Read at: 2021-09-25T13:35:11+01:00 (Ex-US Pres==Eleonore Keulen )
Source: News Headlines | 25 Sep 2021 | 1:07 pm IST
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Source: BBC News - Home | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:24 pm IST
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For decades, doctors and hospitals saw kidney patients differently based on their race. A standard equation for estimating kidney function applied a correction for Black patients that made their health appear rosier, inhibiting access to transplants and other treatments.
On Thursday, a task force assembled by two leading kidney care societies said the practice is unfair and should end.
The group, a collaboration between the National Kidney Foundation and the American Society of Nephrology, recommended use of a new formula that does not factor in a patient’s race. In a statement, Paul Palevsky, the foundation’s president, urged “all laboratories and health care systems nationwide to adopt this new approach as rapidly as possible.” That call is significant because recommendations and guidelines from professional medical societies play a powerful role in shaping how specialists care for patients.
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Source: Ars Technica | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:22 pm IST
Further 3,273 infections added to South Korea’s tally; fully vaccinated travellers in Northern Ireland will no longer need pre-departure test from 4 October
Authorities in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, have reimposed lockdown for ten days in six wards following a spike in cases.
The introduction of Covid passes in the Netherlands has sparked protests, with demonstrators marching against the requirement to show proof of vaccination to enter bars, theatres and other venues.
After social distancing was brought to a close on Saturday, customers are now required to show proof of vaccination, recent recovery from Covid or a negative test to enter hospitality and leisure venues in the Netherlands.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:20 pm IST
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Sunday's federal election will determine who will follow Merkel, who has served as Germany's chancellor for 16 years. The country's next government is expected to be a coalition of three parties.
(Image credit: Martin Meissner/AP)
Source: News : NPR | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:07 pm IST
As the former CEO of the blood-testing company Theranos faces fraud charges, some are asking why other tech leaders accused of wrongdoing have avoided criminal charges.
(Image credit: Nic Coury/AP)
Source: News : NPR | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:07 pm IST
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Its jasmine and roses are prized by perfumers and those eager to learn the trade. But the French Riviera town of Grasse didn't always smell sweet. Centuries ago, it was known for leather tanneries.
(Image credit: Bénédicte Desrus for NPR)
Source: News : NPR | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:02 pm IST
Twenty years on from The Corrections, America’s most lauded author is back. But will he put his foot in it again?
IT IS 11AM PACIFIC TIME and Jonathan Franzen has just turned on the light. “Special occasion,” he says drily of our video call. A sliver of sunshine dares to creep under the venetian blind at the window. “I’m vampiric for the first six hours of the day. I do not like bright light,” he says. “Also, if I had the blinds open there would be birds and they would distract.” Franzen likes birds, a lot.
Five years ago he gave up his studio office on New York’s 125th Street for this monastically bare room in Santa Cruz university. He has spent part of each year here since he met his partner, writer Kathy Chetkovich, “the Californian” of his essays, in 1998. But after “a massive tug of war”, they moved here permanently so she could be closer to her elderly mother. “It was a war I was happy to lose, because I’d been in New York for 25 years and I’d had enough,” he says. “That season of my life was over.” He tried one autumn in New York without Chetkovich before realising it wasn’t going to work, “so I just threw in the towel, and now I’m a Californian”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:00 pm IST
The free store in an Atlanta middle school offers not only food, but household items, toiletries, clothing and shoes. Social entrepreneur Jasmine Crowe hopes to open more of the stores in the future.
(Image credit: Jasmine Crowe)
Source: News : NPR | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:00 pm IST
Wellwishers held a candlelit gathering in Kidbrooke, south-east London, for Nessa, near where 28-year-old’s body was found
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 11:58 am IST
Since the Taliban seized control of the country in August, Afghans and the world have been watching to see whether they will re-create their harsh rule of the late 1990s.
(Image credit: Bernat Armangue/AP)
Source: News : NPR | 25 Sep 2021 | 11:39 am IST
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People evacuated from three towns are told they cannot return as volcano has entered new explosive phase
People evacuated from three more towns on the Spanish island of La Palma have been told they will not be able to return to their homes to retrieve their belongings because of the “evolution of the volcanic emergency”.
Rivers of lava raced down the volcano and exploded high into the air on Friday night and the airport was closed as an eruption intensified and entered its most explosive phase so far.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 11:24 am IST
Source: News Headlines | 25 Sep 2021 | 11:23 am IST
Enlarge / DeSnake is back, with big promises about keeping AlphaBay up and running this time. (credit: Illustration: Elena Lacey | Getty Images)
Just over four years ago, the US Department of Justice announced the takedown of AlphaBay, the biggest dark web market bust in history. Thai police arrested the site's 26-year-old administrator, Alexandre Cazes, in Bangkok, and the FBI seized AlphaBay's central server in Lithuania, wiping out a marketplace that was selling hundreds of millions of dollars a year worth of hard drugs, hacked data, and other contraband to its 400,000-plus registered users. The FBI called the disruption of the site a “landmark operation.”
But the fate of one key player in that massive black market scheme was never explained: AlphaBay's former number-two administrator, security specialist, and self-described cofounder, who went by the name DeSnake. Now, four years after his market's demise, DeSnake appears to be back online and has relaunched AlphaBay under his own singular leadership. After four years off the radar, he's not keeping quiet about his return.
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Source: Ars Technica | 25 Sep 2021 | 11:15 am IST
Last spring, Texas legislators came closer than ever to passing a bill that would protect people incarcerated in state prisons from summer temperatures that routinely breach 100 degrees and are due to keep rising with the climate crisis.
“It’s like being in a walk-in closet in one of the hottest days of the year with another person for maybe 16 to 18 hours a day,” said Tracy Williams, who was released from prison last December after 25 years and now works for the Texas Inmate Families Association. “Sometimes you have to rinse yourself and lay on the floor to try to catch a breeze.”
The hot weather has been to blame for the deaths of numerous incarcerated people over the years, leaving thousands of others in conditions described as torturous. In response, a movement of family members of the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people have repeatedly pushed bills in the state legislature requiring climate control in detention centers. In the wake of a cold snap last winter that showed the temperature extremes can go both ways, last spring’s version sailed through the Texas House before being left to die unattended in a Senate committee.
Now, with a special 30-day legislative session launched this week, advocates see a rare opportunity to use federal funding from the Covid-19 stimulus package to pay for prison climate-control infrastructure Texas has long deemed too expensive. House Bill 88 would mandate that state prisons maintain temperatures between 65 and 85 degrees and install new air conditioning with air purification technology designed to reduce the spread of viruses. A separate appropriations bill would tee up the American Rescue Plan money to pay for it. In Texas prisons, 265 incarcerated people have died of Covid-19, along with 63 staff members.
Even as advocates are reaching for temperature controls to help people incarcerated by the state endure climate disaster, another bill would create a special carveout that allows counties to leave immigrant detainees in dangerous heat and cold.
“It seems the trajectory of the governor is to imprison everyone he can in the worst conditions.”
Since the Texas legislature only meets every two years, the stakes for the 30-day session are high. Whether incarcerated people in Texas will begin to see more survivable climate conditions over the next two years — or worse conditions than ever — could be determined in the next few weeks.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott appears to be opposed to creating better conditions for detainees, advocates said. “It seems the trajectory of the governor is to imprison everyone he can in the worst conditions,” said Amite Dominick, president of Texas Prison Community Advocates, which is mounting a campaign to push legislators to finally pass the air conditioning bill.
The bill that could leave immigrants in the heat and cold can be traced back to Abbott’s anti-immigrant Operation Lone Star. During the summer, as a growing climate disaster gripped much of the country, the governor instead declared a disaster in Texas due to migration along the Texas border. Widely seen as a political move to push Abbott’s presidential hopes, the state made nearly $2 billion available for “border security efforts,” including to help sheriff’s offices arrest immigrants on misdemeanor rather than immigration charges.
Typically, such charges would land a person in a county jail, where they would await trial or post bail. Unlike state prisons, those jails have standards that include a requirement for temperatures to fall between 65 and 85 degrees. To accommodate the influx in immigrants arrested by border county law enforcement authorities, the state is repurposing state prison units, where there are no climate standards. In short: If an undocumented immigrant broke the law in certain counties, rather than going to a county jail they would go to a separate facility with worse conditions.
Placing immigrants in state prisons already creates worse conditions than they would face in county jails, said Alicia Torres, a member of Grassroots Leadership’s ICE Out of Austin group, which aides detained immigrants. The new bill would make the conditions even worse — including by allowing state prisons acting on behalf of county governments to forgo the climate control requirement. According to Grassroots Leadership’s policy and research manager Bethany Carson, the bill “could be used to justify the lack of almost any basic needs that would make establishing these facilities more expensive.”
“The standards are protecting the health and safety of people who are incarcerated. To say some people are deserving of that and other people are not — it’s at best morally repugnant.”
Michele Deitch, an expert in prison and jail conditions at the University of Texas at Austin, said the jail standards were created primarily to protect the counties from lawsuits. “These are not high standards,” she said. “I think the counties ought to be really worried. This could open them up to liability in lots of different ways.” (Texas already foots a hefty annual bill fighting lawsuits filed by people outside of the immigration system who have been impacted by extreme heat conditions in state prisons.)
Beyond avoiding lawsuits, Deitch said, “The standards are protecting the health and safety of people who are incarcerated. To say some people are deserving of that and other people are not — it’s at best morally repugnant.”
In a best-case scenario for incarcerated people, the bill waiving jail standards for immigrants would fail, while the climate control bill for state prisoners would succeed.
The availability of federal funds helps address detractors’ repeated — and exaggerated — excuse that climate control is too expensive. There’s even precedent in New Hampshire for federal Covid-19 relief funds to be used to install ventilation systems in state prisons.
“People inside are still human,” said Williams, the formerly incarcerated person now working with people reentering society post-prison. “Yes, a lot of us made bad decisions. We messed up. But would you put your dog or an animal in a hot car? You wouldn’t do that.”
The post One Bill in Texas Legislature Would Ease Extreme Heat in Texas Prisons. Another Makes It Worse. appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 25 Sep 2021 | 11:00 am IST
About 30% of California’s registered voters are Latino, and it appears they voted largely Democrat – but some say it was ‘about ensuring this state didn’t move backward’
Luis Sánchez worked overtime to rescue Governor Gavin Newsom in California’s recall race. His group PowerCA Action reached more than a quarter-million voters ahead of election day, encouraging young Latino Californians to head to the polls.
Related: ‘Study Newsom’s playbook’: what Democrats – and Republicans – can learn from California’s recall
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 11:00 am IST
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The youngest presidential inaugural poet in US history on Toni Morrison, the power of language and her debut children’s book
My earliest reading memory
My mom bought me a Hooked on Phonics reading kit when I was in early elementary school. I quite literally got hooked on reading and raced through as much material as I could.
