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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Entertainer Bill Cosby will be retried on charges of sexually assaulting a former employee of his alma mater in November, five months after his first trial on those charges ended in a hung jury, a Pennsylvania judge ruled on Thursday.
Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas Judge Steven O’Neill said the 79-year-old comedian would be tried again beginning on Nov. 6. He is accused of the sexual assault of Temple University administrator Andrea Constand in his Philadelphia-area home in 2004.
Cosby built a long career on a family-friendly style of comedy exemplified by the 1980s TV hit “The Cosby Show” before dozens of women came forward to accuse him of sex assault in a series of incidents dating back to the 1960s.
The vast majority of those alleged incidents were too old to be the subject of criminal prosecution, but Cosby has faced one criminal trial because prosecutors in Pennsylvania charged him in December 2015, just days before the statute of limitations was to run out on Constand’s claim.
The jurors who heard Cosby’s first trial in Norristown, Pennsylvania, who were bused in from Pittsburgh, 300 miles (480 km) away, failed to reach a unanimous verdict last month after 52 hours of deliberations that often stretched late into the night.
Cosby has long denied any criminal wrongdoing and has said that any sexual contact he had with his accusers was consensual.
His spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, hailed the hung-jury outcome as a victory for Cosby, who has not performed to a paying audience for more than two years.
Cosby is also awaiting two trials over civil lawsuits filed against him by accusers, with both scheduled for the summer of 2018.
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Director Franco Zeffirelli’s art works and personal library have been moved from his Roman villa to his native Florence to fill a museum honoring his life’s work.
The museum and performing arts center will display around 500 sketches of production sets that Zeffirelli made during his vast career, make available his 10,000-volume library and incorporate artistic activities.
His son, Pippo Zeffirelli, said at a presentation Thursday in Rome “the project was born from the maestro’s desire to leave all his artistic treasures” intact and accessible. Zeffirelli was expected to attend, but his son said he was feeling unwell because of a heat wave.
The film, TV and opera director, who is 94, also will be honored at La Scala with a revival of his 1963 production of “Aida.”
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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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Madonna says the children’s wing at a hospital in Malawi she has been building for two years completed its first surgery last week and will officially open July 11.
The Mercy James Institute for Pediatric Surgery and Intensive Care, located at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in the city of Blantyre, had a soft opening and is the first of its kind in Malawi. It was built in collaboration with the Malawian Ministry of Health.
“When you look into the eyes of children in need, wherever they may be, a human being wants to do anything and everything they can to help, and on my first visit to Malawi, I made a commitment that I would do just that,” Madonna said in a statement to The Associated Press.
“I’d like to thank everyone who has joined me on this unbelievable journey. What started out as a dream for Malawi and her children has become a reality, and we couldn’t have done it without your support,” she added.
Madonna adopted four children, David Banda, Mercy James, Stelle and Estere from Malawi. The children’s wing was named after 11-year-old Mercy.
The pop star’s charity, Raising Malawi, has built schools in Malawi and has funded the new pediatric unit, which began construction in 2015. Madonna, 58, visited the site last year.
The children’s unit includes three operating rooms dedicated to children’s surgery, a day clinic and a 45-bed ward. It will enable Queen Elizabeth hospital to double the number of surgeries for children and will provide critical pre-operative and post-operative care. It also includes a playroom, an outdoor play structure and murals curated by Madonna and other artists.
Sarah Ezzy, executive director of Raising Malawi, said the charity has been working with Queen Elizabeth hospital since 2008, helping the hospital’s chief of pediatric surgery, Dr. Eric Borgstein, develop a training program.
“Pediatric intensive care is not something that has formally existed in Malawi. There hasn’t been any training on it. It’s not part of the curriculum in nursing school [or] medical school. People had to leave the country to train … now people don’t have to leave the country to train,” Ezzy said in an interview. “This facility is attached to the college of medicine and nursing so it will be a learning, teaching hospital.”
Trevor Neilson, who works at Charity Network and has been advising Madonna’s philanthropic efforts for the last six years, said “only someone like Madonna could do this. If you weren’t Madonna, you would have given up a long time ago.”
“Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives will be saved by the hospital in the course of it operating,” added Neilson, who has worked on charity projects with Bill Gates, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, Bono and others.
Madonna founded Raising Malawi in 2006 to address the poverty and hardship endured by Malawi’s orphans and vulnerable children.
“Malawi has enriched my family more than I could have ever imagined. It’s important for me to make sure all my children from the country maintain a strong connection to their birth nation, and equally important to show them that together as humans we have the power to change the world for the better,” Madonna said.
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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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The first time a new country songwriter named Kacey Musgraves saw one of her songwriting heroes, John Prine, she had an unusual proposition when she approached.
“I said, ‘Hey, my name is Kacey and I am a really big fan. I don’t want to offend you or anything, but is there any way you might want to burn one with me?”’ Musgraves recalled saying after one of his shows in Nashville, Tennessee.
Musgraves, who would later go on to win two Grammy Awards for her 2013 major label debut album, was hoping to fulfill a fantasy of smoking a joint with Prine. It was also the premise of an unreleased song she had written that somehow ended up on Prine’s desk.
Prine, who has survived a couple of bouts of cancer, politely declined.
“He says, ‘Well, I don’t do that anymore, but if I did, I would with you,”’ Musgraves, who is now 28, recalled.
This 70-year-old former mailman from Chicago is the hippest writer in Nashville and still in demand. Prine has become an affable songwriting guru for many of Nashville’s talented young artists, including country rebel Sturgill Simpson, Americana darlings Jason Isbell and his wife, Amanda Shires, and rocker Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys.
All those artists have lined up to open for Prine, when they are easily selling out their own venues as headliners.
“I have met some really great people in the last five years that it’s easy to see that music in general is in good hands,” Prine said in an interview from his office, which is decorated year round with Christmas lights and a white Christmas tree.
Prine published his first book in April, a songbook called “Beyond Words,” which features guitar chords, family photos, handwritten or typed lyrics with his editing marks and witty musings alongside some of his most well-known songs, from “Sam Stone,” “Angel from Montgomery,” “Paradise,” and “Hello in There.”
Prine’s reinvigorated career came after neck cancer in the late ’90s left him with a much lower and grittier voice. After his recovery, he just moved his songs to lower key.
“Some of my oldest songs that I used to perform every night became brand spanking new just because I changed the key,” Prine said.
He started his own record label Oh Boy in Nashville in the early ’80s, which sold his CDs by direct mail to fans. He enjoys his independence from major labels, even if it has meant fewer sales. He says his only advice to young songwriters is don’t give up their publishing rights in a record deal.
“I am not a big one for advice,” Prine said. “I will tell them stories about things I have failed at or places I have stumbled and hope they take it as a parable. And maybe apply it to themselves and maybe not.”
Auerbach and Prine wrote several songs together, including the title track for Auerbach’s new solo album, “Waiting On a Song.”
“It was like having a conversation really,” the 38-year-old singer said of writing with Prine. “And I think for me, that’s what John does so well with his music. It’s not over your head. He uses simple language to convey big meaning.”
The Grammy-winner has taken on heavy topics including coal mining on Appalachia, the treatment of Vietnam veterans and the loneliness of growing old, and earned praises from Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt and Kris Kristofferson, who helped Prine get his first record deal. But he also likes to write with humor, as evidenced by another popular duet with Iris Dement “In Spite of Ourselves,” that contains some of his best one-liners about love and marriage.
“I think John is very youthful at heart,” Musgraves said. “He’s a big kid. So naturally he gets along with people that are younger than him. But also he probably recognizes himself in a lot of the up-and-coming songwriters that respect him.”
Even a trip to the grocery store is an opportunity for aspiring writers to pitch him. “I used to leave Kroger with cassettes in my pockets because people would drop CDs and cassettes because they want John Prine to hear it,” Prine said.
His last album in 2016 was a collection of classic country duets with artists like Musgraves, Alison Krauss and Miranda Lambert. He hasn’t released an album of new songs in 12 years, but his wife and manager, Fiona, and his son, Jody, who runs his label, convinced him it was time again.
He’s going back in the studio in July to record new music and he’s also been nominated for artist of the year at this year’s Americana Honors and Awards show held in September.
