Author: Megan Geuss

The New York Times has obtained internal e-mails and memos from Volkswagen Group that may suggest that top executives within the company were aware as early as 2014 that many of their diesel vehicles had illegal emissions control-cheating software.

Volkswagen has maintained that only a small number of engineers knew about the emissions-cheating software that has been found on Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche diesel vehicles. The company has said that Martin Winterkorn, the CEO of Volkswagen Group when then scandal broke, did not know that any illegal software existed on US cars. Winterkorn stepped down from his position shortly after the news of the company’s wrongdoing broke.

If executives were aware that their cars had emissions system cheating software on them before the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) notified the company that it was in violation of federal rules, Volkswagen Group could face harsher fines and penalties for failing to disclose to shareholders issues that could materially affect the company’s stock price.

Last Friday, a charter Alitalia plane carrying Pope Francis was struck by a laser beam as it came in to land at Mexico City International Airport. Although the pilot was able to land the Airbus A330-200 safely, he alerted air traffic control, which alerted local police, according to USA Today.

It's unclear whether the pope's flight was specifically targeted. ABC News noted that "several other pilots in the area also reported laser strikes.” It appears that no one was hurt.

Still, laser strikes have become more and more common over the last decade. In 2012, the FBI called laser strikes against airplanes an "epidemic," noting that reported strikes in the US went from 283 in 2005 to about 3,700 in 2012. According to USA Today the Federal Aviation Administration logged a record total of 7,153 laser strikes in the US in 2015 through December 11.

A US appeals court on Wednesday upheld the $450 million settlement that Apple agreed to (PDF) in an antitrust lawsuit over e-book price-fixing. After a district court found Apple liable for antitrust violations, the company settled for $450 million, but one consumer challenged that settlement figure, saying it was decided prematurely and was too low to represent a fair deal for e-book buyers.

Back in 2012, the Department of Justice followed a class-action lawsuit accusing Apple and five publishers (Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan) of conspiring to offer e-books at price points between $12.99 and $14.99—well above Amazon’s $9.99 e-books. The publishers settled but Apple held out, and in June 2014 a Manhattan district court judge ruled that Apple was indeed violating antitrust law. Apple appealed the ruling, but it worked out a settlement deal later that year—if the company went through the appeals process and lost, it would pay $400 million to consumers in cash and e-book credits and $50 million to the plaintiff’s lawyers. But if Apple won a retrial, it would only pay $50 million to consumers and $20 million to lawyers. And if the decision were overturned on appeal, Apple would pay nothing.

Objector-Appellant John Bradley, a consumer who purchased e-books, appealed the District Court’s decision to approve the $450 million settlement that Apple agreed to. Bradley challenged "the fairness, reasonableness, and adequacy of the Settlement,” arguing that Apple should pay more for its alleged role in the scheme.

On Tuesday IBM announced that it’s been working to make blockchain technology—which was refined and popularized by Bitcoin—easier for businesses to use for financial and non-financial purposes. Specifically, the company is launching what it’s calling “blockchain-as-a-service,” or a set of tools for "creating, deploying, running, and monitoring blockchain applications on the IBM Cloud.”

The idea of applying blockchain technology outside of the realm of Bitcoin has gained a lot of interest from forward-thinking companies in the past year or so. Blockchain applications are also called “distributed ledger technology” because they remove the need for a centralized database and, like Bitcoin, give every transaction in a particular system a cryptographic hash that can be checked by any member of the group.

Traditional financial institutions as well as startups hoping to serve those banks and stock exchanges have been among the first to glom onto the idea that a decentralized ledger could be used to make money transfer more reliable and more secure. If all parties can double check money transfers (even if they don’t know what was exchanged in the transfer), then theoretically, errors caused by mistake or malice could be reduced. Recently nine banking institutions including JP Morgan, BBVA, and Credit Suisse partnered with a company called R3 to work on decentralizing some databases. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this January, MasterCard officials said that the credit card network was carefully studying how to best apply blockchain concepts.

Facebook will have to face a censorship lawsuit over a 19^th century oil painting of a woman's genitalia, a Paris appeals court ruled on Friday.

The ruling favored a French teacher whose Facebook account was suspended when he posted an image (NSFW) of a famous Gustave Courbet painting called L’Origine du monde. The portrait depicts a woman naked from the waist down at a graphic angle, and it hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The teacher claimed that Facebook censored him, and he is asking for €20,000 (or about $22,500) in damages. Facebook countered that the man’s lawsuit was invalid because Facebook's Terms of Service stipulate (section 15) that all users must resolve disputes with the social network, "in the US District Court for the Northern District of California or a state court located in San Mateo County.”

