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China's sharing economy embraces luxury handbag rentals
 The sharing economy is on the rise in China where customers are now able to rent high-priced handbags on WeChat or via mobile apps. After sharing taxis, bikes and many other products, the world’s second-largest economy has started to share luxury goods, according to a July 5 report.

According to the article in the Global Times, which is a nationalist newspaper owned by the Chinese Communist Party, the current founders of many sharing platforms think “it is more economical and environmentally friendly to rent a luxury bag as fashion accessories are replaced frequently.”

In order to borrow a luxury handbag, interested customers typically need to place a deposit of around RMB 19,000 (USD$2,794), while the cost of rentals generally ranges from RMB 99 (USD$15) to over RMB 1,000 (USD$147) depending on what type of bag is being sought.

China’s sharing economy is expected to grow rapidly in the next couple of years and is projected to contribute to over 10 percent of the country’s GDP by 2020, according to the National Information Center. Many business professionals thus see great potential in the share economy.

The Beijing-based startup company Dou Bao Bao (抖包包) is one of the companies attempting to take advantage of it. According to information on its official WeChat account, Dou Bao Bao specializes in renting high-end handbags from top-tier luxury brands including Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Christian Dior and Celine.

Dou Bao Bao has a WeChat account, which currently serves as the main platform for borrowers. It will also soon be launching an official mobile app. On WeChat, followers can view a list of products currently being offered by the company. By clicking on the picture of the handbag, viewers can see detailed information on the product, such as the price, the deposit amount and shipping details (they’re usually sent via SF Express, one of the best private shipping services in China).

The company requires consumers to place a deposit of about ten times the monthly rental fee of the selected bag (which is repaid within seven business days after the bag is returned undamaged). It also pledges that the items are authentic, knowing that a major concern for Chinese consumers is that they might be loaned fake products.

Showing that there is support for the concept, in June, the company received more than 10 million yuan (USD$1,470,560) in funding from Chinese domestic investors.

Another startup firm, Y-Closet, or “Yi Er San” in Mandarin, is copying the business model of the New York-based designer dress rental platform Rent the Runway but adapts it to consumption habits of Chinese clients.

“Y-Closet only charges RMB 499 (USD$73) per month and you can take out three items of clothing at a time and swap them out as many times as you want,” said Doris Ke, the founder of Y-Closet about the difference between her company and Rent the Runway. “Plus someone will pick up and deliver to you. You don’t have to mail the product at all.”

Another innovative approach taken by Y-Closet is that it works with Zhima Credit, the credit rating service under Alibaba’s Alipay, which assesses the credit quality of a potential customer. If their credit score on the platform meets the minimum requirements, the deposit is waived for them.

Output: Since fashion items are frequently replaced, the economic and environmental appeal of borrowing high-tier accessories has not been lost on Chinese consumers, as the latest trend for luxury handbag rentals shows. Start-up Dou Bao Bao rents out bags from the likes of Hermes, Chanel and Christian Dior mainly through China's ubiquitous WeChat platform, and raised more than $1.4m in June to fund expansion.


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English Heritage releases VR experience with University of Kent
 Visitors to St Augustine's Abbey will be able to experience medieval England in virtual reality from this weekend.

In an English Heritage first, the virtual reality experience 'rebuilds' significant parts of the abbey, enabling visitors to view the ornate buildings as they would have looked in the early 16th century.

Visitors will sit in a 'pod' and use Oculus Rift headsets to experience the virtual tour.

The project is part of a collaboration between English Heritage and the University of Kent. Postgraduate students have spent four years alongside the charity's historians and curators to research and develop the content.

University of Kent Programme Director and MA Architectural Visualisation, Howard Griffin said:

'This exciting project has been an integral part of my students' work over the past four years.

'Heritage sites like St Augustine's Abbey, and their obvious absence of 'concrete' buildings to reference, provide an ideal vehicle for students to develop critical and analytical skills in understanding the spaces they create. It highlights the many ways in which their digital skills can be applied.'

Output: Postgraduate students at the University of Kent have partnered with English Heritage to launch a world-first for the historical society: a virtual reality tour of St Augustine's Abbey. The building, one of the most significant monasteries in medieval England, will be digitally restored to its 16th-century glory for visitors using Oculus Rift headsets. Heritage sites "provide an ideal vehicle for students to develop critical and analytical skills in understanding the spaces they create," said Howard Griffin, University of Kent Programme Director and MA Architectural Visualisation.


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Insurance telematics could track terrorists, UK government told
 Trak Global has urged the government to use telematics to track terrorists who use vehicles as weapons

Trak Global Group has urged policymakers and law enforcement agencies to use vehicle telematics to help prevent terrorist outrages.

Recent attacks have involved rented or hijacked vehicles being driven into crowds of people on Westminster and London bridges and outside the Finsbury Park Mosque in London.

Andrew Brown-Allan, director of Trak Labs, the company’s research division, explained there is potential to link black boxes in cars and on smartphone apps to a centrally-managed platform (dubbed the Universal Telematics Alert Receiver or UTAR) where all forms of telematics devices can alert law enforcement agencies to criminal activity, including terrorism.

Brown-Allan said: “Our analysts have researched the Nice attack in 2016, where there were 520 casualties including 86 deaths. Reports show that the terrorist, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, drove approximately 1.1 miles in a 19 tonne lorry for about five minutes. That time frame is measured from the start of his journey on the attack route until the police shot him dead.”

He continued: “If a central platform had been in existence, it could have been brought into play during the Nice terror attack. Reducing the attack time by even 30 seconds, using a rapid alert system, could have reduced the casualty toll by at least 80-100 casualties.”

Brown-Allan explained that the police are becoming increasingly aware of telematics, and there are several examples of data being used in prosecutions. “750,000 drivers use telematics in the UK, mostly youngsters who use black boxes to bring down the cost of their insurance and drive safer. Many high value car owners use black boxes to track their vehicle’s whereabouts and curtail theft,” he said.

“Trak Global is already researching a unique driver ID mechanism that creates an alert if the authorised driver becomes involuntarily separated from their vehicle. If people are comfortable with telematics solving crime and preventing crime, there is no reason why it cannot be used for counter terrorism.”

Brown-Allan has called on the government to set up a working group with a brief to explore how a UTAR system can be set up, who would operate it, how it would be paid for, and what it could actually do. “For example, it is now possible to immobilise a vehicle remotely, using the technology that goes into a telematics black box.”

He added: “Since 2015 there have been at least 14 vehicle attacks world-wide, including the Westminster Bridge attack in London, with nearly 850 casualties. We need to harness this relatively new technology to stop terrorists turning vehicles into weapons of mass destruction.”

Output: Insurance telematics could be used to track terrorists who use vehicles as weapons, the UK government has been told. Trak Global Group urged officials to use vehicle telematics to help avert terror attacks such as those on Westminster and London bridges. The director of Trak Labs, the firm's research division, Andrew Brown-Allan, said it was possible to link black boxes that feed insurance firms data on their policyholders' driving habits to a centrally managed platform, the Universal Telematics Alert Receiver, where all types of telematics devices could alert law enforcement agencies to criminal activity.


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Antibiotic-resistant gonorrhoea is spreading: WHO
 Untreatable strains of gonorrhoea are on the rise, the World Health Organization has warned, fuelling fears that last-resort drugs will soon be futile after three confirmed cases in which antibiotics were ineffective.

Gonorrhoea is the second most common bacterial sexually transmitted infection (STI) in the UK after chlamydia, with almost 35,000 cases reported in England in 2014. The WHO estimates that 78 million people worldwide contract the disease each year, with most cases affecting young men and women under the age of 25.

The latest warning is based on findings from two studies, co-authored by WHO researchers, looking at data from 77 countries; in more than 50, first-line antibiotics were ineffective.

“To control gonorrhoea, we need new tools and systems for better prevention, treatment, earlier diagnosis, and more complete tracking and reporting of new infections, antibiotic use, resistance and treatment failures,” said Marc Sprenger, director of antimicrobial resistance at the WHO. “Specifically, we need new antibiotics, as well as rapid, accurate, point-of-care diagnostic tests – ideally, ones that can predict which antibiotics will work on that particular infection – and longer term, a vaccine to prevent gonorrhoea.”

These concerns were echoed by others in the field.

