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Last updated 19 Feb, 03:11 PM
BBC News
Why has Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor been arrested? - What we know about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office.
Read King and police statements in full after Andrew arrest - King releases statement after Thames Valley Police says a man is in custody and officers are searching addresses in Berkshire and Norfolk.
Andrew in custody as police search two addresses - The former prince remains in custody while searches take place in Norfolk and Berkshire.
Detained British woman describes life in Iran jail hours before being sentenced to 10 years - In a rare telephone interview from Tehran's Evin prison, Lindsay Foreman, whose husband is also held in Iran, likened their detainment to "an endurance test for the mind".
Pupils with SEND to have support reviewed after primary, leaked plans suggest - Leaks suggest plans for a complete redesign of special educational needs and disabilities support in schools.
The Register
IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in DOGE shakeup - CIO says sweeping reorg followed deep cuts as agency pushes cross-functional teams and AI Job cuts at the IRS's tech arm have gone faster and farther than expected, with 40 percent of IT staff and four-fifths of tech leaders gone, the agency's CIO revealed yesterday.…
US tech giants open their wallets for AI-friendly politicians - Rush is on to push forward sympathetic candidates from both parties ahead of midterms Meta is among tech giants reportedly funding US politicians friendly to the AI industry, as concerns mount over a huge expansion in datacenter building and the effects of AI on everyday life.…
DEF CON bans three Epstein-linked men from future events - Emails show all discussed networking and biz interests with the sex offender throughout the 2010s Cybersecurity conference DEF CON has added three men named in the Epstein files to its list of banned individuals. They are not accused of any criminal wrongdoing.…
AI agents can't teach themselves new tricks – only people can - Self-generated skills don't do much for AI agents, study finds, but human-curated skills do Teach an AI agent how to fish for information and it can feed itself with data. Tell an AI agent to figure things out on its own and it may make things worse.…
UK to demand social platforms take down abusive intimate images within 48 hours - 'Why not 12?' says lawyer The UK is bracketing "intimate images shared without a victim's consent" along with terror and child sexual abuse material, and demanding that online platforms remove them within two days.…
New Scientist - Home
Is our galaxy’s black hole actually made of dark matter? - An exotic type of dark matter could explain some of the characteristics of our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, but many cosmologists are leery of the idea
Weird and wonderful fungi should be so much more than sci-fi villains - Fungi have become Hollywood’s go-to bad guys. But as yet another story focuses on Cordyceps, Nick Crumpton says we are missing a chance to broaden our fictional horizons
Why some people cannot move on from the death of a loved one - Prolonged grief disorder affects around 1 in 20 people, and we're starting to understand the neuroscience behind it
Microbe with the smallest genome yet pushes the boundaries of life - Symbiotic bacteria living inside insect cells have lost much of their DNA over hundreds of millions of years, much like the ancient microbes that evolved into mitochondria
Spruce trees stumped (sigh) when it comes to predicting eclipses - Feedback enjoys the debunking of a study that suggested a 2022 solar eclipse had been "anticipated" by a bunch of trees
Hacker News
Pebble Production: February Update - Comments
C++26: Std:Is_within_lifetime - Comments
Don't Trust the Salt: AI Summarization, Multilingual Safety, and LLM Guardrails - Comments
America vs. Singapore: You Can't Save Your Way Out of Economic Shocks - Comments
Paged Out Issue #8 [pdf] - Comments
Slashdot
A $10 Plastic Speaker is the Most Durable Revenue Line in Indian Digital Payments - India's digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it's a cheap plastic speaker that sits on a shopkeeper's counter and reads out incoming payments aloud. The roughly 23 million soundboxes deployed across India earn about $220 million a year in rental fees, more than every explicitly UPI-linked revenue line in the ecosystem combined, according to estimates from Bernstein. Each device costs $7-12 to manufacture and earns its platform $7-10 a year in rent. A story adds: PhonePe processes about 48% of all UPI transactions in India. Its net payment processing revenue in H1 FY26 was about $83 million. Its device revenue was about $34 million. Running nearly half of India's real-time payment infrastructure earns PhonePe only 2.4 times what it makes from renting speakers to shopkeepers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
EV Sales Boom As Ethiopia Bans Fossil-Fuel Car Imports - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Post: In 2024, the Ethiopian government banned the import of fossil fuel-powered vehicles and slashed tariffs on their electric equivalents. It was a policy driven less by the country's climate ambitions and more by fiscal pressures. For years, subsidizing gasoline for consumers has been a major drag on Ethiopia's budget, costing the state billions of dollars over the past decade. The country defaulted on its sovereign bonds in 2023 after rising interest rates drove up the costs of servicing its debts, and it received a $3.4 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund the following year. In the two years since the ban on internal combustion engine vehicles, EV adoption has grown from less than 1% to nearly 6% of all of the vehicles on the road in the country -- according to the government's own figures -- some way above the global average of 4%. "The Ethiopia story is fascinating," said Colin McKerracher, head of clean transport at BloombergNEF. "What you're seeing in places that don't make a lot of vehicles of any type, they're saying: 'Well, look, if I'm going to import the cars anyway, then I'd rather import less oil. We may as well import the one that cleans up local air quality and is cheaper to buy.'" For decades, Ethiopia's high import tariffs on vehicles put new car ownership out of the reach of most of the country's population. Per capita gross domestic product is only about $1,000, and even by the standards of low-income countries, it has among the lowest car ownership rates. At 13 vehicles per 1,000 people, it's a fraction of the African average of 73. With few cars manufactured in the country, the vast majority are imported, and most are bought used. The government's import policy has upended the market. In parallel, tariffs for EVs were dropped to 15% for completed cars, 5% for parts and semi-assembled vehicles, and zero for "fully knocked down" -- vehicles shipped in parts and assembled locally. That has made new EVs cost-competitive with old gasoline cars. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Claims That AI Can Help Fix Climate Dismissed As Greenwashing - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report. Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbots and image generation tools driving the sector's explosive growth of gas-guzzling datacenters, the analysis of 154 statements found. The research, commissioned by nonprofits including Beyond Fossil Fuels and Climate Action Against Disinformation, did not find a single example where popular tools such as Google's Gemini or Microsoft's Copilot were leading to a "material, verifiable, and substantial" reduction in planet-heating emissions. Ketan Joshi, an energy analyst and author of the report, said the industry's tactics were "diversionary" and relied on tried and tested methods that amount to "greenwashing." He likened it to fossil fuel companies advertising their modest investments in solar panels and overstating the potential of carbon capture. "These technologies only avoid a minuscule fraction of emissions relative to the massive emissions of their core business," said Joshi. "Big tech took that approach and upgraded and expanded it." [...] Joshi said the discourse around AI's climate benefits needed to be "brought back to reality." "The false coupling of a big problem and a small solution serves as a distraction from the very preventable harms being done through unrestricted datacenter expansion," he said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Trump Has Prepared Speech On Extraterrestrial Life - According to Lara Trump, Donald Trump has prepared but not yet delivered a speech about extraterrestrial life, though the White House says such a speech would be "news to me." White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt continued: "I'll have to check in with our speech writing team. Uh, and that would be of great interest to me personally, and I'm sure all of you in this room and apparently former President Obama, too." The Hill reports: Lara Trump, speaking on the Pod Force One podcast, said the president has played coy when she and her husband Eric have asked about the existence of UFO's and aliens. "We've kind of asked my father-in-law about this... we all want to know about the UFOs... and he played a little coy with us," Lara Trump said. "I've heard kind of around, I think my father-in-law has actually said it, that there is some speech that he has, that I guess at the right time, I don't know when the right time is, he's going to break out and talk about and it has to do with maybe some sort of extraterrestrial life." Obama has clarified in recent days that he has seen no evidence that aliens are real, after comments he made on a podcast with Brian Tyler Cohen seeming to confirm his knowledge of extraterrestrial life went viral. "They're real but I haven't seen them," Obama said on the podcast. "And they're not being kept in... what is it? Area 51. There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States." Later, in a post on Instagram, Obama clarified that he was trying to answer in the light-hearted spirit of a speed round of questions and that, "Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's life out there." "But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we've been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!" Read more of this story at Slashdot.
EPA Faces First Lawsuit Over Its Killing of Major Climate Rule - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The first shot has been fired in the legal war over the Environmental Protection Agency's rollback of its "endangerment finding," which had been the foundation for federal climate regulations. Environmental and health groups filed a lawsuit on Wednesday morning in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, arguing that the E.P.A.'s move to eliminate limits on greenhouse gases from vehicles, and potentially other sources, was illegal. The suit was triggered by last week's decision by the E.P.A. to kill one of its key scientific conclusions, the endangerment finding, which says that greenhouse gases harm public health. The finding had formed the basis for climate regulations in the United States. The lawsuit claims that the agency is rehashing arguments that the Supreme Court already considered, and rejected, in a landmark 2007 case, Massachusetts v. E.P.A. The issue is likely to end up back before the Supreme Court, which is now far more conservative. In the 2007 case, the justices ruled that the E.P.A. was required to issue a scientific determination as to whether greenhouse gases were a threat to public health under the 1970 Clean Air Act and to regulate them if they were. As a result, two years later, in 2009, the E.P.A. issued the endangerment finding, allowing the government to limit greenhouse gas emissions, which cause climate change. "With this action, E.P.A. flips its mission on its head," said Hana Vizcarra, a senior lawyer at the nonprofit Earthjustice, which is representing six groups in the lawsuit. "It abandons its core mandate to protect human health and the environment to boost polluting industries and attempts to rewrite the law in order to do so." [...] Also on Wednesday, two other nonprofit law firms filed their own lawsuit against the E.P.A. over the endangerment finding, on behalf of 18 youth plaintiffs. That suit, by Our Children's Trust and Public Justice, argues that the E.P.A.'s move was unconstitutional. Separate legal challenges to E.P.A. rules are generally consolidated into one case at the D.C. Circuit Court, which is where disputes involving the Clean Air Act are required to be heard. But the sheer number of groups involved could make the legal battle lengthy and complicated to manage. A three-judge panel at the Circuit Court is expected to pore over several rounds of legal briefs before oral arguments begin. Those may not take place until next year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.