The $7,500 federal EV tax credit has been used for several years to entice consumers to make greener car purchasing decisions, but it has expired for some automakers — and they feel the government needs to remove limits on that incentive. Reuters has learned the CEOs of Ford, GM, Stellantis and Toyota sent a letter to congressional leadership asking them to eliminate the sales-based tax credit cap. The move would help counter economic factors and supply shortages that have raised the costs of producing EVs, according to the companies.

The credit currently applies to the first 200,000 cars sold by any given brand. GM and Tesla have already reached the 200,000-unit mark, while both Ford and Toyota could hit the cap this year. This doesn't affect state-level discounts. The companies hope Congress will replace the unit-based cap with a sunset date that would end the credit once the EV marketplace is "more mature."

It's not certain that enough politicians will warm up to the idea. Senator Joe Manchin, for instance, recently questioned the need for extended credits when EV demand regularly outstrips supply. And when the current Senate frequently shoots down bills without clear bipartisan support, any attempt to legislate the credit could fall apart.

The companies have strong motivations to act now, though. Republicans may regain control of one or both sides of Congress during this fall's midterm elections, and car industry execs are concerned the shift in power could kill chances of extending tax credits. Former President Trump tried to axe the credit in his proposed 2020 budget, and had the support of Republicans — the chances aren't high that the GOP will back an extension.

The customer tax breaks might not be as necessary as they once were, mind you. GM plans to sell a Chevy Equinox EV around $30,000, while Tesla has long-term plans for a $25,000 car. Although these models are years away and won't compete with the lowest-priced conventional cars, they hint at a future where EVs are genuinely affordable without government subsidies.

DJI has temporarily suspended sales and all business activities in both Russia and Ukraine "in light of current hostilities," the dronemaker has announced. As Reuters reports, that makes it the first major Chinese company to halt sales in Russia after the country started its invasion of Ukraine in February. Unlike their peers in the West, most Chinese companies have chosen to continue their operations in the country. 

A DJI spokesperson told Reuters that it's not making a statement about any country by pulling out of Russia and Ukraine — it's making a statement about its principles. "DJI abhors any use of our drones to cause harm, and we are temporarily suspending sales in these countries in order to help ensure no-one uses our drones in combat," the spokesperson told the news organization. 

This move comes a month after Ukrainian politician Mykhailo Fedorov called on DJI to stop selling its products in Russia. The country's Minister of Digital Transformation posted an open letter for the dronemaker on Twitter that says Russia is using DJI products to navigate its missiles "to kill civilians." It also says Russia is using an extended version of DJI's AeroScope drone detection platform to gather flight information. 

In addition, MediaMarkt, a German chain of stores selling electronics across Europe, removed DJI's products from its shelves after receiving "information from various sources that the Russian army is using products and data from the Chinese drone supplier DJI for military activities in Ukraine." DJI denied that it was actively supporting the Russian military not just by providing hardware, but also by providing flight data and called the accusations "utterly false." 

A few days ago, DJI issued a statement to condemn the use of its products to cause harm. It said it does not market or sell its products for military use and that its distributors have all agreed not to sell products to customers who'll clearly use them for military purposes. "We will never accept any use of our products to cause harm, and we will continue striving to improve the world with our work," the company wrote.

Get ready for a Dynamite workout. Apple has a few updates for Fitness+ timed with International Dance Day, which is coming up on April 29th, and arguably the most interesting are the new Dance workouts set to Korean pop sensation BTS' music. Through its existing relationship with BTS, Apple will be teaching users the actual choreography from videos for songs like "Dynamite," "Mic Drop" and, very aptly, "Permission to Dance." 

The first of the BTS dance workouts will arrive next week, but Apple is also bringing new content to its Artist Spotlight series. In addition to music from BTS, Fitness+ is also getting playlists from ABBA and Queen. Every Monday over the next four weeks, there will be new workouts featuring each artist across categories like Strength, HIIT, Treadmill, Cycling, Yoga, Pilates and Dance. 

