala on Sept. 26, 2014, and were turned over to a crime gang. After an initial investigation, the government said it had determined the “historical truth:” that all of the students were killed and that their bodies were incinerated at a dump and then tossed into a river.

But only one student’s remains have been identified, with a partial DNA match on another. The experts criticized the government’s conclusions, saying there was no evidence of a fire large enough to incinerate the bodies and that government investigators had not looked into other evidence.

‘Seemingly political ends’

Citizen Lab said it found similarities in the messages on the sender’s phone number with a previous spyware attack. In a June 19 report, the group said at least 76 spyware text messages were sent to 12 prominent journalists and rights activists in Mexico, all of whom were investigating or critical of the government. Some had uncovered corruption.

The conservative National Action Party was also a target.

The investigators said they had no conclusive proof of government involvement in the attacks, but John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab said National Action case “makes it crystal clear that NSO has been used widely and recklessly across a swath of Mexican civil society and politics. Once again we see ‘government-exclusive’ spyware being used for seemingly political ends.”

“As cases continue to emerge, it is clear that this is not an isolated case of misuse, but a sustained operation that lasted for more than a year and a half,” Scott-Railton said.

The Centro Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez, a human rights group that has investigated a number of high-profile human rights cases, has said its staff members were targeted. Other targets included well-known journalists Carmen Aristegui and Carlos Loret de Mola.

In February, Citizen Lab and its Mexican partners published a report detailing how Mexican food scientists and anti-obesity campaigners who backed Mexico’s soda tax were also targeted with Pegasus.
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A common assumption is that writing computer code is a highly technical skill for people who are good at math and logic, but software engineers say another quality is just as important: creativity.

A group of software developers in Palo Alto, California, has created a game called Osmo Coding Jam to unlock the creative side of children as they learn to code.

Nine-year-old Dylan Dodge and his 11-year-old sister, Meghan, look as though they are playing a game on a digital tablet, but they’re actually making music by creating simple computer code as they manipulate physical tiles with symbols. The tablet reads the tile symbols as commands it can execute.

“It’s an analytical skill that the kids are going to need to have as they grow up in this new era,” said Tanya Dodge, Dylan and Meghan’s mother.

But the developers of Osmo Coding Jam said writing code should be more than just an analytical skill.

“We want to explore the creative side of coding that I think is often not as explored,” said Osmo engineer, Felix Hu.

“It (the game) kind of actually looks to LEGO® as a great example of things that kids like to build with, and so in this case instead of building a house or a castle, they’re building lines of code,” said Coding Jam art director and visual artist Eric Uchalik.

And that code produces something artistic — music.

“A big part of the way that technology is changing and becoming more engaging is because, I think, we’re adding that artistic piece to it. That it’s not just code and pressing buttons but the experience of it, and you can’t successfully do that in my opinion without having a connection to that artistic piece,” Tanya Dodge said.

Developers said coding should be seen as a creative tool. Code was used to create Osmo’s Coding Jam, and children use the game’s coding tiles to create music.

“I think the coolest part is that we’re teaching kids how to be creative with code and that’s a really important thing that kids should get comfortable with because coding is creative,” Hu said. He sees a growing trend of parents considering software code as a second language that children need to learn to succeed in future jobs.

“I think in every aspect of at least the careers I see going forward, you’re going to have to understand at some point the concept of coding,” Tanya Dodge said.

Hu explained there is another reason computer code literacy is important.

“I think very often kids grow up not understanding how computers work or just thinking that it’s like some magical device, but by breaking it down to a lower level, kids can understand that devices aren’t as smart as they think they are.”

“We don’t want to create just workers, we want to create creators,” Uchalik added.
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A common assumption is that writing computer code is a highly technical skill for people who are good at math and logic. There is another quality in the tech world that is just as important: creativity.   VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports on a game that teaches children the creative side of coding.
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Mohammad Aslam has finally found a way to give his family relief from extended power cuts. In February this year he installed a 300-watt solar power generating system on the roof of his house.

