Renewable energy became the biggest source of electricity in the European Union in 2020, beating fossil fuels for the first time. Germany and Spain also hit that milestone individually last year -- so did the UK, which officially left the EU in January 2020. From a report: Renewables powered 38 percent of electricity in the EU last year, according to a report released today by energy think tanks Ember and Agora Energiewende. That gives renewable energy a narrow lead over fossil fuel-fired generation, which accounted for 37 percent of Europe's electricity. The remaining quarter comes from nuclear energy. The rise of renewables is good news for the health of the planet. Still, renewable energy will need to grow at an even faster rate to stave off a future with more climate change-induced disasters. "Renewables overtaking fossils is an important milestone in Europe's clean energy transition. However, let's not be complacent," Patrick Graichen, director of Agora Energiewende, said in a statement. "Post-pandemic recovery [programs] need to go hand-in-hand with accelerated climate action."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: AMC Theatres, the world's largest cinema chain, has raised $917 million in new equity and debt capital, the company said on Monday. "This increased liquidity should allow the company to make it through this dark coronavirus-impacted winter," the company said, adding that its "financial runway has been extended deep into 2021." AMC has raised the finances from Dec. 14, 2020. Of the $917 million, AMC has raised $506 million of equity, from the issuance of 164.7 million new common shares, along with the previously announced securing of $100 million of additional first-lien debt and the concurrent issuance of 22 million new common shares to convert $100 million of second-lien debt into equity. In addition, the company has executed commitment letters for $411 million of incremental debt capital in place through mid-2023, unless repaid before then, through the upsizing and refinancing of its European revolving credit facility. The chain says that it presumes that it will continue to make progress in its ongoing dialogue with theater landlords about the amounts and timing of owed theater lease payments, and is hopeful that the ongoing vaccination push will result in an increase in cinema attendance. As a result, AMC shares soared 36% in premarket trade Monday.

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Can a pair of unique spectacles banish nearsightedness without surgical intervention? Japan's Kubota Pharmaceutical Holdings says its wearable device can do just that, and it plans to start releasing the product in Asia, where many people grapple with myopia. From a report: The device, which the company calls Kubota Glasses or smart glasses, is still being tested. It projects an image from the lens of the unit onto the wearer's retina to correct the refractive error that causes nearsightedness. Wearing the device 60 to 90 minutes a day corrects myopia according to the Japanese company. Kubota Pharmaceutical has not disclosed additional details on how the device works. Through further clinical trials, it is trying to determine how long the effect lasts after the user wears the device, and how many days in total the user must wear the device to achieve a permanent correction for nearsightedness. Myopia is often results from the cornea and the retina in the eye being too far apart. This inhibits the proper focusing of light as it enters the eye and causes distant objects to look blurry. Asian are prone to nearsightedness. Of people aged 20 and under, 96% of South Koreans, 95% of Japanese, 87% of Hong Kongers, 85% of Taiwanese and 82% of Singaporeans are affected by the condition, according to Kubota.

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Twitter unveiled a feature Monday meant to bolster its efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation by tapping users in a fashion similar to Wikipedia to flag potentially misleading tweets. From a report: The new system allows users to discuss and provide context to tweets they believe are misleading or false. The project, titled Birdwatch, is a standalone section of Twitter that will at first only be available to a small set of users, largely on a first-come, first-served basis. Priority will not be provided to high-profile people or traditional fact-checkers, but users will have to use an account tied to a real phone number and email address. "Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading or false, and write notes that provide informative context," Twitter Vice President of Product Keith Coleman wrote in a press release. "We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable." While Birdwatch will initially be cordoned off to a separate section of Twitter, the company said "eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors."

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GameStop shares surged to a record Monday, before pulling back and giving up much of their gains, the latest sign that frenetic trading by individual investors is leading to outsize stock-market moves. From a report: Class A shares of the Texas-based games retailer surged as much as 145% to $159.18 in morning trading, before reversing course and briefly turning lower. By midday, the stock was up 27% at $82.55, up more than 330% in 2021. The rapid swings prompted the New York Stock Exchange to briefly halt trading multiple times. The rally has been fueled by individual investors, encouraging each other on social media to pile into GameStop shares and options. The buying pressure has led money managers to switch out of substantial bets that the stock would fall, analysts said. This resulted in a short squeeze, in which rising prices prompt investors to buy back shares they had sold short to cut their losses, pushing the stock higher still. The company has become a high-profile battleground between bullish chatroom-driven day traders, especially on online platform Reddit, and hedge fund short sellers, who have been betting against the stock. GameStop has been the most-actively traded stock by customers of Fidelity Investments in recent sessions, with buy orders outnumbering sell orders by more than four-to-one, according to the brokerage. "We broke it. We broke GME at open," one Reddit user wrote Monday after the NYSE halted trading, referring to GameStop's stock-market ticker. The tussle over the company, with a modest market value of about $5 billion at Friday's close and four years of declining sales, exemplifies the increased sway of retail investors. Many poured into the market during the coronavirus lockdown, congregating on online platforms to swap trading ideas and to boast about winning bets. From last week: Gaming the System: How GameStop Stock Surged 1,500% In Nine Months.

