TECH

Australia’s First Ever Unmanned Combat Aircraft Makes Maiden Flight

Australia’s Boeing Airpower Teaming System (ATS), also known as the Loyal Wingman, has taken to the skies for the first time, Boeing has announced via a press release.

The aircraft, which is the first combat aircraft designed and developed in Australia in over 50 years, was test run at the high-security RAAF Base Woomera and its surrounding range complex.

The Loyal Wingman is a stealth unmanned aerial vehicle developed by Boeing Australia to perform autonomous missions using artificial intelligence and was initially billed to fly some time in 2020, but a number of factors postponed the D-day.

Air Vice-Marshal Cath Roberts, RAAF Head of Air Force Capability described the project as a “pathfinder for the integration of autonomous systems and artificial intelligence to create smart human-machine teams.”

VOLVO TO GO ALL-ELECTRIC BY 2030

Swedish automobile marque, VOLVO, have revealed plans to become a “fully electric car company” by 2030.

To realise this ambition, VOLVO will phase out the sale of fossil-fuel-only cars by 2025, manufacturing only electric cars in the aftermath of this period or in the least, hybrid vehicles.

In a statement by Volvo Cars’ chief technology officer, Henrik Green, the company forecasted a gloomy and damming future for fossil-fuel vehicles,

“There is no long-term future for cars with an internal combustion engine. We are firmly committed to becoming an electric-only car maker and the transition should happen by 2030.”

The company joins a growing list of fuel-powered car brand chasing zero-emission products, with Jaguar Land Rover and Ford also making similar pledges over the past week.

In October 2019, the company unveiled its first electric vehicle called the XC40 Recharge under the Recharge brand.

TWITTER TO FLAG FALSE POSTS ABOUT COVID-19 VACCINES

Social networking service and micro-blogging platform, Twitter, have announced new rules that will see labels stamped onto timelines to prevent any disruption to the free flow and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines in regions around the world.

The tag will appear as a pop-up message in the retweet window and will come in form of a warning to users that the content “may be misleading.”

This development was revealed hours before Nigeria, Angola, Iraq and Colombia received their first batch of Covid-19 vaccines

BUSINESS

Jack Ma Loses China’s Richest Man Title

Following close scrutiny from domestic regulators, Alibaba and Ant Group founder, Jack Ma, has relinquished his crown as China’s wealthiest man.

The business magnate who was worth 61 billion US$ as at January 2021, had donned the crown of China’s number one billionaire in the Hurun Global Rich List for two consecutive years, but was shockingly supplanted by bottled water maker Nongfu Spring’s Zhong Shanshan, Tencent Holding’s Pony Ma and e-commerce upstart Pinduoduo’s Collin Huang, in 2021’s list, leaving him out of the top three.

The Hurun report believes that his decline came about “after China’s regulators reined in Ant Group and Alibaba on anti-trust issues.”

The Ant Group’s $37 billion IPO was suspended in 2020 just days before the company’s public listing, as a result of a heated speech by Ma on October 24, in which he blasted China’s regulatory system, dubbing it old-fashioned and accusing it of displaying a “pawnshop” mentality.

Following this viral rant, Ma dramatically disappeared from public view for three months, buzzing fears and rumours that an abduction had ensued, before he resurfaced in January 2021 in video clip showing him playing golf.

Since then, China has enforced strict rules and tightened existing ones on the way the tech sector functions.

UNEMPLOYED SPANISH CITIZENS CROSS 4 MILLION MARK FOR FIRST TIME IN FIVE YEARS

European nation, Spain, has joined the UK and South Africa to post an unenviable increase in the number of jobless people across the federation.

The country reported a 23.5% increase in unemployment rate from twelve months dating back to February 2020, when the pandemic first touched down in the country.

Since the outbreak of the deadly virus, Spain has lost over 400,000 jobs, with 66.67% of those coming in the fragile hospitality sector.

Jobless claims registered a rise of 1.12 percent from January 2021 to February 2021, an increment of 44,436 people to 4,008,789. The fifth consecutive month to post an increase in unemployment while the figure of 4 million was the first since 2016.