In Pakistan, power outages scheduled by the country’s strained public electric utilities frequently hit households, lasting as long as 10 hours a day in towns and cities and up to 16 hours in rural areas.

The situation is worst during the brutally hot summer months, when air conditioners often overload the national grid.

Buying solar panels to create power at home might seem an obvious way to bridge the gap. But although the panels have been available since 2014 in Aslam’s town of Larkana, in the southern province of Sindh, the 35-year-old entrepreneur waited two years before finally installing one.

Cost wasn’t the problem. Instead, he said, he was put off by rumors that solar panels would actually make things worse.

Unscrupulous local utility officials, he says, told him that the dark-colored solar panels, built to absorb the sun’s rays and convert them to electricity, would increase the ambient heat in the buildings they were attached to, pushing the temperature indoors even higher.

According to Aslam, the officials even said that the growing use of solar panels was to blame for the more frequent and intense heat waves that Pakistan has experienced – something scientists say is entirely untrue.

Climate change and worsening extreme heat is instead driven largely by a huge expansion in the use of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas since the start of the industrial revolution, they say.

“I discovered it was a fake rumor only after I installed the solar system on the insistence of my friend, a graduate in electric engineering,” Aslam told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.

His friend assured him that the rumors were just a trick by utility company employees bent on discouraging wide-scale adoption of solar energy adoption in order to safeguard their jobs.

Tariq Mehmood, general manager of the Islamabad Electric Supply Company (IESCO), a public power utility, said he was not aware of any IESCO employees spreading rumors.

“Our power utility has nothing to do with [any rumors] and disowns them. People shouldn’t believe them,” Mehmood said in a telephone interview.

‘A great relief’

Aslam’s new solar home system – two solar panels, four ceiling fans, four energy-saving lights and a rechargeable battery – cost him $500.

During the day the system powers the ceiling fans and stores enough electricity in the battery to run the fans and lights for six or seven hours at night if the grid electricity supply goes off. The battery can recharge in sunlight in three hours.

“We have fans and lights [that] remain on whenever power outages hit us. What makes me more happy is that my family feels a great relief thanks to it,” Aslam said.

Abdul Karim, a solar panel retailer at the Aabpara electronic market in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, said prospective customers often mention having heard the rumors that solar panels add to heat problems.

“To prove these rumors wrong, often I have to take them to the rooftop of my shop to show them the solar system that powers my shop,” Karim said. “Then many buy solar systems from me.”

As solar home systems become more affordable, many households see them as an alternative to trying to get a new electrical connection via the public power utilities.

According to Mir Ahmad Shah, executive secretary of the Pakistan Renewable and Alternative Energy Association, public utilities that control power distribution and supply fear that the gradual adoption of solar energy will make people less reliant on the national grid.

“Employees of the public power utilities are hampering this growing shift to solar energy through rumors, because they fear the growing adoption solar energy systems will lead to overall revenue decline from new connection applications,” Shah said.

Cash for service?

Retired Pakistan Railways employee Raja Jameel said he was unsuccessful in getting a grid connection two year ago for his new home in Ghouri, a rural locality on Islamabad’s outskirts.

“What [finally] worked in a matter of a few hours to get what I was denied for nearly four months was a $50 bribe to a superintendent of IESCO,” Jameel said in an interview.

He said he believes that in some utility companies, employees responsible for approving new power connections try to dissuade potential solar adopters by spreading false rumors about the panels, largely because they do not want to lose potential bribes for approving new grid connections.

Jameel plans to build a second story onto his home to rent out, but he says he will install a 2-kilowatt solar home system to power it, rather than begging for a new power connection from the utility.

IESCO’s Mehmood said that although the utility had periodically received complaints from customers about bribe-taking, it had taken steps to reduce the problem.

