Last Year Was Hottest on Record, Climate Experts Say
Rising global temperatures in 2016 set a record for the third year in a row, as federal climate experts Wednesday rated it the warmest year world-wide since modern record keeping began.
In a new federal climate report, researchers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which independently track annual climate trends for the federal government, said that global land and sea surface temperatures were boosted by a powerful El Niño current in the Pacific…
Similarity rank: 11
Sentiment rank: 2.9
© Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/last-year-was-hottest-on-record-climate-experts-say-1484756646?mod=fox_australian
All rights are reserved and belongs to a source media.
President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to face tough questions during the first hours of his U. S. Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday about allegations he has, essentially, been bought and paid for by the nation’s oil, gas and coal companies.
Last Updated Jan 18, 2017 11:34 AM EST 
A streaming service for stand-up comedy called Laugh.ly , which publicly launched this past August, has now closed on $2.25 million in seed funding led by New York Angels , the company announced today. Available for both iOS and Android devices, Laugh.ly is the first to offer an extensive library of comedians’ stand-up sets, with content from top names in the biz, including Kevin Hart, Amy Schumer, Louis C. K., Hannibal Buress, George Carlin, Chris Rock and others. 
DataSift , which taps and structures data from social networks to provide more insights into it, has added a new partner to its own network. The company has linked up with LinkedIn — the social network for the working world with 467 million users that was acquired by Microsoft recently for $26.2 billion — to help develop a stronger marketing profile for LinkedIn by parsing its public data. The deal is part of a bigger push to grow advertising on the social network. 
Iris Automation Inc. has raised $1.5 million to bring “sense and avoid” technology, and truly self-flying capabilities, to drones used for industrial tasks. 
_story.jpg)
Qualcomm is one of the biggest chip makers in the world, with its Snapdragon processors powering a huge number of smartphones. But the company is in some hot water as the US Federal Trade Commission has filed a suit against it for unfair business practices. 
Microsoft has announced a beta release of PIX for Windows 10 (not to be mistaken with the company’s iPhone app ), a tool aimed at developers for capturing and analyzing DirectX 12 games. PIX has historically only been available to run on the Xbox console, which utilizes the same graphics API. 
Deepgram, a YC backed startup using machine learning to analyze audio data for businesses, is open sourcing an internal deep learning tool called Kur. The release should further help those interested in the space get their ideas off the ground more easily. The startup is also including 10 hours of transcribed audio, spliced into 10 second increments, to expedite the training process. 
With less than six months to go before retiring, Hong Kong’s controversial leader sought to claim his legacy in his swansong policy speech on Wednesday, proposing plans ranging from economic development to sports to show he was not heading a lame-duck government for the rest of his term. Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying declared he had “basically” delivered all his election promises, a claim instantly refuted by his critics who also lamented the lack of initiatives to heal the social and political divides that have plagued his four years in power, although others hailed his shift of focus from politics to development and livelihood policies. “I don’t want to create any legacy, but I think it would be useful for everyone to actually go through the policy addresses of the past five years … and ask ourselves whether or not these are the right policies and measures that people in Hong Kong need,” he said later at a press conference, when questioned on whether his successor, to be elected in March, would see his policies through. “After I step down, speaking as a Hong Kong person, I would like … the new government to continue to look after the underprivileged, particularly the elderly, to spend more on health care, to plough ahead on the basis of what we have done in this term, and on the land we will have made available by that time to build more housing, particularly subsidised housing.” In a separate briefing for editors, he said: “Nobody in my administration has the mentality of a sunset government.” The major policies he announced in his speech before the Legislative Council, covering aspects including sports, education, labour, health and tourism, would roughly add up to a one-off expenditure of HK$26.4 billion. The bulk of it – HK$20 billion – will be spent on revamping the city’s sports facilities. It was a surprise move by Leung, who once upset the city’s athletes and sports fans alike when he said the sector did not contribute to the economy. Another highlight on Wednesday, as expected, was the scrapping of the controversial practice of allowing employers to use their contributions to workers’ pension funds to offset severance or long-service payments. To honour his election promise to unionists and grass-roots groups, Leung said the government would “progressively abolish” the Mandatory Provident Fund offsetting mechanism. On his pet subject, housing, Leung conceded problems in finding enough land to meet demand, urging the public to “dare to think out of the box and re-examine land use planning”. He revived the contentious idea of developing country parks, saying the city should consider allocating a small portion of land in protected green areas with “relatively low ecological and public enjoyment value” for public housing and non-profit-making homes for the elderly. Leung also proposed initiatives to support President Xi Jinping’s “One Belt, One Road” development strategy, including a summit in September. As he ended his speech, Leung dropped his antagonistic tone at opponents as he warned against independence, saying Hong Kong’s autonomy “was not absolute or arbitrary” but to be guided by the Basic Law. He skipped the issue of electoral reform for the second consecutive year, leaving it in limbo since it was voted down by lawmakers in 2015. He also spoke of his “affection and commitment” for Hong Kong, pledging to continue to serve the city and the country after stepping down. Former civil service minister Joseph Wong Wing-ping, now a political commentator, said Wednesday’s policy speech was “probably Leung’s best”. “Now he doesn’t have the political burden to show his allegiance to Beijing to seek another term, Leung has adopted a less confrontational political stance,” Wong said. “He may want to be remembered as a man of good policies, not a man playing politics.” Chief executive aspirant Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee said Leung had avoided the core issues of improving frayed ties with the legislature. “This will take him nowhere because Legco can filibuster and hold up funding for his policies,” Ip said.