There will be new dance workouts featuring music from other musicians too, including sessions led by trainer Jhon Gonzalez set to genres like cumbia, tango and Indian pop. While the Fitness+ team generally comes up with their own choreography, for the BTS videos they will be teaching the band's own smooth-like-Butter moves. 

Those who work hard enough and shed some Blood, Sweat and Tears (okay, hopefully no blood) on April 29th will be eligible to earn limited-edition awards and animated Messages stickers. You'll have to be On the workout for at least 20 minutes, and Fitness+ will highlight six sessions of that duration to help you Go get those rewards.

On April 25, which by the way is the perfect date for a Spring Day, Apple will also release a new collection of workouts to ease beginners into dancing with three 20-minute guides. There will also be three 30-minute options that focus more on performance, and span categories like 80's classics, Latin music and hip hop. That last one is great for Hip Hop Lovers.

If BTS is your Idol, this news is probably Dope. Or Fire. Apple may add more workouts based on the band's music so Stay tuned for more. And if BTS or dance are not your thing, then Life Goes On.

You might soon see DJI's drones flying in particularly rough conditions. DJI has unveiled the Matrice 30 (aka M30), an enterprise-class drone with IP55 dust and water resistance that lets it fly in heavy rain, strong wind and even icy situations. It can fly to altitudes as high as 22,965ft above sea level (with the right propellers) and survive temperatures between -4F and 122F, too. Even the included RC Plus controller can handle a downpour thanks to an IP54-rated body.

The M30 can also fold with a button press. The self-heating battery lasts for 41 minutes, but the charging case can bring the drone from 20 percent to 90 percent in 30 minutes.

DJI's robotic flier will also require little human intervention in some cases. A variant of the M30 will support an upcoming DJI Dock that, like other drone stations, lets the aircraft fly programmed routes and autonomously land to recharge between rounds. You can remotely monitor work sites from the air in areas where beyond-line-of-sight drone use is allowed, in other words. The dock is dust- and water-resistant, includes its own weather station and has both a battery backup and 4G dongle support to keep it running.

DJI is taking orders for the M30 today through a contact form. The dock will be available sometime in the fourth quarter of 2022, and M300 RTK drone owners can also buy a new Zenmuse H20N sensor with "starlight-grade" night vision. There's no mention of pricing, but it's safe to assume individual drone enthusiasts aren't the target market. This is for companies that have the need and budget to fly drones on a regular basis.

Now might be a good moment to buy an Echo Show 5 as a smart alarm clock. Amazon is once more selling the second-gen Echo Show 5 for a record-low $45, or a large 47 percent below the official price. You can also buy the Kids edition for $55 (42 percent off) if the colorful shell and year-long Kids+ subscription prove appealing.

The Echo Show 5 is practically tailor-made for your nightstand between its small size, a sunrise alarm and a tap-to-snooze feature. It sounds surprisingly good for its size and includes a camera (with privacy shutter) for morning video calls. If you just want to check the weather or control your Alexa-powered smart home from your bed, this is all you need.

There are some limitations. The interface isn't quite as elegant as Google's Nest Hub, and you'll want that device if you use other Nest devices or otherwise immerse yourself in the Google Assistant ecosystem. The video calling performance isn't a huge leap over the first-gen Echo Show 5, and you can't plug in a better set of speakers. For $45, though, there's not much room to complain — it costs less than an Echo Dot with clock while offering more overall functionality.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

On Saturday morning, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine entered its third day, some of the country’s official government websites went down following a series of alleged cyberattacks. Among the sites that aren’t accessible as of the writing of this article include that of the Kremlin and the country’s Ministry of Defence. Several Twitter accounts claiming affiliation with Anonymous say the international hacking collective is behind the attacks.

“Faced with this series of attacks that Ukraine has been suffering from the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, we could not help but support the Ukrainian people,” said one account. At the start of the conflict, the group said it would launch a “cyber war against the Russian government.” However, the Kremlin has denied Anonymous is behind the attacks, according to CNN.