“IESCO management has controlled [bribe-taking] through a strong online public complaint redressal system established a few years ago. Besides, we have made the process of sanctioning and issuing new electricity connection systems more transparent and hassle-free,” Mehmood said.

In an interview outside the Parliament building in Islamabad, Minister of State for Water and Power Abid Sher Ali did not deny that power distribution companies, including IESCO, have had problems with corruption, but said the government took all complaints regarding such matters seriously.

“We have a zero-tolerance policy regarding bribery in the public power utilities across the country,” Ali said.

The minister added there is a robust complaints mechanism, and that any employees found to have been corrupt are demoted or dismissed.
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Hackers who penetrated the business networks of U.S. energy and nuclear companies in recent weeks were working for the Russian government according to a report in a prominent newspaper.

The Washington Post reported late Saturday that anonymous U.S. government officials confirmed the hackers were working for the Russian government.

The officials told The Post the Russians’ motive is not clear because the operations of the affected companies were not disrupted.

One U.S. official, however, said he viewed the cyberattack as “a reconnaissance effort,” to figure out points of entry into the companies. 

“That’s what all cyber bad guys do,” the official said.

The attacks on the business and administrative systems of the companies were confirmed last week when the U.S. Department of Energy said it was helping the firms defend against the intrusions.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the FBI had alerted the energy companies in late June that unidentified hackers were targeting the nuclear, power and critical infrastructure sectors.

The agencies said that at no time was there any risk to public safety.

News of the Russian government hacking into U.S. energy and nuclear companies follows the information that Russia mounted a hacking campaign designed to interfere with the recent U.S. presidential election.
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Each year, wildfires around the world devastate thousands of square kilometers of forests and grasslands and make many people homeless. Some plants recover faster from fire than others, and scientists would like to know why. In Australia, they are experimenting with a simple monitoring device relying on fiber optics. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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The shortage of housing in California’s Silicon Valley has gotten so severe that Facebook Inc. on Friday proposed taking homebuilding into its own hands for the first time with a plan to construct 1,500 units near its headquarters.

The growth of Facebook, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and other tech companies has strained neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay area that were not prepared for an influx of tens of thousands of workers during the past decade. Home prices and commute times have risen.

Tech companies have responded with measures such as internet-equipped buses for employees with long commutes.

Facebook has offered at least $10,000 in incentives to workers who move closer to its offices.

Those steps, though, have not reduced complaints that tech companies are making communities unaffordable, and they have mostly failed to address the area’s housing shortage.

“The problem with Silicon Valley is you don’t have enough supply to keep up with the demand,” said Sam Khater, deputy chief economist at real estate research firm CoreLogic.

With Facebook’s construction plan, the company said it wanted to invest in Menlo Park, the city some 45 miles (72 km) south of San Francisco where it moved in 2011.

The company said it wants to build a “village” that will also have 1.75 million square feet of office space and 125,000 square feet of retail space.

“Part of our vision is to create a neighborhood center that provides long-needed community services,” John Tenanes, Facebook’s vice president for global facilities, said in a statement.

The 1,500 Facebook housing units would be open to anyone, not just employees, and 15 percent of them would be offered at below market rates, the company said.

Facebook said it expects the review process to take two years.

Alphabet has taken a smaller step, buying 300 modular apartment units for short-term employee housing, the Wall Street Journal reported last month.

Menlo Park Mayor Kirsten Keith said in an interview that there were concerns about whether the Facebook plan would increase traffic, a subject the city’s planning department would study.

She said, though, that Facebook’s plan fits with the city’s own long-term plan for development, and that the city was excited about the additional housing.

Facebook’s Tenanes said the density of the proposed development could also entice spending on transit projects.

“The region’s failure to continue to invest in our transportation infrastructure alongside growth has led to congestion and delay,” he said.
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The U.S. Department of Energy said on Friday it is helping U.S. firms defend against a hacking campaign that targeted power companies including at least one nuclear plant, saying the attacks have not impacted electricity generation or the grid.

