Madrid’s city government announced plans on Monday to ban the oldest and most polluting vehicles from the city center by 2025 in a bid to crackdown on air pollution. The local government will prohibit the use within the city’s limits of gasoline cars registered before 2000 and diesel-powered cars registered before 2006, which at the moment account for 20 percent of all those registered. The ban would lower nitrogen dioxide levels in the city by an estimated 15 percent, a poisonous gas behind respiratory problems, Madrid’s local  government said in …

Before Donald Trump’s election, Laurence Berland viewed political protest as a sort of curiosity. He was in a good place to see it: San Francisco’s Mission District, once an immigrant enclave in the country’s heartland of radicalism that is increasingly populated by people like him — successful tech workers driving up rents while enjoying a daily commute to Silicon Valley on luxury motor coaches. Berland regarded the activism of his adopted city with a mix of empathy and bemusement, checking out Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and protests against the gentrification …

U.S. President Donald Trump this week will unveil a budget expected to massively increase military spending while slashing other federal programs. The proposal, set to be released Thursday, will offer the most detailed look yet at how Trump intends to move ahead with his so-called “America First” policy. The budget will likely face significant opposition in Congress, where lawmakers are already bickering over a plan to overhaul the nation’s health care program. Many of Trump’s fellow Republicans support his plan for a larger military; but, unlike Trump, some want to …

The trendsetting South by Southwest music festival is all about the next big thing, but the heated politics of the moment is stealing the show. Tensions over immigration have put a heavy air over the typically breezy weeklong music bash that begins Monday and includes headliners The Avett Brothers, Weezer and the Wu-Tang Clang dropping into Austin, along with roughly 2,000 other acts from around the world. It’s more than just promises of bands using SXSW as a stage for politically-charged performances in the wake of President Donald Trump’s executive …

A researchers suggests that “60 percent of primate species are now threatened with extinction and about 75 percent have declining populations.” The threat has primatologists around the world sounding the alarm about the future of our closest evolutionary cousins. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports. … From: MeNeedIt

There were startling colors here just a year ago, a dazzling array of life beneath the waves. Now this Maldivian reef is dead, killed by the stress of rising ocean temperatures. What’s left is a haunting expanse of gray, a scene repeated in reefs across the globe in what has fast become a full-blown ecological catastrophe. The world has lost roughly half its coral reefs in the last 30 years. Scientists are now scrambling to ensure that at least a fraction of these unique ecosystems survives beyond the next three …