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WASHINGTON (AP) — In a major step against climate change, President Joe Biden is proposing a return to aggressive Obama-era vehicle mileage standards over five years, according to industry and government officials briefed on the plan. He’s then aiming for even tougher anti-pollution rules after that to forcefully reduce greenhouse gas emissions and nudge 40% of U.S. drivers into electric vehicles by decade’s end.

The proposed rules from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation reflect Biden’s pledge to attack climate change but also balance concerns of the auto industry, which is urging a slower transition to zero-emission electric vehicles.

The regulatory action would tighten tailpipe emissions standards rolled back under President Donald Trump. The proposed rules are expected to be released as early as next week, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the rules haven’t been finalized.

Environmental groups said Tuesday that the proposal did not go far enough.

“The world isn’t the same as it was in 2012 when President Obama signed the clean car standards,” said Katherine Garcia, acting director of Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All campaign. “Millions of Americans have had to swelter in heat waves, evacuate their homes in the face of onrushing wildfires, or bail out flooded homes.”

Biden has set a goal of cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least half by 2030. The transportation sector is the single biggest U.S. contributor to climate change.

The proposed rules would begin with the 2023 car model year, applying California’s 2019 framework agreement on emissions standards reached with Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, BMW and Volvo, according to three of the officials. The California deal increases the mileage standard and cuts greenhouse gas emissions by 3.7% per year.

Requirements ramp up in 2025 to Obama-era levels of a 5% annual increase in the mileage standard and a similar cut in emissions. They then go higher than that for model year 2026, one of the people said, perhaps in the range of 6% or 7%.

Neither EPA nor the Transportation Department would comment on the proposal.

The new standards aim to go partway in meeting the call from environmental groups, which had pushed for a more immediate return to at least the Obama-era standards.

“We’re at the climate cliff, and the stakes are too high to aim low,” the Center for Biological Diversity will write in a full-page ad in The New York Times on Wednesday urging tough action. Dan Becker, director of the center’s Safe Climate Transportation Campaign, on Tuesday said the administration’s proposal is inadequate because it embraces two years of the California deal, which offered a number of exemptions.

In the proposed rule, the EPA is likely to make a nonbinding statement that the requirements will ramp up even faster starting in 2027, forcing the industry to sell more zero-emissions electric vehicles, the industry and government officials said. For now, the agency is seeking to ask that 40% of all new car sales be electric vehicles by 2030, according to one of the officials.

The Biden administration defers for now in setting post-2026 mileage requirements, setting the stage for bigger fights ahead over the level of government effort needed to combat climate change against the future of the auto industry, which currently draws most of its profits from gas-powered SUV sales.

Delaware Sen. Tom Carper, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has been urging tough rules that would ban sales of new gasoline-powered passenger vehicles by 2035. He’s argued that the industry is already moving in the direction of zero-emission electric vehicles.

Under Obama, automakers were required to raise fuel economy 5% per year from 2021 through 2026. But under Trump, that was reduced to 1.5% annually. In 2019, five automakers — Ford, BMW, Honda, Volkswagen and later Volvo — split with competitors and reached a deal with California to raise mileage by 3.7% per year.

Trump later repealed California’s legal authority to set its own standards, which the Biden administration is moving to restore.

The Trump rollback of the Obama-era standards would require a projected 29 miles per gallon in “real world” stop and start driving by 2026. That’s well below the requirements of the Obama administration rules that would have increased it to 37 mpg.

The California deal with Ford and the other automakers has vehicles getting about 33 mpg on average, according to environmental groups, after accounting for credits for electric vehicles.

It wasn’t clear whether the Biden administration would restore credits for selling electric vehicles, but that is likely since EVs are a cornerstone of its plan to fight climate change. Biden’s nearly $2 trillion infrastructure proposal includes 500,000 new charging stations for electric cars and trucks, and he has proposed tax credits and rebates to help spur sales.

Under the Obama-era standards, automakers got double credit for fully electric vehicles toward meeting their fuel economy and pollution requirements. That “multiplier” was removed in the Trump rollback.

Several automakers including General Motors have expressed a commitment to transition to all electric vehicle sales, though environmental groups are skeptical the companies will stick to their promises if consumers continue to favor gas-powered cars, which now cost less. Potentially easing the transition for automakers is a nearly trillion-dollar bipartisan Senate infrastructure bill that would help fund the half-million new electric charging stations around the country. An accompanying $3.5 trillion Senate spending bill backed by Democrats was expected to provide tax credits and other incentives for consumers to switch to electric vehicles.