News of the attacks surfaced a week ago when Reuters reported that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a June 28 alert to industrial firms, warning them of hacking targeting the nuclear, power and critical infrastructure sectors.

“DOE is working with our government and industry partners to mitigate any impact from a cyber intrusion affecting entities in the energy sector,” a Department of Energy representative said in an email to Reuters. “At this time, there has been no impact to systems controlling U.S. energy infrastructure. Any potential impact appears to be limited to administrative and business networks.”

It was not clear who was responsible for the hacks. The joint report by the DHS and the FBI did not identify the attackers, though it described the hacks as “an advanced persistent threat,” a term that U.S. officials typically but not always use to describe attacks by culprits.

Dozen U.S. power companies attacked

The DOE discussed its response to the attacks after Bloomberg News reported on Friday that the Wolf Creek nuclear facility in Kansas was among at least a dozen U.S. power firms breached in the attack, citing current and former U.S. officials who were not named.

A representative with the Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corp. declined to say if the plant was hacked, but said it continued to operate safely.

“There has been absolutely no operational impact to Wolf Creek. The reason that is true is because the operational computer systems are completely separate from the corporate network,” company spokeswoman Jenny Hageman said via email.

A separate Homeland Security technical bulletin issued on June 28 included details of code used in a hacking tool that suggest the hackers sought to use the password of a Wolf Creek employee to access the network.

Hageman declined to say if hackers had gained access to that employee’s account. The employee could not be reached for comment.

Tainted emails

The June 28 alert said that hackers have been observed using tainted emails to harvest credentials to gain access to networks of their targets.

“Historically, cyber actors have strategically targeted the energy sector with various goals ranging from cyber espionage to the ability to disrupt energy systems in the event of a hostile conflict,” the report said.

David Lochbaum, a nuclear expert at the nonprofit group Union of Concerned Scientists, said reactors have a certain amount of immunity from cyber attacks because their operation systems are separate from digital business networks. But over time it would not be impossible for hackers to potentially do harm.

“Perhaps the biggest vulnerability nuclear plants face from hackers would be their getting information on plant designs and work schedules with which to conduct a physical attack,” Lochbaum said.

DOE shares information

The DOE said it has shared information about this incident with industry, including technical details on the attack and mitigation suggestions.

“Security professionals from government and industry are working closely to share information so energy system operators can defend their systems,” the agency representative said. Earlier, the FBI and DHS issued a joint statement saying “There is no indication of a threat to public safety” because the impact appears limited to administrative and business networks.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not received any notifications of a cyber event that has affected critical systems at a nuclear plant, said spokesman Scott Burnell.

A nuclear industry spokesman told Reuters last Saturday that hackers have never gained access to a nuclear plant.
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A senior Facebook official met with Pakistan’s interior minister on Friday to discuss a demand the company prevent blasphemous content or be blocked.

The meeting comes after a Pakistani counter-terrorism court sentenced a 30-year-old man to death for making blasphemous comments on Facebook, part of a wider crack-down.

Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of public policy, met Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan, who offered to approve a Facebook office in Pakistan, which has 33 million users of the network.

Khan said Pakistan believes in freedom of expression, but that does not include insulting Islam or stoking religious tensions.

“We cannot allow anyone to misuse social media for hurting religious sentiments,” Khan said.

Facebook called the meeting “constructive.”

“Facebook met with Pakistan officials to express the company’s deep commitment to protecting the rights of the people who use its service, and to enabling people to express themselves freely and safely,” the company said in an email.

“It was an important and constructive meeting in which we raised our concerns over the recent court cases and made it clear we apply a strict legal process to any government request for data or content restrictions.”

Pakistan’s social media crack-down is officially aimed at weeding out blasphemy and shutting down accounts promoting terrorism, but civil rights activists say it has also swept up writers and bloggers who criticize the government or military.