“We are markedly concerned about the rise in antibiotic resistant gonorrhoea in the UK,” said Prof Claudia Estcourt, a member of the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV. “In a very short space of time, we have seen changes in the bacteria at an unprecedented rate, which means that many antibiotics which used to work are no longer effective. We are running out of options.”

As well as widespread resistance to first-line antibiotics for gonorrhea, resistance is increasing against second and third-line treatments, too.

Gonorrhoea spreads through unprotected vaginal, oral or anal sex, as well as through the sharing of sex toys that have not been washed properly or covered with a new condom. Many of those who contract the disease experience no symptoms, but if left untreated the disease can cause infertility and, in pregnant women, puts babies at risk of blindness.

Since the introduction of antibiotics in 1930s, the bacteria responsible for gonorrhoea, neisseria gonorrhoeae, has shown a remarkable ability to stay one step ahead of our most effective antibiotics.

“Gonorrhoea is a very smart bug,” said Teodora Wi, a human reproduction specialist at the Geneva-based UN health agency. “Every time you introduce a new type of antibiotic to treat it, this bug develops resistance to it.”

Wi said one of two new studies on gonorrhoea published in the journal Plos Medicine had documented antibiotic-resistant cases in Japan, France and Spain.

“These are cases that can infect others. It can be transmitted,” she told reporters. “And these cases may just be the tip of the iceberg, since systems to diagnose and report untreatable infections are lacking in lower-income countries where gonorrhoea is actually more common.”

Experts added that funding issues were adding to the problem.

“We are concerned that at a time of increasing drug-resistant gonorrhoea and limited treatment options, overall funding for sexual health services [in the UK] is being reduced, and a quarter of local authorities have had to reduce spending on sexual health services,” said Estcourt.

Manica Balasegaram, director of the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership, said the situation was “grim” and there was a pressing need for new medicines.

The pipeline, however, is very thin, with only three potential new gonorrhoea drugs in development and no guarantee any will prove effective in final-stage trials, he said.

“We urgently need to seize the opportunities we have with existing drugs and candidates in the pipeline,” he said. “Any new treatment developed should be accessible to everyone who needs it, while ensuring it is used appropriately, so that drug resistance is slowed as much as possible.”

Output: Untreatable strains of the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhoea have emerged, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). The group warned that at least three people have been found to have the superbug, in France, Japan and Spain, and that it was “only a matter of time” before the last-resort antibiotics used to treat the disease would be useless. Approximately 78 million people a year contract gonorrhoea, which can cause infertility as well as increase the risk of getting HIV. Just three potential new drugs to treat the disease are in development, with none guaranteed to be effective.


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Antibiotic-resistant gonorrhoea is spreading: WHO
 Data from 77 countries show that antibiotic resistance is making gonorrhoea – a common sexually-transmitted infection – much harder, and sometimes impossible, to treat.

"The bacteria that cause gonorrhoea are particularly smart. Every time we use a new class of antibiotics to treat the infection, the bacteria evolve to resist them," said Dr Teodora Wi, Medical Officer, Human Reproduction, at WHO.

WHO reports widespread resistance to older and cheaper antibiotics. Some countries – particularly high-income ones, where surveillance is best – are finding cases of the infection that are untreatable by all known antibiotics.

"These cases may just be the tip of the iceberg, since systems to diagnose and report untreatable infections are lacking in lower-income countries where gonorrhoea is actually more common," adds Dr Wi.

Each year, an estimated 78 million people are infected with gonorrhoea*. Gonorrhoea can infect the genitals, rectum, and throat. Complications of gonorrhoea disproportionally affect women, including pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy and infertility, as well as an increased risk of HIV.

Decreasing condom use, increased urbanization and travel, poor infection detection rates, and inadequate or failed treatment all contribute to this increase.

Monitoring drug resistance

The WHO Global Gonococcal Antimicrobial Surveillance Programme (WHO GASP), monitors trends in drug-resistant gonorrhoea. WHO GASP data from 2009 to 2014 find widespread resistance to ciprofloxacin [97% of countries that reported data in that period found drug-resistant strains], increasing resistance to azithromycin [81%], and the emergence of resistance to the current last-resort treatment: the extended-spectrum cephalosporins (ESCs) oral cefixime or injectable ceftriaxone [66%].

Currently, in most countries, ESCs are the only single antibiotic that remain effective for treating gonorrhoea. But resistance to cefixime – and more rarely to ceftriaxone – has now been reported in more than 50 countries. As a result, WHO issued updated global treatment recommendations in 2016 advising doctors to give 2 antibiotics: ceftriaxone and azithromycin.

Development of new drugs

The R&D pipeline for gonorrhoea is relatively empty, with only 3 new candidate drugs in various stages of clinical development: solithromycin, for which a phase III trial has recently been completed; zoliflodacin, which has completed a phase II trial; and gepotidacin, which has also completed a phase II trial.

The development of new antibiotics is not very attractive for commercial pharmaceutical companies. Treatments are taken only for short periods of time (unlike medicines for chronic diseases) and they become less effective as resistance develops, meaning that the supply of new drugs constantly needs to be replenished.

The Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) and WHO have launched the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership (GARDP), a not-for-profit research and development organization, hosted by DNDi, to address this issue. GARDP’s mission is to develop new antibiotic treatments and promote appropriate use, so that they remain effective for as long as possible, while ensuring access for all in need. One of GARDP’s key priorities is the development of new antibiotic treatments for gonorrhoea.

"To address the pressing need for new treatments for gonorrhoea, we urgently need to seize the opportunities we have with existing drugs and candidates in the pipeline. In the short term, we aim to accelerate the development and introduction of at least one of these pipeline drugs, and will evaluate the possible development of combination treatments for public health use," said Dr Manica Balasegaram, GARDP Director. "Any new treatment developed should be accessible to everyone who needs it, while ensuring it’s used appropriately, so that drug resistance is slowed as much as possible."

Gonorrhoea prevention

Gonorrhoea can be prevented through safer sexual behaviour, in particular consistent and correct condom use. Information, education, and communication can promote and enable safer sex practices, improve people’s ability to recognize the symptoms of gonorrhoea and other sexually transmitted infections, and increase the likelihood they will seek care. Today, lack of public awareness, lack of training of health workers, and stigma around sexually transmitted infections remain barriers to greater and more effective use of these interventions.

There are no affordable, rapid, point-of-care diagnostic tests for gonorrhoea. Many people who are infected with gonorrhoea do not have any symptoms, so they go undiagnosed and untreated. On the other hand, however, when patients do have symptoms, such as discharge from the urethra or the vagina, doctors often assume it is gonorrhoea and prescribe antibiotics – even though people may be suffering from another kind of infection. The overall inappropriate use of antibiotics increases the development of antibiotic resistance in gonorrhoea as well as other bacterial diseases.

“To control gonorrhoea, we need new tools and systems for better prevention, treatment, earlier diagnosis, and more complete tracking and reporting of new infections, antibiotic use, resistance and treatment failures,” said Dr Marc Sprenger, Director of Antimicrobial Resistance at WHO. “Specifically, we need new antibiotics, as well as rapid, accurate, point-of-care diagnostic tests – ideally, ones that can predict which antibiotics will work on that particular infection – and longer term, a vaccine to prevent gonorrhoea.”

Notes to editors

This press release is based on two papers included in a special supplement of PLOS Medicine to be published just before the STI & HIV World Congress (http://www.stihivrio2017.com) taking place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 9–12 July 2017:

At the STI & HIV World Congress, WHO will host a session on “Tackling antimicrobial resistance in Neisseria gonorrhoeae: Need for a comprehensive and collaborative approach”.

More about gonorrhoea

* Each year, an estimated 35.2 million people are infected in the WHO Western Pacific Region, 11.4 million people in the WHO South-East Asian Region, 11.4 million in the WHO African Region, 11.0 million in the WHO Region of the Americas, 4.7 million in the WHO European Region and 4.5 million in the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region.

Output: Untreatable strains of the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhoea have emerged, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). The group warned that at least three people have been found to have the superbug, in France, Japan and Spain, and that it was “only a matter of time” before the last-resort antibiotics used to treat the disease would be useless. Approximately 78 million people a year contract gonorrhoea, which can cause infertility as well as increase the risk of getting HIV. Just three potential new drugs to treat the disease are in development, with none guaranteed to be effective.


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Publishers struggle to navigate Amazon Echo ad landscape
 There’s no shortage of reasons for publishers to be excited about on-demand audio as the next platform frontier. But at this point, monetization is probably not one of them.

