Sony has raised the price of PlayStation 5 in most major markets, citing "challenging economic conditions" such as high global inflation rates and adverse currency trends, the latest in a series of challenges engulfing the current generation gaming console. From a report: The new price, which largely varies between $30 to $80, goes immediately into effect in Europe, the UK, China, Australia, Mexico and Canada, the company said in a blog post. The revised price will hit Japan on September 15, said the Japanese conglomerate. The U.S. is not impacted by the price hike, the company confirmed. "While this price increase is a necessity given the current global economic environment and its impact on SIE's business, our top priority continues to be improving the PS5 supply situation so that as many players as possible can experience everything that PS5 offers and what's still to come," Sony said in the post.

The latest crisis that rocked the Greek government shows the bloc's surveillance problem goes beyond the notorious NSO Group. From a report: The ripple effects of the scandal are reaching the heart of the European Union. Over the past 13 months, it has been revealed that spyware had targeted opposition leaders, journalists, lawyers and activists in France, Spain, Hungary, Poland and even staff within the European Commission, the EU's cabinet-style government, between 2019 and 2021. The bloc has already set up an inquiry into its own use of spyware, but even as the 38-person committee works toward producing a report for early 2023, the number of new scandals is quickly mounting up. What sets the scandal in Greece apart is the company behind the spyware that was used. Until then the surveillance software in every EU scandal could be traced back to one company, the notorious NSO Group. Yet the spyware stalking Koukakis' phone was made by Cytrox, a company founded in the small European nation of North Macedonia and acquired in 2017 by Tal Dilian -- an entrepreneur who achieved notoriety for driving a high-tech surveillance van around the island of Cyprus and showing a Forbes journalist how it could hack into passing people's phones.

In that interview, Dilian said he had acquired Cytrox and absorbed the company into his intelligence company Intellexa, which is now thought to now be based in Greece. The arrival of Cytrox into Europe's ongoing scandal shows the problem is bigger than just the NSO Group. The bloc has a thriving spyware industry of its own. As the NSO Group struggles with intense scrutiny and being blacklisted by the US, its less well-known European rivals are jostling to take its clients, researchers say. Over the past two months, Cytrox is not the only local company to generate headlines for hacking devices within the bloc. In June, Google discovered the Italian spyware vendor RCS Lab was targeting smartphones in Italy and Kazakhstan. Alberto Nobili, RCS' managing director, told WIRED that the company condemns the misuse of its products but declined to comment on whether the cases cited by Google were examples of misuse. "RCS personnel are not exposed, nor participate in any activities conducted by the relevant customers," he says. More recently, in July, spyware made by Austria's DSIRF was detected by Microsoft hacking into law firms, banks, and consultancies in Austria, the UK, and Panama.

Six months after switching to a four-day working week, the UK's Atom Bank said it's seen benefits from talent retention to improved productivity. From a report: There was a 49% increase in job applications at the bank in January 2022 compared to a year ago, while staff retention rates have also risen, according to a press release Wednesday. Days lost to sickness fell over the period and customer service ratings also improved. The Durham, England-based challenger bank is one of a number of UK companies exploring new working patterns to meet growing demand for flexible employment following the pandemic. While some have questioned the feasibility of a shorter working week, Atom Bank has no such qualms. "We firmly believe the four-day week is the future of working life," said Anne-Marie Lister, chief people officer at Atom Bank. "We hope Atom's experiences will encourage more businesses to make the shift permanently."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: France's government increased the size of the subsidy it offers to people who trade in their gas-powered cars for electric bikes to as much as 4,000 euros (approx. $3,976) per person, according to The Times. The money is meant to incentivize people to ditch their polluting modes of transportation in favor of cleaner, more environmentally friendly alternatives. People who live in low-income households in low-emission urban zones that trade in their cars are eligible for the full 4,000-euro subsidy to put toward the purchase of an e-bike. (Traditional, non-motorized bikes also qualify for the incentive.) French citizens from higher income brackets can claim smaller subsidies.

