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Category: Technology
silicon valley and technology
US, Taiwan, China race to improve military drone technology
washington — This week, as Taiwan was preparing for the start of its Han Kuang military exercises, its air defense system detected a Chinese drone circling the island. This was the sixth time that China had sent a drone to operate around Taiwan since 2023.
Drones like the one that flew around Taiwan, which are tasked with dual-pronged missions of reconnaissance and intimidation, are just a small part of a broader trend that is making headlines from Ukraine to the Middle East to the Taiwan Strait and is changing the face of warfare.
The increasing role that unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, play and rising concern about a Chinese invasion of democratically ruled Taiwan is pushing Washington, Beijing and Taipei to improve the sophistication, adaptability and cost of drone technology.
‘Hellscape’ strategy
Last August, the Pentagon launched a $1 billion Replicator Initiative to create air, sea and land drones in the “multiple thousands,” according to the Defense Department’s Innovation Unit. The Pentagon aims to build that force of drones by August 2025.
The initiative is part of what U.S. Admiral Samuel Paparo recently described to The Washington Post as a “hellscape” strategy, which aims to counter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan through the deployment of thousands of unmanned drones in the air and sea between the island and China.
“The benefits of unmanned systems are that you get cheap, disposable mass that’s low cost. If a drone gets shot down, the only people that are crying about it are the accountants,” said Zachary Kallenborn, a policy fellow at George Mason University. “You can use them at large amounts of scale and overwhelm your opponents as well as degrade their defensive capabilities.”
The hellscape strategy, he added, aims to use lots of cheap drones to try to hold back China from attacking Taiwan.
Drone manufacturing supremacy
China has its own plans under way and is the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial drones. In a news briefing after Paparo’s remarks to the Post, it warned Washington that it was playing with fire.
“Those who clamor for turning others’ homeland into hell should get ready for burning in hell themselves,” said Senior Colonel Wu Qian, spokesperson for the Chinese defense ministry.
“The People’s Liberation Army is able to fight and win in thwarting external interference and safeguarding our national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Threats and intimidation never work on us,” Wu said.
China’s effort to expand its use of drones has been bolstered, analysts say, by leader Xi Jinping’s emphasis on technology and modernization in the military, something he highlighted at a top-level party meeting last week.
“China’s military is developing more than 50 types of drones with varying capabilities, amassing a fleet of tens of thousands of drones, potentially 10 times larger than Taiwan and the U.S. combined,” Michael Raska, assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, told VOA in an email. “This quantitative edge currently fuels China’s accelerating military modernization, with drones envisioned for everything from pre-conflict intel gathering to swarming attacks.”
Analysts add that China’s commercial drone manufacturing supremacy aids its military in the push for drone development. China’s DJI dominates in production and sale of household drones, accounting for 76% of the worldwide consumer market in 2021.
The scale of production and low price of DJI drones could put China in an advantageous position in a potential drone war, analysts say.
“In Russia and Ukraine, if you have a lot of drones – even if they’re like the commercial off-the-shelf things, DJI drones you can buy at Costco – and you throw hundreds of them at an air defense system, that’s going to create a large problem,” said Major Emilie Stewart, a research analyst at the China Aerospace Studies Institute.
China denies it is seeking to use commercial UAV technology for future conflicts.
“China has always been committed to maintaining global security and regional stability and has always opposed the use of civilian drones for military purposes,” Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told VOA. “We are firmly opposed to the U.S.’s military ties with Taiwan and its effort of arming Taiwan.”
Drone force
With assistance from its American partners, pressure from China and lessons from Ukraine, Taiwan has been pushing to develop its own domestic drone warfare capabilities.
The United States has played a pivotal role in Taiwan’s drone development, and just last week it pledged to sell $360 million of attack drones to the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, or TECRO, Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Washington.
“Taiwan will continue to build a credible deterrence and work closely with like-minded partners, including the United States, to preserve peace and stability in the region,” TECRO told VOA when asked about the collaboration between Taipei and Washington. “We have no further information to share at this moment.”
The effort to incorporate drones into its defense is crucial for Taiwan, said Eric Chan, a senior nonresident fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute.
“The biggest immediate effects of the U.S. coming into this mass UAV game is to give Taiwan a bigger advantage to be able to, first, detect their enemy and, second, help them build a backstop to their own capabilities as well,” Chan said.
With the potential for China to consider using drones in an urban conflict environment, Taiwan is recognizing the importance of stepping up its counter-drone defense systems.
“After multiple intrusions of Chinese drones in outlying islands, the Taiwan Ministry of Defense now places great emphasis on anti-drone capabilities,” said Yu-Jiu Wang, chief executive of Tron Future, an anti-drone company working with the Taiwanese military.
The demand is one that Wang said his company is willing and ready to fill.
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Video game performers to strike over artificial intelligence concerns
LOS ANGELES — Hollywood’s video game performers voted Thursday to go on strike, throwing part of the entertainment industry into another work stoppage after talks for a new contract with major game studios broke down over artificial intelligence protections.
The strike — the second for video game voice actors and motion capture performers under the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — will begin at 12:01 a.m. Friday. The move comes after nearly two years of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement.
SAG-AFTRA negotiators say gains have been made over wages and job safety in the video game contract, but that the studios will not make a deal over the regulation of generative AI. Without guardrails, game companies could train AI to replicate an actor’s voice, or create a digital replica of their likeness without consent or fair compensation, the union said.
Fran Drescher, the union’s president, said in a prepared statement that members would not approve a contract that would allow companies to “abuse AI.”
“Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about offering an agreement our members can live — and work — with, we will be here, ready to negotiate,” Drescher said.
A representative for the studios did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
The global video game industry generates well over $100 billion in profit annually, according to game market forecaster Newzoo. The people who design and bring those games to life are the driving force behind that success, SAG-AFTRA said.
“Eighteen months of negotiations have shown us that our employers are not interested in fair, reasonable AI protections, but rather flagrant exploitation,” said Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee Chair Sarah Elmaleh.
Last month, union negotiators told The Associated Press that the game studios refused to “provide an equal level of protection from the dangers of AI for all our members” — specifically, movement performers.
Members voted overwhelmingly last year to give leadership the authority to strike. Concerns about how movie studios will use AI helped fuel last year’s film and television strikes by the union, which lasted four months.
The last interactive contract, which expired November 2022, did not provide protections around AI but secured a bonus compensation structure for voice actors and performance capture artists after an 11-month strike that began October 2016. That work stoppage marked the first major labor action from SAG-AFTRA following the merger of Hollywood’s two largest actors unions in 2012.
The video game agreement covers more than 2,500 “off-camera (voiceover) performers, on-camera (motion capture, stunt) performers, stunt coordinators, singers, dancers, puppeteers, and background performers,” according to the union.
Amid the tense interactive negotiations, SAG-AFTRA created a separate contract in February that covered indie and lower-budget video game projects. The tiered-budget independent interactive media agreement contains some of the protections on AI that video game industry titans have rejected.
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US economic growth increased last quarter to a healthy 2.8% annual rate
Washington — The nation’s economy accelerated last quarter at a strong 2.8% annual pace, with consumers and businesses helping drive growth despite the pressure of continually high interest rates.
Thursday’s report from the Commerce Department said the gross domestic product — the economy’s total output of goods and services — picked up in the April-June quarter after growing at a 1.4% pace in the January-March period. Economists had expected a weaker 1.9% annual pace of growth.
The GDP report also showed that inflation continues to ease, though still remaining above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. The central bank’s favored inflation gauge rose at a 2.6% annual rate last quarter, down from 3.4% in the first quarter of the year.
Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core PCE inflation increased at a 2.9% pace. That was down from 3.7% from January through March.
The latest figures should reinforce confidence that the U.S. economy is on the verge of achieving a rare “soft landing,” whereby high interest rates, engineered by the Fed, tame inflation without tipping the economy into a recession.
Helping to boost last quarter’s expansion was consumer spending, the heart of the U.S. economy. It rose at a 2.3% annual rate in the April-June quarter, up from a 1.5% pace in the January-March period. Spending on goods, such as cars and appliances, increased at a 2.5% rate after falling at a 2.3% pace in the first three months of the year.
Business investment was up last quarter, led by a 11.6% annual increase in equipment investment. Growth also picked up because businesses increased their inventories. On the other hand, a surge in imports, which are subtracted from GDP, shaved about 0.9 percentage point from the April-June growth.
Despite last quarter’s uptick, the U.S. economy, the world’s largest, has cooled in the face of the highest borrowing rates in decades. From mid-2022 through 2023, annualized GDP growth had topped 2% for six straight quarters. In last year’s final two quarters, GDP expanded by robust rates of 4.9% and 3.4%.
Fed officials have made clear that with inflation edging toward their 2% target level, they’re prepared to start cutting interest rates soon, something they’re widely expected to do in September.
“This is a perfect report for the Fed,” Olu Sonola, head of economic research at Fitch Ratings, said of Thursday’s GDP numbers. “Growth during the first half of the year is not too hot, inflation continues to cool, and the elusive soft-landing scenario looks within reach.”
The state of the economy has seized Americans’ attention as the presidential campaign has intensified. Though inflation has slowed sharply, to 3% from 9.1% in 2022, prices remain well above their pre-pandemic levels.
This year’s economic slowdown reflects, in large part, the much higher borrowing rates for home and auto loans, credit cards and many business loans resulting from the Fed’s aggressive series of interest rate hikes.
The Fed’s rate hikes — 11 of them in 2022 and 2023 — were a response to the flare-up in inflation that began in the spring of 2021 as the economy rebounded with unexpected speed from the COVID-19 recession, causing severe supply shortages. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 made things worse by inflating prices for the energy and grains the world depends on. Prices spiked across the country and the world.
Economists had long predicted that the higher borrowing costs would tip the United States into recession. Yet the economy kept chugging along. Consumers, whose spending accounts for roughly 70% of GDP, kept buying things, emboldened by a strong job market and savings they had built up during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
The slowdown at the start of this year was caused largely by two factors, each of which can vary sharply from quarter to quarter: A surge in imports and a drop in business inventories. Neither trend revealed much about the economy’s underlying health.
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Some US states purge Chinese companies from investments amid tensions with China
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — As state treasurer, Vivek Malek pushed Missouri’s main retirement system to pull its investments from Chinese companies, making Missouri among the first nationally to do so. Now Malek is touting the Chinese divestment as he seeks reelection in an August 6 Republican primary against challengers who also are denouncing financial connections to China.
The Missouri treasurer’s race highlights a new facet of opposition to China, which has been cast as a top threat to the U.S. by many candidates seeking election this year. Indiana and Florida also have restricted their public pension funds from investing in certain Chinese companies. Similar legislation targeting public investments in foreign adversaries was vetoed in Arizona and proposed in Illinois and Oklahoma.
China ranks as the world’s second-largest economy behind the U.S.