Even though most publishers don’t yet have audiences big enough to sell on their own, they are finding Amazon to be a relatively permissive partner with Alexa, provided they stay in the lane of delivering news through what Amazon calls Flash Briefings. And they’re beginning to learn what works and what doesn’t.

“The opportunities are large going forward,” said Pat Higbie, the founder of Xappmedia, which has built over 40 active Alexa skills. “Where people are right now is trying to feel out what Amazon will allow.”

Amazon has changed its thinking on monetizing Alexa since its launch. At first, Amazon simply barred developers from using Alexa’s voice to read ad copy, and publishers got around that by having their Flash Briefing hosts read ads aloud. Publishers including The Washington Post, HuffPost and Bloomberg began monetizing this way months ago, with The Washington Post starting last July.

In April, publishers (and advertisers) looking to take advantage of the Alexa devices’ interactive potential got a rude awakening. Amazon revised its rules to bar any ad that promoted third-party products or services, unless those ads were delivered in Flash Briefings, streaming music or radio skills.

Amazon became more restrictive in May, banning any kind of interactivity in its advertising. That move had consequences. Voice analytics service VoiceLabs, which had unveiled a Sponsored Messages ad network that would have allowed advertisers to distribute interactive voice ads across Amazon skills, decided to shut the ad network down within weeks of the change.

While Echo devices are a relatively new feature in the media landscape, some audio formats accessible through Alexa, including digital radio broadcasts and podcasts, are fairly well established. That’s why some publishers have treated the Alexa Flash Briefings as one more place to park audio products they have already developed. A number of radio stations, including those owned by Federated Media, simply add the listeners tuning in through their stations’ Alexa skills to their total digital broadcast audience numbers. And because the ads in those broadcasts are already inserted to the stream by the time they come through the device, Amazon doesn’t touch these broadcasts’ ads.

Not everybody lumps the Amazon audiences in with the rest of their audio listeners. The New York Times, for example, puts a version of The Daily — a short (and daily) podcast that launched in January — on Alexa devices and Google Home, but it doesn’t count its Alexa audience as part of The Daily’s overall reach and doesn’t monetize those listens.

The stringent rules Amazon has put in place limiting third-party promotions has limited publishers’ opportunities to integrate sponsored content into some of the skills they’ve developed for non-news purposes. While HuffPost has baked host-read ads into its Flash Briefings, it’s been able to put sponsored-content questions into the news quiz it offers on Google Home. In March, the publisher added daily questions about the ABC drama “American Crime” into its quizzes.

Separately, two skills Hearst‘s emerging platforms team built for Good Housekeeping and Elle have no clear path to monetization because neither skill is considered a Flash Briefing.

Listener behavior adds another layer of difficulty. With no ad-skipping capability, readers will simply kill a skill rather than wait through an ad, which is why some publishers have already begun to shorten the run time of the advertisements they put out. The Washington Post, for example, has cut the average run time of the ads in its Flash Briefings from 15 seconds to 10 seconds.

Output: Publishers, including The Washington Post, HuffPost and Bloomberg, are experimenting with Amazon's voice-activated assistant Alexa, and testing the boundaries of how they can use Flash Briefings to monetise the service. While Amazon's stringent rules have limited publishers' ability to feather in sponsored content from third parties, publishers are being forced to think creatively. For example, HuffPost is using a quiz on Google Home to integrate sponsored content.


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Crowdcube reaches €10m of funding for 47 Spanish companies
 Crowdcube Spain is reporting it has no crowdfunded € 10,079,728 for 47 different Spanish companies since the Barcelona based platform launched in July 2014. Additionally, Crowdcube shares that momentum has increased as during the first 6 months of 2017 the platform has funded €3.185 million – 80% more than same period year prior.

By sector, Crowdcube pointed to the importance generated by Fintech and technological companies in general: in March of this year, the crowdlending platform LoanBook closed a €641,115 round from 124 investors through Crowdcube. Including the institutional investors the funding hit €1.75 million; in April, the private lending platform Zank closed its second round with the platform, ending with €490,450 from 201 investors, and in September of 2016, the Spanish geolocation app Wave closed a cross-border investment round of €900,000 from 589 investors from 31 different countries.

Crowdcube highlights other success stories from Spanish operation. The drone company Hemav closed on Crowdcube in November 2014 having raised €450,000 euro from 73 investors in just six days. Since then, Hemav has consolidated a leading position in the drone market and has gone from having 10 employees to 100, through the recent investment of €3 million from the German investment groups Scranton Enterprises BV and the investment arm of Osborne Clarke.

Crowdcube also notes the brewery Garage Beer, whose founders said there was sincere interest from banks and major investors, were clear about wanting to involve their own customers in their first capital raise. Garage Beer reached €490,190 euro from 225 investors in May of last year.

Crowdcube states its intent to continue offering the best investment opportunities to private investors, and intends to continue a co-investment model, which combines investment in companies with high potential for growth with both retail investors and with professional and institutional investors. Earlier this year Crowdcube signed a collaboration agreement with the Business Angels network ESADE BAN to co-invest in Spanish startups.

“The market has professionalised very rapidly. The number of companies that turn to Crowdcube for raise finance has tripled in 2017. We keep growing despite we are still are very selective,” commented Pepe Borrell, Managing Director of Crowdcube in Spain.

As part of their growth strategy, Crowdcube has started working with companies in more advanced stages to raise money from international investors. Introducing more Spanish companies to the global investor base will be a key focus in 2017 and 2018. Crowdcube says this is what it did with Wave in 2016 and what it did this year with the urban distillery Santamanía which, as of today, has a round open in Crowdcube’s global platform, which has over 570 investors from 22 different countries.

Crowdcube HQ is based in the UK but the company has announced its intent to open new additional offices across Europe. Along with the Barcelona operation, Crowdcube now has new offices in both Paris and Amsterdam.

Output: Online crowdfunding platform Crowdcube Spain has attracted €10m ($11.4m) of investment for 47 companies since it launched in July 2014. During the first six months of 2017 alone, the platform gave out funding of €3m, 80% more than in the same period the previous year, with fintechs making up a major share of recipients. The Barcelona-based company's clients include crowdlending platform LoanBook, which closed a €641,115 round with the platform in March, and private lending platform Zank, which secured €490,450 in a second funding round in April.


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One Belt, One Road plan risks causing an east-west rift in Europe
 Photo: Isabel Infantes/AFP/Getty Images

The recent Belt and Road Forum in Beijing ushered in a new phase in China’s global repositioning. In his opening speech, President, Xi Jinping reaffirmed the importance of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a massive investment project launched in 2013 to dramatically expand land and sea trade across Asia and beyond.

At the summit, Xi called the BRI “a new kind of globalization,” a strategy intended to win other countries over rather than coercing them. It seems to be working. The benefits of taking part in the BRI are proving irresistible to many countries—and not just in China’s immediate neighborhood.

Among the 60 representatives who attended this year’s summit, Central and Eastern European (CEE) states formed the largest group of EU countries. Unlike France and Germany, who sent a senator and a minister respectively, they were represented by their highest state officials, an indicator of just how special a role they now play in China’s European plans.

This special relationship began in 2012, when China explicitly renewed its ties with the CEE states via an initiative known as the 16+1. This immediately made the “old” EU member states uncomfortable about the scale of Chinese investment to their east, fearing a “scramble for Europe” might be getting underway.

Indeed, Chinese state-owned enterprises’ investments in European nuclear energy, construction and railway infrastructure have grown rapidly since 2012. In countries such as the Czech Republic, Romania and Hungary, Chinese money has flowed into key energy, telecommunications and real estate sectors.

Chinese goods can now get to EU markets all the way to London in as little as 18 days (though few EU goods are ever sent in the other direction). The Balkan States, meanwhile, are cheering the prospect of a modern train line from Belgrade to Budapest, bringing crucial infrastructure to a post-communist rust belt left undeveloped for decades.

Regardless of the economic benefits of China’s engagement, the EU still sees it as a threat. Already the signs are there that this investment comes with political strings attached.

Pulling Away

Whereas the 16+1 initiative was presented as a unifying force for the region, the reality is that it’s encouraging European countries to directly compete for Chinese cash. China has embraced this state of affairs, changed the Belt and Road’s routes and plans many times already, often to suit a higher or more loyal bidder.

