Every January, tech insiders head to Las Vegas, Nevada where the biggest tech companies show off their latest devices at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Smaller start-ups also vie for attention at one of the largest tech gatherings of the year. Tina Trinh meets with a Brooklyn startup as they prepare to head west.
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Day: January 5, 2019
Thousands of Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, now have safe drinking water thanks to a combination of green technology and sunlight.
Cox’s Bazar has plenty of refugees. More than 900,000. Most have arrived in Bangladesh since August 2017, when violence and persecution by the Myanmar military triggered a mass exodus of Rohingya refugees.
The refugees are living in squalid conditions across 36 different locations in Cox’s Bazar. Water is scarce in most locations. But sunshine is plentiful. Over the past six months, the U.N. refugee agency and partners have been putting into operation solar-powered safe water systems.
The UNHCR reports the first five systems are now running at full capacity. It says the new safe water systems run entirely on electricity generated through solar panels. UNHCR spokesman, Andrej Mahecic, says this new network is providing safe water to more than 40,000 refugees.
“Using the solar energy has allowed the humanitarian community to reduce the energy costs and emissions,” said Mahecic. “So, there is a clear environmental impact of this. Chlorination is also a life-saver in refugee sites of this scale. The recent tests revealed that most contamination of drinking water occurs during collection, transport and storage at the household level.”
Mahecic notes chlorinated water is safe for drinking and also eliminates the risk of the spread of disease.
The UNHCR along with its partner agencies are hoping to install nine more solar-powered water networks across the refugee camp in the coming year. The project, which is funded by the agency, will cost $10 million. It will benefit an additional 55,000 Rohingya refugees.
The UNHCR says its ultimate aim is to provide 20 liters of safe water to every single refugee on a daily basis. It says this will be done by piping in the solar powered water to collective taps strategically installed throughout the Kutupalog-Balukhali refugee site.
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For the past 50 years, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington has been telling America’s story with images of people who helped shape the history and culture of the United States. It recently added 28 pictures in an effort to tell a more diverse and more complete story of U.S. society. The display features well-known people like baseball player Alex Rodriguez and former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy — and sheds light on some “hidden figures.” VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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There are a number of reasons why Americans like to have a live tree for their Christmas centerpiece It just smells like Christmas, they grew up with a real tree, they feel it’s better for the environment than an artificial one. And although trees can be chipped into mulch after the holiday, there are other ways to environmentally dispose of a Christmas tree that’s passed its prime. Faith Lapidus reports.
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People relied on the most popular mobile weather app to track forecasts that determined whether they chose jeans over shorts and packed a parka or umbrella, but its owners used it to track their every step and profit off that information, Los Angeles prosecutors said Friday.
The operator of The Weather Channel mobile app misled users who agreed to share their location information in exchange for personalized forecasts and alerts, and they instead unwittingly surrendered personal privacy when the company sold their data to third parties, City Attorney Michael Feuer said.
Feuer sued the app’s operator in Los Angeles County Superior Court to stop the practice. He said 80 percent of users agreed to allow access to their locations because disclosures on how the app uses geolocation data were buried within a 10,000-word privacy policy and not revealed when they downloaded the app.
“Think how Orwellian it feels to live in a world where a private company is tracking potentially every place you go, every minute of every day,” Feuer said. “If you want to sacrifice to that company that information, you sure ought to be doing it with clear advanced notice of what’s at stake.”
App defends practices
A spokesman for IBM Corp., which owns the app, said it has always been clear about the use of location data collected from users and will vigorously defend its “fully appropriate” disclosures.
Feuer said the app’s operators, TWC Product and Technology LLC, sold data to at least a dozen websites for targeted ads and to hedge funds that used the information to analyze consumer behavior.
The lawsuit seeks to stop the company from the practice it calls “unfair and fraudulent” and seeks penalties of up to $2,500 for each violation. Any court decision would only apply to California.
Marketed as the “world’s most downloaded weather app,” The Weather Channel app claims approximately 45 million users a month, the lawsuit said.
Users who download the free app are asked whether to allow access to their location to “get personalized local weather data, alerts and forecasts.” It does not say how the company benefits from the information.
While disclosures may be included in the privacy policy, state law says “fine print alone can’t make good what otherwise has been made obscure,” Feuer said.
He said he learned about the sale of the private data from an article in The New York Times.
Personal data
The lawsuit comes as companies, most notably Facebook and Google, are increasingly under fire for how they use people’s personal data. Both companies faced congressional hearings last year on privacy issues, which are likely to remain on lawmakers and regulators’ minds both nationally and in California.
In June, California lawmakers approved what experts are calling the country’s most far-reaching law to give people more control over their personal data online. That law doesn’t take effect until next year.
Feuer said he hopes the case inspires other lawsuits and legislation to curb data-sharing practices.
IBM bought the app along with the digital assets of The Weather Company in 2015 for $2 billion but did not acquire The Weather Channel seen on TV, which is owned by another company.
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Health care officials in Sweden say a patient who was admitted to a hospital with a suspected case of Ebola was found not to be suffering from the highly infectious and potentially deadly disease after all.
The male patient, whose identity has not been revealed, had recently returned to Sweden from a trip to Burundi and was exhibiting symptoms of hemorrhagic fever.
He was originally admitted to the emergency ward of a hospital in Enkoping, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Stockholm, but was later transferred to the larger Uppsala University Hospital.
Ebola, other diseases ruled out
Health officials said Friday that the man’s condition had improved and that tests had ruled out Ebola as well as other diseases such as Marburg and dengue fever. They said they would continue to run further tests to figure out what the man was suffering from.
Health officials said people in contact with the patient who had been kept in isolation were now free to go home.
There is currently no known Ebola outbreak in Burundi, but the country borders the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has been battling an Ebola outbreak for almost six months. More than 350 people have died in that outbreak.
Ebola is a hemorrhagic fever that causes internal bleeding and potentially death. It is rapidly spread via contact with the bodily fluids of those infected.
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