On Thursday afternoon, Southern California Gas Company (SoCal Gas) announced that it had “temporarily controlled” a natural gas leak that has spewed more than 80,000 tons of gas from a well just north of Los Angeles. The leak began on October 23, and after SoCal Gas exhausted all other solutions to plug the leak, the company began drilling relief wells as a last-ditch attempt in early December.

"On Feb. 11, 2016, the relief well intercepted the base of the leaking well, and the company began pumping heavy fluids to temporarily control the flow of gas out of the leaking well,” a statement from SoCal Gas read. "DOGGR [California’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources] officials and representatives from other state and local agencies were at the site to observe the operation. The leak and the flow of gas will be declared ended once DOGGR has confirmed that the well has been permanently sealed."

The company will now have to seal the well with cement to permanently shut it down, a process that could take a few more days. Once that occurs, the thousands of displaced residents who lived in the nearby Porter Ranch community will have eight days to return to their homes, at which point SoCal Gas will terminate the leases on temporary housing that the company has been paying for.

On Thursday, the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) announced that it is pressing charges against Foodles Production, a UK-based Disney subsidiary that produced Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, over an incident that left actor Harrison Ford with a broken leg.

According to the HSE press release, Ford was "struck by a heavy hydraulic metal door on the set of the Millennium Falcon” on June 12, 2014, leaving him with a broken leg among other injuries. The accident occurred at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire.

Ford was 71 at the time of the accident.

Although Twitter posted revenue of $710.5 million (PDF) in the fourth quarter of 2015—a result that narrowly surpassed the company’s high-bar projection from the previous quarter—the social media company posted a net loss of $90 million for the fourth quarter.

Worse, however, were the company’s user base statistics. Twitter reported that its Monthly Average Users (MAU) essentially remained flat from Q3 to Q4, but if Twitter subtracted its SMS-only customers (who are largely based in India and Brazil, and don’t see ads the way mobile customers do), that MAU number fell to 305 million per year, down from 307 in the previous quarter.

Twitter executives were quick to point out, however, that the monthly active user base had increased in January to Q3 levels. On the call, a Twitter executive attributed the rebound to the first quarter being a historically strong quarter for Twitter given the number of live events like award shows, sporting events, and other big celebrations that fall in that time period.

On Wednesday afternoon, Tesla Motors posted a 4^th quarter net loss (PDF), but the company’s CEO Elon Musk assured investors that Tesla expects to see "positive cash flow starting next month" and to be profitable again by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) standards in Q4 2016. Although the company's stock was down 3 percent at close of market, after-hours trading favored the stock price by 9.5 percent.

The company also confirmed that it would officially announce the highly anticipated Model 3 on March 31. Tesla added that it was on track for production and delivery of the budget-oriented car by late 2017.

According to the company’s quarterly financial statement, it made $1.75 billion in revenue in Q4 2015 (or $1.21 billion according to GAAP standards, which treat leased vehicles differently), and $5.29 billion (or $405 billion, GAAP) for the 2015 year as a whole. Still, the company posted a net loss of $114 million in Q4 (or $320 million, GAAP).

Time Warner had its fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday morning, and HBO, a subsidiary of the network, revealed some interesting information about its new standalone streaming service, HBO Now. The highly anticipated launch of HBO Now was expected to draw a huge following from cord-cutters. But Richard Plepler, the CEO of HBO, told investors and journalists that HBO Now had only attracted about 800,000 subscribers since the service launched in April.

Plepler said he was pleased with the growth, especially considering that HBO Now hasn’t yet been released on Playstation and Xbox platforms. He added that HBO Now also hasn’t yet released content from Jon Stewart, Bill Simmons, and the Vice Daily News Show, which he said was certain to drive subscriptions. Still, 800,000 subscribers could be seen as a slow start, especially considering that Plepler told investors in November 2014 that he was hoping to draw in four or five million new subscribers with HBO Now.

”We’re learning all the time… We see an enormous amount of subscribers ahead,” Plepler said on the call today, adding that, "HBO Now is an additive part of our growth strategy… We’re going to work in a multifaceted way to expand our sub[scriber] base.”