“I like the scene in Nashville,” Prine said. “I am not particularly happy with modern country music, but it’s part of a tradition. It will come and it will go, but it will always revert back to what country was before. I can see it coming around again. I am going to stick around Nashville and see what happens.”
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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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In prehistoric times, millions of bison roamed North America, but by the late 1800s, they were nearly extinct. Through conservation efforts, they can now be found in all 50 states, including national parks, private lands and even on one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California. As VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports, the story of how the bison crossed 45 kilometers of ocean to get to Catalina Island is right out of a Hollywood movie.
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While the public contemplates how to protect large computer systems, such as banks and voting machines, from hacking, experts warn that another critical part of the data-based world may be vulnerable. Robots are rapidly entering everyday life, and they also rely on a connection to the internet and thus are potentially open to malware. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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A newly discovered photograph may provide the answer to one of the 20th century’s greatest unsolved mysteries — the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.
The legendary American pilot vanished 80 years ago this month somewhere over the Pacific. She was attempting to be the first woman to fly around the world.
What is known is that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan radioed on July 2 that they were in trouble between Papua, New Guinea, and Howland Island.
U.S. investigators quickly gave up the search, concluding they crashed into the ocean and formally pronounced them dead in 1939.
There have been numerous theories of what happened to Earhart and Noonan.
But a new television documentary shows a previously lost photograph of a woman resembling Earhart and a man who experts say is almost certainly Noonan on a dock somewhere in the Pacific.
The woman has her back to the camera and is looking to her right. She has the short hair style and men’s-style pants Earhart was known to favor.
A barge in the background appears to be towing an object that looks like the same size as Earhart’s plane.
The man in the foreground has the same hairline and prominent nose as Noonan’s.
The photo was misplaced in a box at the National Archives in Washington and the filmmakers found it by accident.
Possibly seen as spies
They theorize that Japanese forces captured Earhart and Noonan, believing them to be spies and held them prisoner in the Mariana Islands.
It is unknown when or how they died.
The producers believe someone spying for the U.S. against Japan took the photograph.
They say that may be the reason why the United States hastened to give up looking for Earhart and Noonan.
Shawn Henry, a former assistant director of the FBI and Earhart aficionado, hosts the documentary. He says the aviator was abandoned by her own government and “may very well be the first casualty of World War II.”
The documentary, “Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence,” premiers Sunday night on The History Channel.
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Arts and crafts retailer Hobby Lobby has agreed to forfeit thousands of illegally smuggled ancient Middle Eastern artifacts obtained from antiquities dealers for a Bible museum headed by its president, the company and U.S. officials said Wednesday.
The forfeiture will include about 5,500 artifacts purchased by Hobby Lobby Inc that originated in modern day Iraq and were shipped under false labels, as well as an additional $3 million to settle the civil charges, the Department of Justice said in a statement.
“The protection of cultural heritage is a mission that (Homeland Security Investigations) and its partner U.S. Customs and Border Protection take very seriously as we recognize that while some may put a price on these artifacts, the people of Iraq consider them priceless,” Angel Melendez, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in New York, said in the statement.
Privately held Hobby Lobby said that it was new to the world of antiquities when it began acquiring historical items for its Museum of the Bible in 2009 and made mistakes in relying on dealers and shippers who “did not understand the correct way to document and ship” them.
The company’s president, Steve Green, is the chairman and founder of the Museum of the Bible, which is under construction in Washington, D.C.
The artifacts being forfeited include cuneiform tablets and bricks, clay bullae and cylinder seals. Cuneiform is an ancient system of writing on clay tablets.
“At no time did Hobby Lobby ever purchase items from dealers in Iraq or from anyone who indicated that they acquired items from that country,” Green said in his statement. “Hobby Lobby condemns such conduct and has always acted with the intent to protect ancient items of cultural and historical importance. … “We have accepted responsibility and learned a great deal,” Green added, saying that the company has now “implemented acquisition policies and procedures based on the industry’s highest standards.”
Federal prosecutors say that when Hobby Lobby, which is based in Oklahoma City, began assembling its collection it was warned by an expert on cultural property law to be cautious in acquiring artifacts from Iraq, which in some cases have been looted from archaeological sites.
