Forests are often called the lungs of the planet because they produce so much oxygen. But they also store huge amounts of carbon. NASA scientists want to know exactly how much carbon, and so they have just launched a satellite that will finally give them an exact measurement. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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The attorney general for Washington, D.C., said Wednesday that the nation’s capital had sued Facebook over reports involving Cambridge Analytica’s use of data from the social media giant.

“Facebook failed to protect the privacy of its users and deceived them about who had access to their data and how it was used,” Attorney General Karl Racine said in a statement. “Facebook put users at risk of manipulation by allowing companies like Cambridge Analytica and other third-party applications to collect personal data without users’ permission.”

The lawsuit came as Facebook faced new reports that it shared its users’ data without their permission.

Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign at one point, gained access to personal data from tens of millions of Facebook’s users. The D.C. attorney general said in the lawsuit that this exposed nearly half of the district’s residents’ data to manipulation for

political purposes during the 2016 campaign, and he alleged that Facebook’s “lax oversight and misleading privacy settings” had allowed the consulting firm to harvest the information.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Facebook defended its data sharing practices Wednesday after a report revealing that certain partners of the social network had access to a range of personal information about users and their friends.

The New York Times late Tuesday reported that some 150 companies — including powerful partners like Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix and Spotify — could access detailed information about Facebook users, including data about their friends.

The report marked yet another potential embarrassment for Facebook, which has been roiled by a series of scandals on data protection and privacy and has been scrutinized over the hijacking of user data in the 2016 US election campaign.

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook’s head of developer platforms and programs, said in a blog post early Wednesday that the Times report was about “integration partners” which enabled “social experiences — like seeing recommendations from their Facebook friends — on other popular apps and websites.”

Papamiltiadis added that “none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people’s permission,” and maintained that the deals did not violate a 2012 privacy settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission.

According to documents seen by the Times, Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see names of Facebook users’ friends without consent and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read private messages.”

The report said Amazon was able to obtain user names and contact information through their friends, and Yahoo could view streams of friends’ posts.

While some of the deals date back as far as 2010, the Times said they remained active as late as 2017 and some were still in effect this year.

‘We’ve been public’

Papamiltiadis said however that “we’ve been public about these features and partnerships over the years because we wanted people to actually use them.”

“They were discussed, reviewed, and scrutinized by a wide variety of journalists and privacy advocates,” he said.

But he said most of the features are now gone.

“Still, we recognize that we’ve needed tighter management over how partners and developers can access information,” he added.

Netflix said in a statement the feature was used to make the streaming service “more social” by allowing users to make recommendations to friends, but that it stopped using it in 2015.

“At no time did we access people’s private messages on Facebook or ask for the ability to do so,” Netflix said in an emailed statement.

Spotify offered a similar response, indicating the music service “cannot read users’ private Facebook inbox messages across any of our current integrations.”

The Canadian bank RBC, also cited in the New York Times, said the deal with Facebook “was limited to the development of a service that enabled clients to facilitate payment transactions to their Facebook friends,” and that it was discontinued in 2015.

Facebook has already been called before lawmakers in the US and elsewhere to defend its data policies since news broke this year on the misuse of personal data in 2016 by Cambridge Analytica, a British consultancy working on Donald Trump’s campaign.

A report prepared for US lawmakers revealed this week showed detailed information on how Russian entities manipulated Facebook and other social networks to support the Trump effort.

Senator Brian Schatz said the latest revelations highlight a need for tougher controls on how tech companies handle user data.

“It has never been more clear,” Schatz tweeted. “We need a federal privacy law. They are never going to volunteer to do the right thing.”
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The European Union on Wednesday gave U.S. President Donald Trump two months to name an ombudsman to tackle EU citizens’ complaints under a data protection deal sealed by predecessor Barack Obama’s team.

Brussels has previously sought assurances the Trump administration is committed to the deal to protect Europeans’ personal data held in the United States by internet giants like Google and Facebook.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said an annual review found that Washington “continues to ensure an adequate level of protection for personal data” under the 2016 Privacy Shield.

But it said the United States should “nominate a permanent ombudsperson by February 28, 2019 to replace the one that is currently acting.”

If this does not happen, the commission warned it could take “appropriate measures” under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was adopted in May.

The privacy shield came into force in August 2016 to replace a previous arrangement that the EU’s top court struck down over concerns about U.S. intelligence snooping.

“Today’s review shows that the Privacy Shield is generally a success,” said Andrus Ansip, the Commission vice president for the digital single market.

More than 3,850 companies have been certified, including giants Google, Microsoft and IBM, creating “operational ground” to improve how the deal works, he said.

During the first review more than a year ago, the Commission said more than 2,400 companies had been certified.

