Would You Like Solar Panels on Every Roof? | Nikki Haley's Next Move

Yi+ founder Mo Zhang’s innovative AI image recognition will be a boon to e-commerce, but what about China’s police state?

Mo Zhang is revolutionizing the path from seeing a product to buying it. Say you’re watching a program on a smart TV or another device, and you like an outfit being worn by a particular model on screen. Her software can identify the items and send you to a site where you can purchase the goods. Like the look of a cityscape on a travel show? Search for flights and hotels. It’s all possible thanks to the flagship computer vision software at the Beijing startup Yi+ AI.

Of course, there are more unsettling uses. The types of technology being developed by Yi+ have been the focus of much controversy in China in recent months thanks to their increased use in public security and policing.

Lower costs, policy changes and a growing recognition of the market potential of low-income communities are bringing solar power to poverty-stricken homes.

In a white hard hat, cargo work pants and sunglasses, Krystal Ruiz climbs the scaffolding of a multifamily public housing unit on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Ruiz is installing solar panels on the building as an installation supervisor with GRID Alternatives, a nonprofit providing solar energy to low-income communities in cities across the U.S. She’s excited. A public housing tenant herself, Ruiz is helping to realize the potential of solar power for communities that simply couldn’t access it a decade ago.

It’s a silent revolution sweeping across America’s landscape even as the federal government rolls back on its climate commitments under President Donald Trump. When engineers Erica Mackie and Tim Sears founded GRID Alternatives in 2001, after working in renewable-energy installation in the private sector, they were loners. Now, cheaper technology, new policies and a growing recognition of the market potential of lower-income communities are combining to make what were earlier government- and nonprofit-led initiatives attractive for the private solar-energy sector too.

It’s unlikely Trump’s outgoing UN ambassador is going away any time soon.

Sporting a pink tweed jacket, Nikki Haley smiles brightly into the Fox News camera, as she calmly and cheerfully defends her handling of the GOP rebuttal to President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address. “Our country is made up of immigrants,” Haley says. “That is the fabric of America.”

Donald Trump soon fired back, calling Haley “weak” on immigration. The two verbally sparred a few more times — Haley said Trump is “everything a governor doesn’t want in a president,” and Trump tweeted that the people of South Carolina are “embarrassed” by Haley.

It was quite a different atmosphere in the Oval Office on Tuesday.