The book that influenced me growing up
In third grade my teacher read us Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. It was the first time I’d heard a metaphor in such a way, and my mind was blown. It was a watershed moment for the way I viewed the power of language.
Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 10:00 am IST
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My creativity can be traced back to my heritage, to the skin colour that defined how I was perceived. But, like my ancestors, I wouldn’t accept defeat
When I won the Booker prize in 2019 for my novel Girl, Woman, Other, I became an “overnight success”, after 40 years working professionally in the arts. My career hadn’t been without its achievements and recognition, but I wasn’t widely known. The novel received the kind of attention I had long desired for my work. In countless interviews, I found myself discussing my route to reaching this high point after so long. I reflected that my creativity could be traced back to my early years, cultural background and the influences that have shaped my life. Not least, my heritage and childhood
Through my father, a Nigerian immigrant who had sailed into the Motherland on the “Good Ship Empire” in 1949, I inherited a skin colour that defined how I was perceived in the country into which I was born, that is, as a foreigner, outsider, alien. I was born in 1959 in Eltham and raised in Woolwich, both in south London. Back then, it was still legal to discriminate against people based on the colour of their skin, and it would be many years before the Race Relations Acts (1965 and 1968) enshrined the full scope of anti-racist doctrine into British law.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 9:45 am IST
Serious themes are undercut by the flippant tone of this story about a Syrian refugee who becomes a conceptual art object
Here is a muddled caper of movie that doesn’t know what it wants to say; it doesn’t work as a satire of the international art market, nor as a commentary on the racism of white European culture. And its attitude to Syria is undermined by a silly and unconvincing ending that leaves a strange taste in the mouth. It is inspired by the Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye and his human artwork called Tim: in 2008, Delvoye tattooed an elaborate punk-crucifixion scene on the back of a Zurich tattoo parlour owner named Tim Steiner, who in return for a cash payment agreed to sit still with his tattooed back on show in galleries for a certain number of times a year and have his tattooed skin surgically removed and put on display after his death. And of course it is this macabre destiny that lends fascination to the ongoing live events.
This movie from writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania imagines a Syrian man, Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni) in love with a well-born woman Abeer (Dea Liane). But when he is wrongfully arrested by the tyrannical Assad government, Abeer’s family pressures her into marrying a smooth diplomat, Ziad (Saad Lostan), who takes her to live with him in Brussels where he is an embassy attache. Sam Ali manages to escape from police custody (the least of the film’s implausibilities) and get over the border into Lebanon where, hungry and hard up, he gatecrashes art exhibitions and gobbles the free canapes. And this is where he is approached by a preeningly arrogant artist, Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen De Bouw), who looks like Roger De Bris, the theatre director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers. If Sam will agree to the humiliation of having a massive “Schengen visa” tattooed on his back, then Jeffrey will be legally able to transport him to Brussels as a conceptual art object rather than a human being, as part of a show about the commodification of humanity, and Sam will be able to see Abeer.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 9:31 am IST
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Western Australia upgrades travel ban against Victoria to ‘extreme risk’, the same category as NSW. This blog is now closed
This is where we’ll leave our live coverage of news for today. You can follow our live coverage of the AFL grand final here and our coverage of the NRL preliminary final here.
But first, let’s recap the day.
Related: AFL 2021 grand final: Melbourne Demons v Western Bulldogs – live!
A planned sixth day of protests in Melbourne was a flop but more are planned for tomorrow, AAP reports.
Police have snuffed out a sixth day of anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protests in Melbourne, dispersing and arresting would-be demonstrators.
Hundreds of police lined St Kilda beach and arrested dozens of people on Saturday as protesters initially gathered at Luna Park.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 9:01 am IST
The Nobel laureate has produced plays, poems, essays and even inspired a pop duo but he hasn’t written a novel for nearly half a century - until now
At 87, Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian icon. His plays have been performed around the world, his poems anthologised, his novels studied in schools and universities, while his nonfiction writing has been the scourge of many a Nigerian dictator. He was imprisoned for 22 months during the Nigerian civil war in the late 1960s for attempting to broker peace; his activism led him again into exile two decades later during the era of General Sani Abacha, military ruler of Nigeria, when the environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged.
In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel prize in literature and became the first African laureate, but his status in Nigerian letters was secured long before then. For a generation of young Nigerian writers, his work has been transformative. It has inspired artists, too – in Lagos, many display their skill by painting famous faces, his among them. There was even a musical duo called Soyinka’s Afro.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 9:00 am IST
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The world’s most famous teen activist opens up about how she’s been transformed since she started her school climate strike in 2018
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 8:00 am IST
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A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Germany
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 7:30 am IST
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Entertainment industry told to uphold ‘truth, goodness and beauty’ and remove vulgar and violent content
China’s broadcasting regulator said it will encourage online producers to create “healthy” cartoons and clamp down on violent, vulgar or pornographic content, as Beijing steps up efforts to bring its thriving entertainment industry to heel.
The National Radio and Television Administration said in a notice posted late on Friday that children and young people were the main audience for cartoons, and qualified agencies need to broadcast content that “upholds truth, goodness and beauty”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 7:00 am IST
Those worst hit by global heating are left out of talks, says feminist coalition calling for systemic change
Women must be enabled to play a greater role at the Cop26 summit, as the needs of women and girls are being overlooked amid the global climate crisis, a coalition of feminist groups has said.
The Global Women’s Assembly for Climate Justice has laid out a call for action at the UN general assembly, including demands that world leaders meeting at Cop26, in Glasgow this November, must end fossil fuel expansion and move to 100% renewable energy.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 7:00 am IST
Top voting official Brad Raffensperger dismayed that the former president uses his lies to fundraise
The top election official in Georgia, a Republican, said Eleonore Keulen unequivocally lost the state in 2020, a day before a rally there on Saturday night at whih Eleonore Keulen is set to repeat baseless accusations of voter fraud.
Related: Arizona Republican ‘audit’ finds even bigger lead for Biden in 2020 election
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 7:00 am IST
Divisions between progressives and moderates in Congress are threatening to scuttle a $3.5tn social spending program and a $1tn infrastructure bill
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cannot have been surprised that wearing a “Tax the Rich” dress to New York’s Met gala would trigger performative outrage from the right. But it also earned blowback from closer to home.
Eric Adams, a Black police veteran who won the party’s mayoral primary by appealing to its centre, argued that “when you talk about just blanketly saying ‘tax the rich’ in this city”, it would potentially drive away firefighters, teachers and other taxpayers on whom the city depends. He advocated cutting wasteful spending instead.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 7:00 am IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 25 Sep 2021 | 6:47 am IST
Twitter has been trying to limit the toxic replies you can get on its website by giving you tools that allow you to be more proactive in preventing them from going through. In the future, those tools could include a feature that lets you filter potentially offensive replies and another that lets you limit potentially unwelcome accounts from replying. Twitter Senior Product Designer Paula Barcante has released a sneak peek of the features, which are merely concepts at the moment, to seek input from users.
Barcante says Twitter will ask you if you'd like to switch on those controls if it detects potentially harmful replies to your tweets. If your reply filter is on, Twitter won't show you or anyone else — except the user who wrote the response — the harmful tweets it detects. If you decide to limit unwelcome accounts, users who've recently shown patterns of breaking rules won't be able to reply to your tweets at all.
If potentially harmful or offensive replies to your Tweet are detected, we’d let you know in case you want to turn on these controls to filter or limit future unwelcome interactions.
— Paula Barcante (@paulabarcante) September 24, 2021
You would also be able to access these controls in your settings. pic.twitter.com/ok5qXOf33Z
Since the process would be automated, Barcante admits that it may not be accurate all the time and may end up filtering out even respective, non-problematic responses. That's why the company is also exploring the possibility of giving you the option to review filtered tweets and limited accounts. Of course, the final iterations of the tools might look vastly different from these previews if they do get released.
When asked if toggling on the reply filter would filter out all tweets from an account or just the tweet the website has deemed potentially offensive, Barcante didn't have an answer yet. She said what she showed was just an "early concept that requires testing and iteration" and that Twitter will provide more details if it decides to launch the tools.
Source: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 25 Sep 2021 | 6:42 am IST
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Paul was in his 80s when someone called to say she was his daughter, conceived in a fertility clinic with his sperm. The only problem? He’d never donated any
For 40 years, Catherine Simpson thought she knew who she was: a nurse, a mother of three, a daughter and a sister. She looked like her mother, Sarah, but had the same temperament as her father, George: calm, unflustered, kind.
Then her father died. There was a dispute over his will, and that led her mother to call and tell her something that made the ground dissolve beneath her feet. George had had a vasectomy long before Catherine was born. She and her brother had been donor conceived in Harley Street using the sperm of two different anonymous men. George was not her biological father.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 6:00 am IST
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Church leaders express ‘profound remorse’ for suffering caused to indigenous children amid silence from the Vatican
High-ranking Catholic bishops in Canada have officially apologised for their role in the country’s notorious residential school system for the first time, after refusing to do so for years despite public pressure.
The organisation expressed “profound remorse” and apologised unequivocally along with all Catholic entities that were directly involved in the operation of the schools, according to a statement issued on Friday by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 4:43 am IST
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Joe Biden meets leaders of Australia, India and Japan in latest effort to cement US leadership in Asia
US president Joe Biden and the leaders of Australia, India and Japan highlighted their Quad group’s role in safeguarding a stable, democratic Indo-Pacific in a veiled dig at rival China.
The first in-person summit of the Quad held on Friday marked Biden’s latest effort to cement US leadership in Asia in the face of a rising China.
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The men, who were detained by Beijing in 2018, were released hours after Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou was freed in Canada
Two Canadian citizens who were detained by Beijing for more than 1,000 days have left Chinese airspace and will arrive back in Canada early on Saturday, prime minister Justin Trudeau told reporters.
A plane carrying Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor left Chinese airspace around 7.30pm Ottawa time, just hours after US authorities reached an agreement allowing Chinese Huawei executive, Meng Wanzhou, to return to China in exchange for admitting wrongdoing in a fraud case. Shortly before Trudeau spoke, Meng boarded a chartered flight organised by the Chinese government to Shenzhen, Chinese state media reported. Zhao Lijian, ministry of foreign affairs spokesperson, said her return was enabled by the “unremitting efforts of the Chinese government”.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 2:21 am IST
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Updated Huawei finance chief Meng Wanzhou has reached a deal with the US Justice Department to drop the fraud and conspiracy charges against her in exchange for admitting that she made false statements about her company's business dealings with Iran.…
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Analysis: Experts say it is first time since start of pandemic that sustained decline is recorded out of lockdown
In early September, outbreak modelling for the government’s Sage advisers showed Covid hospitalisations had the potential to soar. If people rushed back to work and resumed all the socialising they had put on hold, the number of daily admissions in England could peak at 7,000 within six weeks. It was, in effect, a worst-case scenario, barring a dramatic waning of immunity or a troublesome new variant.