“We now expect our American partners to nominate the ombudsperson on a permanent basis, so we can make sure that our EU-US relations in data protection are fully trustworthy,” Ansip said in a statement.

After the first review, the Commission said the Trump administration had dispelled initial EU doubts about its commitment to the privacy deal despite its “America First” policy.

Officials say the Privacy Shield lays down tough rules to prevent U.S. intelligence agencies accessing European data. Companies face penalties if they do not meet EU standards of protection.

The European Court of Justice threw out the earlier Safe Harbour arrangement after Austrian activist Max Schrems sued Facebook in Ireland, citing U.S. snooping practices exposed by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
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In recent years, the tech industry has looked to China as a key partner to help build and sell cutting-edge devices and services.

But rising tensions between Washington and Beijing have Silicon Valley worried it will be caught in the middle of a growing trade war.

Over the summer, President Donald Trump slapped $250 million of tariffs on Chinese goods sold in the U.S. and claimed that China offers U.S. businesses an uneven playing field as Beijing seeks to make China into a tech super power.

The detention in Canada earlier this month of a Huawei executive for allegedly breaking U.S. sanctions on Iran has made tech executives feel even more vulnerable.

China, for its part, denies the U.S. claims and has taken steps to pursue a formal inquiry about the tariffs at the World Trade Organization.

A delicate line

For the tech industry, the increasing tensions come as it was already walking a delicate line. Tech executives complain about intellectual property theft in China and what they see as unfair conditions for doing business. But the two regions have strengthened their bonds through investment, trade and partnerships in areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous cars.

The tensions have left tech executives questioning what they can share about their work, said Stanley Kwong, adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco.

“All of these people are worried if they traveled back and forth, they might be arrested because of the IP, something they know and they talk about in both China, and in the USA,” he said.

Silicon Valley firms have complained the relationship “isn’t as reciprocal as it needs to be,” said Sean Randolph, senior director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

The relationship, from some tech firms’ point of view, is about “the extraction of technologies involuntarily from foreign companies to accelerate China’s technology leadership,” he said.

Critical technologies

Chinese money that has helped fuel the current tech boom in Silicon Valley may start drying up. One reason — a new U.S. law, the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA), beefed up oversight of foreign investment and acquisitions of critical technology that are deemed strategically important. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. has expanded powers to block foreign purchases of U.S. firms.

“Silicon Valley people have been optimistic for a long time,” said Xiaohua Yang, professor of international business at the University of San Francisco. “But now, they have begun to worry … about the lack of Chinese investment coming to support Silicon Valley technology development.”

Lawmakers are concerned that U.S. tech companies, as they pursue the Chinese market or seek Chinese investment, might hand over core technology to the Chinese government, a competitor and sometime adversary on the global stage. The tech industry waits, as what constitutes “critical technologies” under FIRRMA is still being developed.

For U.S. entrepreneurs, the changing climate may mean they will become more cautious, said Kwong, who advises startups.

“If you want to do business in China, if you’re doing consumer products, I say, that’s probably fine,” he said. “But let’s presume you’re doing AI. You better find out exactly what you’re doing. You can have AI in a coffee machine, and I don’t think that’s much to do with defense. If you’re doing facial recognition that may be something that’s going to have a major problem.”

Randolph said that the tech industry has long had an “open market, open platform” approach, with the idea that anyone can come and “we’re moving innovation forward globally.”

But if tensions between Washington and Beijing continue to escalate, experts say, the very openness of Silicon Valley may be a casualty — even if tech firms stand to benefit if China becomes more open for doing business.
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The U.S. has had its share of famous on-screen dogs, from Lassie to Benji. In China, the big-screen star is a lovable mutt named ‘Juice.’ But Juice is getting on in years, so what’s a movie company to do? Turn to cutting-edge biotech, of course. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s underground transit venture, planned an unveiling of its first tunnel Tuesday, two years after the billionaire entrepreneur complained about Los Angeles traffic and vowed to “just start digging” as a remedy.

Musk has advertised his 2-mile (3.2 km) tunnel as the first step toward developing a high-speed subterranean network for whisking vehicles and pedestrians below the congested streets of the second-largest city in the United States.

The tunnel, an initial proof-of-concept, has been excavated along a path that runs not through Los Angeles but beneath the tiny adjacent municipality of Hawthorne, where Musk’s Boring Company and his SpaceX rocket firm are headquartered.

In a tweet earlier this month, Musk said the big reveal would include “autonomous transport cars & ground to tunnel elevator cars.”

Boring’s website describes a system of passenger- and automobile-carrying “skates” that can zip through the tunnels by way of electric power once they are lowered underground from street level.

