Gondolas and water taxis will never again have to vie with big cruise ships for space in front of Venice’s St Mark’s Square, an Italian governmental committee has decided. Venetian residents and environmentalists have long voiced concerns about floating pleasure palaces sailing close to the fragile city, dwarfing its Gothic and Byzantine churches.Under the new rules, which follow a temporary limit imposed three years ago, the largest ships weighing 100,000 tonnes or more will take a less glamorous route to the industrial port of Marghera, far from the Grand Canal.

Almost 99% of the 18,000 Venetians who voted in an unofficial referendum in June supported the ban. The mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, hailed the plan as answering the requirements of residents, the lucrative tourism business, and conservation groups who have raised the alarm about damage to the shallow lagoon and canals.

“We want it to be clear to Unesco [the United Nations cultural agency] and the whole world that we have a solution,” Brugnaro said after the meeting of the governmental committee charged with saving Venice. “This takes into account all the jobs created by the cruise industry, which we absolutely couldn’t afford to lose, and we can start to work seriously on planning cruises.”(theguardian)…[+]

Uber has taken a step forward in its plan to make autonomous “flying taxis” a reality, signing a contract with Nasa to develop the software to manage them.

The company’s chief product officer, Jeff Holden, announced the new service contract at Web Summit in Lisbon, alongside its intention to begin testing four-passenger, 200mph UberAir flying taxi services across Los Angeles in 2020, its second test market in the US after Dallas.

Uber said its flying taxi service would be purely electric and that a journey that would take 80 minutes by car in rush-hour traffic could be reduced to as little as four minutes. Uber intends to have some form of its air service operational for the 2028 LA Olympics, but experts remain sceptical as to whether autonomous flying taxis will ever become a reality.

Holden said: “Doing this safely and efficiently is going to require a foundational change in airspace management technologies. Combining Uber’s software engineering expertise with Nasa’s decades of airspace experience to tackle this is a crucial step forward.”(theguardian)…[+]

Complaining to police about her gang-rape was the beginning of a new nightmare for Kajal. Officers detained the young woman from Madhya Pradesh state in central India. They beat her with a stick, she says, until she agreed to drop the charges. She was abandoned by her husband and threatened by the accused men. “I have lost everything and everyone blames me,” said Kajal, an assumed name.

Five years since a brutal gang-rape that galvanised a movement against sexual assault in India, women who report the crime are still routinely harassed by police or bullied into silence, according to research released in Delhi on Wednesday.

The Human Rights Watch report found that willingness to report rape and other sexual offences had significantly grown, but was often stymied by regressive community attitudes, particularly outside big cities. In one case highlighted in the report, a “low-caste” woman from Haryana state was pressured by her village council to sabotage a trial against six men from a more powerful caste charged with raping her.

“[She] didn’t have another way,” a relative of the woman told HRW. “If you want to live in the village, you have to listen to the [councils].” Implementation of laws intended to protect women, passed after the 2012 attack on student Jyoti Singh, was also patchy, activists said.(theguardian)…[+]