Between 2018 and 2022, U.S. public pension and university endowments invested about $146 billion in China, according to an analysis by Future Union, a nonprofit pro-democracy group led by venture capitalist Andrew King. The report said more than four-fifths of U.S. states have at least one public pension fund investing in China and Hong Kong.
“Frankly, there should be shame — more shame than there is — for continuing to have those investments at this point in time,” said King, who asserts that China has used intellectual property from U.S. companies to make similar products that undercut market prices.
“You’re talking a considerable amount of money that frankly is competing against the U.S. technology and innovation ecosystem,” King said.
But some investment officials and economists have raised concerns that the emerging patchwork of state divestment policies could weaken investment returns for retirees.
“Most of these policies are unwise and would make U.S. citizens poorer,” said Ben Powell, an economics professor who is executive director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University.
The National Association of State Retirement Administrators opposes state-mandated divestments, saying such orders should come only from the federal government against specific companies based on U.S. security or humanitarian interests.
The U.S. Treasury Department recently proposed a rule prohibiting American investors from funding artificial intelligence systems in China that could have military uses, such as weapons targeting. In May, President Joe Biden blocked a Chinese-backed cryptocurrency mining firm from owning land near a Wyoming nuclear missile base, calling it a “national security risk.”
Yet this isn’t the first time that states have blacklisted particular investments. Numerous states, cities and universities divested from South Africa because of apartheid before the U.S. Congress eventually took action. Some states also have divested from tobacco companies because of health concerns.
Most recently, some states announced a divestment from Russia because of its war against Ukraine. But that has been difficult to carry out for some public pension fund administrators.
The quest to halt investments in Chinese companies comes as a growing number of states also have targeted Chinese ownership of U.S. land. Two dozen states now have laws restricting foreign ownership of agricultural land, according to the National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas. Some laws apply more broadly, such as one facing a legal challenge in Florida that bars Chinese citizens from buying property within 16 kilometers of military installations and critical infrastructure.
State pension divestment policies are “part of a broader march toward more confrontation between China and the United States,” said Clark Packard, a research fellow for trade policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. But “it makes it more challenging for the federal government to manage the overall relationship if we’ve got to deal with a scattershot policy at the state level.”
Indiana last year became the first to enact a law requiring the state’s public pension system to gradually divest from certain Chinese companies. As of March 31, 2023, the system had about $1.2 billion invested in Chinese entities with $486 million subject to the divestment requirement. A year later, its investment exposure in China had fallen to $314 million with just $700,000 still subject to divestment, the Indiana Public Retirement System said.
Missouri State Treasurer Malek tried last November to get fellow trustees of the Missouri State Employees’ Retirement System to divest from Chinese companies. After defeat, he tried again in December and won approval for a plan requiring divestment over a 12-month period. Officials at the retirement system did not respond to repeated questions from The Associated Press about the status of that divestment.
In recent weeks, Malek has highlighted the Chinese divestment in campaign ads, asserting that fentanyl from China “is drugging our kids” and vowing: “As long as I’m treasurer, they won’t get money from us. Not one penny.”
Two of Malek’s main challengers in the Republican primary — state Rep. Cody Smith and state Sen. Andrew Koenig — also support divestment from China.
Koenig said China is becoming less stable and “a more risky place to have money invested.”
“In China, the line between public and private is much more blurry than it is in America,” Smith said. “So I don’t think we can fully know that if we are investing in Chinese companies that we are not also aiding an enemy of the United States.”
A law signed earlier this year by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis requires a state board overseeing the retirement system to develop a plan by September 1 to divest from companies owned by China. The oversight board had announced in March 2022 that it would stop making new Chinese investments. As of May, it still had about $277 million invested in Chinese-owned entities, including banks, energy firms and alcohol companies, according to an analysis by Florida legislative staff.
Florida law already prohibits investment in certain companies tied to Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Venezuela, or those engaged in an economic boycott against Israel.
In April, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed a bill that would have required divestment from companies in countries determined by the federal government to be foreign adversaries. That list includes China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela.
Hobbs said in a letter to lawmakers that the measure “would be detrimental to the economic growth Arizona is experiencing as well as the State’s investment portfolio.”
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CrowdStrike blames bug for letting bad data slip through, leading to global tech outage
Meta takes down thousands of Facebook accounts running sextortion scams from Nigeria
US is investigating Delta’s flight cancellations and faltering response to global tech outage
India to spend billions of dollars on job creation
New Delhi — The government in India will spend $24 billion on boosting employment opportunities for young people, as job creation emerges as the biggest challenge confronting Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his third term.
The government also announced financial support for development projects in two states ruled by its regional allies.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party failed to win a clear majority in recent elections and has formed a coalition government. Although the country’s economy is growing briskly, high unemployment and distress in its vast rural areas were cited as the key reasons for the party’s loss of support.
Presenting the annual budget in parliament on Tuesday, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the government will “facilitate employment, skilling and other opportunities” for more than 40 million young people over the next five years.
She said the government will provide paid internships in the country’s 500 top companies to improve opportunities for job seekers.
India posted 8.2% growth last year, the fastest among major economies in the world. But critics say only some have benefitted from the boom, while millions struggle to earn a livelihood.
The government’s announcement that it will raise spending on loans for small and medium-sized businesses to boost job creation was welcomed by several economists. Opposition parties have long criticized the Modi government for giving billions of dollars in subsidies to big business and not extending enough assistance to smaller ones.
“The support to smaller businesses is critical because these are the enterprises which create jobs. Big corporations on the other hand use capital intensive technologies, which don’t result in any significant employment generation,” economist Santosh Mehrotra told VOA. “The government appears to have taken serious note of the jobless crisis we face for the first time in 10 years since it has been in power.”