Musk, best known as head of the Tesla Inc electric car manufacturer and energy company, launched his foray into public transit after complaining in December 2016 that L.A.’s traffic was “driving me nuts,” promising then to “build a boring machine and just start digging.”

In May, the company gave the world a preview of the first tunnel, posting a fast-forward video of the interior shot by a camera traveling the length of the cylindrical passageway, which measures about 12 feet (3.7 m) in diameter.

Musk also created a stir by promising free trips through the tunnel once it opened — “like a weird little Disney ride in L.A.” — to get public feedback before proceeding with a larger system.

It remained doubtful, however, whether permits Musk received to dig what was then billed as an experimental tunnel would allow the public inside.

“There will be no cars or people in the research tunnel,” according to the minutes of a special Hawthorne City Council meeting in August 2017 to review an easement for the project.

On its website, the Boring company said that “due to unbelievably high demand, tours through the Hawthorne test tunnel are by invitation only.”

If successful, the Hawthorne tunnel is envisioned as eventually connecting to a network of other tunnels, yet to be approved or built.

Last month, the Boring Company scrapped plans for a slightly longer 2.7-mile segment under a West Los Angeles neighborhood, settling litigation brought by community groups opposed to that project.

But Musk’s company announced it was moving ahead with a proposed tunnel across town to connect Dodger Stadium, home of the city’s Major League Baseball team, to the existing subway line.

In June, Boring was selected by the city of Chicago to build a 17-mile underground transit system linking that city’s downtown to O’Hare International Airport. The company also has proposed an East Coast Loop that would run from Washington, D.C., out to the Maryland suburbs.
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When Hana fled to Britain with her son from East Africa, she was grateful to have found safety from persecution and a roof over her head in her sister’s tiny London apartment.

It should have been a stop-gap, but a year on, the four still live together in cramped conditions, with Hana sharing a bed with her young son, and her sister doing the same with her toddler.

“When I came to Britain, I struggled with everything. It’s very hard to be a single mum and homeless,” said Hana, who did not share her full name for fear of repercussions.

With no job prospects, she had no chance of finding her own home in London, where rents are among the highest in the world.

Homelessness has been rising in England for nearly a decade, with over 82,000 families in temporary accommodation, including more than 123,000 children, government data shows.

But 32-year-old Hana is hoping to buck that trend, after a crowdfunding campaign by social enterprise Beam paid for her to study beauty therapy.

“It’s been a dramatic change, now I will be a professional beauty therapist. Straight away I want to start a job, the day I finish my studies,” Hana said in a phone interview.

She is one of about 50 homeless people who secured employment training through Beam, which it says is the world’s first purpose-built platform that helps homeless people crowdfund donations through their online profile.

The participants, who are referred to Beam by homelessness charities, are also supported by caseworkers throughout their studies and job hunt.

“We really want to return people to a stage of independence. They should never be defined by their homelessness,” said Beam founder Alex Stephany, who launched the platform last year.

He said each crowdfunding campaign is fully funded before a new one is launched to ensure each person has the chance to take a training course of their choice, be it accounting, dental nursing or carpentry.

“There are lots of people who need help, and also lots of people who want to help, and technology has a really important part to play in making it safe and easy for people to do that,” Stephany said in an interview.

‘Housing emergency’

Homelessness charity Shelter, which partners with Beam, blames rising private rents, a freeze on benefits and a shortage of social housing for the sharp increase in homelessness.

“We see destitution every day and desperation from people. People who are being priced out of the rental market. We’re calling it a housing emergency, it’s atrocious,” said Alison Mohammed, Shelter’s director of services.

Discrimination against homeless people has also made it difficult for them to secure rental properties, she said.

A hotel in the northern English city of Hull was criticized this week after it canceled paid bookings made by a local charity to give rough sleepers a bed for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

‘Message from heaven’

Mohammed said initiatives like Beam can harness the public’s goodwill to help homeless people, but it is just “one piece of the puzzle.”

“Anything that can tap into the public’s wish to do something about homelessness is a good idea,” she said in a phone interview.

“It’s not going to solve the lack of social housing, but it is going to help people who have got to a position in their life where they can take that step,” Mohammed said.

Beam said a dozen people had so far gained employment and the group hopes to expand beyond London and roll out the initiative across the country.

For Hana, who will finish her beauty therapy studies next year, knowing that hundreds of strangers care about her well-being and future in Britain has been a source of comfort.

She is confident she will find her own place to live too.

“I don’t know these people and I don’t even see their faces, but they encourage me very much. It’s like a message from heaven,” she said.
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U.S. supermarket chain Kroger Co said on Tuesday it has started using unmanned autonomous vehicles to deliver groceries Scottsdale, Arizona in partnership with Silicon Valley startup Nuro.