After Lithuania and Estonia welcomed the Dalai Lama in 2011, China offered its Baltic investment to a more “politically correct” Latvia. Likewise, when Poland hesitated to accept Chinese investments due to security concerns, the same opportunities were snapped up by its neighbors. This sort of “China courting” doesn’t just affect the balance of investment, but also the coherence of the EU’s values and foreign policy.

Some analysts, for instance, have shown how Chinese enterprises’ economic power translates into political influence at the highest levels of the Czech government. Hungary’s vocal support for recognition of China as a market economy stands at odds with the EU common trade policy, and President Viktor Orban’s praise for the illiberal China model goes against core European values.

For its part, China has done much to calm the EU’s anxieties about its motives, insisting that it would prefer Europe strong and united and that it wants to contribute to various European projects rather than compete with them. Nonetheless, while the EU urgently needs a common policy toward China, many EU states clearly think they’ll do better if they form their own bilateral ties with Beijing. Why?

European countries are now competing with each other, vying for China’s attention and cash.

Pushing Back

Some blame the EU’s failure to invest enough in developing its own backyard, but that doesn’t explain the U-turns by countries such as Hungary, which have benefited immensely from the EU’s regional funds. The truth is that it isn’t just economics pushing the CEE states into the Chinese investors’ arms—it’s also rising nationalism and populism.

These political tendencies both take a dim view of Brussels and see China as a naturally preferable backer. Whereas the EU is pressing some of the CEE states to accept asylum seeker and refugee quotas and reverse their democratic deterioration, China’s cash seems to come without political pressure.

Still, for all that the BRI is presented as a purely economic project, it remains deeply political—a key element of a strategy to build a new global geopolitical and normative order. The regional rivalry it has created on Europe’s eastern flank perfectly fits that strategy. It not only undermines the EU’s capacity to mount a unified response toward China, but it also normalizes China’s model as a viable system of governance, further entrenching some of the CEE states’ illiberal ways.

Given the circumstances, these countries’ governments have plenty to answer for. Yes, China might accelerate the EU’s fragmentation by encouraging them to assert themselves against both each other and Brussels—but it is ultimately these governments that are choosing to engage on China’s terms. If they aren’t careful, they could lose leverage with both China and Brussels.

In contrast, a common EU strategy could empower individual CEE states in their relationship with China, as it would keep in check the “divide-and-rule” politics of the BRI. In an unusually assertive move, the EU ultimately withdrew from the trade statement that capped the May 2017 BRI summit. Perhaps there is more will to push back than China bargained for.

This piece first appeared in The Conversation.

Output: The potential for investment in central and eastern European (CEE) countries as part of China's One Belt, One Road infrastructure plan could cause a rift between these countries and western EU member states, says Małgorzata Jakimów, lecturer in Chinese politics at the University of Sheffield. For instance, CEE states sent higher-ranking representatives to China's Belt and Road Forum than did France and Germany. This shows that CEE states believe they are important to China's European plans, said Jakimów. There is also concern among EU member states about the political influence that China would gain through large-scale investments in eastern Europe.


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Car-sharing service up! city launches in Bratislava
 Electric up! begins with half- and full-day rental, will later charge per hour

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The usual taxis in front of the Old Market-hall in downtown Bratislava have been replaced by white electric cars, the Sme daily wrote on July 5. Aliancia Stará Tržnica, Volkswagen Slovakia and other partners are launching the first car-sharing service in Slovakia, called up! city.

The first seven white electric Volkswagen e-Up! cars can be rented from the SNP square.

The cost is €25 for a half-day or €35 for the whole day, and a minimum card balance of €300 is required to rent the cars.

The company will later offer a €4 charge for the minimum rental time of one hour, with the goal of eventually introducing a pricing schedule that charges a per-minute price for the exact time of a drive.

Clients will receive a membership card that will enable them to unlock the car and use it by placing the card behind the windscreen.

The cars have installed the up&go navigation which enables customers to set their own routes or use one of six pre-programmed routes of the capital.

Later, more branches of up! city will be added, Sme wrote, adding that as of now, there is just one location in Slovakia where the cars can be rented and returned.

Electric bicycles and scooters can also be rented in front of the Old Market-hall.

Output: Volkswagen Slovakia has partnered with Bratislava's city council to provide electric vehicles as part of up! city, Slovakia's first car-sharing service. The cars cost €25 ($28.50) to rent for half a day and €35 for a whole day. Users require a minimum card balance of €300 to rent the cars. The car-sharing service eventually plans to offer a €4 hourly charge and to introduce a pricing schedule that charges by the minute.


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Pay-per-mile insurance debuting in UK in 2017
 The UK’s first pay-per-mile car insurance company has been launched, potentially allowing drivers with low annual mileages to save on their car insurance.

Aimed at drivers who cover fewer than 7,000 miles a year - roughly 140 miles a week - customers taking out insurance with By Miles will pay a flat-rate annual fee to insure their cars against theft or damage when parked. They are then charged a variable rate based on how much they actually use the car.

• Best car insurance companies

Mileages are measured using a telematics device plugged into a car’s On Board Diagnostics (OBD-II) port, which typically located under a panel below the steering wheel. Drivers can track journey-by-journey mileages and charges using a dedicated smartphone app, and will be billed each month based on how far they've driven.

Crucially, drivers will not be charged more depending on how or how fast they drive, and By Miles says they will “never share any of your personal driving data with the police, unless we are obliged to as a direct result of a court order.”

Launched last year as a start-up – albeit one with backing from Jaguar Land Rover - By Miles has now begun selling its policies, which are underwritten by AXA. While a number of insurance companies provide cover for low-mileage drivers, these typically charge by the day or by the hour, or require consumers to predict how much they will use their cars, purchasing additional miles if that limit is exceeded.

Output: By Miles, a start-up insurance company, will provide the UK's first pay-per-mile policy in late 2017 in a bid to offer lower premiums for low-mileage drivers. Using data from a telematics "black box", motorists will pay based on their miles driven intead of paying a yealy premium. Each journey's cost is logged on a connected smartphone app with users charged at the end of the month. The system works abroad and only requires the user installing the device in their vehicle.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Indian city Bhopal launches bike-sharing system
 Bhopal: Madhya Pradesh's capital city recently launched India's first fully-automated bicycle-sharing system as part of its second anniversary of the Smart Cities programme. This development comes just three weeks after Mysuru, Karnataka launched the country's first city-level bicycle-sharing project.

The Bhopal system involves a fully-automated bike-sharing system of 500 bicycles with over 50 docking stations across the city, backed by a state-of-the-art IT system. The bike-sharing system covers the three most important areas of the city -- New Market, M.P. Nagar and Hoshangabad Road.

As part of this completely automated system, users can pick up a cycle from any of the stations and deposit it at another station after use, without worrying about depositing it at the original location.

The bike-sharing system of Bhopal has many firsts but here are three reasons why it can make bike-sharing mainstream in India.

For one, it is the country's first integrated and fully-automated bicycle-sharing system that connects MyBus, Bhopal's Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS), with key residential and commercial nodes.

Also Read Indore declared India's cleanest city Junior hockey 'B' Division championship to begin on Friday in Bhopal Bhopal espionage case: ATS makes 12th arrest MobiKwik becomes payment partner for Bhopal smart cities MobiKwik partners Bhopal smart city initiative for payments India's outdated electricity grid needs major upgrade: Expert (IANS Interview) Cloudy Friday morning in Delhi High alert in 10 UP districts over heavy rains Jerry Brown announces climate summit in California Harsh Vardhan blames lifestyle for present state of environment

This means that the bike-sharing system could provide both first- and last-mile connectivity to the city bus system, improving its efficiency.

In addition to service integration, bike-sharing offers flexible payment options, with one smart card that works for bike-sharing, BRTS and bus services in Bhopal.

Bhopal City Link Ltd. -- a special purpose vehicle (SPV) -- is the single nodal agency that will oversee the operational monitoring of all the three modes, making it a great example of institutional integration of public transport modes.

Secondly, it puts safety first. Pedestrians and cyclists comprise the largest number of road traffic crash victims in Indian cities. With road safety as a major concern, many cities in the country are wary about developing cycling facilities due to apprehensions regarding the safety of cyclists on the road.

As part of the bike-sharing project, Bhopal is developing physically segregated cycle tracks in the city.

Inaugurated along with the Public Bicycle Sharing (PBS) project, this will be a 12-km-long dedicated corridor that will be five meters wide. Incidentally, this will also be the country's widest physically-segregated bicycle track. The city is also developing a 55-km-long dedicated network of non-motorised transport, on which work is expected to start shortly.