Despite that warning and other red flags, the company in December 2010 purchased thousands of items from a middle man, without meeting the purported owner, according to prosecutors.
A dealer based in the United Arab Emirates shipped packages containing the artifacts to three Hobby Lobby corporate addresses in Oklahoma City, bearing false labels that described their contents as “ceramic tiles” or “clay tiles” and the country of origin as Turkey.
A weird thing happened when the four members of the alt-rock band Imagine Dragons sat down to listen to their new album all the way through. They actually liked it.
“This was the first record that I think after we created it and we listened to it, we all went, for the first time, ‘Yes. This is Imagine Dragons and we’re proud of this,”’ said lead singer Dan Reynolds. “That doesn’t happen very often in this band, to be honest with you.”
The Las Vegas-based quartet, which likes to blend rock and hip-hop, has always been its toughest critic, but on “Evolve,” band members had to learn to let go. They relied on producers for the first time — Swedish duo Mattman & Robin, who won a Grammy for Taylor Swift’s “1989,” and Joel Little, who produced Lorde’s “Pure Heroine” — to shepherd the album all the way through.
“We knew as a band one of our biggest flaws was overproducing ourselves. We’ve known it since the beginning and we’ve had so many conversations as a band saying, ‘How do we peel back?’ And we just couldn’t do it until finally somebody walked into the room and slapped our head,” Reynolds said.
The new approach reflects a lot of changes behind the scenes at Imagine Dragons, now re-entering the spotlight after more than a year away as a happier — maybe even sunnier — band. The first single, “Believer,” is already a hit.
The group ground away in obscurity for years — even for sharing a bill with mimes — until being signed by producer Alex da Kid and seeing massive success with the 2012 release of the hit “Radioactive.” Their second album, “Smoke + Mirrors,” went gold but didn’t reach the sales height of their debut, “Night Visions.” They spent seven years touring, a grueling schedule that took its toll.
“I think it kind of snuck up on us a little bit, to be honest. The change happened pretty fast. We were this tiny little band that struggled and struggled for so long and played any show we could — I mean, we opened for mimes, for heaven’s sake. And that was by far not our worst gig,” said guitarist Wayne Sermon.
By the time they blew up — with a Grammy Award and arena tours — band members feared the success would stop if they stopped.
“It was sort of unhealthy for us, so this year-break was amazing,” said Sermon. “I think it reflects in the music. I think the music is brighter. I think it’s cleaner. I think more vibrant.”
The break was most appreciated by Reynolds, who has always been frank about his battles with depression. He was desperate to get home and reconnect with his 4-year-old daughter, his wife and friends.
“I was in a really just scattered, depressed headspace, and I think it just came from a sense of losing my sense of self almost to a degree and all the abrupt changes. I had dealt with depression when I was young, but it really took on a whole new level and it was kind of a full year,” he said.
“I did a lot of self-work, read a lot of books, met with a lot of people who helped me find a healthier headspace and got to a really wonderful, colorful, good headspace, which has been just great.”
To make “Evolve,” the band leaned on Alex da Kid and new collaborators like Joel Little and Mattman & Robin. Imagine Dragons turned to the duo for several songs chiefly because they were very opinionated and very minimalistic.
Reynolds and Sermon recall working in the studio for hours, trying all kinds of song approaches, until one of the Swedish producers smiled or just nodded.
“They helped us see the weakness of what we’d done and the strengths and try to make a more evolved version of what Imagine Dragons was sonically while also retaining the elements that made the band who they were,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds, whose wife recently gave birth to twins, also was freed up to push himself lyrically, turning for the first time to address love on songs like “Walking the Wire” and “I’ll Make It Up to You.”
“Since I was in a healthy headspace for the first time in a long time, love was exciting to me and it wasn’t cliched or corny. It was beautiful and interesting. So I found myself writing about love.”
After spending much of the summer on tour in Europe, the band returns for a fall swing through the United States. Life on the road may be a grind but they say the reward is the ultimate high of playing live.
“Cliff jumping isn’t as exciting to me as the idea of going onstage and playing for people who got a babysitter, fought traffic, paid extra for parking and showed up,” said Sermon.
