Business
World’s first wind-powered underwater datacentre starts operating in China
The datacentre, which is located more than 10km (6 miles) off the coast Shanghai, is submerged at a depth of 10 metres and is powered by an offshore wind farm. According to the Chinese Government, the datacentre reduces energy consumption by more than a fifth compared to land-based datacentres.
The natural cooling effect of being submerged in the seawater reduces its overall energy demand.
In a traditional datacentre on land, between 25 and 40 percent of the total energy demand is due to the need to pipe cold water around the servers in order to prevent them overheating.
Water consumption in traditional datacentres has also been a subject of scrutiny. Datacentres located in the ocean reduce the need for freshwater.
The United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health has warned this week that the water footprint from datacentres may reach 9.3tn. litres in 2030, enough to meet the domestic water needs for all 1.3 billion people living in sub-Saharan Africa.
HiCloud launched in 2023 the first commercial underwater datacentre on Hainan Island, a tropical island located in southern China. Shanghai’s launch is the world’s first offshore wind powered project. The farm is visible just off the coast of Lingang in eastern Shanghai, a hi tech, free trade zone that also houses a Tesla gigafactory.
China is not the first to experiment with building underwater datacentres to make them more efficient. Microsoft conducted a pilot project in the waters surrounding Orkney, Scotland in 2018. The company reported promising results two years later but the progress has since stagnated.
“Microsoft proved the concept earlier, but China has moved further in commercial deployment, because it was able bring together market demands, industrial cability, maritime engineering and policy support faster into a commercial project,” Dr Hanjiang Dong from Hong Kong Polytechnic University said.
China has made AI support a central pillar in its economic and growth strategy. It released an AI Action Plan last year that called for the rid construction of datacentres. The government has also promised that clean energy supply for AI infrastructure will “significantly increase” by 2030.
According to the Chinese government, the Shanghai Lingang datacentre has received 1.6bn Yuan (PS177m) in investment.
Underwater datacentres can also pose some risks to marine ecosystems by disrupting sediments or heating seawater. Experts said that these risks are manageable, but will require more monitoring.
Prof Rick Stafford, marine biologist from Bournemouth University said: “An undersea datacentre would be a good idea.” While cooling with seawater may result in some localised temperatures being elevated, this will not be widespread.
Original article by The Guardian
Business
be tenants thousands in lost deposits
Student Mide Awosika pays thousands for a flat rental deposit – and discovers many others also did.
I thought I’d got my dream flat – so did 23 others
Last summer, 20-year-old Mide Awosika thought she had secured her dream flat ahead of starting a new term at Queen Mary University in London.
She and two flatmates together paid a £12,000 deposit to rent a four-bedroom property in Poplar, east London. But when they arrived on moving day, there were no keys – and they found nine other people also trying to move into the same flat.
The property had been advertised on major rental websites Zoopla and OpenRent. After a viewing in July, Awosika said the letting agent, who identified himself as Derrick Fringe, told them there was stiff competition and they needed to pay immediately to secure it. She said they handed over three months’ rent upfront, plus holding and security deposits.
She told us that just before the scheduled August move-in date, Fringe told them the existing tenants had refused to leave and bailiffs were needed. Then contact stopped.
When Awosika went to the building the following day, she realised the scale of the problem and described how group after group arrived, all expecting to collect keys for the same property.
She decided to set up a Whatsp group to keep track of and share information amongst those affected.
Neither Fringe nor the landlord who owns the property responded to the BBC’s questions.
Since then, Awosika said, 23 people have contacted her claiming to have been targeted in the same way, all linked to the same flat and the same agent.
Figures from Report Fraud indicated the cost of rental fraud was a growing issue with reported losses almost doubling in the past five years.
In 2021, there were 4,642 rental fraud cases reported leaving those affected £7.2m out of pocket.
In 2025, 4,178 cases were reported in England and Wales and Northern Ireland – costing victims £14.5m.
Among those who joined Awosika’s Whatsp group were Freazy Warr, 24, Nirrhit Pal, 23, and three other flatmates, who between them transferred £7,200 to secure the same property. They never received the keys either.
“As the moving van was pulling into the road, we were told by a friend to cancel immediately because two other groups were already waiting,” Warr said.
“My lease was ending and I was terrified I’d have nowhere to live.”
He said the pressure of London’s rental market had left them feeling vulnerable.