One of five prominent writers and activists who disappeared for nearly three weeks this year later told a U.N. human rights event in March that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies had kidnapped him and tortured him in custody.

Others’ families said right-wing and Islamist parties had filed blasphemy accusations against them to punish them for critical writings.

Anything deemed insulting to Islam or the Prophet Muhammad carries a death penalty in Pakistan, and sometimes a mere allegation can lead to mob violence and lynchings. Right groups say the law is frequently abused to settle personal scores.

In April, a Pakistani university student, Mashal Khan, was beaten to death by a mob after being accused of blasphemous content on Facebook. Police arrested 57 people accused in the attack and said they had found no evidence Khan committed blasphemy.
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South Australia has picked Tesla to install the world’s largest grid-scale battery, which would be paired with a wind farm provided by France’s Neoen, in a major test of the reliability of large-scale renewable energy use.

South Australia, the fifth-biggest state with a population of 1.7 million, has raced ahead of the rest of the country in turning to wind power. Its shutdown of coal-fired plants has led to outages across the eastern part of the nation, driving up energy prices.

The drawback to South Australia’s heavy reliance on renewables has been an inability to adequately store that energy, leading to vulnerabilities when the wind doesn’t blow.

The project is designed to have a storage capacity of 129 megawatt-hours, which is enough to light up 30,000 homes, a Tesla spokesman told Reuters.

100 days or it’s free

Under the terms of the agreement, Tesla must deliver the 100-MW battery within 100 days of a contract being signed or it’s free, matching a commitment made by Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk in a Twitter post in March.

“There will be a lot of people that will look at this, ‘did they get it done within 100 days? Did it work?’” Musk told reporters in South Australia’s capital city of Adelaide. “We are going to make sure it does.”

The 100-day deadline will begin within a few weeks, a political source said, after a connectivity agreement is reached between South Australia, Telsa, Neoen and the Australian Energy Market Operator.

Musk and a spokesman for South Australia Premier Jay Weatherill declined to reveal the cost of the project.

Musk said a failure to deliver the project in time would cost his company “$50 million or more,” without elaborating.

Lithium ready 

The battery, designed to provide emergency back-up power if a shortfall in energy is predicted, will be built on site in South Australia, a spokesman for the state government said.

Tesla said in a statement that upon completion by December 2017, the system would be the largest lithium-ion battery storage project in the world, overtaking an 80 megawatt-hour power station at Mira Loma in Ontario, Calif., also built using Tesla batteries.

The neighboring state of Victoria is also seeking 100 megawatt-hour battery capacity, to be installed by January.

Lithium-ion batteries have been in widespread use since about 1991, but mostly on a small scale, such as in laptops and cell phones.

A typical lithium-ion battery can store 150 watt-hours of electricity in 1 kilogram of battery, representing more than double the capacity of nickel batteries.

Its proponents have been pushing to use lithium batteries on a grander scale.

“For lithium technology to take off on a global scale, they clearly need the storage capacity to make sure renewables can deliver 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” said Adrian Griffin, a geologist who specializes in lithium extraction.

Dozens of companies from 10 countries, including privately owned Lyon Group, working with U.S. power company AES Corp, had expressed interest in the South Australian project.
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Street violence and gang shootings are on the rise in many big cities worldwide. Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro sees an average of 15 gun battles a day, and innocent bystanders are often caught in the crossfire. But people in Rio can now avoid street violence thanks to several smartphone apps. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.
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While our fossil fuel-dependent civilization keeps releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, scientists are racing to find a viable method for lowering the emission of the most harmful one — carbon dioxide. It can be captured and stored underground, or it can be turned into a harmless rock. The price is steep, but the cost of not doing something could be higher. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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A U.S. judge ruled on Thursday that Twitter could move forward with a lawsuit that aims to free technology companies to speak more openly about surveillance requests they receive from the U.S. government.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, said in a written order that the U.S. government had failed to show the kind of “clear and present danger” that could possibly justify restraints on the right of Twitter to talk about surveillance requests.

