New York Times

Big City is watching you. It will do it with camera-equipped drones that inspect municipal power lines and robotic cars that know where people go. Sensor-laden streetlights will change brightness based on danger levels. Technologists and urban planners are working on a major transformation of urban landscapes over the next few decades. Much of it involves the close monitoring of things and people, thanks to digital technology.

To the extent that this makes people’s lives easier, the planners say, they will probably like it. But troubling and knotty questions of privacy and control remain. A White House report published in February identified advances in transportation, energy and manufacturing, among other developments, that will bring on what it termed “a new era of change.” Much of the change will also come from the private sector, which is moving faster to reach city dwellers, and is more skilled in collecting and responding to data. That is leading cities everywhere to work more closely than ever with private companies, which may have different priorities than the government.

Yahoo’s board has agreed to sell the company’s core internet operations and land holdings to Verizon Communications for $4.8 billion.

After the sale, Yahoo shareholders will be left with about $41 billion in investments in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, as well as Yahoo Japan and a small portfolio of patents. That compares with Yahoo’s peak value of more than $125 billion, reached in January 2000. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, is not expected to join Verizon, but she is due to receive a severance payout worth about $57 million, according to Equilar, a compensation research firm.

For Verizon, the deal simply adds another piece to the digital media and advertising business it is trying to build. Verizon is building a portfolio of online content and aiming to monetize it via advertising. Its current assets include Huffington Post and TechCrunch, which it acquired in last year’s AOL deal, and its own mobile video app, called go90. Acquiring Yahoo will bring in millions more viewers from Yahoo sites like Finance, Sports and News. Verizon also hopes to plug data derived from smartphones into AOL, and now Yahoo’s, digital advertising systems, and it is aiming to build a competitor to online advertising giants Facebook and Google. But a combined Yahoo and AOL would be far outpaced by its now far-larger rivals.

The companies said the deal is subject to customary closing conditions, including approval by Yahoo’s shareholders, and is expected to close in early 2017. Until the closing, the companies said, Yahoo will continue to operate independently.

China has ordered several of the country’s most popular internet portals to halt much of their original news reporting, in a move that could confine an even larger share of the journalism in the country to Communist-controlled mouthpieces ahead of an important party meeting in 2017.

The profit-driven portals, several of which are listed on United States stock exchanges, have in recent years expanded their investigative teams to increase readership among China’s more than 600 million internet users by scooping the staid state-owned news media on stories about subjects including industrial pollution, tainted milk powder and even police brutality. But on July 25, several news organizations reported that the Beijing office of China’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, ordered the websites of a number of the companies, including Sina, Sohu, NetEase and Phoenix, to shut down or “clean up” several of their most popular online news features.

William Gaines, an investigative reporter for The Chicago Tribune who shared two Pulitzer Prizes for exposing corruption in Chicago and was a finalist for a third, died on July 20 in Munster (IN) He was 82. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his daughter, Michelle Gaines, said.

Gaines, who joined The Tribune in 1963 and uncovered malfeasance for most of his tenure, until he retired in 2001, won his first Pulitzer in 1976 for local investigative specialized reporting on a newspaper team that exposed mortgage abuse in federal housing programs and horrific conditions at two private hospitals — including one where, while working undercover as a janitor, he was enlisted to assist during surgery. “The experience was frightening to me; it was depressing,” he wrote in a Tribune column in 1975, “for I knew that it was not just a fluke that I, a janitor, had been called on to do the work of trained orderlies and nurses’ aides.” He shared his second Pulitzer in 1988, for investigative reporting, with Dean Baquet, now the executive editor of The New York Times, and Ann Marie Lipinski, now the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The prize recognized a series of articles that uncovered waste and self-dealing in the Chicago City Council. The Pulitzer board called the series “a model of municipal reporting.”

Roger Ailes stepped down July 21 as chairman and chief executive of Fox News, ending a 20-year reign as head of the cable network he built into a ratings juggernaut and an influential platform for Republican politics. Rupert Murdoch, the 85-year-old media mogul who started Fox News with Ailes, will assume the role of chairman and will be an interim chief executive of Fox News channel and Fox Business Network until a permanent replacement for Ailes is found.

Ailes will receive about $40 million as part of a settlement agreement, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. As part of the agreement, Ailes cannot start a competitor to Fox News. He will continue to make himself available as an adviser to Murdoch on an interim basis, the person said, though he will not be directly involved with Fox News or its owner, 21st Century Fox. In a statement, Murdoch praised Ailes, 76, and his “remarkable contribution” to the company, without making mention of the sexual harassment scandal that felled him.

The Republican convention erupted into tumult July 20 as the bitter primary battle between Donald J. Trump and Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) reignited unexpectedly, crushing hopes that the party could project unity. In the most electric moment of the convention, boos and jeers broke out as it became clear that Sen Cruz — in a prime-time address from center stage — was not going to endorse Trump. It was a pointed snub on the eve of Trump’s formal acceptance speech. As hundreds of delegates chanted “Vote for Trump!” and “Say it!” Sen Cruz tried to dismiss the outburst as “enthusiasm of the New York delegation” — only to have Trump himself suddenly appear in the back of the convention hall.

