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Heat wave in U.S. West threatens health in vulnerable communities

A roofer works on a new roof while the sun beats down on him as the heat wave continues, June 17, 2021, in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. /AP Extreme temperatures like the ones blistering the America

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Spotify acquires Podz, a podcast discovery platform

Podcasts are all the rage, but podcast discovery is a challenge. Today, Spotify announced its acquisition of Podz, a startup that’s trying to solve the problem of podcast discovery.“At Spo

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Instagram’s TikTok rival, Reels, rolls out ads worldwide

Instagram Reels are getting ads. The company announced today it’s launching ads in its short-form video platform and TikTok rival, Reels, to businesses and advertisers worldwide. The ads will be

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Beamery raises $138M at an $800M valuation for its ‘operating system for recruitment’

Online job listings were one of the first things to catch on in the first generation of the internet. But that has, ironically, also meant that some of the most-used digital recruitment services aroun

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Kenyan foodtech startup Kune raises $1M pre-seed for its ready-to-eat meals service

While there has been a wave of innovation in food tech worldwide, it’s still in early days for Africa. There are only a handful of African food-tech startups, and a year and a half’s worth

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Facebook rolls out new tools for Group admins, including automated moderation aids

Facebook today introduced a new set of tools aimed at helping Facebook Group administrators get a better handle on their online communities and, potentially, help keep conversations from going off the

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Volvo Cars wants to make a concept car using “fossil-free” steel

Volvo Cars wants to be climate-neutral by 2040, and it has set its sights on a major vehicle component that’s notoriously difficult to decarbonize: steel. The automaker has partnered with Swedish comp

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Daily Crunch: In $1.2B deal, EV battery maker Solid Power files to go public

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.Welcome back to the Daily Crunch for June 15, 2021. Henry here while

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Uberall raises $115M, acquires MomentFeed to scale up its location marketing services

Location-based services may have had their day as a salient category for hot apps or innovative tech leveraging the arrival of smartphones, but that’s largely because they are now part of the un

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Mobile game spending hits record $1.7B per week in Q1 2021, up 40% from pre-pandemic levels

The Covid-19 pandemic drove increased demand for mobile gaming, as consumers under lockdowns looked to online sources of entertainment, including games. But even as Cov

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Even heroes need encouragement: The sci-fi game shining a spotlight on mental health

Developer Insomniac's latest release, Ratchet And Clank: Rift Apart, tackles mental health issues such as anxiety.

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Is Joe Biden's policy towards China "Trump 2.0"?

07:51 Editor's note: John Mearsheimer, Professor of Department at Political Science at the University of Chicago tells Wang Guan that China's achievements, instead of ideological differ

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Everyone you know is a Disney princess, which means AR is queen

This weekend, all of your friends morphed one by one into animated, Pixar-inspired characters. This isn’t a fever dream, and you’re not alone.On Thursday, Snapchat released a Cartoon 3D Style Lens, wh

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Euro 2020: Matchday 3 roundup

England 1 - 0 Croatia England's Raheem Sterling and Mason Mount celebrate scoring against Croatia. /Reuters Three years on from the Russia 2018 semifinal comes a rematch that not even Floyd Ma

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Global Political Calendar: NATO conf., Biden with Putin, Iran election

The upcoming week will see a busy time with several high-attention political events on the agenda. U.S. President Joe Biden will refresh the U.S.' position with NATO allies and grab headlines with

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7 new security features Apple quietly announced at WWDC

Apple went big on privacy during its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote this week, showcasing features from on-device Siri audio processing to a new privacy dashboard for iOS that makes it

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The rise of robotaxis in China

AutoX, Momenta and WeRide took the stage at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 to discuss the state of robotaxi startups in China and their relationships with local governments in the country.They also talked