Man who fatally shot California store owner tore down her Pride flag and shouted slurs

Shooter had history of posting hateful content online, sheriff says, and shot Laura Ann Carleton with gun not registered to him

A 27-year-old man who fatally shot a store owner in California had torn down her Pride flag and shouted homophobic slurs, officials said on Monday.

Laura Ann Carleton, 66, who went by “Laurie”, died at the scene of the shooting on Friday outside her Mag.Pi clothing store in Cedar Glen, an unincorporated community in the mountains roughly 60 miles (100km) east of Los Angeles.

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Children’s prison staff in England and Wales to be banned from pain-inducing restraints

MoJ policy says such restraints must only be used in emergency scenarios

Staff working in children’s prisons are to be banned from using techniques that deliberately cause pain, except in emergency scenarios to save life or to prevent life-changing injury.

The new Ministry of Justice policy, for England and Wales, which follows a review completed by the now chief inspector of prisons Charlie Taylor in 2020, will be effective from February 2024. It states that it is “never acceptable to deliberately cause pain when a non-painful alternative can safely achieve the same objective”.

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Sammich, serious business [Strange]

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Microsoft wants Activision so badly, it's handing streaming rights over to ... Ubisoft?

All to appease the UK's competition watchdog, the last hurdle to the deal

Microsoft so desperately wants its $68.7 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard to happen that it's willing to divest cloud streaming rights for the publisher's games to France's Ubisoft.…

The Internet Is Turning Into a Data Black Box. An ‘Inspectability API’ Could Crack It Open

Unlike web browsers, mobile apps increasingly make it difficult or impossible to see what companies are really doing with your data. The answer? An inspectability API.

A Brain Implant Helped Stroke Survivors Regain Movement

Stimulating the brain with electricity has been used for 30 years to treat Parkinson’s disease. Now, researchers are testing whether it could help restore hand and arm motion.

Top Features in Apple’s iOS 17 and iPadOS 17: Compatible Devices, Release Date

Learn about the NameDrop, Contact Posters, and Adaptive Audio—all coming to your iPhone later this year.

Network Rail faces prosecution over fatal 2020 crash near Stonehaven

Case will call at high court in Aberdeen next month, after three people died when ScotRail train derailed

Network Rail is facing prosecution over a train crash that killed three people in Scotland.

Train driver Brett McCullough, 45, conductor Donald Dinnie, 58, and passenger Christopher Stuchbury, 62, died in the crash near Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, on 12 August 2020.

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Growing Up Gay in the Age of Apps

From the time I knew what intersections were, I said my family lived at the crossing of Inwood Road and Preston Road in North Dallas. I asserted that fact certainly for the better part of a decade. Then I found out those two roads ran parallel to each other. Then we moved to a different house. I did eventually learn…

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Deaf-blind man gets a service dog, plays a mean pinball [Spiffy]

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Scotland records largest fall in drug deaths but rate still 2.7 times UK average

Official data shows there were 1,051 deaths due to drug misuse in 2022 – a drop of 279 on the previous year

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Scotland has recorded its largest fall in drug deaths, but the number is still almost three times higher than the average for the UK as a whole.

Data from National Records of Scotland (NRS) showed there were 1,051 deaths due to drug misuse in 2022 – a drop of 279 on the previous year. It is the second year in a row that drugs deaths have fallen, although the total for 2021 dropped by just nine from the record high seen in 2020, when 1,339 people died.

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Federal government rejected Queensland’s funding request for Gabba rebuild, inquiry told

Senate hears request was turned down because project was part of ‘urban renewal’ that went beyond Brisbane Olympics

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The Queensland government asked the commonwealth to help fund a $2.7bn redevelopment of the Gabba stadium but was turned down because the project was part of “broader urban renewal” that went beyond the Brisbane Olympics, an inquiry has heard.

On Tuesday, the first day of a Senate inquiry into the 2032 Olympic Games, a senior Queensland government public servant confirmed the federal government had walked away from the sports stadium reconstruction.

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Instagram is adding a chronological feed for Reels and Stories in Europe

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Instagram and Facebook users in Europe are getting more options to opt out of Meta’s recommendation algorithms, the company has explained in a blog post today. According to Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg, European users will be able to access features like Reels, Stories, and Search on Facebook and Instagram without seeing content that’s been ranked by Meta’s recommendation algorithms.

“For example, on Facebook and Instagram, users will have the option to view Stories and Reels only from people they follow, ranked in chronological order, newest to oldest,” Clegg writes. “They will also be able to view Search results based only on the words they enter, rather than personalized specifically to them based on their previous...

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Chris Christie courts Republican voters in Trump and DeSantis territory

The presidential candidate took his pitch to Florida, which overwhelmingly backed Trump in 2020 and DeSantis last year

It’s a little after 6.30am on a steamy Friday in South Miami. A road sweeper appears in the pre-dawn twilight and trundles noisily past a man fixing red, white and blue bunting to a hedge at the Casa Cuba restaurant.