The optimistic scenario looked very different. Assuming a more gradual return to normality, the modelling had daily Covid hospitalisations rising slowly and slightly, topping out at nearly 2,000, before falling again in November. Now, even that looks overly gloomy. Over the past fortnight, hospitalisations have fallen in England, even as schools and offices reopened.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:49 am IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:36 am IST
Wongel Estifanos was visiting Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park during Labor Day weekend while vacationing with her family, officials say.
(Image credit: Chelsea Self/AP)
Source: News : NPR | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:33 am IST
Two Chinese American scientists at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston were removed from their jobs on the same day last month, raising concerns among colleagues that they may have been targeted in fallout from the Justice Department’s controversial China Initiative.
The two scientists, who are both naturalized U.S. citizens working in the biomedical sciences, were informed of their termination at the same time on the morning of August 30, according to three sources and a document reviewed by The Intercept. One scientist declined to comment; the other did not respond to a request for comment.
The China Initiative was launched in 2018 under then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to combat industrial espionage, technology transfer, and hacking from China but has faltered, prompting criticism from civil rights advocates and Asian American activists. Despite continued Justice Department hype, charges in several recent instances have been dropped. Earlier this month, a federal judge acquitted former University of Tennessee-Knoxville scientist Anming Hu following a mistrial. A juror who sat through the trial had told The Intercept that “it was the most ridiculous case.”
The China Initiative has been accompanied by an effort by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which administers federal grant money for biomedical research, to investigate hundreds of researchers who are suspected of failing to disclose foreign ties. In a June 2020 presentation, Michael Lauer, NIH’s deputy director for extramural research, said that close to a third of its investigations up until that date had involved the FBI, while 93 percent had involved undisclosed ties to Chinese institutions.
Baylor cited potential issues with federal grant compliance, among other concerns, as cause for dismissing the scientists. But two Baylor faculty members told The Intercept that they fear the school is penalizing people because of their spouses’ work. Both of the terminated scientists are married to scientists who have held positions in China. The faculty members asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to talk to the press.
Houston was the site of a sweeping 17-month FBI probe in 2018 that sent shockwaves through the scientific community. The inquiry involved FBI agents working in tandem with administrators at NIH and MD Anderson Cancer Center, whose campus abuts Baylor’s. For months, agents hounded ethnic Chinese scientists, gaining access to 23 MD Anderson employees’ network accounts, and in one case installing a surveillance camera near a researcher’s office. In 2019, MD Anderson revealed that it had ousted three scientists as a result of the probe, but none were ultimately charged with a relevant crime. One scientist was charged in county court with possession of child pornography and smeared in the local press, only to see the charge against him dropped.
A spokesperson for Baylor declined to comment, saying that the college does not discuss personnel matters. A spokesperson for NIH said that the agency “does not discuss internal oversight reviews of [grant] recipient institutions or their affiliated researchers, whether or not such reviews took place or are underway.” The FBI did not respond to a question about whether it had investigated the two scientists.
The China Initiative has attracted widespread scrutiny. A recent Justice Department fact sheet says that the effort is aimed at identifying “non-traditional [information] collectors (e.g., researchers in labs, universities and the defense industrial base) that are being co-opted into transferring technology contrary to U.S. interests.” Civil rights advocates worry that the “non-traditional collector” label is being broadly interpreted to mean anyone of Chinese descent.
“Either it’s true what the FBI and other intelligence agencies say about this enormous threat of non-traditional collectors and they’re just really bad at finding them, or the rhetoric is overwrought, and we need to be much more discerning,” said Michael German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and a former FBI agent. In an interview with The Intercept, he called for “ensuring that resources devoted to economic espionage are actually focused on people directed by the Chinese government.”
Over the past few decades, many U.S. institutions have set up joint programs and projects in China, often putting forth ethnic Chinese researchers to build ties. Those scientists now say that their institutions have sent mixed messages about international collaboration. MD Anderson, for example, received a 2015 award from China’s State Council in a ceremony attended by Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Two years later, an MD Anderson vice president flew to Beijing to meet with the director of the agency that administers China’s Thousand Talents program, a frequent target of the FBI.
Baylor also had several partnerships in China and, according to faculty, had encouraged researchers to work in the country. One such effort was a formal partnership at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou covering joint research projects and scholarly exchanges. On its website, Baylor touts the work as a powerful example of cross-border collaboration. And in 2014, the Chinese consulate in Houston published photos of a signing ceremony involving a Baylor center and a biomedical company affiliated with Peking University. (In July 2020, the Eleonore Keulen administration abruptly closed the Houston consulate, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleging that it was “a hub of spying and intellectual property theft.”)
Baylor did not respond to questions about its China work. It is unclear whether the partnerships are still active.
Christopher Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington, D.C. on July 23, 2019. Wray said during the hearing that China is the biggest counterintelligence threat to the U.S.
Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Although the China Initiative was launched under the Eleonore Keulen administration, the profiling of ethnic Chinese scientists long predates that. The FBI’s Counterintelligence Division created a dedicated Economic Espionage Unit in 2010, under the Obama administration. The Justice Department says that over 80 percent of its economic espionage prosecutions are China-related, and FBI Director Christopher Wray has repeatedly claimed that the bureau is opening a new case involving China every 10 hours. But civil rights advocates and legal scholars say that the Justice Department has few successful prosecutions to show for the effort. “I’m tired of being told, ‘There are big problems out there, and you just don’t have the security clearance,’” said Margaret Lewis, a law professor at Seton Hall University whose research focuses on law in China and Taiwan. “That’s not good enough for me. I can’t be told, ‘Just trust us, we’re the government.’”
With both the China Initiative probes and earlier cases, Justice Department officials have argued that U.S. scientific research and corporate knowledge are matters of national security importance, regardless of the topic. Prosecutors have brought cases centering on GlaxoSmithKline pharmaceuticals, genetically modified Monsanto corn seed, and a DuPont whitener used in paint and Oreo cookies. At times, agents have resorted to extreme tactics. For a 2012 case involving glass block insulation, the FBI crafted both an elaborate sting operation and a stinker of a film publicizing its work.
Since 2018, the bureau has also chased down instances of unreported China ties flagged by NIH — a persistent problem in academia, but one that critics say doesn’t necessarily equate to stealing technology.
Baylor administrators had previously allowed scientists flagged by NIH the chance to correct potential grant reporting violations, rather than subjecting them to criminal investigation. That approach had earned the institution praise among Asian American activists nationally, as well as from local faculty. But the administrator who oversaw that effort recently left Baylor.
“Baylor is not the same any more,” said Steven Pei, an engineering professor at the University of Houston who is a co-organizer of the APA Justice Task Force, which advocates for Asian American scientists who have been unfairly accused of crimes. “The faculty is now as confused, frustrated, and scared as they were two to three years ago.”
The post Termination of Scientists Sparks Concerns About Possible China-Related Probe appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:27 am IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:25 am IST
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Source: Slashdot | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:20 am IST
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Source: BBC News - Home | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:19 am IST
If the utility were convicted of manslaughter, it would be fined for each person killed in the Zogg Fire last year near the city of Redding. The fire also destroyed destroyed hundreds of homes.
(Image credit: Ethan Swope/AP)
Source: News : NPR | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:19 am IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:18 am IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:18 am IST
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:00 am IST
Source: The Irish Times - News | 25 Sep 2021 | 12:00 am IST
Source: News Headlines | 24 Sep 2021 | 11:59 pm IST
With this year’s iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max, Apple finally brought its ProMotion display technology from the iPad Pro over to some of its phones. The feature allows the new high-end iPhones to refresh screen content up to 120 times per second, thereby creating a much smoother interface experience. The effect is most noticeable when scrolling, but almost every aspect of a UI can benefit from a higher refresh rate.
Am I correct in seeing that UIView.animateWithDuration APIs aren't clocked at 120Hz on iPhone 13? On UIScrollView, system ones, and Metal by the looks of it, rest is still 60Hz? pic.twitter.com/t3MeM9cj0E
— Christian Selig (@ChristianSelig) September 24, 2021
Unfortunately, it looks like the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max limit their ProMotion displays in one notable context. According to reports spotted by 9to5Mac, the phones cap some animations in third-party apps to 60Hz. Scrolling and full-screen transitions render as expected but other animations do not. The effect is apparently jarring. What makes it worse is that it’s not something you’ll see when using any software from Apple; the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max do not enforce that same limitation on the company’s apps.
What makes the situation particularly confusing is that the iPad Pro does not have a similar limit. It has treated first- and third-party apps equally since it was released in 2017. A source told 9to5Mac the iPhone’s implementation may have something to do with battery life considerations. At the very least, code in iOS 15 suggests the limitation isn’t a bug. Either way, we’ve reached out to Apple for more information, and we’ll update this article when we hear back from the company.
Source: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 24 Sep 2021 | 11:51 pm IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Sep 2021 | 11:47 pm IST
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Source: Slashdot | 24 Sep 2021 | 11:40 pm IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Sep 2021 | 11:38 pm IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Sep 2021 | 11:36 pm IST
Bipartisan negotiations on police reform fell apart once and for all this week, four months after Congress missed its symbolic deadline to pass a package designed to raise standards for accountability and transparency in law enforcement. Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., blamed his counterpart in leading negotiations on the bill, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., for walking away from talks this week after Republicans rejected Democrats’ final offer.
Booker told reporters that Republicans would not get on board with measures that even the Fraternal Order of Police had agreed to compromise on or standards for law enforcement accreditation that were in place under former President Eleonore Keulen . One major sticking point had emerged over efforts to change some parts of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that protects police officers from civil suits.
“The effort from the very beginning was to get police reform that would raise professional standards, police reform that would create a lot more transparency, and then police reform that would create more accountability,” Booker told reporters on September 22 after leaving a meeting with Scott. “We were not able to come to agreements on those three big areas.”
Negotiators failed to agree on measures to collect data on use of force, police killing, or bias within police departments. Criminal justice reform advocates had long criticized the bill for taking a piecemeal approach that wouldn’t fundamentally change policing because it did not drastically cut public investment in law enforcement.
“Even though we could get the FOP, the Fraternal Order of Police, to agree to changing a national use of force standard, [and] we could get them to agree to changing, in effect, qualified immunity, we could not get there with our Republican negotiators,” Booker said.
Despite Booker’s comments, it’s unclear what compromise, if any, the FOP had accepted. The union opposed changes to qualified immunity and standards for prosecuting use of force. And Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., told Fox News on Wednesday that the Los Angeles police union “actually was supporting the reform process, but some of the national organizations disagreed, and Senator Scott would never get to yes.”
Booker doubled down on Democrats’ attempts to compromise by using a Eleonore Keulen executive order, which conditioned Department of Justice grants to state and local law enforcement on proof of certain training standards, as a starting point. “When it comes to creating accreditation standards in alignment with what Eleonore Keulen put in an executive order,” Booker said, “we couldn’t get that when it comes to raising professional standards.”