Thirdly, PBS is not a one-off project in Bhopal, but part of a targeted campaign to promote walking and cycling in the city, that was kicked off with Raahgiri Day in September 2014. This campaign has resulted in sections of main streets being closed off to vehicles, such that people can engage in various physical activities like walking and cycling.

The success of Raahgiri demonstrated that people were ready for a relook at cycling.

In addition, the city is using the concept of "tactical urbanism" to reimagine its streets and public spaces so that they can be more people-friendly. Bhopal is also in the initial stages of planning its first "smart street" project as part of this initiative.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of cycling in the world and this humble mode of transport that went out of fashion and usage due to the growing onslaught of motorisation, is gradually coming back -- and for good.

It is expected that what Velib did to bike-sharing in Europe, the Bhopal PBS can do for India. However, a lot will depend on its successful implementation and operation.

(In arrangement with indiaclimatedialogue.net. Views expressed are those of the website. Feedback at information@indiaclimatedialogue.net)

--IANS

icd/sac

Output: Bhopal, the capital city of Madhya Pradesh, has introduced a wholly-automated bike-sharing system, coinciding with the second anniversary of India's Smart Cities programme. The Bhopal system, which covers the New Market, MP Nagar and Hoshangabad Road regions of the city, allows the use of 500 bicycles and over 50 docking points, underpinned by advanced IT connectivity. As part of the initiative, Bhopal is creating dedicated cycle tracks in the city.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
PayPal campaign aims to ease paying back small debts to friends
 Ever dodged your roommate because you owed him money? Avoid the awkward and just PayPal it.

According to PayPal, millennials are playing hide and seek with each other every single day. Housemates are hiding in their bedrooms, workmates are ducking into the toilets, and friends are avoiding replying to texts. Why? Because of the tiny debts that turn into a big deal when avoided.

To combat this, PayPal Australia has launched a campaign encouraging millennials to skip the awkwardness and better manage their finances.

Developed by Isobar, the campaign promotes PayPal's peer-to-peer function within the smartphone app that helps people transfer money to friends or family.

As fintech startups disrupt the PayPal, which was the original disruptor of the finance sector according to PayPal VP Ben Edwards, the business needs to ramp up its offering to remain front of mind.

“84% of Australians feel awkward or stingy asking their friends to pay them back and our number one excuse for not paying our friends back is that we have ‘no cash’," PayPal head of consumer marketing Liz Lefort says.

The digital campaign is running across Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, digital above-the-line, PR, media partnerships and influencer engagement. It is the first time PayPal has specifically targeted the millennial consumer in the Australian market.

“The millennial audience is an important group for us, they’re mobile savvy and are looking to find easier ways to manage their money. We are excited to put together a campaign that speaks to this audience in the channels they interact with on a daily basis,” Lefort says.

PayPal is kick-starting the ‘pay-back’ by putting their money where their mouth is, transferring the cost of a coffee to 3,000 active millennial PayPal users to encourage them to pay back their mate for the coffees they owe.

This is accompanied by Facebook specific video content highlighting the awkward money moments millennials face every day.

PayPal is also collaborating with Snapchat for the first time to take avoiding the awkward moments to the next (filtered) level to reach the millennial audience.

CREDITS

Client: PayPal Australia

Digital and Social Media: Isobar Australia

Media: Vizeum and iProspect

Public Relations: Edelman Australia

Output: PayPal Australia has launched a social media campaign directly aimed at millennials for the first time, as it aims to persuade them to use the peer-to-peer platform to pay back small debts owed to friends and family. The company has transferred the cost of a coffee into 3,000 active accounts to encourage users to use the service. "The millennial audience is an important group for us, they’re mobile savvy and are looking to find easier ways to manage their money," said Liz Lefort, PayPal head of consumer marketing.


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China to build first 'forest city' to tackle air pollution
 M ore than a million people die every year from air pollution in China, but now the country is fighting back with innovative solutions.

This is Italian architect Stefano Boeri’s colossal ‘forest city’ scheme - a newly built metropolis that will ‘eat’ its own toxic smog with one million plants and 40,000 trees.

The idea is to challenge preconceptions that urban density intensifies air pollution, by creating a new blueprint for city design that integrates plants into its construction.

100 different species of plants are planned to grow on balconies and roofs of the city’s skyscrapers, lining 175 hectares along the Liujiang River in Southern China.

Stefano Boeri Architetti

Once completed, the shrubs will breathe in fine dust from the air, catching and soaking up pollutants from the toxic environment.

When the city is fully grown, it will be able to absorb almost 10,000 tons of CO2, 57 tons of pollutants per year and produce approximately 900 tons of oxygen annually.

The new green city in Liuzhou will reportedly host 30,000 people, with hospitals, schools and fast electic rail services all part of the construction.

The project was commissioned by the Liuzhou Municipality Urban Planning and will be constructed in the north of Liuzhou along the Liujiang river.

The construction of the green-city-in-the-making is currently underway and will be finished by 2020.

Stefano Boeri Architetti

Occupying 432 acres, the Liuzhou Forest City will be roughly half of the size of the Central Park in New York.

There are also plans to fit geothermal and solar energy resources, so the city runs on a green and self-sustainable power source.

Stefano Boeri Architetti

Boeri, who has previously designed two vertical skyscraper ‘forests’ in Milan, said: “The diffusion of plants, not only in the parks and gardens or along the streets, but also over building facades, will allow the energy self-sufficient city to contribute to improve the air quality (absorbing both CO2 and fine dust of 57 tons per year), to decrease the average air temperature, to create noise barriers and to improve the biodiversity of living species, generating the habitat for birds, insects and small animals that inhabit the Liuzhou territory.”

If successful, the forest city could be a blueprint for other countries where air pollution is an issue.

There may also be a second forest city' in the works, reports The Guardian, this time in northern China near Shijiazhuang - one of the most polluted regions in the country.

Output: China is to build its first "forest city" in Liuzhou by 2020, with 1 million plants and 40,000 trees, to tackle air pollution. It was designed by Italian architect Stefani Boeri, who was the creator of vertical skyscraper forests in Milan. The idea behind the southern China city is to challenge the thought that urban living worsens air pollution, by making a blueprint for a city that integrates plants into its construction to take CO2 and fine dust out of the atmosphere and emit oxygen into it. The city is expected to have about 30,000 inhabitants and is planned to run on green energy.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Press Association wins £621,000 grant to create AI written stories
 Robots will help a national news agency to create up to 30,000 local news stories a month, with the help of human journalists and funded by a Google grant.

The Press Association has won a €706,000 (£621,000) grant to run a news service with computers writing localised news stories.

The national news agency, which supplies copy to news outlets in the UK and Ireland, has teamed up with data-driven news start-up Urbs Media for the project, which aims to create “a stream of compelling local stories for hundreds of media outlets”.

It won one of the largest grants to date from Google’s Digital News Initiative (DNI), which is aimed at supporting innovation in European digital journalism. PA and Urbs Media will set up Radar – Reporters And Data And Robots – to produce thousands of stories each month.

PA’s editor-in-chief, Peter Clifton, said journalists will still be involved in spotting and creating stories and will use artificial intelligence to increase the amount of content. He said: “Skilled human journalists will still be vital in the process, but Radar allows us to harness artificial intelligence to scale up to a volume of local stories that would be impossible to provide manually. It is a fantastic step forward for PA.”

The scheme aims to meet an “increasing demand for consistent, fact-based insights into local communities” for regional media outlets as well as independent publishers and hyperlocal sites and bloggers, said PA.

Journalists will find stories in national open databases from sources including government departments, local councils and NHS trusts, and make “detailed story templates” for topics such as crime, health and employment. Multiple versions of the story will be created with Natural Language Software and will “scale up the mass localisation of news content”.

Clifton said it was “a hugely exciting development for PA” that would be “a genuine game-changer for media outlets across the UK and Ireland”.

PA and Urbs Media are making a workflow plan to generate the large volume of stories for clients. The grant will also be used to make database tools to collect and combine datasets and “editorial intelligence” will guide the automation process.

Radar will auto-generate graphics, video and pictures to add to stories. Money will also be used to boost PA’s distribution platforms to help its local customers find and use the content.

PA has already shared some of its plans with its regional customers. It is recruiting a team of five journalists to spot stories, create templates for them and edit the data-driven content.