The delivery service follows a pilot program started by the companies in Scottsdale in August and involved Nuro’s R1, a custom unmanned vehicle.

The R1 uses public roads and has no driver and is used to only transport goods.

Kroger’s deal with Nuro underscores the stiff competition in the U.S. grocery delivery market with supermarket chains angling for a bigger share of consumer spending.

Peers Walmart Inc and Amazon.com Inc have also invested heavily in their delivery operations by expanding their offerings and shortening delivery times.

Walmart, Ford Motor Co and delivery service Postmates Inc said last month they would collaborate to deliver groceries and other goods to Walmart customers and that could someday use autonomous vehicles.

Kroger said the service would be available in Scottsdale at its unit Fry’s Food Stores for $5.95 with no minimum order requirement for same-day or next-day deliveries.
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American tech companies have long looked to China as a key partner to help build and sell cutting-edge devices and services. But tensions are rising between Washington and Beijing, and Silicon Valley may be caught in the middle. Michelle Quinn reports.
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Alphabet’s Google is investing more than $1 billion on a new campus in New York, becoming the second major technology company after Amazon to pick America’s financial capital to expand and create thousands of jobs.

The 1.7 million-square-foot campus, called Google Hudson Square, will include leased properties at Hudson Street and Washington Street, the company said in a blog post Monday. The new campus will be the main location for Google’s advertising sales division, the Global Business Organization.

Google hopes to start moving into two Hudson Street buildings by 2020, followed by a Washington Street in 2022 and will have the capacity to more than double its New York headcount, currently more than 7,000, in the next 10 years.

The company’s plans to invest outside its home base mirror those of other U.S. tech giants such as Apple Inc, which said last week it would spend $1 billion to build a new 133-acre campus in Austin, Texas.

Last month, Amazon.com Inc said it would open offices in New York and the Washington, D.C. area, creating more than 25,000 jobs.

Mountain View, California-based Google’s move to invest in prime real estate on the lower west side of Manhattan also underscores the growing importance of New York as a hub for innovation and an incubator for technology companies.

With a plethora of white-collar workers and good infrastructure, the city provides a better option to other places that would require more investment.

“We’re growing faster outside the Bay Area than within it,” said Ruth Porat, chief financial officer of Alphabet and Google.

It is a “fairly sensible” move for Google given the amount of available talent pool, Atlantic Equities analyst James Cordwell said.

It also makes sense for Google as New York has been the center for their core advertising business, Cordwell added.

U.S. corporations are also under pressure from the Trump administration to create more jobs domestically. Companies that have moved jobs overseas or closed factories have drawn sharp rebukes from President Donald Trump.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Google was nearing a deal to buy or lease an office building in New York City that could add space for more than 12,000 new workers.

Google’s first New York office at 111 Eighth Avenue is one of the city’s largest buildings that it bought in 2010 for $1.77 billion.

Earlier this year, the company announced a $2.4 billion purchase of the Manhattan Chelsea Market. It also has leased space on Pier 57 jutting into the Hudson, which will create a four-block campus.

Google shares were down 1.7 percent at $1,032.84 amid a broader market sell-off.
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Virgin Galactic is preparing for a new flight test Thursday that aims to fly higher and faster than before toward the edge of space.

The U.S. company run by British tycoon Richard Branson is aiming to be the first to take tourists on brief trips into microgravity.

Virgin Galactic’s fourth flight test on the VSS Unity is scheduled for Thursday, weather permitting.

The flight will take off from a spaceport in Mojave, California.

The vessel does not launch from Earth but is carried to a higher altitude — about nine miles (15 kilometers) high — attached to an airplane.

Then, two pilots on the VSS Unity fire the engines toward the frontier of space, typically defined as an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers).

In July, after burning the rocket motor for 42 seconds, the VSS Unity reached a height of 32 miles, a part of the atmosphere called the mesosphere.

Commercial airplanes typically fly at an altitude of about six miles.

The VSS Unity reached a top speed of over 1,530 miles per hour, or beyond Mach 2.

“Overall the goal of this flight is to fly higher and faster than previous flights,” said a statement from Virgin Galactic.

“If all goes to plan our pilots will experience an extended period of microgravity as VSS Unity coasts to apogee, although — being pilots — they will remain securely strapped in throughout.”

Another U.S. rocket company, Blue Origin, founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, is also racing to be the first to send tourists to space, but using a small rocket to get there.

Virgin’s first flight date has been pushed back multiple times, following a test flight accident that killed a co-pilot in 2014.

Branson told CNN in November he hoped to send people to space “before Christmas.”

More than 600 clients have already paid $250,000 for a ticket.
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