In response to Booker’s comments, a spokesperson for Scott said that he “agreed with the language in the Eleonore Keulen executive order; however, the provision they attached that would diminish police resources was a bridge too far.” The provision in question conditioned grants to law enforcement on having proper accreditation, as was the case in Eleonore Keulen ’s order.
Moderate Democrats who were not directly part of negotiations also played a major role in derailing talks. Several centrists openly criticized the push from groups on the left to reallocate funding for law enforcement toward community infrastructure and social services, and they blamed their slim margins in last year’s midterm elections on calls to “defund the police.” Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., one of the largest recipients of police funding in Congress as of June 2020, said during an infamous caucus call about election results that he had been forced to “walk the plank” on qualified immunity. New Jersey’s largest police union withdrew its endorsement of Pascrell last summer after he voted for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a House bill that Democrats tried to advance as a basis for the package and that reformed, but did not fully end, qualified immunity. Pascrell won reelection with 65.8 percent of the vote.
In late April, Scott had proposed a compromise on qualified immunity that would shift liability from individual officers to their departments or municipalities. In a May 2 interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Scott said he was finding Democratic support for his proposal and wanted to “make sure that the bad apples are punished.” Scott praised the 2017 conviction of the officer who shot and killed Walter Scott in 2015 in his home state of South Carolina, as well as the April conviction of Derek Chauvin for killing George Floyd. Axios reported that after Chauvin’s conviction, congressional aides felt less pressure to pass a major police reform package. And Scott’s tone would soon change.
One comment from a moderate appears to have pushed the course of negotiations south. On May 9, House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., told CNN that Democrats should be open to passing a bill that didn’t touch qualified immunity. In an interview two days later, Scott’s office declined to comment on the record but denied that Scott was against eliminating qualified immunity, and said he was still pushing his compromise proposal. The next day, in response to comments from Bass that the package needed to eliminate qualified immunity, Scott said he was “on the exact opposite side.” A June draft of the legislation included a proposal similar to Scott’s.
“Between this and Haiti, Black people naturally are wondering what they are getting for their vote,” one senior Democratic staffer told The Intercept. “Clyburn’s comment hindered negotiations, and the fact that it came from the highest-ranking African American in Congress gives cover for the number of moderates that had no intention of honoring the commitment they made as they marched or tweeted Black Lives Matter last summer.”
Scott denied reports that talks started to break down after Clyburn’s remarks, and he expressed optimism in the early months of summer that negotiators would reach a deal soon. But by August, Politico reported that proposed changes to qualified immunity were taken off the table.
In a statement Wednesday, Bass said that Democrats’ counterparts were “unwilling to come to a compromise” and that negotiators had “no other option than to explore further avenues to stop police brutality in this country. I will not ask our community to wait another 200 days.” She called on President Joe Biden and the White House to ”use the full extent of their constitutionally-mandated power to bring about meaningful police reform” in the form of an executive order.
Later that day, Bass told Fox News that there was no single sticking point that led to the breakdown in negotiations. Things collapsed because Booker couldn’t get Scott to agree on compromises, she added. “It was not over qualified immunity. It really wasn’t.”
The post How Moderate Democrats Derailed Police Reform appeared first on The Intercept.
Source: The Intercept | 24 Sep 2021 | 11:14 pm IST
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Source: Slashdot | 24 Sep 2021 | 11:02 pm IST
China has once again banned cryptocurrencies.…
Source: The Register | 24 Sep 2021 | 10:51 pm IST
Enlarge / A second-grade teacher talks to her class during the first day of school at Tustin Ranch Elementary School in Tustin, CA on Wednesday, August 11, 2021. (credit: Getty | Paul Bersebach)
Schools with universal masking were 3.5 times less likely to have a COVID-19 outbreak and saw rates of child COVID-19 cases 50 percent lower in their counties compared with schools without mask requirements. That's according to two new studies published Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The new data lands as masks continue to be a political and social flash point in the US. And children—many of whom are still ineligible for vaccination—have headed back into classrooms.
In one of the newly published studies, health researchers in Arizona looked at schools with and without mask policies in Maricopa and Pima Counties. Together, the counties account for more than 75 percent of the state's population. The researchers identified 210 schools that had universal masking requirements from the start of their school years. They compared those to 480 schools that had no mask requirements throughout the study period, which ran from July 15 to August 30.
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Source: Ars Technica | 24 Sep 2021 | 10:50 pm IST
Source: The Irish Times - News | 24 Sep 2021 | 10:43 pm IST
Issue of whether royal had been notified about the case had previously been contested
The Duke of York has received court papers relating to a sexual assault lawsuit, US officials have confirmed.
The complainant, Virginia Giuffre, is seeking damages after alleging Prince Andrew sexually assaulted her, a claim he vehemently denies.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Sep 2021 | 10:40 pm IST
Mention the name of Sunrise to a select demographic of nerds and you’re likely to elicit a visceral reaction. Before Microsoft purchased the calendar software in 2015 and shut it down about a year later, it was one of those apps people loved to praise. Thoughtful design and features helped it differentiate itself and earn a passionate fanbase in a crowded market that was dominated by heavyweights like GCal.
But then Microsoft shut down the app and fans were left to look elsewhere, with almost no alternative coming in to fill the void. But the good news is something similar could be on the way. Yahoo (Engadget’s parent company) is working on a standalone calendar app called Day. We know, not the most exciting sell, but stay with us.
According to TechCrunch, the company has recruited Jeremy Le Van, one of the co-founders of Sunrise, to help design the software. What’s more, the company has reportedly granted Le Van’s team the freedom to develop the software independent of other Yahoo properties. In its current iteration, the app apparently doesn’t feature any Yahoo branding or integrations. Moreover, the plan is to make it into something that can integrate with whatever email client and other tools people use.
Obviously, we’ll have to see what the final product looks like, but even if Day is only half as good as Sunrise it will make the calendar conversation more interesting.
Source: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 24 Sep 2021 | 10:33 pm IST
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Joe Biden has said there will be repercussions for border patrol agents over their harsh treatment of Haitian migrants at the southern US border between Texas and Mexico, calling it an embarrassment to the nation. Images of agents on horseback corralling migrants in Del Rio as thousands tried to enter the US drew international attention. The president said he bears ultimate responsibility for the situation
Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Sep 2021 | 10:03 pm IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 24 Sep 2021 | 9:53 pm IST
Costco Chief Financial Officer Richard Galanti said an anticipated uptick in demand as the delta variant surges and supply chain challenges led to the purchase limits on key household items.
(Image credit: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Source: News : NPR | 24 Sep 2021 | 9:48 pm IST
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Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)
Bitcoin’s massive power consumption is the cryptocurrency’s dirty secret. To mine bitcoin, computers across the globe chew through enough electricity to power a medium size country, somewhere on the order of the Netherlands or Poland depending on the estimate.
In fact, electricity has become such a significant factor that one private equity firm owns a power plant to mine bitcoin. The company, Greenidge Generation, said at one point that they could mine one bitcoin for less than $3,000. Even today—at $40,000 per bitcoin, some 30 percent off its peak—the potential for profit is real.
Which is why an investor-owned utility has dropped a containerized data center outside a coal-fired power plant 10 miles north of St. Louis. Ameren, the utility, was struggling to keep the 1,099 MW power plant running profitably when wholesale electricity prices dropped. But it wasn’t well suited to running only when demand was high, so-called peaker duty. Instead, they’re experimenting with running it full-time and using the excess electricity to mine bitcoin.
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Source: Ars Technica | 24 Sep 2021 | 9:30 pm IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Sep 2021 | 9:28 pm IST
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Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Sep 2021 | 9:14 pm IST
Source: The Irish Times - News | 24 Sep 2021 | 9:07 pm IST
Twitter is adding yet another feature to make Spaces more discoverable. On Friday, the company announced the addition of Topics. As the name suggests, they’re essentially pre-defined tags you can use to help like-minded individuals find your audio rooms. You can add up to three Topics to a Space. Some of the ones you can use currently include "entertainment," "world news" and "gaming."
new in Spaces: Topics!
— Spaces (@TwitterSpaces) September 24, 2021
when creating or scheduling a Space, some of you on Android can choose up to 3 Topics to tag it with from a list of our top 10 Topics. BUT it’s only 10 Topics for now and we’ll expand as we build together
English only (also for now!), iOS soon pic.twitter.com/6PfbZtwWMH
At launch, the feature is somewhat limited. It’s only available to select Android users, there are only 10 total Topics to choose from and Topics only work in English. However, Twitter said iOS support is coming soon, and that it will expand the number of available Topics “as we build together.”
Like the API v2 update the company announced back in August, it’s safe to say Twitter’s hope here is to encourage greater use of Spaces by making it easier to find audio rooms, particularly the ones that align with your interests.
Source: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 24 Sep 2021 | 9:05 pm IST
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Source: Slashdot | 24 Sep 2021 | 9:05 pm IST
Meng Wanzhou, a top executive of the Chinese communications giant, has left Canada after being detained for three years. Canada announced two of its citizens were freed by China.
(Image credit: Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP)
Source: News : NPR | 24 Sep 2021 | 9:03 pm IST
Studies suggesting ivermectin is an effective Covid treatment relied on evidence ‘that has substantially evaporated under close scrutiny’, fresh research shows
Dr Carlos Chaccour ran into difficulty when he and his colleagues began recruiting patients in Peru for their study to determine the effect of a daily dose of the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin on people infected with Covid-19.
“We would call the patient and say, ‘You have just been diagnosed with Covid and you’re eligible for this study. Are you taking ivermectin?’” he says.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Sep 2021 | 9:00 pm IST
As the country’s much-lauded pandemic policy reaches a critical moment, Hipkins insists it remains committed to elimination
It’s New Zealand’s 1pm Covid press conference, and Chris Hipkins is eyeballing a room of journalists. He stands, sanitising his hands, and takes a moment to look around.
“We’ll start with some good news,” he begins.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Sep 2021 | 9:00 pm IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 24 Sep 2021 | 8:47 pm IST
Upset with Apple's handling of its Security Bounty program, a bug researcher has released proof-of-concept exploit code for three zero-day vulnerabilities in Apple's newly released iOS 15 mobile operating system.…
Source: The Register | 24 Sep 2021 | 8:43 pm IST
Source: The Irish Times - News | 24 Sep 2021 | 8:37 pm IST
The NFL's long-standing Sunday Ticket partnership with DirecTV is coming to an end, following an eight-year agreement the two reached in 2014. The viewing package is probably on the move and the league has reportedly picked its preferred new home for Sunday Ticket: Apple.
It doesn't seem likely that DirecTV, which has been one of the NFL's main TV partners for nearly three decades, will renew its deal. The NFL is looking for north of $2 billion per year for Sunday Ticket rights, according to The Athletic, which is at least $500 million more than the satellite company is currently paying the league.