Those measures are still pending in Congress.

The move comes at a time when Americans are buying record numbers of less-efficient pickup trucks and SUVs, which will make it harder for the industry to comply. So far this year, more than three-quarters of U.S. new vehicle sales were trucks, vans and SUVs, according to Edmunds.com. Fewer than a quarter were more efficient cars.

Only three automakers — Tesla, Honda and Subaru — complied with the standards in 2019, the latest year figures are available from the EPA. The rest had to use fuel efficiency credits from previous years or buy electric vehicle credits from other automakers to hit their goals.

Fully electric vehicles represent just 2% of new vehicle sales in the U.S., but analysts expect that to rise rapidly in coming years.

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Krisher reported from Detroit.

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Three tech companies — Apple, Microsoft and Google owner Alphabet — reported combined profits of more than $50 billion in the April-June quarter, underscoring their unparalleled influence and success at reshaping the way we live.

Although these companies make their money in different ways, the results served as another reminder of the clout they wield and why government regulators are growing increasingly concerned about whether they have become too powerful.

The massive profits pouring into each company also illustrated why they have a combined market value of $6.4 trillion — more than double their collective value when the COVID-19 pandemic started 16 months ago.

APPLE

Apple’s first iPhone model capable of connecting to ultrafast 5G wireless networks continued to power major increases in quarterly revenue and profits for tech’s most valuable company.

With iPhone sales posting double-digit growth over the previous year for the third consecutive quarter, Apple’s profit and revenue for the April-June period easily exceeded analyst estimates. The Cupertino, California, company earned $21.7 billion, or $1.30 per share, nearly doubling profits earned during the same period last year. Revenue surged 36% to $81.4 billion.

But in a Tuesday conference call with analysts, Apple CEO Tim Cook lamented that the steadily spreading delta variant of the coronavirus is casting doubt on how the rest of the year will unfold. “The road to recovery will be a winding one,” Cook said. That uncertainty has already led Apple to delay employees’ mass return to its offices from September to October. Most of Apple’s stores, though, are already open.

The iPhone 12, released last autumn, is shaping up to be Apple’s most popular model in several years, largely because it’s the first to work on the 5G networks that are still being built around the world. Apple’s iPhone sales totaled nearly $40 billion in the latest quarter, up 50% from a year ago.

Apple’s services division, the focal point of a high-profile trial revolving around the commissions it collects from iPhone apps, saw revenue climb 33% from last year to $17.5 billion. A potentially game-changing decision from the trial completed in May is expected later this summer.

Among Apple’s upcoming challenges is whether shortages of computer chips and other key parts will force the company to delay its next iPhone this year, as it did last year. While Apple expects revenue to rise 10% in the current quarter, it said it may have more trouble getting parts for iPhones and iPad during the upcoming months. Executives skirted questions about another possible iPhone delay.

ALPHABET

Google’s earnings improved markedly over the year-ago period, when the pandemic was starting to bite consumer spending and its partner, advertising. Now that vaccines have allowed people to shed the shackles of the pandemic and splurge again, a big chunk of that pent-up demand has spurred advertisers to spend more too, with a big chunk going to Google and its corporate parent Alphabet Inc.

Powered by Google, Alphabet earned $18.53 billion, or $27.26 per share, during the quarter, a nearly threefold increase from last year’s earnings of $6.96 billion, or $10.13 per share. Google’s advertising revenue soared 69% to $50.44 billion thanks to what CEO Sundar Pichai called a “rising tide” of online activity among consumers and businesses.

Retail, along with travel and entertainment ads, were the biggest contributors to the revenue increase, the company said. Total revenue surged 62% from last year to $61.88 billion. Revenue after subtracting TAC, or traffic acquisition costs, was $50.95 billion.

The April-June quarter looks particularly strong since the 2020 downturn forced Google to report its first decline in quarterly ad revenue from the previous year.

Analysts were expecting Alphabet to earn $19.24 per share on revenue of $56.2 billion, and $46.2 billion after subtracting TAC. Alphabet’s stock jumped $135, or 5.1%, to $2,773 in after-hours trading after the results.

