Robocalls are rising sharply in the U.S., and there’s no disconnect in sight.

New York artist Jennifer May Reiland’s phone rings all the time. While that gives the impression that she’s a very popular lady, the constant calls she gets aren’t from real people: They’re robocalls or telemarketing algorithms trying to sell her something. While this is a daily annoyance for many, Jennifer’s relationship with robocallers goes even deeper. “I work at a bookstore and for a while, I guess robocallers were spoofing our number because we would get multiple calls each day from people demanding angrily, ‘Why did you just call me?’ and when I said we didn’t, they refused to believe me,” she says.

As strange as this situation was, it wasn’t the fact that a robocall agency had stolen her work’s phone number that surprised Reiland. It was the fact that all of these people had actually answered their phones. “It mainly just amazed me that people actually call back unknown numbers that called them!” she exclaimed. “I assume all unknown numbers are robocalls at this point.”

This is a familiar scenario for most phone-owning Americans. In 2018, about 26.3 billion robocalls were placed to cellphones and landlines — roughly seven calls per month per person. If that’s not enough to make you want to go off the grid, consider this: The number of robocalls in the U.S. increased an estimated 41.3 percent from 2017-2018.

Real influence and fake news are putting Beijing center stage in Indonesian politics. Will China be President Joko Widodo’s Achilles heel?

It was the first week of 2019, and the rumor spread quickly: Officials had found seven containers with punched ballots shipped from China to Indonesia’s Tanjung Priok port. The ballots, the rumor went, were cast for Indonesia’s President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and his running mate, Ma’ruf Amin, with the aim of impacting the genuine vote count in the country’s coming elections. An investigation showed that the rumor was false — there were no such containers stashed with ballots. But by then, the claim had been retweeted more than 17,000 times.

The incident was an example of an unlikely shadow that’s increasingly falling on Indonesia’s April elections to the Parliament and presidency: China. Polls at the start of the month suggest Jokowi is in the lead, poised to win again. But he faces an unusual challenge. In December, right-wing Islamic organizations held protests outside the Chinese embassy in Jakarta and demanded that the Indonesian government respond to the human rights violations against Uighurs. The opposition’s presidential candidate, Prabowo Subianto, is calling for a review of the country’s trade policy with China, arguing that unfair practices are hurting the Indonesian economy. Prabowo has criticized major Chinese infrastructure investments in Indonesia. And social media is awash with misinformation campaigns spreading falsehoods — that illegal Chinese workers are flooding the country, that the secular Jokowi is spreading communist ideology through Indonesia’s education system and that tampered ballots are coming in from China.

Investments in clean energy aren’t leading to revenues yet, underscoring a growing struggle over their future. 

It has been nearly 20 years since BP launched its “Beyond Petroleum” advertising campaign, which included a new sunburst logo and a plethora of videos about making solar panels. The logo endured; the solar manufacturing business did not. Now BP and other global oil majors are again embarking on advertising sprees — but this time with a twist. Unlike previous efforts to burnish their green credentials, these new ads reflect the existential crisis the fossil fuels business is in.

The multimillion-dollar campaigns in recent months from groups including Equinor and Royal Dutch Shell come at a time when the industry is facing increasing investor pressure to act on climate change, difficulty in recruiting talent and mounting legal challenges related to greenhouse gas emissions.

The new BP campaign, in particular, is indicative of a pervasive theme across the industry — how to produce more energy with fewer emissions. The U.K. major is highlighting its legacy oil and gas business as well as new investments into wind and solar power.