“The government’s restrictions on Twitter’s speech are content-based prior restraints subject to the highest level of scrutiny under the First Amendment,” Rogers wrote.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees certain rights including freedom of speech.

Twitter filed the lawsuit in 2014 after revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of U.S. spying.

The detail that tech companies can provide about U.S. national security requests is limited, so that companies can release the number of requests only within a range, such as 0-499 in a six month period.

Rogers scheduled a hearing in Twitter’s case for next month.
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Microsoft is laying off thousands of employees in a shake-up aimed at selling more subscriptions to software applications that can be used on any internet-connected device.

Most of the people losing their jobs work in sales and are located outside the U.S. The Redmond company confirmed that it began sending the layoff notices Thursday, but declined to provide further specifics, except that thousands of sales jobs would be cut.

“Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis,” Microsoft said in a statement. “This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, redeployment in others.”

Microsoft Corp. employs about 121,500 people worldwide. Nearly 71,600 of them work in the U.S.

Software subscriptions

The job cuts are part of Microsoft’s shift away from its traditional approach of licensing its Office software and other programs for a one-time fee tied to a single computer. The company is now concentrating on selling recurring subscriptions for software accessible on multiple devices, a rapidly growing trend known as “cloud computing.”

That part of Microsoft’s operations has been playing an increasingly important role, especially among corporate and government customers, since Satya Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer as the company’s CEO in 2014.

Microsoft’s “commercial cloud” segment is on a pace to generate about $15 billion in annual revenue. More than 26 million consumers subscribe to Microsoft’s Office 365 service that includes its Word, Excel and other popular programs. That number has more than doubled in the past two years.

Meanwhile, revenue from licensing of Microsoft’s Windows operating system has been increasing by 5 percent or less in the past three quarters.
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There is a happy ending for a team of Gambian students who planned to compete in a major global robotics contest in Washington later this month.

The five-members were granted visas Thursday to come to the United States after being turned down earlier this week.

They say they are still disappointed that their mentor, education and science ministry director, Mucktarr Darboe, was not granted a visa.

But the Gambian American Association will escort the students around Washington.

Gambia and Afghanistan were the only two countries whose robotics teams were initially denied visas. Neither were given any reason.

The Afghan students had planned to try again this week.

The Gambian and Afghan students were especially puzzled because teams from Iran and Sudan, and a group of Syrian refugees were given visas. All three Muslim-majority countries are on President Donald Trump’s travel ban. Afghanistan and Gambia are not.

Lida Azizi, a 17-year old from Herat, calls the visa rejection “a clear insult for the people of Afghanistan.”

The group called FIRST Global Challenge holds the yearly robotics competition to build up interest in science, technology, engineering and math across the world.

The group says the focus of the competition is finding solutions to problems in such fields as water, energy, medicine and food production.
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Without adequate power, even the best smartphone or laptop can quickly become useless.  It’s a simple concept that’s often taken for granted in industrialized nations.  But not in the developing world where basic internet access is a challenge.

“You have a very large population of people who are not on the electrical grid, so you can’t bring them internet access if you can’t also solve issues around energy access,” said Paul Garnett, director of Microsoft’s Affordable Access Initiatives.  “Companies who are starting out in the internet access space are ending up in the energy access space, and vice versa.”

Two years ago, Microsoft launched the Affordable Access Initiative (AAI), which recently doled out $75,000 to $100,000 to 10 firms working to bridge the digital divide.  Each firm also receives Microsoft’s cloud services and software.

Andy Bogdan Bindea, CEO of California-based Sigora International, knows a thing or two about the challenges of bringing power to developing countries.  Sigora’s electrification efforts in Haiti made it one of this year’s grant winners.  The company works to build solar-powered, mini electricity grids in the country’s most remote regions.