He said providing internships could be a crucial step in tackling the unemployment problem. Mehrotra said it remains to be seen how the proposals are implemented.
Economists say jobs have failed to grow because India’s manufacturing sector is relatively small, accounting for only 17% of gross domestic product.
According to official figures, the unemployment rate is close to 6%, but an economic research group, the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy, estimates that it is about 9%. The biggest challenge confronts young graduates, among whom the unemployment rate is about 29%. In the world’s youngest country, an estimated 10 million people enter the workforce every year.
A World Bank report released in April, “Jobs for Resilience,” said that while growth in South Asian countries like India is strong, the region is not creating enough jobs to keep pace with its rapidly increasing working-age population. According to the report, the employment ratio for South Asia was 59%, compared to 70% in other emerging market and developing economy regions.
India’s economy will continue expanding at a brisk pace, according to government estimates, which have pegged growth this year at 6.5% to 7% – lower than that posted last year but still high among major economies.
“The global economy, while performing better than expected, is still in the grip of policy uncertainties,” she said. “In this context, India’s economic growth continues to be the shining exception and will remain so in the years ahead,” Finance Minister Sitharaman said.
Modi said the budget will lead India toward “better growth and a bright future.”
With an eye on keeping its coalition allies on board, the government also announced financial assistance for two states — Andhra Pradesh and Bihar. The two regional parties that govern these states have pledged support to Modi and are crucial for his BJP to stay in power.
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South Africa presses to maintain preferred trade status with US
Johannesburg — Some members of the U.S. Congress have called for South Africa to be excluded from the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a U.S. program that grants duty-free access to the enormous U.S. market for many South African exports. South Africa presses to remain eligible for the trade program and its evolving relationship with the U.S.
Sonwabile Ndamase remembers when U.S. President Bill Clinton came to Soweto in 1998. Ndamase, a fashion designer who created the iconic “Madiba” shirts worn by then-South African President Nelson Mandela, got a last-minute request from Mandela’s office.
“[T]hey wanted to give something as a gesture and as a gift to President Bill Clinton and then they called me. They said, listen, you need to do something — the president, Bill Clinton, would be coming in. So I had to go to the house of late President Nelson Mandela and deliver the shirt,” he said.
That was during a period of good relations between the U.S. and Africa as a whole and the U.S. and South Africa in particular. In 2000, Clinton initiated the African Growth and Opportunity Act, or AGOA, allowing duty-free access to the U.S. market for most agricultural and manufactured products from eligible African countries.
But times have changed. As U.S. lawmakers consider whether to extend AGOA past its September 2025 expiration date, there are calls in Washington to exclude South Africa due to its geopolitical stance on key issues, such as its refusal to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide.
Political analyst Daryl Glaser from the University of Witwatersrand said tension has existed between the United States and South Africa’s longtime ruling African National Congress party since 2000.
“Yeah, there has always been a tension at the heart of ANC foreign policy between, on the one hand, a kind of human rights focus and a desire to appear to the West a human rights and democracy champion, and on the other side what you might call anti-imperialism or anti-Western imperialism, in particular combined with a kind of loyalty to the countries that supported South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle,” he said.
Those countries include Soviet-era Russia.
Despite the tension, South Africa has sent a delegation to Washington to advocate for its continued participation in AGOA.
According to U.S. Census Bureau data from 2020, South Africa has become America’s largest trading partner in Africa, with over $20 billion in two-way trade volume.
Economist Dawie Roodt said South Africa cannot afford to lose AGOA, given the country’s high unemployment rate and slow economic growth.
He thinks a new coalition government, the result of inconclusive May elections, will help the country’s cause.
“I think what is important, what happened in South Africa in the last couple of weeks, South Africa now has a national government of unity and that’s the message that we need to send. Basically, it’s a coalition between the ANC and the DA, a political party slightly to the right. We’ve got a government now that is not a left-leaning government — it’s a government that is forming a coalition with a more business-friendly alliance partner,” he said.
If its status in AGOA is revoked, South Africa can still trade with the United States, but it won’t receive the preferential rates enjoyed by other African nations.
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CrowdStrike: More machines fixed as customers, regulators await details on what caused meltdown
AUSTIN, Tex. — Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike says a “significant number” of the millions of computers that crashed on Friday, causing global disruptions, are back in operation as its customers and regulators await a more detailed explanation of what went wrong.
A defective software update sent by CrowdStrike to its customers disrupted airlines, banks, hospitals and other critical services Friday, affecting about 8.5 million machines running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The painstaking work of fixing it has often required a company’s IT crew to manually delete files on affected machines.
CrowdStrike said late Sunday in a blog post that it was starting to implement a new technique to accelerate remediation of the problem.
Shares of the Texas-based cybersecurity company have dropped nearly 30% since the meltdown, knocking off billions of dollars in market value.
The scope of the disruptions has also caught the attention of government regulators, including antitrust enforcers, though it remains to be seen if they take action against the company.
“All too often these days, a single glitch results in a system-wide outage, affecting industries from healthcare and airlines to banks and auto-dealers,” said Lina Khan, chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, in a Sunday post on the social media platform X. “Millions of people and businesses pay the price. These incidents reveal how concentration can create fragile systems.”
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India ed-tech firm Byju’s founder faces reckoning as startup implodes
NEW DELHI — Byju Raveendran, an Indian mathematics whiz who soared from teacher to startup billionaire before his education-technology company imploded this year, now faces his biggest test.
