March, 2017

• 23 March

  Google Maps users can now ‘broadcast’ their movements

  

    SAN FRANCISCO / AP Google Maps users will soon be able to broadcast their movements to friends and family — the latest test of how much privacy people are willing to sacrifice in an era of rampant sharing. The location-monitoring feature will be in an update to the Google Maps mobile app, which is already installed on most of ...

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• 23 March

  A camping stove that can recharge your gadgets

    Bloomberg A new camping stove is using mankind’s oldest communal activity—cooking over fire—to power our newest communal obsession: sharing pictures of your meal on social media. The BioLite CampStove 2, available for $130, employs thermoelectric technology to turn cooking heat into electricity. It can run the internal fan that turbocharges your fire, and via the built-in USB outlet, power ...

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• 23 March

  YouTube losing major advertisers upset with videos

  

    SAN FRANCISCO / AP AT&T, Verizon and several other major advertisers are suspending their marketing campaigns on Google’s YouTube site after discovering their brands have been appearing alongside videos promoting terrorism and other unsavory subjects. The spreading boycott confronts Google with a challenge that threatens to cost it hundreds of millions of dollars. But that diverse selection periodically allows ...

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• 23 March

  Swiss startup bringing AI to music label business

  

    Bloomberg A Swiss-Swedish startup wants to bring the power of big data and social-media analysis to the music business, offering artists instant insight into where and how their songs are playing so they can market more effectively to fans. Utopia Music Group is being billed as a new kind of record company by its founder, Mattias Hjelmstedt. Like an ...

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• 23 March

  What makes this temple different!

  

    BANGKOK / AP It’s more than eight times bigger than Vatican City and twice the size of Cambodia’s ancient Angkor Wat, making it quite possibly the world’s biggest religious complex. Yet few non-Buddhists have heard of Wat Dhammakaya, a sprawling, extravagant temple compound north of Bangkok that has been at the center of a high-profile power struggle between monks ...

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• 22 March

  Car rampage, knife attack leave two dead in London

  

    LONDON / AP A vehicle mowed down pedestrians on London’s Westminster Bridge, killing at least one woman and leaving others with injuries described as catastrophic. Around the same time on Wednesday, a knife-wielding attacker stabbed a police officer and was shot on the grounds outside Britain’s Parliament, sending the compound into lockdown. Authorities said they were treating the attacks ...

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• 22 March

  Dozens dead or missing from airstrike in IS-held north Syria

    BEIRUT / AP Syrian activists said on Wednesday that dozens of people were killed or missing after an airstrike the day before leveled a school near the IS-held city of Raqqa where displaced families had sought refuge. The activist-run group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently said some 50 families had been sheltering at the school in the northern Syrian ...

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• 22 March

  China says no monitoring station on disputed island

    BEIJING / AP China is not building an environmental monitoring station on a disputed South China Sea shoal, the foreign ministry said Wednesday, apparently denying remarks made by a local official last week that prompted a request for clarification from rival claimant the Philippines. Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said reports about the facility on Scarborough Shoal had been checked ...

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• 22 March

  Afghanistan wants more US help in fight against Taliban, IS

    WASHINGTON / AP Afghanistan wants the United States to send more forces to help meet shortfalls in the battle against the Taliban and the IS group, the nation’s top diplomat said. Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani welcomed a recent call by US Gen. John Nicholson, the top American commander in Afghanistan, for a few thousand more troops from the US ...

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• 22 March

  Obamacare — ‘mend it, but don’t end it’

  

    Mend it, don’t end it’ was Bill Clinton’s rhetorical straddle regarding affirmative action. Republican efforts to ‘repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (ACA) (Obamacare) look increasingly like ‘mend it, don’t end it.’ The problem is not that, as is frequently said, no entitlement can be ended. The most consequential legislation of the 1990s, the 1996 welfare reform, repealed ...

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