“It is a very, very difficult place to work in, logistically.  It costs about 28 percent extra to bring any kind of equipment into the country,” said Bogdan Bindea, “It takes us 12 hours to get from the capital to our pilot project, which is 100 miles away … nine hours if you drive like a maniac.”

Through the partnership with Microsoft, Bogdan Bindea hopes to expand Sigora’s offerings, building a web portal for instance, so customers can pay for internet access and online content using digital wallets.

“More than anything, a company like ours needs names like Microsoft, needs partners like Microsoft” said Bogdan Bindea.

Access to the internet is as essential a need as food, shelter and clothing these days.  More than half of the world’s population, 3.9 billion people, are stranded along the digital divide, according to the International Telecommunication Union.

Picosoft is a startup in Kathmandu and one of this year’s AAI grant winners.  The company uses untapped TV frequencies or “white space”, to provide internet access to schools in the remote, mountainous regions of Nepal.

“One of the great things about TV white space frequencies is they are in the broadcast bands, and therefore the signals that are transmitted over those frequencies travel over very long distances,” Garnett said.

SunCulture was another one of this year’s grant winners.  The Kenya-based startup offers solar-powered irrigation kits to smallholder farmers across Africa.  Working with Microsoft, team members plan to build a digital platform for farmers that will provide data on crops, collected from connected sensors and cameras in the field.

“Internet is a conduit to other services in the markets that we work in,” said Samir Ibrahim, SunCulture CEO and co-founder.

“The value that SunCulture provides and the value of our company isn’t in the things that we sell to farmers, it is in the connected experience and the relationship we build with them,” said Ibrahim.  “So internet for us is a conduit to build the relationships with farmers so we can continue to develop solutions for them.”

Microsoft’s AAI grant winners may have clinched the prize, but Garnett says the real gains can’t be counted in dollars and cents.

“The bigger value that the relationship delivers is really the network and the mentorship, helping companies to adapt and evolve their business models,” said Garnett.
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France will stop selling gasoline and diesel cars by 2040.

The move, announced by the country’s ecology minister Nicolas Hulot, is part of a plan to meet emissions targets set forth in the Paris climate accord.

“We are announcing an end to the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040,” Hulot said, adding that it would be a “veritable revolution.”

Saying the goal would be “tough” to accomplish, he added that French carmakers such as Peugeot-Citroen and Renault would be able to handle the changes. France is the biggest manufacturer of electric cars sold in Europe.

France is the latest country to focus on electric cars. India has said it wants all cars sold there to be electric by 2030. Norway has said it will stop selling gasoline and diesel cars by 2025, and Germany is aiming to have 1 million electric cars on its roads by 2020.

In 2016, the largest market in the world for electric cars was China, where more than 500,000 were sold.

On Wednesday, Volvo announced it would stop producing cars with conventional engines by 2019.

According to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA), only 3.6 percent of cars sold in Western Europe in 2016 were hybrid or electric.

Hulot said getting conventional cars off the road was important to “public health” as several French cities, including Paris and Lyon have recurring issues with air pollution. Hulot said the move was part of the country’s plan to be carbon neutral by 2050.

To that end, he announced last month that France would no longer give licenses for oil and gas exploration in France and its overseas territories.

“One of the symbolic acts of the plan is that France, which previously had made the promise to divide its greenhouse gas emissions by four by 2050, has decided to become carbon neutral by 2050 following the U.S. decision,” Hulot said.”The carbon neutral objective will force us to make the necessary investments.”

Last month, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris pact saying it would be unfair to American businesses and too expensive for taxpayers.
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A team of Afghan teenage girls who were denied a visa to participate in a robotics contest in Washington say they will not be deterred and have sent their home-made robot to the contest. While disappointed, the girls are glad their robot will be part of the competition. Bezhan Hamdard narrates this report by Khalil Noorzai and Mohammad Ahmadi of VOA’s Afghan service.
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