It’s believed Anonymous is also responsible for hacking several Russian state TV channels. People have uploaded videos showing those channels playing Ukrainian music and displaying images of the country’s flag and other nationalistic symbols. 

The collective has also pledged to “keep the Ukrainian people online as best we can,” even as the invasion takes a heavy toll on the country's internet infrastructure. While there hasn’t been a widespread blackout, some parts of Ukraine, particularly those areas where fighting has been the most intense, have seen greatly diminished access. That's something that has prevented people from staying in touch with their loved ones.

Russia is responsible for the cyberattacks that took down the websites for Ukraine's government agencies and major banks back in January, according to The White House. Anne Neuberger, the administration's deputy national security adviser, said the government has "technical information that links the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU" to the hacks. Neuberger added that "GRU infrastructure was seen transmitting high volumes of communication to Ukraine based IP addresses and domains."

According to AP and Reuters, Britain has also publicly attributed the incident to Russia, saying that the country's GRU military intelligence agency is almost certainly involved. While the attacks managed to take down the targeted Ukrainian websites, Neuberger said they had "limited impact," thanks to the the country's officials that quickly secured and restored them. 

Ukraine's defense and foreign ministries were among the affected websites, and a message in Ukrainian, Russian and Polish left by the attackers on the latter translated to: "Ukrainians! All your personal data has been uploaded to the public network. All data on the computer is destroyed, it is impossible to restore them." The message also referenced the "historical land" and showed crossed-out versions of the Ukraine map and flag. 

The Ukrainian Information Ministry said back then that there were early indications Russia carried out the attacks. In addition, the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy also suggested that references to Ukrainian ultra-nationalist groups were merely an attempt by the Russians to mask their footprint. 

Neuberger said the White House is publicly calling out Kremlin, because "[t]he global community must be prepared to shine a light on malicious cyber activity and hold actors accountable for any and all disruptive or destructive cyber activity." Although the attacks had "limited impact," the White House believes Russia could carry out more disruptive activities in the future followed by an invasion of Ukraine. President Biden has announced on Friday that the US has obtained intelligence showing that Russia's Vladimir Putin has made the decision to invade Ukraine in the coming days. 

Feeding the planet's 8 billion people is challenge enough and our current industrialized commercial practices are causing such ecological damage that we may soon find ourselves hard-pressed to feed any more. For decades, scientists have sought out higher yields and faster growth at the expense of genetic diversity and disease — just look at what we've done to the humble banana. Now, finally, researchers are working to revitalize landrace and heirloom crop varieties, using their unique, and largely forgotten, genetic diversity to reimagine global agriculture. 

In his new book, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them, BBC food journalist Dan Saladino scours the planet in search of animals, vegetables and legumes most at-risk of extinction, documenting their origins and declines, as well as the efforts being made to preserve and restore them. In the excerpt below, Saladino takes a look at all-important rice, the cereal that serves as a staple crop for more than 3.5 billion people around the world.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing

Excerpted from Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2021 by Dan Saladino. All rights reserved.

Whereas the global Green Revolution was largely steered by American science and finance, China’s push for greater food production was more self-contained. Both efforts happened more or less in parallel. Mao’s attempt at rapid industrialization, the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in the late 1950s, forced farmers off their land, leading to famine and the death of millions. Soon after, an agricultural researcher, Yuan Longping, was given the task of helping China’s recovery by increasing the supply of rice. Based in a lab in Hunan, Yuan, like Borlaug in Mexico, spent years working with landraces and crossing varieties in meticulous experiments. By the early 1970s, he had developed Nan-you No. 2, a hybrid rice so productive it had the potential to increase food supply by nearly a third. Farmers were told to replace the old varieties with the new, and by the start of the 1980s, more than 50 per cent of China’s rice came from this single variety. But, as with Borlaug’s wheat, Yuan’s rice depended on huge amounts of fertilizers, pesticides and lots and lots of water.