MICROSOFT

Microsoft on Tuesday reported fiscal fourth-quarter profit of $16.5 billion, up 47% from the same period last year. Net income of $2.17 per share beat Wall Street expectations. The software maker also topped forecasts by posting revenue of $46.2 billion in the quarter that ended on June 30, a 21% increase over the same time last year.

Analysts were expecting Microsoft to earn $1.91 per share for the April-June quarter on revenue of $44.1 billion. Microsoft profits have soared throughout the pandemic thanks to ongoing demand for its software and cloud computing services for remote work and study. After an initial dip in after-hours trading, the company’s shares later recovered and were up by less than 1%.

Growth in sales of Microsoft’s cloud services, which compete with Amazon and other companies, and its Office productivity tools for handling work documents and email both outpaced overall revenue growth. The company’s historical pillar — personal computing — grew just 9% in the quarter.

Microsoft noted that supply issues were affecting its personal-computing division, including for its Surface and Windows products. The company recently unveiled the next generation of Windows, called Windows 11, its first major update in six years. It will be available later this year.

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BEIJING (AP) — China’s industry ministry has announced a 6-month campaign to clean up what it says are serious problems with internet apps violating consumer rights, cyber security and “disturbing market order.”

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said in an online notice that, among other things, companies must fix pop-ups on apps that deceive and mislead users or force them to use services they might not want.

The order is part of a wider effort to crack down on tech industries and police use of personal information. Authorities have ordered fines and other penalties for some of China’s biggest tech companies.

This latest campaign was launched with a teleconference call Friday, the ministry said. On Sunday, it issued its 15th list of dozens of apps it has said require fixing.

Among 22 specific scenarios it said required “rectification,” the ministry cited pop-up windows as a specific problem, especially situations where the entire screen of a pop-up window is a jump link with a false close button.

Other problems it pointed to were malicious blocking of website links and interference with other companies’ products or services; threats to data security, due to a failure to encrypt sensitive information while it is being transmitted, and failure to obtain users’ consent before providing data to other parties.

It also took aim at illicit broadband networks, which it called “black broadband” that failed to conform to website filing procedures or might be subletting or using illegal access to networks.

The regulators have been stepping up enforcement of anti-monopoly, data security, financial and other rules against scores of tech companies that dominate entertainment, retail and other industries.

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LONDON (AP) — Irish singer Ronan Keating on Monday accepted “substantial damages” from a British tabloid newspaper publisher over phone hacking.

The former member of boy band Boyzone is the latest in a long list of celebrities whose mobile phone voicemail messages were intercepted by News of the World reporters more than a decade ago.

Keating’s lawyer, Ellen Gallagher, told a High Court hearing that the singer had identified a number of “suspicious” articles published between 1996 and 2011 which he said contained his private information.

Keating’s suspicions about who might be leaking personal information to the newspaper “generated distrust which impacted on his relationships and caused him considerable distress and upset,” Gallagher said.

Ben Silverstone, lawyer for News of the World publisher News Group Newspapers, said the company offered “its sincere apologies to the claimant for the distress caused to him by the invasion of his privacy by individuals working for or on behalf of the News of the World.”

“The defendant acknowledges that such activity should never have taken place and that it had no right to intrude into the private life of the claimant in this way,” he said.

The amount of the damages was not disclosed.

Owner Rupert Murdoch shut down the 168-year-old News of the World in 2011 after the revelation that its employees had eavesdropped on celebrities, politicians and crime victims. Since then, police investigations, criminal trials and a public inquiry have revealed that phone hacking was widespread at Britain’s tabloids.

News Group Newspapers and rival publisher Trinity Mirror have both paid millions of pounds to settle lawsuits from hacking victims.

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DALLAS (AP) — It was the start of a steamy Friday two Augusts ago when Jason Whisler settled in for a working breakfast at the Coffee Ranch restaurant in the Texas Panhandle city of Borger. The most pressing agenda item for city officials that morning: planning for a country music concert and anniversary event.

Then Whisler’s phone rang. Borger’s computer system had been hacked.

Workers were frozen out of files. Printers spewed out demands for money. Over the next several days, residents couldn’t pay water bills, the government couldn’t process payroll, police officers couldn’t retrieve certain records. Across Texas, similar scenes played out in nearly two dozen communities hit by a cyberattack officials ultimately tied to a Russia-based criminal syndicate.

In 2019, ransomware had yet to emerge as one of the top national security concerns confronting the United States, an issue that would become the focus of a presidential summit between Washington and Moscow this year. But the attacks in Texas were a harbinger of the now-exploding threat and offer a vivid case study in what happens behind the scenes when small-town America comes under attack.