“There are so few affordable properties,” he said. “Students and people without a lot of money are pushed online, where it’s harder to know who to trust.”
Two young professionals working in nearby Canary Wharf paid a £9,460 deposit to rent the flat.
Satchit Warade and another tenant, who asked for her name to be withheld, said they were rushed into the viewing with the agent saying they had 45 minutes to get there.
On their moving-in day, the 23-year-olds told us they called Fringe between 20 and 30 times before he called them back to say the existing tenants would not move out and claimed he was going to evict them.
The next day they could not reach Fringe so reported the matter to the police.
Warade said the experience was “harrowing”.
“Especially in cases like these where a false sense of urgency is created, it becomes all the more stressful.
“It has definitely made me super cautious and I think I will forever be on my toes now every time I’m renting in London.
“There’s something about just the trauma of having to go through something that makes me lose the trust in the market and how it works.”
The flat was listed on both OpenRent and Zoopla.
Open Rent said it offered its “sympathies” to those “affected by fraudulent activities” but claimed it had “a comprehensive vetting system in place to verify the legitimacy of landlords and properties listed on our platform”.
“Upon receiving this report we acted promptly, removing the listing and suspending the account pending the outcome of any investigation,” a spokesperson said.
“When users choose to pay off-platform against our explicit guidance, which pears to be the case here, unfortunately we cannot guarantee the safety of funds.
“Our ability to help recover funds is more limited when direct bank transfers have been made to a private individual off-platform.”
Zoopla did not respond to the BBC.
Its website used to describe it as a “leading UK real estate agency” with “eight branches” and “170 staff”. That website pears to have been taken down.
However, only two staff members were named online. The agent also claimed to be a member of the industry body Arla Propertymark. Arla said it had no record of the name.
An address listed for complaints links, on Companies House, went to an unrelated firm with a similar name.
A spokesperson for that company told the BBC it was unaware its details were being used without its knowledge or consent, had nothing to do with the flat, and said it was a “victim of corporate identity theft”.
Using tenancy documents given to us by Satchit Warade, the BBC traced an email address linked to the person listed as the landlord, Edward Robinson, who peared to have bought the property in March 2025. The email was connected to the same email account used by the letting agent.
Awosika said her group emailed Robinson when she could not access the flat but never received a reply.
Another prospective tenant claimed building managers flagged to him the issue on the day of the failed move-in. The BBC contacted both men. The person known as Fringe did not respond while Robinson declined to answer questions and ended the call.
Another student, Samyek, told how he was part of a group that transferred more than £26,000 to a different person named as landlord on their contract. Tenants were given different landlord names and bank details, but all linked to the same address, the BBC found.
The organisation’s chief policy advisor said prospective tenants should:
Try to verify that the letting agent is legitimate, such as ensuring they are members of one of the reputable membership bodies for example SafeAgent or PropertyMark
If they have a high street presence, insist on going to one of their offices
Try not to be pressured into doing something that you might not do if you had more time to consider
Avoid deals that pear too good to be true and step back if you’re being put under too much pressure to act quickly. Say you’ll take away the contract and the perwork and you’ll review it that evening
As for Awosika, she said the experience had left her far more cautious.
“It was such an elaborate scam,” she said. “It felt real. Telling my mum was awful.
“It was a huge amount of money – and it was just gone.”
Additional reporting by Thomas Spencer and Paul Myers.
Source: BBC
Business
Progressive Nithya Raman advances to November runoff against Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass
The race also has historical markers. Bass is the first Black woman to hold the post, and Raman could be the first South Asian woman in the job.
“If you’re as frustrated by the broken status quo as I am, I hope you’ll join our movement to build a city that works for everyone,” Raman said in a statement. “For too long, City Hall has prioritized giving political advantage to powerful interests that fund elections. Meanwhile, working people pay the price in higher rents, depleted services and a city that has stopped working for them.”
“A campaign against Nithya Raman, who allows encampments near schools and cuts the police force, is one Mayor Bass looks forward to winning,” said Bass campaign strategist Douglas Herman.
Raman gained votes on Pratt in every vote update since Election Day as Los Angeles continued to process additional mail ballots and release results. Raman moved past Pratt and into second place on Sunday and extended her lead over Pratt on Monday to nearly 22,000 votes.
The mayoral race was technically nonpartisan, so the candidates peared on the ballot without party identification next to their names.