Virtually every head in the room seemed to turn from Sen Cruz to Trump, who was stone-faced and clearly angry as he egged on delegates by pumping his fist. Sen Cruz was all but drowned out as he asked for God’s blessing on the country and left the stage, while security personnel escorted his wife, Heidi, out of the hall. One delegate yelled “Goldman Sachs!” at her — a reference to the company that has employed her, a job that Trump attacked during the primaries. A short while later, Sen Cruz faced insults as he made his way down a corridor — one woman yelled “Traitor!” When he tried to enter the convention suite of the Las Vegas (NV) casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, he was turned away.

Will Fox News’s prime-time lineup remain intact? Will the network’s ratings fall back to earth after this wild presidential election? Who could possibly replace Roger Ailes?

Breathless, yes, but Fox News’s seemingly unassailable position as the most powerful cable news channel was rocked this week by the news that Ailes, the only leader the network has ever known, was negotiating his exit as chairman after accusations of sexual harassment. No matter how unseemly his departure, Ailes will leave Fox News in strong shape. Thanks to an election year that has been a boon for all cable news channels, the network has never had higher ratings. And on July 20, as confusion swirled about the leadership of the network, many financial analysts told investors that the huge profits it delivers for 21st Century Fox were in no danger of suddenly disappearing.

Roger Ailes’s tenure as the head of Fox News appears to be over. Ailes and 21st Century Fox, Fox News’s parent company, are in the advanced stages of discussions that would lead to his departure as chairman, said Susan Estrich, one of Ailes’s lawyers. The development follows a sexual harassment suit filed on July 6 against Ailes by a former anchor, Gretchen Carlson. The suit prompted 21st Century Fox to conduct an internal review and it set off an intense round of speculation in the news media and the television industry about Ailes’s future at Fox News.

On July 19, the sides were negotiating terms that could include Ailes’s staying on in a consulting role for Fox News. Estrich said nothing had been finalized about what sort of continuing role he could have at the network. “Roger is at work,” 21st Century Fox said. “The review is ongoing. And the only agreement that is in place is his existing employment agreement.” Ailes’s exit would be a humbling and startlingly sudden fall from power for a man who started Fox News from scratch 20 years ago and built it into a top-rated cable news network and a critical profit center for 21st Century Fox. Along the way, Ailes, a former Republican operative, established Fox News as the leading media platform for conservative politics. He also minted prime-time stars like Bill O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly and Greta Van Susteren.

[Commentary] Many critics of Silicon Valley question whether the industry is really doing all it can to influence policy on this issue of [police violence]. “We know what it looks like when tech cares, and it doesn’t look like peace signs in the Uber app,” said Anil Dash, a tech entrepreneur and activist. Dash cited the example of FWD.us, the initiative for immigration reform led by tech executives like Zuckerberg. He also cited a colossal joint effort among websites like Tumblr and YouTube to stop two anti­piracy bills in 2011. The latter effort was able to persuade 10 million people to ask their representatives to protest the bills, which were ultimately killed. The tech industry knows how to lobby Washington on issues that affect its bottom line, but it limits its engagement with other issues to grandstanding. Or as Dash puts it, more bluntly: “Tech only cares about black people as consumers.”

Ultimately, what the tech industry really cares about is ushering in the future, but it conflates technological progress with societal progress. And perhaps all of us have come to rely too deeply on machinery and software to be our allies without wondering about the cost, the way technology doesn’t fix problems without creating new ones.

A yearlong digital training course for Irish high school teachers started in 2014. A fund to help European news outlets adapt to the web popped up in 2015. And in March, a virtual reality exhibition began at a Belgian museum to showcase a Renaissance painter. All these projects are aimed at supporting European culture and education, helping the region embrace the fast-changing online world. And all are financed by Google.

Google has been staging a full-court press in Europe to finance everything from start-up offices to YouTube-sponsored music concerts, trying to remake its image in the region as it battles a mounting list of regulatory woes. Those efforts represent a campaign of “soft lobbying” where instead of, or alongside, paying registered lobbyists to advocate its case in the corridors of power, a company looks to change the minds of the public at large. In Google’s case, experts say, its push equates to an almost unprecedented effort by a United States tech company to change the perceptions of Europeans, many of whom still see it as an American interloper that does not play by the rules. Google’s soft lobbying efforts are by no means unique, and have filled a funding gap that governments and European rivals are unwilling, or incapable, of matching. But the company has ramped up its campaign in recent years, earmarking about $450 million from 2015 to 2017 — based on Google’s public filings and industry estimates of its activities — to revamp its reputation with Europeans and, more important, the region’s policy makers who have the power to issue fines totaling billions of dollars.