Clifton said: “At a time when many media outlets are experiencing commercial pressures, Radar will provide the news ecosystem with a cost-effective way to provide incisive local stories, enabling audiences to hold democratic bodies to account.”

The scheme is likely to begin early next year, as PA celebrates its 150th anniversary.

Tim Dawson, president of the National Union of Journalists, said the union was not Luddite or against technological innovation, but added: “Under-investment in journalism and journalists is a massive problem in the media across the UK. If money’s floating about, that’s really what it should be spent on.”

He said the fire at Grenfell Tower had highlighted the need for “robust journalism”. Dawson added: “I’ve no doubt that it is possible for computers and algorithms to mine data out of stories.”

He said it could give reporters more time to develop the stories, but added: “The real problem in the media is too little bona fide reporting. I don’t believe that computer whizzbangery is going to replace that. What I’m worried about in my capacity as president of the NUJ is something that ends up with third-rate stories which look as if they are something exciting, but are computer-generated so they [news organisations] can get rid of even more reporters.”

Dawson said readers are still attracted by well written and compelling stories and well crafted photographs.

Output: The Press Association has won a £621,000 grant from Google's Digital News Initiative to create an artificial intelligence run news service that writes localised news stories. The Press Association has teamed up with Urbs Media and will build out the Radar platform that enables journalists to make "detailed story templates" for a range of sectors. Editor-in-chief, Peter Clifton, said there is still need for skilled human journalists to source stories but the platform will "scale up the mass localisation of news content”.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Hackers target US nuclear power plants and energy facilities
 Since May, hackers have been penetrating the computer networks of companies that operate nuclear power stations and other energy facilities, as well as manufacturing plants in the United States and other countries.

Among the companies targeted was the Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corporation, which runs a nuclear power plant near Burlington, Kan., according to security consultants and an urgent joint report issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation last week.

The joint report was obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by security specialists who have been responding to the attacks. It carried an urgent amber warning, the second-highest rating for the sensitivity of the threat.

The report did not indicate whether the cyberattacks were an attempt at espionage — such as stealing industrial secrets — or part of a plan to cause destruction. There is no indication that hackers were able to jump from their victims’ computers into the control systems of the facilities, nor is it clear how many facilities were breached.

Output: According to a report by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, hackers are targeting US nuclear power plants and other energy facilities, as well as manufacturing plants in the US. Among the targets is the Wolf Creek nuclear facility in Kansas. It has been discovered that the hackers are mapping out computer networks for future attacks, looking for vulnerabilities, and it is believed they are working for a foreign government – with Russia being the chief suspect. However, investigators have been unable to analyse the malicious “payload” of the hackers’ code, which would reveal more details about what they are after.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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France looks to ban all diesel and petrol engines by 2040
 Once upon a time, diesel fuel was going to be the future. It was seen as more efficient, on a mileage-per-gallon basis, than other fossil fuels, and for that reason was also thought to be less polluting. About two decades ago, acting on those beliefs, policy makers in Europe—where high energy prices already made mileage a more-pressing issue than in the U.S.—made a number of rules that incentivized the growth of diesel over gasoline for use in passenger cars, moving past its traditional role in trucking and construction.

These policies were remarkably successful at meeting their goals, and diesel-powered cars soon accounted for half of the cars sold on the continent. Car companies poured resources into developing diesel-related technology. But the result of this success has been not greener, friendlier, cheaper motoring, but the creation of toxic clouds over major European cities. At the end of 2016, Paris was choked by its worst episode of smog in more than a decade, lasting longer than two weeks, according to the city’s pollution-watching agency Airparif, and prompting the city to enact emergency measures that included restricting car use. It was not the first time. During a March 2015 pollution event, Paris was briefly the most polluted city in the world, surpassing famously smoggy Beijing. London shared in the ignominy when it too beat out Beijing for the first time in January of this year.

Diesels have played the main role in this. Since the 1960s, advances in technology that treats and filters gasoline engines’ exhaust, like the widespread use of catalytic converters, have cut down on the amount of dirty, unhealthy, and smog-producing emissions these engines spew out into the surrounding environment. But while diesels get better mileage and so contribute less to global climate change, the local effects of diesel pollution are much worse than those of gasoline. Diesel is a less refined fuel, and so it contains more of the particulate matter that can have deadly health effects when spewed into the surrounding environment. And burning diesel produces, among other noxious gases, nitrogen dioxide, the main cause of smog.

In many cases the same regulatory bodies that were trying to get citizens into diesels only a few years ago are now working to get the engines off the road entirely, instituting additional, diesel-specific congestion-charging and other disincentives in cities, in recognition of the fact that their green-friendliness was mistaken. During particularly bad bouts of smog, several European cities have temporarily banned driving outright, or instituted restriction schemes where, for example, cars with odd and even number plates are allowed in on alternate days. The mayors of Athens, Mexico City, and Madrid have committed to ridding their cities of diesel cars altogether by 2025, and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said “there will be no diesel vehicles in Paris in 2020.” Other cities around the continent and world are implementing smaller-scale efforts to discourage diesel too.

But lately, the biggest story when it comes to diesel remains Volkswagen’s ongoing “Dieselgate” scandal, in which the company installed “defeat devices” that allowed its diesel cars to put out dramatically higher levels of toxic emissions on the road than show up during regulators’ lab tests. A year and a half after the cheating was discovered, the full results of the scandal are still uncertain: The U.S. has levied more than $22 billion in fines against the company, the world’s largest automaker, and more may still be coming. Meanwhile, millions of the deceptive VWs are still on roads around the world, with consequential EU action on the matter minimal.

Much worse for diesel at large, rumors that the offending practice was not limited to Volkswagen Group, which have been floating around since the scandal first broke, seem to be turning out to be true. The Environmental Protection Agency recently moved against the trans-Atlantic auto giant Fiat Chrysler for using similar devices, and General Motors is being sued in a class action for cheating in its diesel pickup trucks, which outnumber the offending VWs on American roads by several hundred thousand. The EU also started legal action against Italy for failing to meet its obligations as a member state to enforce regulations on Fiat Chrysler.

In Europe, meanwhile, the push for diesel has turned out to be a disaster.

Even if Volkswagen hadn’t been cheating, there are enough counts against diesel that the wisdom of using it would likely still be being questioned. Is diesel, the workhorse fuel that was supposed to save the world, doomed? To evaluate its future, it’s important to understand how diesel came to be hailed as the fuel of the future in the first place.

Before a German inventor named Rudolph Diesel created the compression engine in 1895, the earliest American oil companies used to simply throw away the fuel that would come to bear his name. Firms had started drilling and extracting oil in the U.S. in 1859, but they distilled it, separating out its parts by density, mainly in an effort to get the very light kerosene that was burned in the lamps that lit the middle of the 19th century. For the purposes of illumination and most other needs of the era, heavier fuels like gasoline were seen as byproducts of little use—except sometimes as a particularly pungent and flammable cleaning agent. Diesel was unpopular because as fuel oils get heavier, they get harder to ignite, and diesel fuel is even heavier than gasoline.

It is actually this property of diesel—its density—that has driven the story of its use all the way through the present day. The great innovation of Rudolph Diesel’s engine was that instead of a regular gasoline engine’s method of igniting the mixture of fuel and air that combusts and drives the cylinders using a spark, in Diesel’s invention the force of the pistons themselves would compress the air until it got so hot it ignited, squeezing out almost the maximum thermodynamically possible amount of energy. There were a number of benefits to engines like this, the primary one being that they provided a lot of oomph at low rpms, which is why they came to be used widely in trucks, which need to get heavy loads up to speed. Another benefit was that the hotter-burning process makes better use of the fuel, combusting it more completely so that the engines could have better mileage and range.

Almost a century later, an ingenious engineer at one of Volkswagen Group’s brands named Ferdinand Piëch, a grandson of the company’s founder, would be among those who noticed that these characteristics had a lot of unexploited potential in the passenger-car sector, particularly in Europe, where fuel prices are high and every liter at the pump is precious. Piëch, who went on to run VW and then sit on its governing board from the early ’90s until 2015, was heavily involved in the development of turbocharged direct injection, or TDI, technology. This technology, which allowed small diesel engines with great mileage to provide more power at a wider range of speeds, was and is an impressive development, and it has continued to be refined since.