The election was not a vote of confidence in Bass, who according to incomplete returns received under 35% of the vote, a vulnerable position for an incumbent.
Raman — in her first run for citywide office — has promised to speed up housing construction, bring back entertainment industry jobs and improve services in a city known for dirty streets, gridlock and homeless encampments that are commonplace in many neighborhoods.
“What we are doing right now is just not working,” Raman says. “LA’s primary strategy for homelessness has been to move encampments from one block to another, from your block to your neighbor’s block and back again. … It’s political theater.”
California’s vote count takes a long time
Los Angeles, like other counties in California, processes and counts mail ballots in roughly the order they are received, so the last ones returned are the last ones counted.
On Tuesday night after polls closed, Los Angeles released results from mail ballots that had been returned early and already processed as well as votes cast that day. Those votes put Bass in the lead with Pratt running in second and Raman behind in third. Since then, the county has been processing and releasing results from mail ballots that arrived later.
Election data shows that large numbers of Democrats held onto their mail ballots and returned them in the race’s final days, which helps explain why Bass and Raman have been doing better than Pratt in the votes counted since primary day.
Raman’s political positions have shifted
Born in India, Raman moved to the United States as a child and earned degrees from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied urban planning.
She has opposed efforts to prohibit homeless people from setting up tents within 500 feet (152 meters) of schools and daycare centers. However, she pears to have softened her opposition to no-camping zones, which were intended to curb the spread of encampments and clear streets. She voted against dozens of them on the council but later said she would not block them if elected mayor.
Raman’s positions on policing in the city have also changed.
She once talked of a department that would be much smaller and posted “defund the police” on social media in 2020. She did not support the mayor’s 2023 police contract, which she said was too expensive for the financially strped city.
In diverse Los Angeles, mayors are elected by building coalitions, ethnically and geogrhically. And to surpass 50% of the vote and win, Raman will need to find more supporters.
“I don’t think it’s impossible, but she is going to have to expand beyond her ideological base,” said Democratic consultant Bill Carrick, who sees Bass as vulnerable.
“The people who didn’t vote for Nithya weren’t voting against her, they were voting for somebody else. Karen (Bass) had a good number of people who were voting against her,” Carrick added.
Though Raman and Pratt are political opposites, both have attracted voters who aren’t hpy with the city’s status quo.
Tanika Vickers, who works for a housing nonprofit in Los Angeles, said that she felt like she was part of a group of people who work and pay taxes but have been “forgotten.” She said she was frustrated with the way tax dollars were being spent, especially “throwing” more money toward homelessness without results.
She said she voted Raman for mayor because she was most qualified to execute her plans and fulfill what the city needs.
“I think that we are all looking for change,” she said.
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Associated Press journalists Jaimie Ding in Los Angeles and Stephen Ohlemacher in Washington contributed.
Business
Ukrainian strikes hit oil sites in Russia and Crimea
Separately, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has confirmed that Roman Abramovich acted as a go-between for messages between Kyiv and Moscow. Zelenskyy told Sky News that the former owner of Premier League team Chelsea traveled to Kyiv with a message from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Zelenskyy said Abramovich brought the message that the Russians “want to understand what we are ready to do,” and had offered to take a reply to Putin.
Meanwhile, the European Union’s foreign policy chief said a new proposed round of sanctions against Russia includes 80 listings targeting Russia’s “military industrial complex, human rights violators and propagandists.”
Kaja Kallas told a news conference after a meeting of EU defense ministers Monday that Western sanctions have already cost Moscow an estimated $1.2 to 1.5 trillion.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces shot down 310 Ukrainian drones overnight into Monday, including over the Moscow region, western and southwestern Russia, Russian-occupied Crimea and the Black and Azov seas.
Russia targeted Ukraine with 155 drones, of which Ukrainian air defenses shot down or suppressed 124, according to its air force.
Ukraine strikes Russian energy sites
Ukraine’s General Staff said Ukrainian forces had struck Russia’s Krasnodar Krai region overnight, hitting the Grushovaya oil transshipment base near Novorossiysk. The complex is one of the largest transshipment hubs in southern Russia for oil and petroleum products.
Russian regional authorities confirmed a Ukrainian drone sparked a fire at the facility, adding that there were no casualties. While they did not comment on the extent of damage, they said 130 rescue workers were involved in putting out the blaze.