Texas communities struggled for days with disruptions to core government services as workers in small cities and towns endured a cascade of frustrations brought on by the sophisticated cyberattack, according to thousands of pages of documents reviewed by The Associated Press and interviews with people involved in the response. The AP also learned new details about the attack’s scope and victims, including an Air Force base where access to a law enforcement database was interrupted, and a city forced to operate its water-supply system manually.

In recent months, a ransomware attack led to gasoline shortages. Another, tied to the same hacking gang that attacked the Texas communities, threatened meat supplies. But the Texas attacks — which, unlike these prominent cases, were resolved without a ransom payment — make clear that ransomware need not hit vital infrastructure or major corporations to interrupt daily life.

“It was just a scary feeling,” Whisler, Borger’s emergency management coordinator, recounted in an interview.

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In the early morning of Aug. 16, as most Texans were still asleep, hackers half a world away were burrowing into networks. They encrypted files and left ransom notes.

That afternoon, with the attack’s impact becoming apparent, the city manager of Vernon emailed colleagues about a “ransom type” virus affecting the police department. The city near the Oklahoma state line could get back online by paying the $2.5 million the hackers were demanding, he wrote, but that was “obviously” not the plan.

“Holy moly!!!!!” replied city commissioner Pam Gosline, now the mayor.

The culprits were affiliated with REvil, the Russia-linked syndicate that last spring extorted $11 million from meat-processor JBS and more recently was behind a Fourth of July weekend attack that crippled businesses around the globe. In the Texas case, however, communities were ultimately able to recover most of their data and rebuild their systems without anyone paying ransom.

The hackers gained their foothold through an attack on a Texas firm that provides technology services to local governments, branching through screen-sharing software and remote administration to seize control of the networks of some of the company’s clients.

An early hint of trouble came with a 2 a.m. phone call to the firm’s president, Richard Myers. His company, TSM Consulting Services Inc., provides data communications service for Texas communities, linking police agencies to a statewide law enforcement database.

One of his client’s servers was unresponsive, he was told. Upon inspection, Myers noticed that someone who wasn’t supposed to be in the computer system was trying to install something remotely. He rebooted the server. Things initially seemed fixed until the department called back: One of its laptops had a ransom note on it.

It soon became clear the problem wasn’t isolated to a single client.

“I don’t think you can begin to express the terror that goes through your mind when something like that starts to unfold,” he said.

Within hours, state officials were hunkered inside an underground operations center normally used for calamities like hurricanes and floods. Gov. Greg Abbott declared it a cyber disaster. Texas National Guard cyber specialists were activated.

“If you needed to build something — you needed an inspection, something like that — out of luck for a week,” said Andy Bennett, the state’s then-deputy chief information security officer. “Records look-ups? Couldn’t go look up records. Basically, if there’s a municipal function that you would go down to a city hall for, or that you would rely on the police department for, it wasn’t available.”

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In Borger, a city of fewer than 13,000, early indications were worrisome as the city raced to shut down its computers.

Gibberish ransom demands spat out of printers and displayed on some computer screens. Government files were encrypted, with titles like “Budget Document” replaced by nonsensical combinations of letters and symbols, said current city manager Garrett Spradling.

Vital records, like birth and death certificates, were offline. Payments couldn’t be processed, checks couldn’t be issued — though, blessedly for Borger, it was an off-week for payroll. Signs posted on a drive-up window outside City Hall told residents the city couldn’t process water bill payments but cutoffs would be delayed.

One update shared with city officials soon after the attack described how every server was infected, as were about 60% of the 85 computers inspected by that point. A city government email told council members that agendas for a meeting would be in paper format, “since your tablets won’t be able to connect.” An official told a judge it was unclear if computer systems would be operational in time for trials two days away.

Because the city had paid for offsite remote backup, Borger had the capability to reformat servers, reinstall the operating system and bring data back over. A newly purchased server that had yet to be installed came in handy. The police department, however, retained its data locally and the attack hampered officers’ access to previous incident reports, Spradling said.

As they worked to resolve the problem, officials shared draft press releases that offered reassurances that critical emergency operations would continue and that the attacks weren’t a reflection of any misstep by the city.

One councilmember, a military veteran named Milton Ooley, cautioned against publicity for the hackers’ “form of terrorism.”