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Swedish carmaker Volvo says it is phasing out the internal combustion engine in favor of electric motors by 2019.
Volvo, which is Chinese owned, is the first traditional carmaker to announce the move.
“This announcement marks the end of the solely combustion engine-powered car,” said Volvo’s president Håkan Samuelsson in a statement Wednesday. “People increasingly demand electrified cars, and we want to respond to our customers’ current and future needs.”.
The company, which made a name for itself for emphasizing passenger safety, said it will offer five electric cars between 2019 and 2021. Three will be branded as Volvo and the others will be labeled as Polestar, the company’s high-end brand.
The company said it will also offer plug-in hybrid or other hybrid-type cars, some of which do use a small gas engine along with a rechargeable battery.
The company says it will continue to make pure combustion engine cars launched prior to 2019.
Geely, the Chinese company which has owned Volvo since 2010, was likely an impetus for the move as electric vehicles have been eagerly adopted in China due to high levels of air pollution.
According to Center for Automotive Research at Germany’s University of Duisberg-Essen, the country is home to half the world’s electric cars. China has said it wants 5 million electric cars on Chinese roads by 2020.
Electric carmaker Tesla recently announced it was in talks to build a plant near Shanghai.
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Singapore has a near-perfect approach to cybersecurity, but many other rich countries have holes in their defenses and some poorer countries are showing them how it should be done, a U.N. survey showed on Wednesday.
Wealth breeds cybercrime, but it does not automatically generate cybersecurity, so governments need to make sure they are prepared, the survey by the U.N. International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said.
“There is still an evident gap between countries in terms of awareness, understanding, knowledge and finally capacity to deploy the proper strategies, capabilities and programmes,” the survey said.
The United States came second in the ITU’s Global Cybersecurity Index, but many of the other highly rated countries were small or developing economies.
The rest of the top 10 were Malaysia, Oman, Estonia, Mauritius, Australia, Georgia, France and Canada. Russia ranked 11th. India was 25th, one place ahead of Germany, and China was 34th.
The ranking was based on countries’ legal, technical and organizational institutions, their educational and research capabilities, and their cooperation in information-sharing networks.
“Cybersecurity is an ecosystem where laws, organizations, skills, cooperation and technical implementation need to be in harmony to be most effective,” the survey said.
“The degree of interconnectivity of networks implies that anything and everything can be exposed, and everything from national critical infrastructure to our basic human rights can be compromised.”
The crucial first step was to adopt a national security strategy, but 50 percent of countries have none, the survey said.
Among the countries that ranked higher than their economic development was 57th-placed North Korea, which was let down by its “cooperation” score but still ranked three spots ahead of much-richer Spain.
The smallest rich countries also scored badly – Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco and San Marino were all well down the second half of the table. The Vatican ranked 186th out of 195 countries in the survey.
But no country did worse than Equatorial Guinea, which scored zero.
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The Ukrainian software firm at the center of a cyber attack that spread around the world last week said on Wednesday that computers which use its accounting software are compromised by a so-called “backdoor” installed by hackers during the attack.
The backdoor has been installed in every computer that wasn’t offline during the cyber attack, said Olesya Bilousova, the chief executive of Intellect Service, which developed M.E.Doc, Ukraine’s most popular accounting software.
Last week’s cyber attack spread from Ukraine and knocked out thousands of computers, disrupting shipping and shut down a chocolate factory in Australia as it reached dozens of countries around the world.
Ukrainian politicians were quick to blame Russia for a state-sponsored hack, which Moscow denied, while Ukranian cyber police and some experts say the attack was likely a smokescreen for the hackers to install new malware.
The Ukrainian police have seized M.E.Doc’s servers and taken them offline. On Wednesday morning they advised every computer using M.E.Doc software to be switched off. M.E.Doc is installed in around 1 million computers in Ukraine, Bilousova said.
“… the fact is that this backdoor needs to be closed. There was a hacking of servers,” Bilousova told reporters.
“As of today, every computer which is on the same local network as our product is a threat. We need to pay the most attention to those computers which weren’t affected (by the attack). The virus is on them waiting for a signal. There are fingerprints on computers which didn’t even use our product.”
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