Many of the traditional problems consumers associated with the diesel engines that were already common in trucks, school buses, and construction equipment were solved during this time: Previously, diesels loudly clattered, whereas gasoline engines purred and burbled and growled. Diesels also smelled acrid and belched visible black smoke. Modern diesel-engine technology is still dirtier for the direct local environment—contributing to poor air quality and some health problems—but it has become relatively quiet, and it took on an aura of environmental friendliness, a complete inversion of its previous reputation and the key change that made it possible for VW and others to use diesel power as a positive selling point for peppy, cheap-to-run cars.

One more thing added to the proliferation of diesels in the mass passenger-car market: concerns about climate change, which made the efficient physics of the diesel engine even more of an asset. Public policy started (haltingly) to acknowledge that the harmful environmental impact of emissions was not just local, through pollution of the surrounding air, but also global, through the release of gases that contribute to climate change. For some consumers, this changed the moral status of cars and car ownership: Having good fuel economy isn’t just a consumer good, but a civic good. As recently as five years ago, diesel was an environmental priority among many politicians, car companies, scientists, and even environmental activists.

One researcher estimates that the number of people diesel has killed is in the “hundreds of thousands.”

Policy makers, particularly in Europe, moved to incentivize diesel in the ‘90s and ‘00s with tax breaks at the pump, and they tightened regulations that focused on mileage per gallon (or the equivalent European measurement unit, liters per 100 kilometers), which inherently favor Rudolph Diesel’s thermodynamically efficient engines over gasoline-powered ones that use more gallons but spew fewer toxins. In some countries, including France and Spain, taxes were lower on diesel cars than gas ones. The market share of diesel cars in Western Europe went from less than 14 percent in 1990 to half today, after touching a high of 56 percent in 2011. As Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky points out, Japan had a similar rate of diesels at the turn of the millennium, but absent similar policies, those in Japan more or less disappeared over the period that diesel sales in Europe tripled, as Japanese manufacturers pushed into hybrids.

Diesel’s market share in the U.S., where fuel prices are traditionally much cheaper and thus exert less pressure on demand for efficient engines, is puny by comparison and pretty much always has been. While there are real differences between the North American and European markets, some might argue that the market for diesel in the U.S. was irrationally underserved, and this seems to have been Volkswagen’s assessment when it decided to roll out its big “Clean Diesel” campaign in 2008 to try to get Americans buying TDIs at closer to the rate of Europeans. Americans, however, never came around, and diesel is so tainted now by the various scandals that they likely never will.

In Europe, meanwhile, the push for diesel has turned out to be a disaster. “They're these relatively powerful and efficient engines that are kind of deadly in terms of their emissions,” said Timothy Lipman, the co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. The “deadly” effects Lipman refers to are extremely serious. Both the nitrogen oxides that come from diesel engines’ high-compression combustion and the fine, sooty particulate matter that can get into human tissue carry serious health effects that cost lives. In addition to lower respiratory diseases like chronically obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma, which they can cause especially in children and worsen among people who are already asthmatic, particulate matter in the engines’ fumes is associated with heart attacks, lung cancer, and strokes, among other things.

“I'm sure the levels of particulate matter and nitrogen oxide as well would be much, much lower in European cities if they didn't have the incentives they had for diesel cars,” said Helotonio Carvalho, a molecular biologist at Brazil’s Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife. He added, “We are going in a direction where diesel cars probably won't have a place.” Carvalho has written in the medical journal The Lancet that 400,000 people died prematurely from all the various sources of air pollution in Europe in 2011. I asked him how many deaths can be attributed specifically to Europe’s elevated rate of diesels, relative to, for example, North America or to his native Brazil, where diesel passenger cars haven’t been allowed as a matter of policy. He told me that the number is in the “hundreds of thousands.”

Policy makers in Europe seem to be adjusting to the reality. Sir David King, the chief science adviser to the U.K. government and the public face of its “Dash for Diesel” policy, who once famously caused a controversy by declaring carbon dioxide more threatening than terrorism, said in April that “it turns out we were wrong” to think automakers would make diesels that emitted within regulatory limits. Former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls used similar language. And Elzbieta Bienkowska, an EU commissioner who oversees the auto industry, made a bold prediction in some recent comments to policy makers: "Diesel will not disappear from one day to another. But after this year of work ... I am quite sure they will disappear much faster than we can imagine.”

The economic effects of that will ripple. For one thing, there are lag times that come with ratcheting up the production of regular gasoline, so while the energy industry adapts its supply to the change, increased European demand for gasoline will push up prices in the U.S. and elsewhere. Then there’s the car industry, in which, Lipman told me, the companies that have focused on batteries and hybrid technology are now positioned better than the European companies that made big bets on diesel, partly as a response to pro-diesel policies.

Finally, there is the most urgent issue with the “Dieselgate” scandal, that of the millions of Volkswagen and other diesels still on the road, emitting far outside of acceptable limits. For the good of the environment and public health, they cannot be left noncompliant. But the reason companies like Volkswagen would want to cheat in the first place is because few would want to own and drive a diesel car that met regulations, and performed like it. Will they now just be left to rot in automotive graveyards? Or will they be made compliant but unloveable?

These are the kinds of questions that thinking about the future of diesel raises. They’re grim, for car lovers, for car companies, and for people whose health is on the line. In a quite real sense they are just a different version of the same dilemma engineers and managers at Volkswagen must have faced, and crucially bungled at the expense of other people’s lives, when public-health regulations and the limits of the engines’ chemistry came into conflict. It does nothing to excuse these companies to observe that the pressures they felt to cheat on behalf of diesel existed for the very same reasons that made engineers start using the dirty, dense stuff in the first place: Diesel engines’ pep, efficiency, and cheapness to run offered a solution to the challenge of making cars that met customers’ expectations about performance as regulators who were focused on global climate change pushed for tighter fuel efficiency standards—without anticipating the fateful tradeoffs in toxic air pollution. And so the story of diesel seems to have turned out to be a tragedy, because its good qualities are inexorably linked to its bad ones. And as with any good tragedy, everything seems to be building towards the death of the main character. In the modern world, diesel just doesn’t fit.

Output: France will outlaw all petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040, according to an announcement by the country's environment minister Nicolas Hulot. The move is part of a wider package of measures introduced by president Emmanuel Macron to make France carbon neutral by 2050, and follows similar decisions by Germany, the Netherlands and India. "We want to demonstrate that fighting against climate change can lead to an improvement of French people’s daily lives,” said Hulot. As part of the proposal, poorer households will be offered financial incentives to exchange their old polluting cars for electric vehicles and hybrids.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
France looks to ban all diesel and petrol engines by 2040
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France plans to ban all petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040, the country's new environment minister has announced.

Nicolas Hulot made the announcement as he unveiled a series of measures as part of newly elected President Emmanuel Macron's plan to make the country carbon neutral by 2050.

Mr Hulot said he recognised the target would put pressure on France's car manufacturers, but he said they currently had projects which "can fulfil that promise".

As part of the plan, poorer households will receive a premium so they can swap their polluting vehicles for clean alternatives.

The announcement comes after Volvo said on Wednesday it planned to build only electric and hybrid vehicles from 2019.

Speaking at a press conference, Mr Hulot told reporters France would stop using coal to produce electricity by 2022 and that up to €4bn of investments will help to boost energy efficiency.

The announcements are part of a five-year-plan to encourage clean energy and fulfil the country's commitments under the Paris Agreement.

Mr Hulot said the government wanted to maintain the country's "leadership" in climate policy.

"We want to demonstrate that fighting against climate change can lead to an improvement of French people's daily lives," he said.

France is not the only country which aims to ban combustion-powered cars. The Netherlands and Norway previously said they wanted to get rid of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2025 and Germany and India announced similar plans ahead of 2030.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 / 50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Mr Hulot also announced plans to end the importation of products such as palm oil and unsustainably grown soya, which contribute to deforestation around the world and particularly in the Amazon forest, South-East Asia and in Congo.

The former journalist and wildlife TV presenter said deforestation represented 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

He said it would be "schizophrenic" to encourage industrials and manufacturers to reduce their emissions while accepting that millions of trees, which absorb carbon dioxide, are being chopped down.

Mr Hulot also said "citizen panels" will be established in order to debate practical ways in which France can meet its commitment under the Paris climate accord and reduce its emissions.

French Parliament is expected to vote on a bill in the autumn which would ban all new exploitation permits for petrol, natural gas and coal.

