One of the innovations at this year’s Paris Olympics was supposed to be an electric flying taxi service.
Germany’s Volocopter promised its electric-powered, two-seater aircraft, the VoloCity, would be ferrying passengers around the city.
It never happened. Instead the company ran demonstration flights.
While missing that deadline was embarrassing, behind the scenes a more serious issue was playing out – Volocopter was urgently trying to raise fresh investment to keep the firm going.
The Epic Games Store is coming to Apple devices in Europe, but as usual, it couldn’t just happen without some minor fighting between Apple and Epic first.
Apple announced the EGS would get the green light in Europe on Friday, per Reuters. However, that only came after Epic took to X to publicly accuse Apple of slow-rolling the submission by rejecting the app for seemingly trivial reasons. For instance, Epic said Apple’s regulations found that the EGS app’s “Install” button was too similar to Apple’s “Get” button.
IN DECEMBER 2021, sales of electric vehicles overtook sales of diesel cars for the first time in Europe, as 176,000 EVs rolled out of car dealerships across the continent. At the same time in China, the country’s automotive industry announced that EV sales for the year had ballooned by 158 percent compared with 2020, as more than 3.5 million vehicles took to the roads.
These sales figures were not a blip. In Europe, EVs made up an estimated 14 percent of all new vehicles sold in 2021, according to the banking and financial services company ING. In China, it was 9 percent.
American holidaymakers who have received a coronavirus vaccine will be permitted to enter the European Union in time for summer vacation thanks to the success of the U.S. vaccine rollout, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the New York Times Sunday.
The timing of the policy change is still unclear, and will depend on the spread of the virus in both the U.S. and Europe over the next few months, Von der Leyen said told the newspaper.
Prime Minister Theresa May has won a vote of confidence in her leadership of the Conservative Party by 200 to 117.
After securing 63% of the total vote, she is now immune from a leadership challenge for a year.
Speaking in Downing Street, she vowed to deliver the Brexit “people voted for” but said she had listened to the concerns of MPs who voted against her.
Her supporters urged the party to move on but critics said losing the support of a third of MPs was “devastating”.
Europe has opened a new battlefront in its war against big U.S. tech, announcing draft rules that could force YouTube and others to pay more money to the music industry.
The European Commission, which administers EU law, has proposed a new Europe-wide copyright law on Wednesday, saying it wants to strengthen the rights of artists and make sure they receive a fair share of the profits made on their work.
If approved, the new rules will force streaming services such as YouTube and Dailymotion to beef up their copyright protection measures by filtering out copyrighted content or paying for its use.
That’s a huge step up from the current measures that only require these services to act when notified about a copyright infringement.
Everyone is suddenly talking about the coming Brexit vote.
With Britain preparing to vote in a June 23 referendum on whether to leave the European Union, the latest polls seem to suggest that Brits are leaning toward Leave:
The ICM phone and online poll: Remain 47% / Leave 53%
ORB phone poll: Remain 48% / Leave 49%
YouGov online poll: Remain 39% / Leave 46%
At first glance, Uber’s most recent troubles in France look like an especially violent case of a hidebound country’s reaction to technological disruption. I, too, was once tempted to see Uber’s legal problems in Europe in that light.
Now, I think there’s a valid reason for the French government to resist the spread of Uber. The company is not doing enough to convince governments or the European public that it isn’t a scam.
Uber’s troubles have been particularly acute in France. Last week, licensed taxi drivers blocked roads and airports, burned tires and trashed cars. Previously, President Francois Hollande demanded that the company’s UberPop service be “dissolved” and its vehicles seized. On Monday, police detained two of Uber’s top executives in the country for questioning. Thibaud Simphal, the company’s director general for France, and Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, its director for Western Europe, will have to appear in court in September to answer charges of fraud and illegal activity.
The French data protection watchdog has ordered Google to widen its implementation of the so-called European ‘right to be forgotten‘ so that links are also delisted from all Google domains, including google.com, not just (as is currently the case) from the .fr French subdomain.
Quick backgrounder here: the rtbf refers to a legal ruling by Europe’s top court last year. It identified search engines as data controllers and required they process requests from private individuals wanting outdated, inaccurate or irrelevant information delisted from a search result for their name.
Google, which is by far and away the dominant search engine in Europe, started processing these requests last summer. However the way Google implemented the court’s ruling has created a trivial workaround because it only delists links from European sub-domains (such as .fr and .co.uk), not from google.com.
Moments after the Iranian president made the startling claim at the inauguration of a dam in a central province, it started to rain.
Dispatches From The Front 