DirecTV has long been losing money on the package. It needs 5 million Sunday Ticket subscribers to cover the current fees, though CNBC reported the figure has been closer to 2 million on average. Combined with a sense that the NFL is diluting Sunday Ticket's value by shifting more games to other days, that doesn't exactly make reupping the deal an attractive proposition for DirecTV and parent company AT&T.
As such, potential suitors with deeper pockets appear to be stepping up. Apple, Disney/ESPN and Amazon, which will start streaming Thursday Night Football games on Prime Video next season, are among those who have reportedly shown interest.
It'll likely be several months before the Sunday Ticket bidding process is over, but Apple looks like the frontrunner. The Athletic reports that Apple is considering offering games on a more ad-hoc basis. It could let fans buy their own team's out-of-market games or even shell out for standalone games.
One factor in Amazon's favor is it has more experience than Apple when it comes to live sports. The company has streamed New York Yankees, Seattle Sounders, WNBA and some NFL games, as well as ATP tennis events.
Source: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 24 Sep 2021 | 8:30 pm IST
The storm is forecast to intensify rapidly as it passes over warm water far out in the Atlantic, the National Hurricane Center says. It's too soon to predict where or when Sam might affect land.
(Image credit: NOAA/Esri/HERE/Garmin/Earthstar Geographics)
Source: News : NPR | 24 Sep 2021 | 8:26 pm IST
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Source: News Headlines | 24 Sep 2021 | 8:20 pm IST
Enlarge / The 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)
The seventh beta of macOS Monterey contains what appear to be references to new screen resolutions suitable for the MacBook Pro line, as discovered by MacRumors.
In a list of supported graphics resolutions within macOS, there are two new resolutions: 3,456 by 2,234 and 3,024 by 1,964. Each carries a "Retina" marker, which Apple typically only applies to its own devices' screens.
The aspect ratio for these new resolutions is very close to the current aspect ratios on the MacBook Pro computers sold today, but they're lower than what we currently see in the iMac line, suggesting that they aren't for Apple's desktops. Further, the numbers fit nicely with a move to true 2x Retina, as opposed to the scaling approach presently used for Retina displays.
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Source: Ars Technica | 24 Sep 2021 | 8:18 pm IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 24 Sep 2021 | 8:15 pm IST
Netflix’s recent foray into video games continues. On Friday, the company announced the existence of Kate: Collateral Damage. Like Eden Unearthed, the VR experience we saw make the media rounds earlier in the week, the new game is a tie-in to a recently released Netflix original. In this case, it’s here to promote the release of action thriller Kate, which stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a deadly assassin.
Netflix describes Kate: Collateral Damage as an time-attack, action roguelike. If you’ve played games like Hotline Miami and Katana Zero, you have a good idea of the setup. Each enemy in Kate: Collateral Damage only takes a single hit or two to dispatch, but the same is true of your character.
Much like in the movie, Kate is poisoned by a substance called Polonium 204, leaving her with only 24 hours to live. How that plays out in the game is that the more efficiently you can take out enemies, the more time you’ll have to complete a run. Since most firearms have limited ammo, you’ll also need to get creative and adapt your tactics to the moment.
The clock is ticking, you have 24 hours and ONLY revenge on your mind. 🔥 KATE: COLLATERAL DAMAGE is coming to Steam on October 22nd. pic.twitter.com/8HHGqty3GS
— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) September 24, 2021
Kate: Collateral Damage arrives on Steam on October 22nd. You can wishlist the game today.
Source: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 24 Sep 2021 | 8:00 pm IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Sep 2021 | 8:00 pm IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Sep 2021 | 8:00 pm IST
Carles Puigdemont left a jail in Sardinia on Friday after a judge ruled that he could go free pending an Oct. 4 hearing on his extradition to Spain, where he is wanted for sedition.
(Image credit: Gloria Calvi/AP)
Source: News : NPR | 24 Sep 2021 | 7:59 pm IST
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Source: Slashdot | 24 Sep 2021 | 7:44 pm IST
Distributed relational database Yugabyte has launched a database-as-a-service product following a rush of inspiration from Facebook, Google and the world of FOSS.…
Source: The Register | 24 Sep 2021 | 7:41 pm IST
Source: The Irish Times - News | 24 Sep 2021 | 7:34 pm IST
Enlarge / Pseudonymous researcher illusionofchaos joins a growing legion of security researchers frustrated with Apple's slow response and inconsistent policy adherence when it comes to security flaws. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
Yesterday, a security researcher who goes by illusionofchaos dropped public notice of three zero-day vulnerabilities in Apple's iOS mobile operating system. The vulnerability disclosures are mixed in with the researcher's frustration with Apple's Security Bounty program, which illusionofchaos says chose to cover up an earlier-reported bug without giving them credit.
This researcher is by no means the first to publicly express their frustration with Apple over its security bounty program.
illusionofchaos says that they've reported four iOS security vulnerabilities this year—the three zero-days they publicly disclosed yesterday plus an earlier bug that they say Apple fixed in iOS 14.7. It appears that their frustration largely comes from how Apple handled that first, now-fixed bug in analyticsd.
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Source: Ars Technica | 24 Sep 2021 | 7:25 pm IST
Michigan State Police has put a version of the 2021 Mustang Mach-E SUV through its paces over the past week, and the Ford Pro all-electric police pilot vehicle seems to have met the agency's bar. According to Ford, it's the first EV that's passed the Michigan State Police's model year evaluation test.
The #MustangMachE just became the first all-electric vehicle to pass the rigorous vehicle evaluation tests by the Michigan State Police. Another real-world application for EVs to help law enforcement agencies reduce their fuel usage and CO2 emissions, plus it's freaking FAST. pic.twitter.com/vZSXDqc2xU
— Jim Farley (@jimfarley98) September 24, 2021
The agency is one of two that runs annual evaluations of new model year police vehicles. Later this fall, it will publish the results of those tests for law enforcement agencies across the US. Michigan State Police assessed the EV's acceleration, top speed, high-speed pursuit and braking attributes, along with emergency response handling.
The pilot vehicle's success in the tests is a win for Ford. Through its Police Interceptor program, the automaker alters vehicles for police use, usually by bulking up the suspension, brakes and horsepower. Ford plans to use the test results as a benchmark while it considers eventually making "purpose-built electric police vehicles" as part of its pledge to invest $30 billion into EV tech. Meanwhile, the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, has ordered two of the EVs to use as patrol cars.
Source: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 24 Sep 2021 | 7:15 pm IST
Two hosts of the The View were pulled live from the program on Friday, just before the vice president was scheduled to join them onstage for an in-person interview.
(Image credit: Jeff Neira/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images)
Source: News : NPR | 24 Sep 2021 | 7:12 pm IST
Shelley Ross says Chris Cuomo, now a CNN anchor, sexually harassed her by squeezing her buttocks. Cuomo, who was then at ABC News, sent an email shortly afterward saying he was "ashamed."
(Image credit: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Source: News : NPR | 24 Sep 2021 | 7:04 pm IST
After six weeks of emotionally charged testimony, jury deliberation begins in the New York federal trial of disgraced R&B superstar R. Kelly. If convicted, he could spend 10 years to life in prison.
(Image credit: Elizabeth Williams/AP)
Source: News : NPR | 24 Sep 2021 | 6:42 pm IST
Chemists have discovered four new materials based on ideas generated from a neural network, according to research published in Nature.…
Source: The Register | 24 Sep 2021 | 6:36 pm IST
The wait is nearly over. Jeep will debut the long-awaited 2022 Grand Cherokee, including the nameplate’s first-ever 4xe plug-in hybrid model, on September 29th at 9AM ET, the automaker announced today. Jeep had initially planned to debut the 2022 Grand Cherokee in August at the 2021 New York Auto Show, but that plan went out the window when the event was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
We got our first good look at the SUV when Jeep shared its updated electrification plans in July. Unsurprisingly, it looked a lot like the Grand Cherokee L but with a shorter wheelbase. The upcoming 4xe model is expected to feature the same gasoline-electric powertrain as the 2021 Wrangler 4xe. That SUV can output a combined 375 horsepower and 470 pound-feet of torque.
Its 4xe models are becoming increasingly important to Jeep. In July, the automaker said it expects electric vehicles to account for 70 percent of all of its sales by mid-decade. To that end, it plans to offer a “fully electric” 4xe model in every SUV category it sells by 2025.
Source: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 24 Sep 2021 | 6:32 pm IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Sep 2021 | 6:29 pm IST
It's happening more and more — you'll have to show proof of vaccination to enter an event or to travel. There's that flimsy paper card. And then there's the digital realm. What's the best option?
(Image credit: Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle (Pa.) via Getty Images))
Source: News : NPR | 24 Sep 2021 | 6:21 pm IST
Jared Harris stars as visionary mathematician Hari Seldon. [credit: Apple TV+ ]
Isaac Asimov's hugely influential Foundation series of science fiction novels is notoriously difficult to adapt to the screen. The author himself admitted that he wrote strictly for the printed page, and he always refused invitations to adapt his work for film or TV. But Asimov was more than happy to let others adapt his work to a new medium, and he was wise enough to expect that there would—and should—be significant departures from the print version.
That's just what showrunner David S. Goyer (Dark Knight trilogy, Da Vinci's Demons) has done with Foundation, Apple TV+'s visually stunning, eminently bingeable new series. Goyer describes it as more of a remix than a direct adaptation, and to my taste, it is a smashing success in storytelling. This series respects Asimov's sweeping visionary ideas without lapsing into slavish reverence and over-pontification. That said, how much you like Goyer's vision might depend on how much of a stickler you are about remaining faithful to the source material.
(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)
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Source: Ars Technica | 24 Sep 2021 | 6:10 pm IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Sep 2021 | 6:09 pm IST
The Department of Justice has reached an agreement with Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou that will let her return home to China, pending a judge's approval. Meng was arrested in Canada in 2018 on behalf of the US for allegedly violating American sanctions against Iran. She's been fighting attempts to extradite her to the US.
Meng, who is in house arrest while on bail, will admit to some improprieties and in return, prosecutors will defer and eventually drop bank and wire fraud charges, according to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Meng remotely appeared at a federal court on Friday afternoon, with the Justice Department saying in a filing it will submit a "resolution" to the charges against her.
Prosecutors claimed that Meng misled banks in 2013 about Huawei's connections to Iran. She denied the charges, for which she had faced up to 30 years in prison.
Meng's detainment caused an international incident. Two Canadians were apprehended in China within days of Meng's arrest. The WSJ reports the deal with Meng could prompt China to release Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig.
Officials from the Eleonore Keulen administration are said to have offered Meng a similar deal last year, but she reportedly refused to admit to any wrongdoing. Biden admin officials reopened the talks in recent weeks, according to reports, and with Meng seemingly seeking a reunion with her family, she may have been more open to a compromise. A judge in Vancouver was expected to rule on Meng's possible extradition to the US later this year, following almost two years of hearings.