Chris Christie is up early for his campaign event, as he has been on many mornings of his ambitious presidential run. Yet this one has a different feel. It’s essentially a raid on an enemy stronghold. This turf is held by Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, the two prominent Floridians in the race for the Republican nomination. Christie is aware he has to make a good impression.

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US businessman is wannabe ‘warlord’ of secretive far-right men’s network

Revealed: Charles Haywood, creator of the Society for American Civic Renewal, has said he might serve as ‘warlord’ at the head of an ‘armed patronage network’

The founder and sponsor of a far-right network of secretive, men-only, invitation-only fraternal lodges in the US is a former industrialist who has frequently speculated about his future as a warlord after the collapse of America, a Guardian investigation has found.

Federal and state tax and company filings show that the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR) and its creator, Charles Haywood, also have financial ties with the far-right Claremont Institute.

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New Supply Chain Attack Hit Close to 100 Victims—and Clues Point to China

The hackers, who mostly targeted victims in Hong Kong, also hijacked Microsoft’s trust model to make their malware harder to detect.

ICANN warns UN may sideline tech community from future internet governance

'We built this thing and now you don't want to hear from us – WTF?' is the gist of it

The United Nations' proposed Global Digital Compact will exclude technical experts as a distinct voice in internet governance, ignoring their enormous contributions to growing and sustaining the internet, according to ICANN and two of the world's regional internet registries.…

The View From the Center of the World’s Myopia Epidemic

In Taiwan, so many people are nearsighted that the island nation has already glimpsed what could be coming for the rest of us.

Children trapped in Pakistan chairlift after cable snaps

High winds hamper attempts to rescue six children and two teachers stranded above ravine

Six children and two teachers were trapped in a chairlift hanging 274 metres (900ft) above a ravine in Pakistan after a cable snapped, with a helicopter rescue mission being hampered by high winds, officials said.

The children, who have been stranded since 7am local time (0200 GMT), were using the chairlift to get to school in a mountainous area in Battagram, about 125 miles north of Islamabad.

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Nearly 7,000 ambulance workers in England left in past year, figures show

Lib Dems say paramedics are ‘voting with their feet’, as number of staff leaving service rises 51% in three years

Ambulance services in England have experienced a mass exodus of staff in the past year with nearly 7,000 leaving their jobs, figures have revealed.

The number of emergency service crew leavers has risen sharply compared with 2019 levels, prompting concern for patient safety during the next NHS winter crisis.

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Invasive blue crabs threaten economy of whole regions of Italy, official say

Crustacean native to Americas is devastating shellfish production in Po delta, where they have no natural predators

Italian fishing communities in the north of the country are fighting an invasion of predatory blue crabs which risks jeopardising the economy of whole regions, authorities have said.

The crab, originally from the coast of north and south America, has spread across several lagoon-like locations in Italy over the past year, preying on local shellfish and posing a threat to the country’s role as one of the world’s leading clam producers.

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Seriously, Little Debbie Snack Cakes aren't good enough to kill for. Except to this security guard in Milwaukee [Murica]

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Murray-Darling Basin plan: states given three more years to finish water projects as extra buybacks on table

Tanya Plibersek warns Victoria as state holds out on signing deal while move to lift embargo on federal water purchases likely to enrage farmers

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The states will have three more years to complete water efficiency projects in the Murray-Darling and will be offered more money, but more water buybacks from agriculture are also on the table, the federal water minister has said.

Tanya Plibersek announced on Tuesday she had struck an agreement with all but one of the basin states to extend the Murray-Darling Basin plan and increase the funding beyond the original $13bn that has been allocated.

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Julian Leeser urges Coalition colleagues to avoid ‘red Trumpian hats’ and ‘political diet of anger’

Liberal moderate claims party hasn’t fully grasped its electoral challenges following 2022 election defeat

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The Liberal MP Julian Leeser has urged his colleagues to avoid the “fringes” of debate like the CPAC conservative conference, telling a party function the Coalition’s future should not be in “red Trumpian hats or a political diet of anger”.

The Liberal moderate, who is a supporter of the Indigenous voice to parliament, said the Liberal party needed to spend more time focusing on middle Australia, and claimed the organisation had not yet fully grasped the electoral challenges it faces following the 2022 election defeat.

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‘They’ve become complacent’: Greens face battle to hold on to Brighton seat

The Green party hopes to convince voters in its only seat in parliament that there is life after Caroline Lucas

Locking up her bike on a busy Brighton street, cafe manager Bridget Weston might seem a good bet to back the local Green party, but she is sceptical. “I think they have become complacent,” she says. “There’s almost this presumption that because of the way Brighton is, people are just going to vote Green.”

A general election is most likely still over a year away, but the starting gun has been fired on one of its most fascinating micro-battles: whether the Greens can hold on to their sole Commons seat in an area where, these days, they arguably represent the political establishment.

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