In the 1960s, in another part of Asia, a team of scientists were also breeding new rice varieties. What became known as the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines was funded by the American Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. The IRRI’s plant breeders also made a breakthrough drawing on the genetics of a dwarf plant. This new pest-resistant, high-yielding rice, called IR8, was released across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in 1966. Using the Green Revolution package of irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides, IR8 tripled yields and became known as ‘miracle rice’. As it rapidly spread across Asia (with the necessary agrichemicals subsidized by Western foundations and governments), farmers were encouraged to abandon their landrace varieties and help share the new seeds with neighbors and relatives in other villages. Social occasions, including weddings, were treated by Western strategists as opportunities to distribute IR8. A decade later, rice scientist Gurdev Khush, the son of an Indian rice farmer, improved on the ‘miracle rice’ (IR8 wasn’t the tastiest rice to eat and had a chalky texture). A later iteration, IR64, was so productive that it became the most widely cultivated rice variety in the world. But while most of the world was applauding the increase in calories created by the new rice varieties, some people were sounding a note of caution about what was also being lost.

In July 1972, with the Green Revolution in full flow, the botanist Jack Harlan published an article entitled ‘The Genetics of Disaster’. As the world’s population was increasing faster than at any time in history, Harlan said, crop diversity was being eroded at an equally unprecedented rate. ‘These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine,’ he argued. ‘In a very real sense, the future of the human race rides on these materials.’ Bad things can happen at the hands of nature, Harlan reminded his readers, citing the Irish potato famine. ‘We can survive if a forest or shade tree is destroyed, but who would survive if wheat, rice, or maize were to be destroyed? We are taking risks we need not and should not take.’ The solutions being developed in the Green Revolution would be as good as they could be until they failed – and when they did, the human race would be left facing disaster, he warned. ‘Few will criticize Dr. Borlaug for doing his job too well. The enormous increase in . . . yields is a welcome relief and his achievements are deservedly recognized, but if we fail to salvage at least what is left of the landrace populations of Asia before they are replaced, we can justifiably be condemned by future generations for squandering our heritage and theirs.’ We were moving from genetic erosion, he said, to genetic wipe-out. ‘The line between abundance and disaster is becoming thinner and thinner, and the public is unaware and unconcerned. Must we wait for disaster to be real before we are heard? Will people listen only after it is too late?’ It may be nearly too late, but, fifty years on, people are listening to Harlan.

One of them is Susan McCouch, Professor of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University and an expert on rice genetics. Her research includes the less familiar aus rice which evolved in the Bangladeshi delta. ‘It has the most stress-tolerant genes of all the rice we know,’ says McCouch. ‘It grows on poor soils, survives drought and is the fastest species to go from seed to grain.’ And yet aus is endangered. Most farmers in Bangladesh have abandoned it and switched to more commercial varieties. Only the poorest people have saved the rice, farmers who couldn’t afford to buy fertilizers and build irrigation systems. Its genetics are so rare because, unlike japonica and indica which travelled far and wide, aus stayed put. ‘The people who domesticated it never left the river delta,’ says McCouch. ‘They weren’t empire builders, didn’t have armies and never enslaved populations.’ But by bequeathing the world aus, they have left their mark.

In 2018, McCouch, along with researchers from USDA, released a new rice called Scarlett. It was, the team said, a rice with nutty rich flavors but also ‘packed with high levels of antioxidants and flavonoids along with vitamin E’. To create it, McCouch had crossed an American long-grain rice called Jefferson and a rice that was discovered in Malaysia. The reason the new rice was packed with nutrients and called Scarlett was because the Malaysian plant was a red-colored wild species. One person who would have been unsurprised at the special qualities of these colored grains was Sun Wenxiang, the farmer I had visited in Sichuan.

Inside a room on his farm, Sun was packing up small parcels of his special red rice to send to customers in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Hangzhou. They order his red mouth rice on WeChat, the Chinese social media app used by more than a billion people across Asia that is part Twitter and part PayPal (and so much more). Some have told him they buy it for its taste or intriguing color, but most buy it for its health properties.