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Dutch police arrested two individuals late last week for allegedly selling data from the Dutch health ministry's COVID-19 systems on the criminal underground. From a report: The arrests came after an investigation by RTL Nieuws reporter Daniel Verlaan who discovered ads for Dutch citizen data online, advertised on instant messaging apps like Telegram, Snapchat, and Wickr. The ads consisted of photos of computer screens listing data of one or more Dutch citizens. The reporter said he tracked down the screengrabs to two IT systems used by the Dutch Municipal Health Service (GGD) -- namely CoronIT, which contains details about Dutch citizens who took a COVID-19 test, and HPzone Light, one of the DDG's contact-tracing systems. Verlaan said the data had been sold online for months for prices ranging from $36 to $60 per person. Buyers would receive details such as home addresses, emails, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and a person's BSN identifier (Dutch social security number).

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Google employees from across the globe are forming a union alliance, weeks after more than 200 workers at the search engine giant and other units of parent company Alphabet formed a labor union for U.S. and Canadian offices. From a report: Alpha Global was formed in coordination with UNI Global Union, a union federation that represents about 20 million workers globally, and includes unions from countries such as the United States, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and the UK, UNI Global Union said.

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First selfie I took, March 2003.

A third class action lawsuit has been filed in Europe against Apple seeking compensation -- for what Italy's Altroconsumo consumer protection agency dubs "planned obsolescence" of a number of iPhone 6 models. From a report: The action relates to performance throttling Apple applied several years ago to affected iPhones when the health of the device's battery had deteriorated -- doing so without clearly informing users. It later apologized. The class action suit in Italy is seeking $72.8 million in compensation -- based on at least $72.8 in average compensation per iPhone owner. Affected devices named in the suit are the iPhone 6, 6S, 6 Plus and 6S Plus, per a press release put out by the umbrella consumer organization, Euroconsumers, which counts Altroconsumo a a member. The suit is the third to be filed in the region over the issue -- following suits filed in Belgium and Spain last month. A fourth -- in Portugal -- is slated to be filed shortly.

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Flights at hundreds of airports worldwide are in danger of being disrupted by rising sea levels, according to a new study. From a report: More than 260 airports around the globe are currently at risk of coastal flooding, and dozens could be below mean sea level by the turn of the century, the research published in the journal Climate Risk Management found. Hundreds more could be in danger depending on the amount of sea level rise driven by global warming between now and 2100. Airports in Asia and the Pacific topped the list. Researchers looked at several different factors to come up with the rankings, including the likelihood of flooding from extreme sea levels, flood protection and the impact on flights. They found that up to one-fifth of air travel routes could be affected.

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First selfie I took, March 2003.

I think ultimately the only way TV can work in the future is completely a la carte.

I have subscribed to FUBO and YouTube TV, each for just one channel, both costing about $65 a month. But the money isn't going to the one channel each, it's being spread over hundreds of channels, and some of my money is going to Fox News and I totally object to that. I might cancel both just to avoid paying any money at all to Fox.

Meanwhile when something comes out on HBO, Apple TV or Disney that I'm interested in, there's no way for me to pay to watch it without buying into everything they sell. (I'm only subscribed to Netflix, Amazon and Hulu.)

So what alternative is there to piracy? They've created such a convoluted system, that costs so much money for so little, they've completely destroyed their own business.

Maybe the only thing that can make money in the new system are live sports shows. Or ceremonies like the inaugural, that you want to watch as they're happening. And this is all rent. The technology was paid for a long time ago. The system is screwed up beyond recognition.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Many Tesla fans view the electric carmaker as a world leader in self-driving technology. CEO Elon Musk himself has repeatedly claimed that the company is less than two years away from perfecting fully self-driving technology. But in an interview with Germany's Manager magazine, Waymo CEO John Krafcik dismissed Tesla as a Waymo competitor and argued that Tesla's current strategy was unlikely to ever produce a fully self-driving system. "For us, Tesla is not a competitor at all," Krafcik said. "We manufacture a completely autonomous driving system. Tesla is an automaker that is developing a really good driver assistance system." For Musk, these two technologies exist along a continuum. His plan is to gradually make Tesla's Autopilot software better until it's good enough to work with no human supervision. But Krafcik argues that's not realistic. "It is a misconception that you can just keep developing a driver assistance system until one day you can magically leap to a fully autonomous driving system," Krafcik said. "In terms of robustness and accuracy, for example, our sensors are orders of magnitude better than what we see on the road from other manufacturers."

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I also have a definitive answer on what the difference is between rain and showers, a question that has come up here before. When they call for rain in the forecast, they mean water is going to be coming out of the sky uniformly, both in terms of geography and time. If you go out when it's raining, you will get wet. However if they call for showers that means it will rain on and off, and it might be raining in one town and not in the other. It's more intermittent. You can risk it, you might not get wet if you don't bring an umbrella.

Followup on my question about why neo-Nazi instead of plain old Nazi and there is an answer. The original Nazis came with a lot of stuff the new ones don't. They had uniforms, a symbol, flag, a leader and his manifesto. The new Nazis don't have any of that. In Germany the paraphernalia of the old Nazis are illegal. In the US that would be too offensive. There is still a memory of WW II, we remember who the enemy was then. If they walked around with swastika armbands people would know for sure they're the enemy. Maybe at some point they will decloak, but that hasn't happened yet. I thought of putting a swastika in the right margin, but felt that would be too shocking. That's the point. So there is a difference. I got emails from several readers. Thanks!