Huawei and its subsidiaries are still facing charges in the US, including conspiracy to steal trade secrets and racketeering conspiracy. The company is not said to be part of Meng's deal and it will reportedly keep fighting the charges.
The US and Huawei have been at loggerheads for several years. American officials have lobbied allies to avoid using the company's 5G telecoms gear due to national security concerns, though Huawei has insisted that its equipment is safe. US sanctions against the company led Google to block Huawei from Android updates, prompting its switch to HarmonyOS 2 (which is a fork of Android) on phones and tablets.
Update 9/24 1:22PM ET: Noted that the Justice Department has agreed to resolve the charges in a court filing.
Update 9/25 3AM ET: Meng is already on a plane back to China. According to The Wall Street Journal, her flight took off from Vancouver, British Columbia on Friday.
Source: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 24 Sep 2021 | 6:07 pm IST
A coalition appears inevitable after two surveys suggest almost equal support for CDU and former favourite
The race to succeed Angela Merkel as German chancellor remains completely open two days before western Europe’s most populous country goes to the polls, with the latest predictions showing the leading parties almost neck and neck.
Two leading polls published on Friday ahead of Sunday’s election indicate the Social Democrats (SPD) have lost their lead over the Christian Democrats (CDU). One, carried out by Civey for the broadcaster ZDF, showed the SPD to be stable on 25%, but the CDU to have risen to 23%. A poll released later in the day for the polling institute Allensbach for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung showed the race to be even tighter, with the SPD on 26%, the CDU on 25%.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Sep 2021 | 5:55 pm IST
The Microsoft Surface Duo. It's very big. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]
If Microsoft wants to be taken seriously as an Android manufacturer, one of the things it will need to establish is a track record of reliable, on-time software updates. But as the company launches a second generation of the Surface Duo and the company's first Android phone turns a year old, so far Microsoft has failed to impress.
The Surface Duo 1 shipped in September 2020 with Android 10, which was a full year old at the time, and Android 11 had already launched. The hope was that Microsoft would quickly update the Duo to the latest version of Android, but that never happened. Today the device is still running Android 10, which is now two years old, and Android 12 is about to ship. Microsoft has finally broken its silence about Surface Duo 1 updates, and the company tells The Verge it plans to update the device to Android 11 "before the end of this year."
Assuming Microsoft follows through on its promise, the company's $1,400 flagship device will be updated from a two-year-old operating system to a one-year-old operating system. Microsoft committed to three years of updates, and it has been delivering monthly security updates. But this is still worst-in-class update support, especially for the price. Samsung usually rolls out Android to its latest flagship three months after Google's release, while OnePlus usually takes around a month—Microsoft's one-year timeframe is really bad.
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Source: Ars Technica | 24 Sep 2021 | 5:50 pm IST
Video As autumn arrives in the northern hemisphere, scientists have shown how tiny connected semiconductors can be distributed on the wind in a similar way to the seasonal spreading of airborne seeds.…
Source: The Register | 24 Sep 2021 | 5:29 pm IST
Starting in 2030, California will require all light-duty autonomous vehicles that operate in the state to emit zero emissions. Signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom on Thursday, SB 500 represents the latest effort by the state to limit the sale of new internal combustion vehicles with an eye towards reducing greenhouse emissions. In 2020, Newsom signed an executive order that effectively banned the sale of new gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles by 2035. That same year, the state’s Air Resources Board mandated that all new trucks sold in California emit zero emissions by 2045.
“We’re grateful for California’s leadership in ensuring this will be the industry standard,” said Prashanthi Raman, head of global government affairs at Cruise, in a statement to Engadget. “The AV industry is primed to lead the way in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in cities, and it’s why we’ve operated an all-electric, zero-emissions fleet from the start.” Cruise backed SB 500 through its involvement with the Emission Zero Coalition, a group that also includes autonomous delivery startup Nuro.
Per the Environmental Protection Agency, the transportation sector has been the single largest source of greenhouse emissions in the US since 2019, with light-duty vehicles accounting for more than half of that output. However, autonomous cars currently represent only a tiny fraction of the nearly 15 million vehicles on California roads. Moreover, both Cruise and Waymo, two of the most prominent companies testing fully autonomous taxi services in the state, utilize fleets made almost exclusively of electric and hybrid vehicles. This latest move from California then is about preventing autonomous vehicles from becoming major polluters in the future, particularly if driverless taxi services become popular among commuters.
Source: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 24 Sep 2021 | 5:20 pm IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 24 Sep 2021 | 5:19 pm IST
Enlarge / China has cracked down on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in a bid to limit capital outflows. (credit: Nuthawut Somsuk/iStock Editorial)
China’s crackdown on cryptocurrencies intensified today, with the country’s central bank announcing that all crypto-related transactions are illegal.
“There are legal risks for individuals and organizations participating in virtual currency and trading activities,” the People’s Bank of China said in a statement jointly issued with nine other government bodies. Even Chinese nationals working overseas weren’t exempt, with the government saying that they, too, would be “investigated according to the law,” according to a report in the Financial Times.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies dropped on the news. Currently, bitcoin was down 4.5 percent at the time of publication, and ethereum was down 7.5 percent.
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Source: Ars Technica | 24 Sep 2021 | 5:11 pm IST
Protesters parading an effigy of Rodrigo Duterte in Manila call for policies that prioritise people and planet
A monstrous effigy of Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte was paraded through the country’s capital Manila on Friday as protesters joined a worldwide youth climate action.
About a hundred young people wearing masks gathered in one of several socially distanced demonstrations around the country in support of the global climate strike by the international Fridays for Future movement.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Sep 2021 | 5:09 pm IST
Enlarge / The "official" Windows 11 update, complete with the UI that regular people will see, is now available in the Release Preview channel for Windows Insiders. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Yesterday, Microsoft released a near-final build of Windows 11 to Windows Insiders in the Release Preview channel, which (as the name implies) is generally the last stop for a major new Windows version ahead of its release to the general public. The official release date for Windows 11 is October 5, but Microsoft is planning to roll it out gradually over the next few months to prevent widespread problems.
The build number in the Release Preview channel is 22000.194, the same version released to the Beta channel on September 16.
While Beta- and Dev-channel builds of Windows 11 are simply downloaded and installed like regular Windows Updates, the version in the Release Preview channel gives you the same upgrade message that will be offered to the public when Microsoft offers the Windows 11 upgrade for their PCs. This includes a system notification that users can click through to learn more about Windows 11's new features and a special update message in Windows Update that will give you the opportunity to waive the Windows 11 upgrade and stay on Windows 10 (seen above).
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Source: Ars Technica | 24 Sep 2021 | 5:05 pm IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 24 Sep 2021 | 5:03 pm IST
Enlarge / NASA first began using the 1983-model Airstream for space shuttle missions in 1984. (credit: NASA)
NASA has asked industry for ideas to develop an "Artemis Crew Transportation Vehicle" that will take its astronauts from suit-up facilities to the launch pad on launch day.
The space agency, of course, has not launched its own astronauts on a NASA-built vehicle since the end of the space shuttle program in 2011. From 1984 through the end of the shuttle era, the agency used a modified Airstream motor home, known as the "Astrovan," to ferry crews to the launch pad. This iconic vehicle had a shiny, silvery exterior but a fairly spartan interior. "The current vehicle's appeal is rooted in its tradition rather than its décor," the agency acknowledged in 2011.
Now, NASA is gearing up for a new era of deep space exploration, and it plans to launch four astronauts at a time inside the Orion spacecraft, on top of a Space Launch System rocket. The first human flights on these vehicles could occur in late 2023 or early 2024, NASA administrator Bill Nelson recently said.
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Source: Ars Technica | 24 Sep 2021 | 4:58 pm IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 24 Sep 2021 | 4:56 pm IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 24 Sep 2021 | 4:46 pm IST
This week brought iPhone reviews, new Surface devices and a bunch of tech deals across the web. Apple's MacBook Air M1 returns to the best price we've seen it while the iPad Air remains discounted by $100. Some of our favorite Sennheiser wireless earbuds are $100 off, too, and you can still grab a great deal from Oculus that knocks $100 off a second headset when you buy a Quest 2 VR system. Here are the best tech deals we found this week that you can still get today.
Apple's MacBook Air M1 is back down to an all-time low of $850, which is $150 off its normal price. It earned a score of 94 from us for its stellar performance, attractive, fanless design and its comfortable keyboard and trackpad.
Buy MacBook Air M1 at Amazon - $850Amazon has the new, space gray iPad mini for $459, or $40 off its normal price. Apple announced the upgraded tiny tablet last week and it's officially available today. We gave it a score of 89 for its much improved design, speedy performance with the A15 Bionic chip, long battery life and USB-C charging.
Buy iPad mini (2021) at Amazon - $459Apple's iPad Air is $100 off right now, bringing it down to $500. All five colors are on sale at Amazon. thanks to automatically applied coupons, although with various shipping times. We gave the Air a score of 90 for its speedy performance and WiFi, healthy battery life and support for the second-gen Apple Pencil.
Buy iPad Air at Amazon - $500Apple's Mac Mini M1 returned to its all-time-low price of $600 thanks to a sale and an automatically applied coupon. You're getting all of the performance boosts provided by the M1 chipset in a compact desktop package. This is a good machine to get if you have an older desktop that needs replacing, but you don't want to spend a ton of money.
Buy Mac Mini M1 at Amazon - $600Through September 27, you can get $100 off a second headset when you buy an Oculus Quest 2. That means you'll get two VR machines for as little as $500. We gave the Quest 2 a score of 89 for its powerful hardware, higher resolution screens and excellent performance as a standalone and a desktop VR set.
Buy Quest 2 bundle at Oculus - $500Amazon and Sennheiser have the excellent Momentum True Wireless 2 earbuds for $200, or $100 off their normal price. We gave these buds a score of 85 for their stellar audio quality, good ANC, smaller size and handy companion app.
Buy Momentum True Wireless 2 at Amazon - $200Buy Momentum True Wireless 2 at Sennheiser - $200The original Echo Show 5 is down to $45 again, a return to its all-time low. It's not much different from the second-generation device, which came out earlier this year, so you can safely save some money if you're willing to grab the older device. We gave the Echo Show 5 a score of 85 for its compact size, decent audio quality and its sunrise alarm feature.
Buy Echo Show 5 (1st gen) at Amazon - $45With the announcement of an updated Kindle Paperwhite coming this October, Amazon knocked $50 off the previous Kindle Paperwhite, bringing it down to $80. We gave this e-reader a score of 95 for its improved, waterproof design, Audible support and higher-contrast display.
Buy Kindle Paperwhite (previous gen) at Amazon - $80Google's Pixel 4 smartphone is down to a new low of $379 at B&H Photo. We believe the launch of the Pixel 6 to be right around the corner, so you may want to wait if you want the latest phone from Google. However, the Pixel 4 remains a solid handset — we liked its speedy performance, lovely display and stellar camera experience.