For farmers such as Sun working to save China’s endangered foods, help is at hand at the Centre for Rural Reconstruction, a modern day iteration of a movement founded a century ago to empower peasants and revitalize villages. In the 1920s a group of intellectuals and smallholders set up the original Rural Reconstruction Movement to develop farms, improve crops, establish co-operatives and sell more produce in China’s towns and cities. After the revolution, and during Mao’s rule, it disappeared, but in the 1990s was resurrected. A former government economist named Professor Wen Tiejun believed rural communities across China faced serious decline as manufacturing boomed and millions of people migrated from thousands of villages. By 2010, the country had experienced the largest and most rapid rural-to-urban migration ever witnessed in human history. Professor Wen began to ask what this meant for the future of China’s small-scale farmers and the food they produced and, as a result, he launched the New Rural Reconstruction Movement.

The garden surrounding the two-story training center 50 miles north of Beijing is a statement of intent: its raised beds are fertilized with night soil, the nutrients processed from a row of eco-toilets (an ancient technique, as Chinese farmers enriched their fields using human and animal waste for thousands of years). The idea came from a book written a century ago, not by a Chinese agricultural expert, but an American one. Farmers of Forty Centuries by Franklin Hiram King has become essential reading matter for some students at China’s Centre for Rural Reconstruction.

In the early 1900s, King, an agronomist from Wisconsin, worked at the United States Department of Agriculture, but he was regarded as a maverick, more interested in indigenous farming systems than the agricultural expansion the department had been set up to deliver. Convinced that he could learn more from peasant farmers than the scientists in Washington, King left the United States in 1909 and set out on an eight-month expedition through Asia. ‘I had long desired to stand face to face with Chinese and Japanese farmers,’ he wrote in the book’s introduction, ‘to walk through their fields and to learn by seeing some of their methods, appliances and practices which centuries of stress and experience have led these oldest farmers in the world to adopt.’ King died in 1911 before he had completed his book and the work was pretty much forgotten until 1927, when a London publisher, Jonathan Cape, discovered the manuscript and published it, ensuring it remained in print for the next twenty years. It went on to influence the founding figures in Britain’s organic movement, Albert Howard and Eve Balfour. The farmers who visit the Centre for Rural Reconstruction and come across King’s book, will read an account of how food was produced in China’s villages a century ago. Crops grown then, now endangered, are also being resurrected.

Inside a storeroom at the center, now a bank of some of China’s rarest foods, I was shown boxes full of seeds and jars and packets of ingredients all produced by farming projects in villages supported by the New Rural Reconstruction Movement. All were distinctive products that were helping to increase farmers’ incomes. There was dark green soy from Yunnan in the south; red-colored ears of wheat from the north; wild tea harvested from ancient forests; and bottles of honey-colored rice wine. And among other varieties of landrace rice was Sun Wenxiang’s red mouth glutinous grains.

‘When we lose a traditional food, a variety of rice or a fruit, we store up problems for the future,’ Professor Wen told me. ‘There’s no question China needs large-scale farms, but we also need diversity.’ With 20 per cent of the world’s population, China encapsulates the biggest food dilemmas of our times. Should it intensify farming to produce more calories, or diversify to help save the planet? In the long run, there is no option but to change the system. China suffers from wide-scale soil erosion, health-harming levels of pollution and water shortages. As a consequence, land has become contaminated, there are algae blooms around its coastline and high levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

There are signs of change. In September 2016 China ratified the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Among the specific targets it set was zero growth in fertilizer and pesticide use. To conserve more of its genetic resources and crop diversity, China is one of the few countries investing heavily in new botanic gardens to protect and study endangered species. The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences has also built a collection of half a million samples of landrace crops, varieties now being researched for future use. This is what Jack Harlan might have called the genetics of salvation. It’s a long way from King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries, but there is clear recognition that China’s current food system can’t go on as before.