The future of Raveendran’s eponymous Byju’s online coaching firm rests with India’s courts after the country’s biggest startup, once loved by global investors who valued it at $22 billion, crashed below $2 billion in valuation.
The 44-year-old founder last week lost control of the company as a tribunal kick-started an insolvency process.
Accused of “financial mismanagement and compliance issues,” the son of a family of teachers from a small village in south India faces a reckoning that will test the ingenuity that made him a poster child for India’s startups.
His formerly high-flying company was eventually brought low when it could not pay $19 million in sponsorship dues to India’s cricket federation, prompting a tribunal to suspend Byju’s board and make Raveendran report to a court-appointed restructuring expert.
An appeals tribunal is expected to hold a hearing on Monday on whether Byju’s insolvency process should be quashed after the former billionaire argued in court his company is solvent and that insolvency could shut it down and cost the jobs of 27,000 staff, including teachers. Insolvency also would not bode well for Byju’s backers, such as Dutch technology investor Prosus.
Raveendran denies the allegations of mismanagement and wrongdoing at his firm, which has in recent months faced lawsuits over unpaid loans and boardroom battles with foreign investors that went public.
Potential insolvency is a dramatic turn of events for an entrepreneur described by one person who has worked with him as an extremely passionate and goal-oriented person who might adopt “an abrasive approach” in a crisis.
Raveendran presented a “suave, nice and polished” image, appearing to heed advice, but “eventually there was a trust deficit,” said another executive who quit last year as a Byju’s senior vice president.
“He said things are improving, don’t worry, we have the money,” the former executive said.
Raveendran and a Byju’s spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
Byju’s downfall: ‘Our fair share of mistakes’
An engineer by training, he started Byju’s in 2011 with physical classes after friends urged him to go into teaching.
Raveendran, who aced a premier Indian management exam “with a score of 100 percentile, not once but twice,” according to the company website, started what would become his empire with his wife Divya Gokulnath, 38, a former student of his.
In education-obsessed India, Raveendran hit gold by offering online teaching programs priced from $100 to $300. He got a mammoth boost when the COVID-19 pandemic sent students indoors. At the height of his fame in 2021, he and his wife had a net worth of $4 billion, Forbes reckoned.
Now all that is in tatters.
Behind the reversal of Byju’s meteoric success, say executives and advisers who worked with Raveendran, is that he overruled associates and expanded the business through expensive acquisitions, splurging on marketing and being slow to address problems such as sales agents adopting aggressive tactics to mis-sell courses that damaged the company’s reputation.
With the backing of investors like General Atlantic, Prosus and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy venture, Raveendran spent millions on acquisitions, and the company says it has 150 million students in over 100 countries.
“While growing fast, as I’ve accepted multiple times, we’ve made our fair share of mistakes,” Raveendran told an interviewer last year at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
As he battled crises, the CEO also said decisions to lay off some of its then-50,000 employees and slash branding expenses would help strengthen loss-making Byju’s and turn its cashflow positive.
“Every country needs a Byju’s,” he said.
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Iraq to import electricity from Turkey
Baghdad — Iraq said Sunday a new power line will bring electricity from Turkey to its northern provinces as authorities aim to diversify the country’s energy sources to ease chronic power outages.
The 115-kilometer (71-mile) line connects to the Kisik power station west of Mosul and will provide 300 megawatts from Turkey to Iraq’s northern provinces of Nineveh, Salah al-Din and Kirkuk, according to a statement by the prime minister’s office.
Prime Minister Mohamed Shia al-Sudani said the new line was a “strategic” step to link Iraq with its neighboring countries.
“The line started operating today,” Ahmed Moussa, spokesperson for the electricity ministry, told AFP.
Decades of war have left Iraq’s infrastructure in a pitiful state, with power cuts worsening the blistering summer when temperatures often reach 50 Celsius (122 Fahrenheit).
Many households have just a few hours of electricity per day, and those who can afford it use private generators to keep fridges and air conditioners running.
Despite its vast oil reserves, Iraq remains dependent on imports to meet its energy needs, especially from neighboring Iran, which regularly cuts supplies.
Sudani has repeatedly stressed the need for Iraq to diversify energy sources to ease the chronic outages.
To reduce its dependence on Iranian gas, Baghdad has been exploring several possibilities including imports from Gulf countries.
The Iraqi government aims “to complete the connection with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) electric grid by the end of this year,” Sudani said Sunday.
“This will enable Iraq to integrate into the regional energy system,” allowing it to diversify its energy sources, he added.
In March, a 340-kilometer (210-mile) power line started operating to bring electricity from Jordan to Al-Rutbah in Iraq’s southwest.
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What to know about Kids Online Safety Act and its chances of passing
Mayor: Barcelona will raise tourist tax for cruise passengers
Madrid — Barcelona will raise the tourist tax for cruise passengers visiting the city for less than 12 hours, the mayor said in an interview published on Sunday.
Jaume Collboni said the current tourist tax for stopover cruise passengers was 7 euros ($7.61) per day. He did not say by how much the tax would be increased.
“We are going to propose.. substantially increasing the tax for stopover cruise passengers,” he told El Pais newspaper.
“In the case of stopover cruise passengers (less than 12 hours) there is intensive use of public space without any benefit for the city and a feeling of occupation and saturation. We want to have tourism that is respectful of the destination.”
He said tourists, not local tax payers, should pay for local projects like air-conditioning schools.
The proposal will have to be agreed with the Catalan regional government, Collboni said.
