An Australian museum has teamed up with computer giant International Business Machines to count the country’s native frog population, and they want amphibian enthusiasts to jump on board. The Australian Museum and IBM say they developed the world’s first smartphone app especially designed to let users record and report frog …
The FBI has yet to gain access to data on Devin Kelley’s phone four days after the former airman killed 26 churchgoers in Texas in the deadliest mass shooting in the state’s history, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said Thursday, blaming “warrant-proof encryption” for impeding criminal investigations. The FBI’s San …
Chinese gaming and social media company Tencent Holdings Ltd. on Thursday flagged video games and ad sales as areas where it thinks it could help Snapchat owner Snap after acquiring a 12 percent stake in the U.S. firm. Snap disclosed in a U.S. regulatory filing on Wednesday that Tencent recently …
The quiz games and ring tosses at factories around Vietnam are more than just amusement; charity workers are using them in their efforts against human trafficking, with the support of foreign governments and corporations. Factory workers play these games as part of training workshops to raise awareness about trafficking, held …
U.S. President Donald Trump went around and over the “Great Firewall” of China in a late-night tweet in Beijing as he thanked his hosts for a rare tour of the Forbidden City and a private dinner at the sprawling, centuries-old palace complex. Many Western social media platforms such as Twitter …
Executives from Google, Facebook and Twitter faced anger from lawmakers last week over their platforms’ roles in Russian interference into the 2016 election. But for Silicon Valley, the biggest challenge lies ahead as tech companies look for ways to work with a U.S. Congress intent on closing legal loopholes before …
The ScanPyramid team made news last week when they announced the discovery of a ‘void’ inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. And while the void may remain a mystery, the team’s detailed map of the pyramid now allows visitors to roam its depths from anywhere in the world. VOA’s Kevin …
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday that Janet Yellen has not said yet whether she plans to remain on the Federal Reserve board when her term as chair ends in February, but the administration is moving ahead with filling other vacancies. There are three vacancies on the seven-member Fed board …
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross plans to completely divest from a shipping company that counts a Russian gas producer with ties to the Kremlin among its major customers. A commerce department spokesman says Ross plans to sell all his shares of Navigator Holdings. That company ships products from Sibur, a …
The Chinese internet company Tencent has acquired a 10 percent stake in Snap, with the social media company struggling to boost user growth. Tencent runs the WeChat messaging app, as well as online payment platforms and games. Earlier this year, it bought a 5 percent stake in Tesla Inc. …
German bureaucrats — notorious for their ability to create lengthy tongue twisters consisting of one single word — are celebrating the doubling of Twitter’s character limit. Twitter announced Tuesday it’s increasing the limit for almost all users of the messaging service from 140 to 280 characters, prompting a mix of …
Was Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s move to scrap most currency overnight a year ago a “watershed moment” that helped clean up India’s economy or a “reckless move” that pulled down the world’s fastest-growing economy? The contentious debate intensified on the anniversary of the measure as opposition parties held …
To learn more about how stars are formed, astronomers look at light coming from deep space that illuminate events that happened billions of years ago. Cosmic dust, vapor in the earth’s atmosphere and light pollution can obscure that vision, but scientists at NASA found a way around all this by …
Microsoft and the U.N. Refugee Agency have partnered to teach about two dozen young refugees from around East Africa how to code and develop software. For VOA, Lameck Masina has the story from the Dzaleka refugee camp in central Malawi. …
Players line up beside a small kiosk in a poor neighborhood to choose animals in a lottery game that has become a craze in Venezuela even as the oil-rich country suffers a fourth year of brutal recession. It seems more and more Venezuelans are turning to gambling in their desperation …
Inflation in Venezuela’s crisis-hit economy was 826 percent in the 10 months to October and may end 2017 above 1,400 percent, the opposition-controlled National Assembly said Friday. The government stopped releasing price data more than a year ago but congress has published its own figures since January and they have …
Unless emissions can be drastically and quickly curbed, efforts by small island nations to adapt to climate change may be in vain, a leader of a group of small island nations said Tuesday. Hurricanes that hit the Caribbean this year were like nothing seen before, with Hurricane Irma so strong …
Twitter says it’s ending its iconic 140-character limit — and giving nearly everyone 280 characters. Users tweeting in Chinese, Japanese and Korean will still have the original limit. That’s because writing in those languages uses fewer characters. The company says 9 percent of tweets written in English hit …
The United States and other countries hoping to host the 2026 World Cup should provide government guarantees on visa-free travel plus work permit and tax exemptions for their bids to be accepted, according to documents published by FIFA on Tuesday. The U.S wants to host the 2026 tournament in a …
In the same affluent, suburban city where Google built its headquarters, Tes Saldana lives in a crowded but tidy camper she parks on the street. She concedes it’s “not a very nice living situation,” but it also is not unusual. Until authorities told them to move, more than a dozen …
Indonesia on Monday vowed to block Facebook’s WhatsApp Messenger within 48 hours if the service did not ensure that obscene Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images were removed. WhatsApp, which is widely used in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, said message encryption prevented it from monitoring the animated graphics …
Snapchat faced a worldwide outage for at least four hours on Monday, prompting a flood of complaints on rival mobile application Twitter a day before posting its third quarterly earnings as a public company. “We’re aware of the issue and working on a fix,” Snapchat said on its support Twitter …
The restive Spanish region of Catalonia faces a potential $500 million financial hit in the fourth quarter as business-related travel dips following the attack in Barcelona and the uncertainty generated by the disputed independence referendum. In an interview Monday with The Associated Press at the World Travel Market in …
Technology can hopefully reverse some of the harm caused to the planet by industrialisation and help end disease and poverty, but artificial intelligence (AI) needs to be controlled, physicist Stephen Hawking said on Monday. Hawking, a British cosmologist who was diagnosed with motor neuron disease aged 21, said technology could …
Two weeks ago the glitzy Ritz Carlton hotel in Riyadh was the site of an international conference promoting Saudi Arabia as an investment destination, with over 3,000 officials and business leaders attending. Now the hotel is temporarily serving as a luxury prison where some of the kingdom’s political and business …
A revamping of the Federal Reserve’s leadership is widening with the announcement Monday that William Dudley, president of the New York Fed and the No. 2 official on the Fed’s key interest rate panel, will retire next year. Just last week, President Donald Trump chose Fed board member Jerome …