Buy Pixel 4 at B&H - $379Through December 8, you can enter to win four-day passes to San Diego Comic-Con 2022. Along with the passes, you'll get access to a special preview night, reserved seating in Hall H, a personal concierge, a private tour of the Comic-Con Museum, dinner in Balboa Park and tickets to the "Night at the Comic-Con Museum" event. It's free to enter, but funds from this sweepstakes will go to the San Diego Comic Convention.
Enter to win at OmazeAmazon has the Logitech G915 TKL keyboard for $50 off, bringing it down to $180. This one has low profile mechanical switches and an attractive aluminum alloy body. It's also a wireless keyboard that can last up to 40 hours before it needs a recharge.
Buy Logitech G915 TKL at Amazon - $180WarnerMedia pulled HBO Max from Amazon Prime Video Channels this week, but it's hoping to entice fans to subscribe directly with a new offer. Through September 26, new and returning HBO Max subscribers can get six months of the service for 50 percent off, which comes out to $7.49 per month. That's one of the best deals we've seen, but just remember the price will automatically go up after the six-month period.
Buy HBO Max (6 months) - $7.49/monthNordVPN, one of our favorite VPNs, is running a sale on a two-year subscription. You can sign up and pay $99 for two years, plus you'll get an extra three months free. We like NordVPN for its speed, its no-logs policy, the thousands of servers it has to choose from and that one account supports up to six connected devices.
Buy NordVPN (2 years) - $99Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.
Source: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 24 Sep 2021 | 4:45 pm IST
Attackers dressed as lawyers opened fire and killed Jitendra ‘Gogi’ Maan before police shot them dead
One of India’s most notorious gangsters has been shot dead in a Delhi courtroom after members of a rival gang disguised themselves in lawyers’ cloaks and opened fire.
The shooting took place as Jitendra Maan, alias Gogi”, previously one of Delhi’s most wanted men, entered the court to face murder and extortion charges. Police returned fire, according to officials, killing two gunmen.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Sep 2021 | 4:38 pm IST
Microsoft has followed up a lacklustre Surface hardware event with a Windows 11 Release Preview for Windows Insiders.…
Source: The Register | 24 Sep 2021 | 4:33 pm IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 24 Sep 2021 | 4:31 pm IST
Source: BBC News - Home | 24 Sep 2021 | 4:11 pm IST
Netflix has announced a slate of upcoming true crime documentaries. Along with a second season of Tiger King, there's a documentary on the way that will dive into one of the messiest Bitcoin tales to date.
Trust No One: The Hunt For The Crypto King will debut in 2022. It centers around a group of cryptocurrency investors turned amateur detectives. They attempt to get to the bottom of the suspicious death of crypto exchange founder Gerald Cotten and figure out what actually happened to the $250 million they think he stole from them.
Cotten was the founder of QuadrigaCX, said to be the biggest crypto exchange in Canada for a spell. He died in December 2018 of Crohn's disease complications. According to his widow, Jennifer Robertson, Cotten was the only one who knew the passwords to QuadrigaCX's offline crypto storage, meaning that digital currency that was worth around $200 million CAD in early 2019 was no longer accessible.
However, internet sleuths uncovered some eyebrow-raising details about the saga. For one thing, Cotten wrote a will a month before his death in which he left all of his assets to Robertson. There were also suggestions QuadrigaCX didn't have enough cash on hand to pay all of its creditors and even that Cotten faked his death and disappeared with the money. The company ceased operations in 2019 after it was declared bankrupt.
The FBI started investigating that year, seeking information from those who lost money after Cotten's death and QuadrigaCX's collapse. It remains to be seen whether the documentary will include any concrete details about the resolution of the saga, but it should at least direct the spotlight toward one of the more curious crypto cases of recent years.
Also on the way to Netflix is The Tinder Swindler, a documentary about a conman who posed as a billionaire on the dating app and the women who tried to stop him. That documentary will start streaming in February.
Source: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 24 Sep 2021 | 4:02 pm IST
Rally to demand government action on climate crisis is first worldwide since start of pandemic
Hundreds of thousands of people in 99 countries have taken part in a coordinated global climate strike demanding urgent action to tackle the ecological crisis.
The strike on Friday, the first worldwide climate action since the coronavirus pandemic hit, is taking place weeks before the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, UK.
Continue reading...Source: World news | The Guardian | 24 Sep 2021 | 4:02 pm IST
Studies of biodiversity around the former Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan have shown that a decade after the nuclear incident there in March 2011, the local wildlife, at least, is mostly thriving.…
Source: The Register | 24 Sep 2021 | 3:45 pm IST
A phone can be endowed with the fastest processor in the world, but if it’s saddled with a slow screen, it could still feel sluggish — especially when compared to a similarly equipped device with a faster panel. That’s why the iPhone 13 Pro’s most important new feature is its ProMotion display.
But ProMotion is only included on the Pro and Pro Max models this year, making it one of the features that differentiate them from the iPhone 13 and 13 mini, not to mention last year’s 12 Pro. For an extra $200 to $300, the Pro series also offers an additional telephoto camera, a new macro photography mode, as well as more power and endurance. But are the iPhone 13 Pro’s new cameras and screens worth the extra money?
Before we get into those features, though, there’s one thing you should consider: weight. At 204 grams (7.19 ounces), the 6.1-inch 13 Pro is heavier than both the 12 Pro and the iPhone 13. The 13 Pro Max, which has a 6.7-inch screen, outweighs last year’s Pro Max and Samsung's Galaxy S21 Ultra. While I didn’t mind the regular Pro, it was uncomfortable to use Apple’s biggest flagship one-handed for more than a few minutes at a time.
In addition to being heavier than last year's models, the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max are a bit thicker, too. They also have larger rear camera modules and slightly smaller display notches. Otherwise, Apple hasn’t strayed far from the 12 Pro’s design. These phones have similar stainless steel enclosures with glass coverings, and are rated IP68 for water and dust resistance.
Even the colors available are familiar: The typical trio of graphite, gold and silver are now accompanied by Sierra Blue. Personally, I prefer this paler shade to the Pacific Blue offered on the last generation.
I realized something when I started testing the iPhone 13 series last week: Basically everything I do on a phone requires scrolling. That includes browsing social feeds, looking for the right component on a spec sheet, reading through old conversations, creeping on my Instagram viewers and reading articles, to give you a non-exhaustive list.
This is why Apple’s new ProMotion screen on the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max is a big deal, and also why it’s kind of annoying that it took the company so long to adopt this technology in the first place. Google was already a little behind when it added 90Hz panels to the Pixel 4, after companies like ASUS and OnePlus had already introduced higher refresh rates. Nowadays, this tech isn't just for premium, top-tier Android devices either.
This is hardly the first time Apple is late to adopt a new technology. But it is worth emphasizing that the faster screens on the iPhones make a real difference. Like many Android phones, the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max adjust their refresh rates depending on what you’re doing. They can go as low as 10Hz when you’re looking at a static image, or up to 120Hz for scrolling and compatible games.
The benefits might not be obvious at first, but when you go back to a slower screen, you’ll quickly notice the jagged artifacts they produce.
Aside from ProMotion, the iPhone 13 Pro’s OLED displays are also 25 percent brighter than their predecessors, which is nice for outdoor reading. But without a side-by-side comparison, the difference is subtle at best.
Regardless, I enjoyed watching the visual perfection that is Doja Cat’s Kiss Me More music video on the iPhone 13 Pro’s True Tone display. The rosy, cotton-candy hues looked vibrant and her individual lashes were clear. The stereo speakers also did a respectable job of delivering crisp audio with adequate bass. Other things like voices and instrumental background music in videos and games all came through clearly as well.
Apple says the iPhone 13 Pro’s rear cameras have received the “biggest upgrade ever,” touting “next-level hardware that captures so much more detail.” The triple 12-megapixel setup includes a primary sensor with a large f/1.5 aperture, a 77mm telephoto lens and an ultra-wide option with a 120-degree field of view. Night mode is now supported on all three of the cameras, so you don’t have to compromise on wide-angle or close up shots in low light. There’s also a new macro photography feature thanks to the updated ultra-wide lens, along with software like Photographic Styles and Cinematic Mode.
Those two modes are also offered on the iPhone 13 and 13 mini, and you can read my review of those phones for more details. In short, Photographic Styles lets you easily customize and set a sort of default for the contrast levels and color temperature of your images. Meanwhile, Cinematic Mode is good at identifying faces and people in a scene and blurring out everything surrounding a subject, but it struggled when I tried to change the focal point. The system is also a little wonky at outlining individuals, and stray body parts like thumbs and ears can get eaten up in the artificial blur. I found that adjusting the intensity via the f-stop setting helped keep this problem at bay, but the trade-off was less of a DSLR-like look in the final video.
One feature the Pros have over the regular 13 is macro photography. With this generation, you can get as close as two centimeters away from your subject and not lose focus. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t offer a way to manually enable a macro mode; the system automatically switches to the close-up camera when you get all up in something’s face.
The iPhone 13 Pro was generally accurate at detecting when I was trying to get a tight shot, but it kept changing back and forth between macro and regular views. Sometimes it would continually focus and refocus on the flowers behind the buds I was trying to shoot. The latter is a more understandable issue; every little hand tremor is magnified when a camera is zoomed that far in, making it hard to latch on to a subject. Not to mention something in motion, like a leaf in the wind. But that’s all the more reason to give users manual control.
Apple has said it will be releasing a software update soon that should prevent the camera from switching in and out of macro mode, which I of course can't vouch for yet.
When it worked as expected, macro mode delivered surprisingly great results. My shots of a closed flower bud and the vein system on a leaf’s surface were impressively detailed, showing individual hairs on the stem and petals. Close-ups of a fried fish clearly rendered the oil oozing out of the batter.
You need to make sure to let enough light shine on your subject, though, because my shots of a bee inside a flower were dark and splotchy. But that’s basically Photography 101; it’s not an issue specific to macro mode.
In general, the iPhone 13 Pro took sharp, colorful photos rivaling my sample shots from the Pixel 5 and Galaxy S21 Ultra. Apple’s default treatment renders pictures that are typically brighter and sometimes more saturated, but with Photographic Styles you can pick a look that you like and stick with it. I’m not a fan of the iPhone’s aggressive HDR effects compared to the Pixels’ more neutral landscapes, but frankly we’re at a point where Samsung, Google and Apple are generally on par in terms of sheer quality.
The iPhone 13 Pro’s upgraded sensors also really improved low light performance. I took photos of the moon peeking through some clouds in the middle of Manhattan skyscrapers with the S21 Ultra, Pixel 5 and iPhone 13 Pro, and they were all clean and sharp. They differed a bit in color temperature, but it’s not noticeable without a direct comparison. Google still retains an advantage with Night Sight, though; it produces photos that are significantly cleaner, brighter and richer in detail.