Asked whether the Kremlin is worried about the fuel crisis in Crimea, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Energy Ministry and other agencies are working on a set of measures to respond to the situation.
“There are indeed certain problems at the moment,” Peskov said. “Measures are being taken.”
The Krasny Yar “linear production and dispatching station” in the Volgograd region was also hit, the General Staff said. A fire broke out at the site, according to the statement. Russian Gov. Andrei Bocharov didn’t specify what the facility produces, but said there were no injuries.
Ukraine also carried out strikes overnight in the Semykolodezkaya oil base in the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula on Sunday night, sparking a fire at the facility. The base is used to store fuel reserves supplying the Russian military, according to the statement posted on Telegram.
Ukrainian forces also struck an oil depot near Feodosia in Crimea, the General Staff said.
Zelenskyy sent message to Putin
Zelenskyy said his message was that he would meet Putin “any time” in any location other than Russia or Belarus, and either bilaterally or with U.S. President Donald Trump and European leaders.
But he said Ukraine would not surrender the Donbas region, currently part-occupied by Russia.
“It was the key message. I said we will not leave and we will not go out from our territory,” Zelenskyy told Sky News.
Putin said last week that a Russian businessman, who he didn’t identify, traveled to Kyiv last month and met with Zelenskyy to hear his offer of a personal meeting. The Russian leader rejected the idea of a meeting, saying he saw no point in it.
Drone strikes civilians
Two people were killed and at least 18 injured, including four children aged 5, 10, 13 and 12, by a Russian drone attack in the central Zorizhzhia region that damaged residential buildings and vehicles and destroyed market kiosks, said the regional military administration head, Ivan Fedorov.
In Nikopol. a Russian attack killed a 49-year-old woman and injured four other people, according to the State Emergency Service.
The service also reported that four people were injured in the Dnipropetrovsk region when strikes hit residential buildings. In Odesa, three people were wounded after a Russian drone struck a public transport stop.
Russian drone strikes overnight also injured civilians and damaged buildings and businesses in the Kharkiv, Odesa and Chernihiv regions, regional authorities said.
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian drone overnight struck a passenger train traveling from Moscow to Simferopol in occupied Crimea, injuring the driver and killing the driver’s assistant, Kremlin-installed regional leader Sergei Aksyonov reported early Monday.
Akysyonov added that no passengers were hurt. But all passenger train traffic in Crimea was halted following the attack, with passengers evacuated and replacement buses provided, Russian operator Grand Service Express reported on Telegram that same morning.
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Business
Los Angeles trial to begin for man accused of sparking the deadly Palisades Fire
The Palisades Fire ultimately killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes as it incinerated hillside neighborhoods in Pacific Palisades and the city of Malibu. Rinderknecht faces at least five years in prison if convicted of charges that also include malicious destruction by means of a fire.
News of the trial drew mixed reactions from residents of the Pacific Palisades, who have spent the last year and a half tussling with insurance claims and red te for building permits as they try to regain normalcy in their lives.
“It drums up all of the emotions over this past year and makes me think about all of the suffering and chaos of all of our neighbors and friends’ lives,” said Meghan Wald, whose home was among the few left standing in her block.
Palisades streets are now crowded with construction vehicles and workers, and charred trees have recovered their luscious green. But vacant lots abound, filled with weeds and wildflowers and the skeletal frames of homes. Of the more than 450 construction projects, only 17 homes have been certified for occupancy.
Wald and her family now live in nearby Brentwood, but she visits weekly to support the handful of businesses that have reopened, including her hair salon, her usual CVS pharmacy and the Palisades Garden Cafe, where her kids used to grab snacks after school.
“It’s great to see the shops that we know and love coming back,” Wald said. “It’s also hard to imagine what it’s going to be like. It will never be the same.”
Haney said he also plans to argue that the government lacks solid evidence or witness testimony linking Rinderknecht to the first fire, and that first responders heard fireworks in the vicinity of where the blaze started.
Lena Loh, who opened a skin care clinic in the Palisades three months before the fire, said Rinderknecht’s prosecution gives her no sense of relief. She has been struggling to reopen and is looking to leave because she can’t sustain the business financially anymore.
“I don’t necessarily think putting him on trial is gonna fix anything,” she said. “This is a city issue. The city needed to manage that small speck of fire better.”
