A Yes vote would pave way for resolving a long-running row with Greece and clearing the path to join NATO and the EU.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 1913 on the outskirts of Cairo, an inventor from Philadelphia named Frank Shuman built the world's first solar thermal power station, using the abundant Egyptian sunshine to pump 6,000 gallons of water a minute from the Nile to irrigate a nearby cotton field. World War I and the discovery of cheap oil derailed Shuman's dream of replicating his "sun power plant" on a grand scale and eventually producing enough energy to challenge the world's dependence on coal. More than a century later, that vision has been resurrected. The world's largest solar park, the $2.8-billion Benban complex, is set to open next year 400 miles south of Cairo in Egypt's Western Desert. It will single-handedly put Egypt on the clean energy map. That is no small feat for a country that's been hobbled by its longtime addiction to cheap, state-subsidized fossil fuels and currently gets more than 90% of its electricity from oil and natural gas. [...] The Benban complex, which will be operated by major energy companies from around the world, is expected to generate as much as 1.8 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses. It will consist of 30 separate solar plants, the first of which began running in December, and employ 4,000 workers.

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Comment comes as the US prepares to step up sanctions against Iran and after public sabre-rattling between two sides.

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla is rebranding Firefox. The company is asking for feedback on the new look, which will try to cover the various Firefox offerings. For most people, Firefox refers to a browser, but the company wants the brand to encompass all the various apps and services that the Firefox family of internet products cover, "from easy screenshotting and file sharing to innovative ways to access the internet using voice and virtual reality." The fox with a flaming tail "doesn't offer enough design tools to represent this entire product family," Mozilla believes.

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Lubuntu, a popular Ubuntu flavor, has gained traction over the years for supporting older hardware. As Brian Fagioli writes at BetaNews, one of the focuses of the Lubuntu developers is to support aging computers. However, that is about to change. He adds: When Lubunu 18.10 is released in October 2018, it will ditch LXDE for the newer LXQt. Despite it also being a desktop environment that is easy on resources, the Lubuntu developers are planning to drop their focus on old hardware after the transition. "[...] Our main focus is shifting from providing a distribution for old hardware to a functional yet modular distribution focused on getting out of the way and letting users use their computer. In essence, this is leveraging something we have always done with Lubuntu; providing an operating system which users can use to revive their old computers, but bringing this to the age of modern computing," says Simon Quigley of Lubuntu team.

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Four million people have been left off a list of citizens in the northern Indian state of Assam.

Group including 239 Thais struggling to evacuate mountain before landslides blocked them since Sunday's deadly disaster.

Mars might not have the right ingredients to terraform into our planetary home away from home -- even with the recent discovery of liquid water buried near its south pole. From a report: Research published Monday in Nature Astronomy puts a kibosh on the idea of terraforming Mars. At the heart of the study is carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, is abundant on Mars -- its thin atmosphere is made of the stuff, and the white stuff we often see on the surface is dry ice, not snow. CO2 is even trapped in the rocks and soil. That abundance has long fueled visions of a fantasy future where all that trapped carbon dioxide is released, creating a thicker atmosphere that warms the planet. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has even proposed nuking Mars to make this happen. But in this new study, veteran Mars expert Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado Boulder and Christopher S. Edwards of Northern Arizona University, surveyed how much carbon dioxide is available for terraforming the Red Planet. They combined Martian CO2 observations from various missions -- NASA's MAVEN atmospheric probe, the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, as well as NASA's Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The results throw shade on the dreams of futurists.

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Jordanians have shown that they will no longer accept austerity without major political changes and accountability.

Turnout high in poll where incumbent Emmerson Mnangagwa and opposition leader Nelson Chamisa are seen as frontrunners.

The armed drones are currently deployed to Niger's Air Base 101 in the capital, Niamey.

California authorities say a 20-year-old college student hijacked more than 40 phone numbers to steal $5 million in Bitcoin, including some from cryptocurrency investors at a blockchain conference Consensus. Motherboard, which broke the story citing court documents: This is the first reported case of an alleged hacker who was using SIM swapping (also known as SIM hijacking or Port Out Scam) specifically to target people in the blockchain and cryptocurrency worlds. Joel Ortiz was arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport on his way to Europe, according to sources close to the investigation, who said Ortiz was flashing a Gucci bag as part of a recent spending spree they believe was financed by the alleged crimes. He is facing 28 charges: 13 counts of identity theft, 13 counts of hacking, and two counts of grand theft, according to the complaint filed against him on the day before his arrest.

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I skipped season 5 of Orange Is The New Black. Was that a mistake? Is season 6 any good??

NPR has an interesting story, full of anecdotes, that looks into several growing marketplaces where reviews for Amazon products are bought and paid for. From the story: "Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic," says Sharon Chiarella, vice president of community shopping at Amazon. She adds that "sometimes individual products have more suspicious activity." [...] Chiarella says the lawsuits give the company the opportunity to subpoena bad actors to get data from them. "That allows us to identify more bad actors and spider out from there and train our algorithms," she says. But this has led to a sort of digital cat-and-mouse game. As Amazon and its algorithms get better at hunting them down, paid reviewers employ their own evasive maneuvers. Travis, the teenage paid reviewer, explained his process. He's a member of several online channels where Amazon sellers congregate, hawking Ethernet cables, flashlights, protein powder, fanny packs -- any number of small items for which they want favorable reviews. If something catches Travis' attention, he approaches the seller and they negotiate terms. Once he buys the product and leaves a five-star review, the seller will refund his purchase, often adding a few dollars "commission" for his trouble. He says he earns around $200 a month this way. The sellers provide detailed instructions, to avoid being detected by Amazon's algorithms, Travis says. For example, he says, "Order here at the Amazon link. Don't clip any coupons or promo codes. [Wait 4 to 5 days] after receiving [the item]." This last instruction is especially important, Travis adds. "If you review too soon after receiving it'll look pretty suspicious."

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The government has published a register of citizens of Assam state on the Bangladesh border, and to be included, residents must prove they came to India by March 24, 1971.