‘We need to modernize and develop, but that doesn’t mean letting go of our past,’ said Wen. ‘The entire world should not be chasing one way of living, we can’t all eat the same kind of food, that is a crazy ideology.’ And then he shared the famous quote attributed to Napoleon: ‘Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.’ ‘Well,’ said Wen, ‘we have woken up and we’ve started to eat more like the rest of the world. We need to find better ways of living and farming. Maybe some answers can be found in our traditions.’

Don't expect the US Federal Reserve to issue a digital dollar any time soon. CNBCreports the Reserve has published its long-in-the-making study of a central bank cryptocurrency, but took no stances on whether or not it should pursue the technology. The paper instead explored the potential benefits and pitfalls of digital currencies, and asked for public comments.

The Fed cautioned that existing cryptocurrencies tend to be highly volatile, consume lots of energy and frequently have significant transaction limitations. A central bank-backed format might overcome some of those problems, the Reserve said, by serving as a "bridge" between payment services, making finance more inclusive and providing "safe and trusted" money. The Reserve also believed the digital money could improve cross-border payments and protect the role of the US dollar on the world stage.

However, the government also warned that official digital cash would need to account for possible changes to the financial world, such as encouraging more runs on financial companies. It would also need to maintain privacy, protect against crimes like fraud and be resilient. The Reserve floated the possibility of offline capability to enable transactions when internet access isn't available, such as during natural disasters.

The agency stressed its report was a "first step" in discussing the possibility of a central bank cryptocurrency, and that it would give the public until May 20th, 2022 to offer feedback and answer questions. For now, though, the Reserve will remain neutral and will only work on a digital currency if longer-term research supports the concept. It's resisting the pressure to act quickly, even if other countries are already moving forward.

Hackers have hit around 70 Ukraine government department websites, forcing many of them offline. A message in Ukrainian, Russian and Polish on the country's foreign ministry site reportedly read "Ukrainians! All your personal data has been uploaded to the public network. All data on the computer is destroyed, it is impossible to restore them.”

The page referenced "historical land" and featured crossed-out versions of Ukraine map and flag. "All information about you has become public, be afraid and wait for the worst. This is for you for your past, present and future," the message is said to have read. Along with the foreign ministry site, the state emergency service, state treasury and the ministries of education, foreign affairs, sport, energy, agrarian policy, veterans and environment were reportedly targeted.

However, Ukraine's security service told CNN that personal data was not affected. It noted that most services have been restored. 

According to the Ukrainian Information Ministry, early indications suggest the Russian Federation carried out the attack. "This is not the first time or even the second time that Ukrainian Internet resources have been attacked since the beginning of the Russian military aggression," the ministry said in a statement.

The Ministry of Culture and Information Policy suggested that references to Ukrainian ultra-nationalist groups in the message were an attempt by hackers to mask the "Russian footprint." The ministry added that "It is obvious that this was done on purpose to cast a shadow over the hacker attack on Poland: Russia and its proxies have been working for a long time to create the quarrel between two friendly neighboring countries."

Hackers believed to be from Russia have targeted other parts of Ukraine's infrastructure in recent years. In 2015, an attack took out parts of the power grid. Since then, Russia was also blamed for attacks on Ukraine's weapon supply and the Kiev airport. The NotPetya cyberattack, for which the US charged Russian hackers in 2020, impacted the Ukrainian government and banking system, a state power distributor and an airport, as well as entities in Russia and the US.

The latest attack took place as Russia mobilizes 100,000 troops to Ukraine's border. Western allies fear Russia will again invade Ukraine, following its annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Attempts by the US, NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to de-escalate the situation in talks with Russia this week haven't proven successful. Russia’s lead envoy said the discussions hit a dead end.

Although Russia has denied plans to attack Ukraine, it said it may take action if its demands aren't met. Among those is an assurance that Ukraine and Georgia won't join NATO.

Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of NATO, condemned the cyberattack on Ukraine. He said NATO has been working with the country for years to bolster its cyber defenses and that the two sides will sign an agreement on enhanced cyber cooperation in the coming days. As part of that, the country will gain access to NATO’s malware information sharing platform.