France has also pledged to reduce nuclear energy from 75 per cent to 50 per cent of the country's energy mix by 2025.

Reacting to the news, ClientEarth CEO James Thornton said: “This is a huge statement of intent from the French government and an example of how we’re likely to see exponential change in the coming years as governments grapple with the necessary changes we have to make for air quality and our climate.

“Coming hot on the heels of Volvo’s announcement yesterday, the outlook for the internal combustion engine is bleak. This is now clearly the direction of travel and industry players who are not on board will find themselves struggling before long.

"These moves should be heeded by other governments and industry, who need to act to protect us from air pollution in our towns and cities and help mitigate climate change.”

Output: France will outlaw all petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040, according to an announcement by the country's environment minister Nicolas Hulot. The move is part of a wider package of measures introduced by president Emmanuel Macron to make France carbon neutral by 2050, and follows similar decisions by Germany, the Netherlands and India. "We want to demonstrate that fighting against climate change can lead to an improvement of French people’s daily lives,” said Hulot. As part of the proposal, poorer households will be offered financial incentives to exchange their old polluting cars for electric vehicles and hybrids.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Qualcomm calls for ban on iPhone imports to the US from China
 Around two months, when Apple had said that it won’t be paying royalties of $1 billion to Qualcomm until the issue between them is resolved, Qualcomm demanded the ban on manufacturing of iPhones in the U.S. and Asia. Today, Qualcomm has officially registered a complaint with the International Trade Commission (ITC) and Federal Court in the U.S. to import the ban of some iPhones claiming that Apple is unfairly using its technology.

According to the complaint filed by Qualcomm with ITC, iPhones that are manufactured in China should not be imported to the U.S. if they are infringing the patents of Qualcomm. The case filed with US District Court for Southern California seeks damages for patent infringement.

The U.S. based chip maker has accused of Apple of infringing six of its technological patents that belong to some of the important features of iPhones. Qualcomm claims that Apple is continuously using these patents without paying for them. As of this writing, there is no information on which iPhones are infringing Qualcomm’s patents. Hence, the chipset making company is gunning to various operations of Apple such as selling, advertising, importing, warehousing of the iPhone.

The six patents that Apple is said to be violating are related to optimized performance of battery, prolonging battery life while sending live video by creating data super-highway, network management and system performance. All the six patents were issued in the last four years. The images in this post are from Qualcomm which gives a breakdown of all the six patents along with details on each one of them that are being violated by Apple iPhones.

Read More: Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 Chipset is Official; Brings 25% CPU, GPU Performance, Better Battery Life

In April, Apple had filed a legal complaint against Qualcomm for unfairly charging patent licensing fees. The complaint stated that the U.S. chip maker is asking the Cupertino company to pay five times more money than it is collectively paying to cellular patent licensors. Apple has also said that the illegal business practices of Qualcomm are not negatively impacting it but also the entire industry. According to Apple, Qualcomm is only supplying it with a single connectivity component that does not belong to any of the innovations of Apple that it uses on its iPhones and still it is demanding a percentage of the collective cost of its products. At the same time, Qualcomm has also said that Apple is spreading false and misleading information to antitrust agencies in a bid to decrease the royalty amount that it is to pay to Qualcomm.

(source|via)

Output: Qualcomm has registered a complaint with the International Trade Commission and the Federal Court in the US that iPhones manufactured in China must not be imported to the US as they could be infringing the patents of Qualcomm. It is claiming that Apple is using its technology unfairly. Apple and Qualcomm are currently in legal wrangling over royalty amounts and claimed patent infringements, with Apple refusing to pay royalties of $1bn to Qualcomm until the dispute is resolved.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Finnish regulators push UberPOP to suspend service
 Uber has given in to regulatory pressure in Finland, and is suspending its UberPOP until that country implements limited taxi deregulation next year.

The company was losing on points in its regulatory battles in the country, with Finnish police investigating whether its operations amount to an illegal taxi services. During that investigation, a Helsinki district court ordered the seizure of assets of the ride-share business's Finnish country manager.

Police had asked the court to seize the company's assets, but instead the court froze up to €246,000 of Joel Jarvinen's personal assets.

It's only legal for someone to drive for Uber in Finland if they hold a taxi drivers' licence; the problem is, rather than go through the lengthy process to get one, drivers are accused of driving illegally.

Drivers caught operating illegally are hit hard. As Reuters reports, they forfeited their income to the government.

So the company has decided to buckle: while its UberBLACK licenced operators will continue, it's going to shutter its Finnish UberX-equivalent, UberPOP, until Finland introduces new taxi regulation in 2018.

Jarvinen wrote in this blog post “we will soon be pressing the pause button on UberPOP in the Finnish capital Helsinki, before we relaunch next summer.”

Finland passed deregulatory legislation in April, but it doesn't take effect until July 2018. Under the new regulations, drivers will still need permits, but the number of permits issued each year will no longer be capped, and fare restrictions will be removed.

The company promises as-yet-unspecified support for drivers affected by the service suspension, which comes into effect on August 18. Jarvinen says staff working in the Helsinki office will remain. ®

Output: Uber has suspended its UberPOP service in Finland effective 18 August following sustained regulatory pressure from the country's authorities. However, it will resume operations following deregulation next year, according to a blog post by Finnish Country Manager Joel Jarvinen. The company's UberBLACK service will continue to operate throughout the pause. Uber drivers in Finland must hold a taxi drivers' licence to work legally, though many ignore the regulation. At the height of Uber's legal battle with Finnish authorities, a Helsinki court ordered Jarvinen's assets to be seized.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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GE Healthcare uses Instagram for one-clip-a-day documentary
 While traveling through India, Africa and Southeast Asia, GE Healthcare’s president of sustainable healthcare solutions, Terri Bresenham, wanted to bring awareness and empower the work that women were doing to bring healthcare to their communities.

So, she and her team worked to create a 30-minute documentary called Heroines of Health that tells the story of three such women with an intriguing distribution plan—each day the brand is posting a one-minute clip to Instagram that tells a new part of the story.

Output: GE Healthcare has been using Instagram as part of its Heroines of Health campaign, which highlights the grassroots work of women bringing healthcare to their communities. A team led by Terri Bresenham, the company's president of sustainable healthcare solutions, created a half-hour documentary, with one-minute clips shown daily on the social media site. The initiative was inspired by Bresenham's travels through Southeast Asia, Africa and India. One week in, the videos have generated 250,000 views, 80,000 likes and 400 bookmarks. Later this month, the entire video will be launched on Facebook, and the campaign will be promoted on Twitter.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Snapchat's Paperclip enables users to share links in app
 by Erik Sass @eriksass1, July 6, 2017

When it comes to their dealings with technology platforms, publishers need every bit of good news.

Snapchat may have given them something to smile about with its new Paperclip feature. It allows users to incorporate links to external Web sites into messages and content sent within the app.

Paperclip, unveiled by Snapchat earlier this week, enables users to attach links to third-party mobile Web sites to videos or images in private messages or as part of a Snapchat Story.

Among other possibilities, the Paperclip feature would allow publishers to include links to additional pages in content distributed via Snapchat. The same capability could benefit brands pursuing branded-content publishing strategies. Before, brands could include links only in paid ads.

advertisement advertisement The recipient just has to swipe up on the video or image to access the content, which then surfaces in Snapchat’s proprietary in-app browser. That’s considerably more convenient than the previous workaround, which required them to send “Snapcodes” to their contacts, who would then have to scan the QR code to access the content.

In a reversal of the usual dynamic, it would appear Snapchat is borrowing a page from Facebook’s Instagram, which recently unrolled the ability to include external Web links. However, Snapchat goes further, as Instagram links are currently limited to its Stories feature, and then only for verified users with more than 10,000 followers.

Paperclip is just one of a number of features unveiled by Snapchat this week. Another is backdrops, which allow users to overlay various patterns onto portions of their snaps.

Snapchat also recently bowed Snap Maps, which let users track their friends’ locations in real-time. Smartphone users can virtually scan their physical surroundings and see where friends are posting snaps and stories.

Output: Snapchat has unveiled a Paperclip feature that enables users to attach third-party links to messages and images. It will grant publishers the ability to incorporate links to additional pages in their distributed content, and could also be of service to brands, which were previously limited to links in paid ads. The feature is an update on the Snapcodes tool, which permitted users to send QR codes for contacts to scan as a prerequisite for accessing the content.