Business
Maverick Republican Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregon, who resigned after sexual harassment scandal, dies
PORTLAND, Ore. () — Former Sen. Bob Packwood, a moderate Oregon Republican whose reputation as a champion of abortion and women’s rights was spoiled at the end of his career by allegations of sexual harassment, has died. He was 93.
Packwood’s death on Saturday was announced in an obituary sent to media outlets by his family. The release didn’t include additional details.
Packwood was a political scrper who first refused to quit the chamber in which he had served for 27 years, saying he didn’t want to be remembered only for that controversy.
Before the #MeToo era, Packwood stood out as an example of private behavior undermining a man’s public image. He had been praised by Planned Parenthood and others.
The great-grandson of a member of the 1857 Oregon Constitutional Convention, Packwood established himself as a social moderate and fiscal conservative who often voted across party lines. He considered running for president in 1980.
Elected to the Senate in 1968, Packwood was best known as the leading Republican advocate of abortion rights and was widely admired by women’s groups throughout the country until the Senate Ethics Committee launched an investigation into the allegations of sexual and official misconduct in 1993.
More than two dozen women, former employees and acquaintances, accused him of making unwanted or uninvited sexual advances.
The allegations remained the target of an ethics probe that widened to include other alleged acts of official misconduct. He resigned in September 1995, then went to start a lucrative lobbying business in Washington.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, who replaced Packwood in 1996, said while he should be praised for his record on abortion rights and tax reform, how he treated women overshadows it all.
“His horrible history as documented in his own diaries will forever overshadow that public record. Simply put, historians’ first line about Bob Packwood must include those women who he abused and assaulted for years and years,” Wyden said in a statement.
As chairman and then ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Packwood was a master of cutting deals and forging compromises needed to pass tax legislation through Congress. He was most proud of the lead role he played in a sweeping tax reform of 1986 that lowered the top income tax bracket and eliminated many itemized deductions.
Over his career, he was described as a blunt, independent, outspoken politician who was a maverick, boat-rocker, loose cannon, skilled partisan, and, above all, political survivor.
“I think they probably all ring true,” Packwood told The Associated Press in December 1992.
“I would like to think that I am nobody’s lackey. I try to reach conclusions independently and then I’m willing to fight for those conclusions; if necessary, having to fight against my party or my party’s president,” he said.
Packwood won his first Senate election at age 36, narrowly defeating Democratic Sen. Wayne L. Morse, an Oregon legend who had held the seat for 23 years. He quickly grabbed attention as a rising star in the GOP. By 1980, he was elected chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
But he lost the seat when the White House backed a competitor after Packwood publicly accused President Ronald Reagan of alienating women, African Americans and Jews.
Just two weeks after Packwood’s reelection in 1992, The Washington Post printed allegations from former female employees and acquaintances that the senator had subjected them to uninvited sexual advances.
The Senate Ethics Committee also investigated allegations that Packwood solicited jobs from lobbyists for his ex-wife, used his staff to try to threaten the female accusers into keeping quiet and obstructed the investigation by altering his personal diaries.
The Senate held two days of extraordinary debate in 1993 over whether Packwood should have to comply with an ethics committee subpoena for his diaries, in which he reportedly made entries relevant to the investigation. The Senate voted 94-6 to enforce the subpoena.
Packwood took the case to federal courts and lost, ending when Chief Justice William Rehnquist refused Packwood’s request for the U.S. Supreme Court to intercede.
Packwood launched his lobbying business, Sunrise Research Corp., in 1997. By 1999, the firm was grossing $1.5 million a year. His business slowed in later years, but he told a City Club of Portland audience in 2010 that he was still spending about half his time in Washington lobbying for a number of clients.
It was interesting work, Packwood told the audience, according to The Oregonian, but “it is not as much fun as being in the Senate.”
As Congress became increasingly partisan following his departure, Packwood continued to advocate a centrist tact and called for Oregon to create nonpartisan elections in his 2010 City Club speech.
Packwood’s wife, Elaine Franklin, was his former chief of staff who became a political consultant in Portland. The couple had homes in the Portland area and Washington.
In a November 2002 interview with the Salem Statesman Journal, Packwood said he had gotten past the scandal that forced him out of office.
“People have told me it must have been tough on me, or it seems unfair,” he said. “But you cannot go through the rest of life and say look what hpened. Pretty soon you become a bore to your friends.
“I told myself I was not old enough to retire,” Packwood said, “so I have got to get at life and not complain about it.”