In recent weeks, anti-tourism activists have staged protests in popular holiday destinations across Spain, such as Palma de Mallorca, Malaga and the Canary Islands, saying visitors drive up housing costs and lead to residents being unable to afford to live in city centers.
Another protest is planned in Palma de Mallorca, the capital of the largest Balearic Island on Sunday evening.
Collboni announced last month that the city will bar apartment rentals to tourists by 2028, an unexpectedly drastic move as it seeks to rein in soaring housing costs and make the city liveable for residents.
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India’s battery storage industry grows
BENGALURU, India — At a Coca-Cola factory on the outskirts of Chennai in southern India, a giant battery powers machinery day and night, replacing a diesel-spewing generator. It’s one of just a handful of sites in India powered by electricity stored in batteries, a key component to fast-tracking India’s energy transition away from dirty fuels.
The country’s lithium ion battery storage industry — which can store electricity generated by wind turbines or solar panels for when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing — makes up just 0.1% of global battery storage systems. But battery storage is growing fast, with around a third of India’s total battery infrastructure coming online just this year.
“Our orders are growing exponentially,” said Ayush Misra, CEO of Amperehour Energy, the company that installed the batteries at the Chennai factory. “It’s a really exciting time to be a battery storage provider.”
Businesses invest in industry
India currently has around 100 megawatts of storage capacity from batteries, with another 3.3 gigawatts of clean energy storage coming from hydropower. The Indian government estimates that the country will need about 74 gigawatts of energy storage from batteries, hydropower and nuclear energy by 2032, but experts think the country actually needs closer to double that amount to meet the country’s energy needs.
Some customers are still wary of using battery technology for storage, and the storage systems can be seen as more expensive than the more commonly used coal. The supply chain of batteries is also concentrated in China, meaning the sector is vulnerable to geopolitical volatility.
But markets don’t think customers will be hesitant about batteries for long, with major Indian businesses announcing significant investments in the industry.
In January this year, energy giant Reliance Industries said it will build a 5,000-acre factory in Jamnagar, Gujarat. And in March, Goodenough Energy said it will spend $53 million by 2027 to set up a 20 million kilowatt-hour battery factory in the northern region of Jammu and Kashmir.
Alexander Hogeveen Rutter, an independent energy analyst based in Bengaluru, said upping storage capacity should be done alongside ramping up renewables.
“Clean energy combined with adequate storage can be an alternative to coal. Not in the future but right now,” he said. He added that it’s a “myth” that clean energy is more expensive than coal, as current prices of renewable energy combined with storage is cheaper than new coal.
Global battery costs are declining faster than expected, and experts say that if costs continue to plummet, energy storage systems can better compete with both coal and clean energy sources like hydropower and nuclear energy that can also control their supply to meet demand.
“Battery storage is now the largest resource to meet California’s evening peak electricity requirements. It’s more than gas, nuclear or coal,” he said. This is being replicated in the U.K., China and even smaller nations like Tonga. “There’s no reason why this can’t happen in India too,” he said.
India’s energy needs grow
One of India’s unique challenges is that energy needs are growing more rapidly than most nations: the population is increasing and extreme heat fueled by climate change means more and more people are using energy-guzzling air conditioning. India’s electricity demand grew by 7% last year and is expected to grow by at least 6% every year for the next three years, according to the International Energy Agency.
“The country needs to quadruple its renewable energy deployment just to meet demand growth,” said Hogeveen Rutter.
Ankit Mittal, co-founder of Sheru, a software company that offers energy storage and management solutions, said that making battery storage sites more flexible can help the industry ramp up quickly.
Mittal said battery storage sites should be more accessible to the national energy grid, so they can provide electricity to whichever regions need the extra boost of energy most. Currently, battery storage sites in India only power up more local sites.
To encourage further growth of the battery sector, the Indian government announced last year a $452 million effort to support an additional four gigawatts of battery storage by 2031. But the government also provides subsidies for coal plants, making the electricity generated there a cheaper bet for some utility companies.
Future government policy could level the playing field. The country is set to announce a new national budget later in July that industry leaders hope will contain incentives for clean energy storage.
Akshat Singhal, co-founder of the Bengaluru-based battery tech startup Log 9 Materials, thinks that better government support can help the country meet growing energy demands “the right way,” with clean energy.
“One significant policy change can kickstart the entire ecosystem,” he said.
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Australia warns of ‘malicious websites’ after cyber outage
sydney — Australia’s cyber intelligence agency said on Saturday that “malicious websites and unofficial code” were being released online claiming to aid recovery from Friday’s global digital outage, which hit media, retailers, banks and airlines.
Australia was one of many countries affected by the outage that caused havoc worldwide after a botched software update from CrowdStrike.
On Saturday, the Australian Signals Directorate — the country’s cyber intelligence agency — said “a number of malicious websites and unofficial code are being released claiming to help entities recover from the widespread outages caused by the CrowdStrike technical incident.”
On its website, the agency said its cyber security center “strongly encourages all consumers to source their technical information and updates from official CrowdStrike sources only.”
Cyber Security Minister Clare O’Neil said on social media platform X on Saturday that Australians should “be on the lookout for possible scams and phishing attempts.”
CrowdStrike — which previously reached a market cap of about $83 billion — is a major cybersecurity provider, with close to 30,000 subscribers globally.
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Airlines resume services after global IT crash wreaks havoc
Paris — Airlines were gradually coming back online Saturday after global carriers, banks and financial institutions were thrown into turmoil by one of the biggest IT crashes in recent years, caused by an update to an antivirus program.
