At the table: Gov. John Bel Edwards will travel to Rhode Island this week to meet with other governors from around the nation. The Associated Press reports Edwards will leave Louisiana on Wednesday for the National Governors Association summer meeting in Providence. Vice President Mike Pence and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will address the meeting. While there, Edwards will be part of a panel discussion with FEMA Administrator Brock Long about disaster recovery and building more resilient communities. He also will participate in a meeting of the Council of Governors—10 governors from both parties, chosen by President Donald Trump to discuss homeland defense and National Guard issues. Edwards is expected to return to Louisiana on Saturday.
Connected: Microsoft wants to extend broadband services to rural America by using the buffer zones separating individual television channels in the airwaves. The Associated Press reports Microsoft plans to partner with rural telecommunications providers in 12 states. The strategy calls for a combination of private and public investments and regulatory cooperation from the Federal Communications Commission to get about 2 million rural Americans connected to high-speed internet in the next five years. Microsoft’s initiative, unveiled today, comes as policymakers struggle to extend high-speed internet services to rural areas, which cable and phone companies have often shunned as cost prohibitive. Read more.
Rained out: Zhao Shuping was so impressed with bike-sharing programs that successfully launched across China he figured the same model could be implemented for umbrellas. As Business Insider reports, the businessman founded Sharing E Umbrella, a company that makes umbrellas available to the public via a rental program similar to bike sharing. Ideally, members of the public would pay a deposit and a fee every 30 minutes to borrow an umbrella from stands at subway or bus stations. But things haven’t gone as planned. Just three months after making 300,000 of them available, the umbrella sharing company has announced that most have gone missing. A report in the news website Thepaper.cn quotes Zhao as saying his company is by no means a washout. He plans to make 30 million umbrellas available across China by the end of the year. Read more.
