Panama Papers: Full database published

The ICIJ is publishing the information in the public interest The data the ICIJ is now making public represents a fraction of the Panama Papers, a trove of more than 11.5 million leaked files from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world’s top creators of hard-to-trace companies, trusts and foundations.

The consortium is not publishing the totality of the leak, and it is not disclosing raw documents or personal information en masse. The database contains a great deal of information about company owners, proxies and intermediaries in secrecy jurisdictions, but it does not disclose bank accounts, email exchanges and financial transactions contained in the documents.

In all, the database reveals more than 360,000 names of people and companies behind secret offshore structures. As the data are from leaked sources and not a standardised registry, there may be some duplication of names. The data was originally obtained from an anonymous source by reporters at the German newspaper Süeddeustche Zeitung, who asked ICIJ to organise a global reporting collaboration to analyse the files. More than 370 reporters (https://panamapapers.icij.org/about.html) in nearly 80 countries investigated the files for a year. Their investigations uncovered the secret

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Five Pacific islands lost to rising seas as climate change hits

Six more islands have large swaths of land, and villages, washed into sea as coastline of Solomon Islands eroded and overwhelmed. Five tiny Pacific islands have disappeared due to rising seas and erosion, a discovery though to be the first scientific confirmation of the impact of climate change on coastlines in the Pacific, according to Australian researchers.

The submerged islands were part of the Solomon Island

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This Personal electric plane won't need an airport

Backed by the ESA, the "Lilium" will take off vertically and fly at 250 mph. Now that hoverboards are an honest-to-god thing, we have to say we're pretty disappointed with how flying cars have worked out. Another company has jumped into the fray with a vertical take-off plane called theLilium that can soar at 400 km/h (250 mph). We'd normally say they're dreaming with the specs: A 10,000 foot ceiling, 500 km (310 mile) range and helicopter-like takeoffs, all on battery power. However, it's hosted by a European Space Agency (ESA) incubator and the team from the Technical University of Munich plans manned tests next year.

The Lilium has wings and flies like a regular plane, but takes off like a helicopter by swiveling its ducted fan engines, much like DARPA's VTOL X-Plane concept. The engines, batteries and controllers

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Password tips you've never heard

Once again, hundreds of millions of passwords used in e-mail accounts were stolen this week. And, again, we're being told there's only one way to keep ourselves digitally safe: Change our passwords frequently, with hard-to-figure combinations of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers and symbols.

This week we asked the panelists on the #Talking Tech Roundtable podcast how they go about it. You'll be amazed at this simple tip from 

a Google product manager. If it could work for him — he's never been hacked — perhaps we need to revise our password strategies and make them easier to recall.

The most commonly used

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Water deficit to hurt economies of African countries – World Bank

The World Bank has warned that water shortages will severely hurt economies of the countries in Africa including Middle East and Central Asia by the middle of the century, taking double digits off their GDP.

The bank predicted that by 2050, growing demand for cities and for agriculture would put water in short supply in regions where it is now plentiful and worsen shortages across a vast swath of Africa and Asia, spurring conflict and migration. Water shortages could strip off 14 per cent of GDP in the Middle East and nearly 12 per cent of GDP in the Sahel– without a radical shift in management-according to the bank’s projections.

Central Asia could lose close to 11 per cent of GDP and East Asia

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Panama Papers: Secret offshore world feeds global inequality

At a meeting on Brexit and the law last week in Dublin, former attorney general Paul Gallagher SC emphasised the potential for instability in the UK’s referendum on leaving the European Union.

What if one of the largest economies in Europe was to pull out of such a project as the EU? Would others follow suit, or threaten to do so unless they received whatever was on their national demand wish list? How would this affect an already very fragile world order? Are we back in the 1930s, Gallagher asked, sleepwalking towards disaster?

Up until the financial crisis erupted in 2008, the US Federal Reserve

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Oracle vs. Google, Round 2: Trial begins over Java API copyright claim fight is back in court

Two of the world's biggest software companies face off in court this week for the second time, even though the most important issue of their dispute has already been resolved.

The high-profile trial that begins Monday will again include celebrity CEOs on the stand, dense expert testimony, and an utterly unpredictable outcome decided by a jury. But what's truly at stake in Oracle v. Google, round two?

For those who work with code for a living, a lot. The case revolves around how Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, can and cannot be used. Boiled down, APIs define how different types of code communicate to each other. If owners of those APIs can use copyright law to control how programming is done, there will be a sea change in industry practices. For many developers, especially of open source software, this will be a change for the worse.

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Self-driving cars could hit roads within 5 years, says Fiat Chrysler chief

Self-driving cars could hit roads within five years, the head of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has said, days after the company announced an alliance with Google parent Alphabet. Chief executive Sergio Marchionne declined to disclose financial details of the partnership or a timetable for building minivans that will expand the Internet company’s test fleet of autonomous vehicles.

“It’s not sort of ‘pie-in-the-sky,’ the thing is real and it’s coming,” Marchionne said. “People are talking about 20 years, I think we’ll have it here in the next five years.” Alphabet this week

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