Passenger crowds had swelled at airports Friday to wait for news as dozens of flights were canceled and operators struggled to keep services on track, after an update to a program operating on Microsoft Windows crashed systems worldwide.
Multiple U.S. airlines and airports across Asia said they were now resuming operations, with check-in services restored in Hong Kong, South Korea and Thailand, and mostly back to normal in India and Indonesia and at Singapore’s Changi Airport as of Saturday afternoon.
“The check-in systems have come back to normal [at Thailand’s five major airports]. There are no long queues at the airports as we experienced yesterday,” Airports of Thailand President Keerati Kitmanawat told reporters at Don Mueang airport in Bangkok.
Microsoft said the issue began at 1900 GMT on Thursday, affecting Windows users running the CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity software.
CrowdStrike said it had rolled out a fix for the problem, and the company’s boss, George Kurtz, told U.S. news channel CNBC he wanted to “personally apologize to every organization, every group and every person who has been impacted.”
It also said it could take a few days to return to normal.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s team was talking to CrowdStrike and those affected by the glitch “and is standing by to provide assistance as needed,” the White House said in a statement.
“Our understanding is that flight operations have resumed across the country, although some congestion remains,” a senior US administration official said.
Other industries
Reports from the Netherlands and Britain suggested health services might have been affected by the disruption, meaning the full impact might not yet be known.
Media companies were also hit, with Britain’s Sky News saying the glitch had ended its Friday morning news broadcasts, and Australia’s ABC similarly reporting major difficulties.
By Saturday, services in Australia had mostly returned to normal, but Sydney Airport was still reporting flight delays.
Australian authorities warned of an increase in scam and phishing attempts following the outage, including people offering to help reboot computers and asking for personal information or credit card details.
Banks in Kenya and Ukraine reported issues with their digital services, while some mobile phone carriers were disrupted and customer services in a number of companies went down.
“The scale of this outage is unprecedented and will no doubt go down in history,” said Junade Ali of Britain’s Institution of Engineering and Technology, adding that the last incident approaching the same scale was in 2017.
Flight chaos
While some airports halted all flights, in others airline staff resorted to manual check-ins for passengers, leading to long lines and frustrated travelers.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration initially ordered all flights grounded “regardless of destination,” although airlines later said they were reestablishing their services and working through the backlog.
India’s largest airline, Indigo, said operations had been “resolved,” in a statement posted on social media platform X.
“While the outage has been resolved and our systems are back online, we are diligently working to resume normal operations, and we expect this process to extend into the weekend,” the carrier said Saturday.
A passenger told AFP that the situation was returning to normal at Delhi Airport by midnight on Saturday with only slight delays in international flights.
Low-cost carrier AirAsia said it was still trying to get back online and had been “working around the clock toward recovering its departure control systems” after the global outage. It recommended passengers arrive early at airports and be ready for “manual check-in” at airline counters.
Chinese state media said Beijing’s airports had not been affected.
In Europe, major airports, including Berlin’s, which had suspended all flights earlier on Friday, said departures and arrivals were resuming.
‘Common cause’
Companies were left patching up their systems and trying to assess the damage, even as officials tried to tamp down panic by ruling out foul play.
CrowdStrike’s Kurtz said in a statement his teams were “fully mobilized” to help affected customers and “a fix has been deployed.”
But Oli Buckley, a professor at Britain’s Loughborough University, was one of many experts who questioned the ease of rolling out a proper fix.
“While experienced users can implement the workaround, expecting millions to do so is impractical,” he said.
Other experts said the incident should prompt a widespread reconsideration of how reliant societies are on a handful of tech companies for such an array of services.
“We need to be aware that such software can be a common cause of failure for multiple systems at the same time,” said John McDermid, a professor at York University in Britain.
He said infrastructure should be designed “to be resilient against such common cause problems.”
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African aviation conference ends with pledges to improve travel
Yaounde, Cameroon — Participants in Africa-Indian Ocean Aviation Week this week in Libreville, Gabon, say they’ve produced a plan to make continentwide improvements to aviation development and safety.
Some 350 representatives from 180 countries attended AFI Aviation Week, which was organized by the U.N. International Civil Aviation Organization, or ICAO, with the aim of enhancing air travel safety across Africa and the Indian Ocean in the face of climate change and regional terrorism.
Officials from Gabon, Rwanda and Equatorial Guinea said they have agreed to expand fleets and modernize their airports, while Nigeria said it will repair aging infrastructure.
Many participants said it is time for African states to embrace a plan called the Single African Air Transport Market and liberalize civil aviation across the continent by removing restrictions on traffic rights for African airlines.
ICAO Council President Salvatore Sciacchitano was among those who endorsed the idea, saying on Gabon state TV that the continent needs to accelerate the implementation of the market to enhance connectivity.
Sciacchitano expressed his wish for governments and investors to make good use of what he called huge air transport opportunities in Africa to boost trade, create jobs and develop the continent.
The ICAO says that although no attacks on planes have been reported over the past year, terrorism threats in Africa — in countries such as Nigeria, Cameroon and Niger — sometimes cause passengers to rethink their schedules and make some travelers reluctant to fly.
Participants at the conference said Africa recorded no fatalities in commercial aviation accidents during 2023.
Navy Captain Loic Ndinga Moudouma, Gabon’s transport minister, said Gabon, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea entered an agreement to search and rescue people in distress should an accident or crash occur in parts of the Atlantic Ocean the three states share.
The African Union pointed out that although Africa has a population of close to 1.5 billion people and constitutes about 18% of the world population, Africans account for about 3% of global travel.