“This is consistent with my firsthand experience with how the U.S. handled terrorism in Europe when I was there in the late ’70s, some of which was directed at U.S. units including missile units I worked with/in during those days,” he wrote colleagues. In an interview, he said he believed the public was entitled to information but hackers didn’t deserve notoriety.

The day of the attack, Jeremy Sereno was working his civilian job at Dell when he was contacted by the state about the attack. A lieutenant colonel and senior cybersecurity officer with the Texas Military Department, Sereno began helping deploy Texas National Guard troops to hacked cities, where specialists over the next two weeks helped assess the damage, restore data from backed-up files and retake control of locked systems.

One of the first areas of concern was a small North Texas city where the attack locked the “human-machine interface” that workers used to control the water supply, forcing them to operate the system manually, Sereno said. Water purity was not endangered.

“That was probably our biggest number one,” Sereno said. “That’s what’s considered critical infrastructure, when you talk about water.”

AP is not identifying the city at the urging of state officials, who said doing so could draw new attacks on its water system.

In Graham, a small city a couple of hours west of Dallas, the computer virus attacked a police server housing body-camera videos, causing hundreds of them to be lost, said Sgt. Chris Denney.

For days, officers had to use notebooks and pens to take reports. Instead of using mobile data terminals to run checks on people, officers had to rely on requests to dispatchers of a sheriff’s office that was unaffected by the attack, said Chief Brent Bullock.

“That’s been at these officers’ fingertips for years, and then all of a sudden, they don’t have that anymore,” Bullock said. Officers, he added, “kind of had to go back to old school.”

Other communities preemptively took potentially vulnerable systems offline. In the Austin suburb of Leander, the city shut off the program that police used to check license plates for 24 hours as IT staff worked to confirm that it hadn’t been exposed.

Emails reveal moments of exasperation as problems persisted.

Spradling complained to an outside technology company about “massive delays” in getting a response to a support request. Local technology managers griped about what they perceived as state and law enforcement secretiveness. Several in cities that were not hit complained in emails after the attack that they hadn’t been told what company the ransomware spread from and didn’t have enough information to ensure their systems were safe.

The impact wasn’t limited to local governments. Sheppard Air Force Base confirmed to AP that its access to a statewide law enforcement database used for background checks on visitors was temporarily interrupted, causing delays for issuing passes. Operations were otherwise unaffected.

Officials at Joint Base San Antonio Randolph, which public records indicated was also affected, did not directly answer questions about the hack but said that it had no impact on “missions or network security” and the base “as a whole” was not a target.

One complication: TSM’s customer list was itself encrypted, though eventually a copy was procured, officials said. State officials didn’t immediately know which communities had been victimized. They called around asking, “Were you impacted? Were you impacted? Were you impacted?” said Nancy Rainosek, Texas’ chief information security officer.

“There was one place that we contacted and they said, ‘no, no, we’re not hit,’” Rainosek said. Then, days later, “they said, ‘yes, we were.’”

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State officials spent a full week inside their command post — built to withstand a nuclear blast — and used a map to chart the attack’s spread. All told, some 23 government entities were ultimately shaded to indicate they’d been hit.

“It’s a bit of a mind struggle because you’re trying to stay focused and present on the folks that you know about,” said Amanda Crawford, executive director of the Texas Information Resources Department. “But you’re continually worrying about, ‘Is there something you’re missing? Or are there others, that you’re going to get another call that somebody else has been hit?’”

By Wednesday evening, records show, most city services in Borger were restored, including utility payments, vital statistics and most employee computers. The situation had stabilized; the city ended up with about 80% of its data back and the concert Whisler was planning happened as scheduled.

Still, in a city with a roughly $31 million budget, Borger had overtime IT expenses to contend with and purchased $44,000 worth of new computers. It’s invested in additional cybersecurity protections, including some $30,000 in annual costs for additional remote backup.

Borger officials in the weeks before the hack had discussed upgrading the threat level from cyberattacks. Those considerations are now more than theoretical.

“When you complain about having to change your passwords, you complain a lot more when it’s never happened to you and you don’t have anything to relate it to,” Spradling said. “You tend to complain a little less after you’ve had to answer the phone and tell 300 people they couldn’t pay their water bill.”

But damage remains two years later.

Sometimes even now, Spradling said, officials will go to pull an old report or address record — only to find it isn’t there.

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Tucker reported from Washington.

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