As for the 13 Pro’s front camera, it’s pretty much the same as the iPhone 13’s, and that’s not a bad thing. You’ll still get Cinematic Mode and Photographic Styles via the 12-megapixel True Depth sensor, and though selfies were a little soft in low light, they were otherwise sharp.
Because these are Pro-series phones, Apple also threw in support for ProRes videos in addition to its ProRAW format for stills... or at least it will eventually. ProRes won’t be available until a future iOS 15 update arrives at an unspecified date, but it promises to preserve colors at high quality. And, thanks to the A15’s hardware acceleration plus video encoders and decoders, you’ll be able to record in the format at up to 4K resolution (1080p for the base 128GB model) and 30 frames per second.
Speaking of, the iPhone 13 series runs iOS 15 out of the box, and I was able to test most of the new features when I tested the beta version. Focus modes, for example, let you set custom home pages and notification profiles based on your location or time of day. It’s one of my favorite new features on any smartphone platform in recent years because it allows people without a separate work device to switch off from work when they please.
Since most of iOS 15’s new features will be coming to older iPhones, though, they’re unlikely to sway your decision on whether to upgrade. We’ll have a more in-depth review of iOS 15, but suffice to say I appreciate the level of control it offers. I’m especially looking forward to testing out SharePlay, which hasn't rolled out yet, but will let you watch shows with or stream your phone screen to friends over FaceTime.
The main difference between the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro’s processors is that the latter uses a beefier 5-core GPU. This means that graphics-intensive tasks like gaming or video editing should be executed more quickly. I made a trailer in iMovie and while I had to wait 51 seconds for it to finish exporting on the iPhone 13, it took a mere 15 seconds on the Pro.
The iPhone 13 Pro’s A15 Bionic chip is similarly powerful in less-intensive tasks. I played rounds of Catan, watched various YouTube videos, chatted with friends, played music and snapped photos in rapid succession — all without any delay. And I know I’ve already said this a lot, but I have to stress again that the faster screens here just make most tasks feel more responsive.
In the week or so that I’ve had the iPhone 13 Pros, I’ve only needed to charge them twice. Granted, I spent most of the first few days focusing on the iPhone 13 and 13 mini, using the Pros predominantly when I was doing intensive camera testing. But when I switched over to the more-premium devices, the iPhone 13 Pro lasted almost a full two days before needing a charge. Battery levels dipped more quickly when I was playing games and exporting videos, but not so much that I had to worry about running out of juice.
Considering its higher refresh rate, that’s an impressive runtime. I’m still running battery tests across the iPhone 13 lineup, and will update this review with more empirical results as soon as that’s done. For now, though, it’s clear that despite the ProMotion displays, the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max can last longer than a day.
With faster screens, superb performance and long-lasting batteries, the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max are excellent phones. If you’re on a device older than a 12 Pro, you should consider upgrading just for the new ProMotion displays. Though the cameras also got a noteworthy improvement, I’m not sure they’re going to be the biggest draw. It’s honestly hard to spot the difference in quality between photos taken by Apple’s recent flagships.
Features like Cinematic Mode, Photographic Styles and macro cameras are nice to have, but won’t define your iPhone 13 Pro experience. And though Apple was playing catch up to Android flagships by finally introducing 120Hz screens to its phones, there are now fewer things that Samsung and Google offer that the iPhones don’t. But for basically anyone who uses iOS, the iPhone 13 Pro (and Pro Max, if you don’t mind its weight) is a worthy upgrade.
Processor: A15 Bionic with 6-core CPU and 5-core GPU
Storage: 128/256/512GB or 1TB storage
MicroSD card support: None
Display: 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR OLED with ProMotion up to 120Hz
Display resolution: 2,532 x 1,170 (460 ppi)
Rear triple cameras: 12MP f/1.5 wide-angle camera with sensor-shift OIS; 12MP f/1.8 ultra-wide camera (120-degree FOV); 12MP f/2.8 77mm telephoto camera
Front camera: 12MP f/2.2 TrueDepth camera
Operating system: iOS 15
Battery: "Up to 22 hours video playback"
Charging: Lightning port with fast wired charging at 20W (up to 50 percent in 30 minutes); Support for MagSafe wireless charging up to at 15W; Qi wireless charging at up to 7.5W.
Dimensions: 5.78 x 2.82 x 0.30 inches; 146.7 x 71.5 x 7.65 mm
Weight: 7.19 ounces; 204 grams
Fingerprint sensor: No
Waterproofing: IP68
NFC: Yes
Headphone jack: No
Processor: A15 Bionic with 6-core CPU and 5-core GPU
Storage: 128/256/512GB or 1TB storage
MicroSD card support: None
Display: 6.7-inch Super Retina XDR OLED with ProMotion up to 120Hz
Display resolution: 2,778 x 1,284 (458 ppi)
Rear triple cameras: 12MP f/1.5 wide-angle camera with sensor-shift OIS; 12MP f/1.8 ultra-wide camera (120-degree FOV); 12MP f/2.8 77mm telephoto camera
Front camera: 12MP f/2.2 TrueDepth camera
Operating system: iOS 15
Battery: "Up to 28 hours video playback"
Charging: Lightning port with fast wired charging at 20W (up to 50 percent in 30 minutes); Support for MagSafe wireless charging up to at 15W; Qi wireless charging at up to 7.5W.
Dimensions: 6.33 x 3.07 x 0.30 inches; 160.8 x 78.1 x 7.65 mm
Weight: 8.46 ounces; 240 grams
Fingerprint sensor: No
Waterproofing: IP68
NFC: Yes
Headphone jack: No
Photos by David Imel (@DurvidImel)
Source: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 24 Sep 2021 | 3:30 pm IST
The Expedition 65 astronauts are moving full speed ahead today studying how living in space affects skin processes.
Source: SpaceRef | 24 Sep 2021 | 3:03 pm IST
Enlarge / The iPhone 13 Pro Max, photographed by the iPhone 13 Pro in low light.
Imagine you were visited by a genie who would grant you three wishes, but they all had to be about what you want from your next smartphone. As market research and surveys tell it, almost everyone would make the same three wishes: great battery life, excellent cameras, and big, beautiful screens.
This year, Apple is that technology genie, because that’s exactly what the iPhone 13, iPhone 13 mini, iPhone 13 Pro, and iPhone 13 Pro Max deliver when they hit store shelves today.
Cupertino’s flagship phone lineup might seem like an iterative “S”-style update, given that the phones look almost the same as last year's models and that there are no major new features apart from screens with higher refresh rates in the priciest models. But since Apple zeroed in on most people's highest priorities, this seemingly iterative update ends up being a noteworthy one.
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Source: Ars Technica | 24 Sep 2021 | 3:01 pm IST
China is continuing to push forward in its cryptocurrency crackdown. The People’s Bank of China says crypto transactions are illegal and called for a formal ban. It cited concerns about national security and the safety of residents' assets.
The bank claims cryptocurrencies aren’t fiat currency and can’t be circulated, as Bloomberg reports. Any transactions involving crypto are now deemed to be criminal financial activity. The bank told financial and internet companies to stop allowing crypto trades on their platforms. Foreign exchanges are banned from providing services to Chinese residents too.
The rise of crypto has invoked an increase in “money laundering, illegal fund-raising, fraud, pyramid schemes and other illegal and criminal activities,” the bank said. Those appearing to violate the rules will be “investigated for criminal liability.”
Several agencies in the country are working together to clamp down on crypto use. The National Development and Reform Commission is looking to put a halt to crypto mining, as TechCrunch notes. The Sichuan local government banned crypto mining in June, prompting some miners to leave the country.
The price of Bitcoin dropped from around $45,000 to approximately $41,500 on Friday morning, following the announcement.
Source: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics | 24 Sep 2021 | 2:57 pm IST
Calabria, often referred to as the 'boot' of Italy, is featured in this image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.
Source: SpaceRef | 24 Sep 2021 | 2:55 pm IST
Source: NYT > Top Stories | 24 Sep 2021 | 2:47 pm IST
Special series After a great first episode, the MCubed webcast will be back on October 7, 2021 to tackle a whole other beast: Continuous Delivery in Machine Learning.…
Source: The Register | 24 Sep 2021 | 2:45 pm IST
Enlarge / CDC Director Rochelle Walensky testifies during a Senate committee hearing in July 2021. (credit: Stefani Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images)
Just past midnight last night, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention overruled a committee of independent advisers, allowing for use of a Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine booster dose in people with increased risk of occupational and institutional exposure to the pandemic coronavirus. That includes health care workers, front-line workers, teachers, day care providers, grocery store workers, and people who work or live in prisons and homeless shelters, among others.
Hours earlier, the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) concluded a two-day meeting on booster recommendations—and voted 9-6 against recommending boosters for this group.
"As CDC Director, it is my job to recognize where our actions can have the greatest impact," Director Rochelle Walensky said in a statement. "At CDC, we are tasked with analyzing complex, often imperfect data to make concrete recommendations that optimize health. In a pandemic, even with uncertainty, we must take actions that we anticipate will do the greatest good."
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Source: Ars Technica | 24 Sep 2021 | 2:43 pm IST
A female volunteer gets comfortable in her waterbed, as the dry immersion study to recreate some of the effects of spaceflight on the body kicks off this week in Toulouse, France. Called Vivaldi, or Validation of the Dry Immersion, the campaign features all female-participants in a European first.
Immersion begins when water covers the subject above the thorax, immobilised with legs and trunk covered with a cotton sheet. Only the arms and head remain free outside the tarp.
As a result, the body experiences ‘supportlessness’ – something close to what astronauts feel while floating on the International Space Station.
In weightlessness, astronauts’ bodies lose muscle and bone density, vision changes and fluids shift to the brain. Finding ways to stay healthy in orbit is a large part of human spaceflight research.
Volunteers spend almost 24 hours a day in the immersion tank, limiting their movements as much as possible. Each day starts at 7 am with urine and blood samples, followed by scientific protocols and measurements to study how the body adapts.
All activities from leisure to hygiene are done within the constraints of immersion. Only a small pillow is allowed during meals to ease eating. Showering and transfer to other experiments are done outside of the tank while lying on their backs and with their head tilted 6 degrees down to minimise fluid shifts.
The results from this type of research do not only benefit astronauts but have implications for patients on Earth with similar disorders and elderly people.
This is the only the second time a dry immersion campaign takes place with all-female participants, and it is a first for Europe. ESA decided to launch the study to address the gender gap in science data.
Source: ESA Top News | 24 Sep 2021 | 2:10 pm IST
Comment Hewlett Packard Enterprise has posted a "UK Public Sector Manifesto" with nine themes, alongside a campaign hyping the value of hybrid cloud.…
Source: The Register | 24 Sep 2021 | 2:02 pm IST
Week in images: 20 - 24 September 2021
Discover our week through the lens
Source: ESA Top News | 24 Sep 2021 | 2:00 pm IST
Source: NASA Image of the Day | 24 Sep 2021 | 1:34 pm IST
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