The International Air Transport Association reported that despite various challenges, airlines across Africa are expected to earn at least $100 million in profit in 2024, compared with $90 million in 2023.
The conference was the first time Gabon had hosted a major international event since the military coup that ousted longtime leader Ali Ben Bongo last August. Unlike military takeovers in other West African states such as Mali and Niger, the coup on Gabon has been widely accepted.
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Widespread technology outage disrupts flights, banks, media outlets and companies around the world
WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A global technology outage grounded flights, knocked banks offline and media outlets off air on Friday in a massive disruption that affected companies and services around the world and highlighted dependence on software from a handful of providers.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said that the issue believed to be behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack.
The issue affected Microsoft 365 apps and services, and escalating disruptions continued hours after the technology company said it was gradually fixing it.
The website DownDectector, which tracks user-reported internet outages, recorded growing outages in services at Visa, ADT security and Amazon, and airlines including American Airlines and Delta.
News outlets in Australia reported that airlines, telecommunications providers and banks, and media broadcasters were disrupted as they lost access to computer systems. Airlines in the U.K., Europe and India reported problems and some New Zealand banks said they were offline.
Microsoft 365 posted on X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.”
The company did not respond to a request for comment. It did not explain the cause of the outage further.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz posted on social media platform X that the company “is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”
He said: “This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
New Zealand’s acting prime minister, David Seymour, said on X that officials in the country were “moving at pace to understand the potential impacts” of the global problem.
“I have not currently received any reporting to indicate these issues are related to malicious cyber security activity,” Seymour wrote. The issue was causing “inconvenience” for the public and businesses, he added.
Israel’s Cyber Directorate that it was among the places affected by the global outages, attributing them to a problem with Crowdstrike. The outage also hit the country’s post offices and hospitals, according to the ministries of communication and health.
Meanwhile, major disruptions reported by airlines and airports grew.
In the U.S., the FAA said the airlines United, American, Delta and Allegiant had all been grounded. Travelers at Los Angeles International Airport slept on a jetway floor, using backpacks and other luggage for pillows, due to a delayed United flight to Dulles International Airport early on Friday.
Airlines, railways and television stations in the United Kingdom were being disrupted by the computer issues. The budget airline Ryanair, train operators TransPennine Express and Govia Thameslink Railway, as well as broadcaster Sky News are among those affected.
“We’re currently experiencing disruption across the network due to a global third party IT outage which is out of our control,” Ryanair said. “We advise all passengers to arrive at the airport at least three hours before their scheduled departure time.”
Edinburgh Airport said the system outage meant waiting times were longer than usual. London’s Stansted Airport said some airline check-in services were being completed manually, but flights were still operating.
Widespread problems were reported at Australian airports, where lines grew and some passengers were stranded as online check-in services and self-service booths were disabled. Passengers in Melbourne queued for more than an hour to check in, although flights were still operating.
Airline operations in India were disrupted, affecting thousands.
The privately-owned IndiGo airlines told the passengers on X that the Microsoft outage on Friday impacted airline operations in India, inconveniencing thousands of passengers.
Several airlines made statements on X saying that they were following manual check-in and boarding processes and warned of delays due to technical problems.
Hong Kong’s Airport Authority said in a statement that the outage was affecting some airlines at the city’s airport and they had switched to manual check-in.
Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport said on its website that the outage was having a “major impact on flights” to and from the busy European hub. The outage came on one of the busiest days of the year for the airport, at the start of many people’s summer vacations.
In Germany, Berlin Airport said Friday morning that “due to a technical fault, there will be delays in check-in.” It said that flights were suspended until 10 a.m. (0800GMT), without giving details, German news agency dpa reported.
Zurich Airport, the busiest in Switzerland, suspended landings on Friday morning but said flights headed there that were already in the air were still allowed to land. It said that several airlines, handling agents and other companies at the airport were affected, and that check-in had to be done manually in some cases, but that the airport’s own systems were running.
At Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport, some US-bound flights had posted delays, while others were unaffected.
Australia appeared to be severely affected by the issue. Outages reported on the site DownDetector included the banks NAB, Commonwealth and Bendigo, and the airlines Virgin Australia and Qantas, as well as internet and phone providers such as Telstra.
Hospitals in Britain and Germany also reported problems.
Several practices within the National Health Service in England reported that the outage had hit their clinical computer system that contains medical records and is used for scheduling.
“We have no access to patient clinical records so are unable to book appointments or provide information,” Church Lane Surgery in Brighouse in Northern England said on the social media platform X. “This is a national problem and is being worked on as a high priority.”
The NHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In northern Germany, the Schleswig-Holstein University Hospital, which has branches in Kiel and Luebeck, said it had canceled all elective surgery scheduled for Friday, but patient and emergency care were unaffected.
News outlets in Australia — including the ABC and Sky News — were unable to broadcast on their TV and radio channels, and reported sudden shutdowns of Windows-based computers. Some news anchors broadcast live online from dark offices, in front of computers showing “blue screens of death.”
In South Africa, at least one major bank said it was experiencing “nationwide service disruptions” as customers reported they were unable to make payments using their bank cards at grocery stores and gas stations.
The New Zealand banks ASB and Kiwibank said their services were down.
An X user posted a screenshot of an alert from the company Crowdstrike that said the company was aware of “reports of crashes on Windows hosts” related to its Falcon Sensor platform. The alert was posted on a password-protected Crowdstrike site and could not be verified. Crowdstrike did not respond to a request for comment.
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