The subsidy, which was first introduced last year, was recently increased after officials determined that more needed to be done to catch up to bike-loving rivals like the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. The French government has said it wants 9 percent of the country to switch to bicycles by 2024, compared with only 3 percent now. The Netherlands boasts a huge 27 percent in this area. [...] But France isn't just spending money on individual incentives. Emmanuel Macron's government also said it would invest 250 million euros to make the city of Paris entirely bikeable. And the city's mayor, Anne Hidalgo, won reelection last year on a promise to add another 130 kilometers (over 80 miles) of bike-safe pathways over the next five years.

A consumer rights advocacy group has filed a class action lawsuit against Sony, claiming they are "ripping people off" by charging a 30 percent commission fee on all digital purchases made through the UK PlayStation Store. Kotaku reports: "Sony dominates the digital distribution of PlayStation games and in-game content," said one of the lawyers leading the lawsuit. "It has deployed an anti-competitive strategy which has resulted in excessive prices to customers that are out of all proportion to the costs of Sony providing its services."

The argument here is that Sony has a "near-monopoly" on the sale of digital games, particularly PlayStation games, and so it shouldn't be using that power to enforce unreasonable prices on consumers. Sony is not the only platform that enforces a 30 percent take (most major storefronts do, with the notable exception of the Epic Games Store). We'll have to wait and see whether or not the courts uphold that the PlayStation ecosystem is a monopoly, and whether or not that will have an impact on other walled gardens like app stores or Steam. Kotaku reached out to the legal team about what it considers to be a reasonable commission fee, but did not get a comment by the time of publication.

The plaintiffs point out that gaming is the biggest entertainment industry in the UK, and Sony is hurting consumers who can't afford their games. "We're in the midst of a cost of living crisis and the consumer purse is being squeezed like never before," said Alex Neill, a consumer rights advocate who filed the lawsuit. While I'm sympathetic to how inflation makes it difficult for players to afford more games, I'm not sure if I would lump gaming together with a cost of living crisis. Paying rent is a necessity. Playing God of War Ragnarok on launch is not.

Facebook's parent company Meta is heading into another political battle over the planned introduction of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in its Messenger chat platform. From a report: The UK's home secretary, Priti Patel, makes this clear in an op-ed for Tory mouthpiece The Telegraph this week, saying it would be a "grotesque betrayal" if the company didn't consider issues of child safety while introducing E2EE. Similar arguments are likely to be raised in the US, too. Meta has been working on adding E2EE to Messenger for years, and recently confirmed that it aims to encrypt all chats and calls on the platform by default next year. (It currently only offers default E2EE on its other big chat platform, WhatsApp, though users can opt-in to E2EE on Messenger on a chat-by-chat basis.)

The move is reigniting decades-old debates in politics and tech about the right way to balance user privacy and safety. In the US, these arguments have been heightened by the potential for police to issues search warrants for user chats in order to enforce new abortion laws after the overturn of Roe v. Wade. In the UK, arguments over encryption tend to focus on child safety and the dissemination of of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. "A great many child predators use social media platforms such as Facebook to discover, target and sexually abuse children," writes Patel in her op-ed. "It is vital that law enforcement have access to the information they need to identify the children in these images and safeguard them from vile predators."

Slashdot reader tedlistens writes that "Nuclear is booming again. And with a serious pile of private and public funding behind them—and physics (see the recent breakthrough at Livermore National Lab) — these companies say they're getting closer to fusion."

The companies were profiled in a Fast Company article titled "The frontrunners in the trillion-dollar race for limitless fusion power." Last year, investors like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos injected a record $3.4 billion into firms working on the technology, according to Pitchbook. One fusion firm, Seattle-based Helion, raised a record $500 million from Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. ... The Fusion Industry Association says that at least 33 different companies were now pursuing nuclear fusion, and predicted that fusion would be connected to the energy grid sometime in the 2030s.... And you'd be forgiven for missing another milestone in July, when the Energy Dept. announced awards of between $50,000 and $500,000, to ten fusion companies working on projects with universities and national labs.

Here are a few of the awardees, who include some of the industry's leading companies, and whose projects offer a sampling of the opportunities — and hard problems — in fusion....

Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building their first machine, SPARC, with a goal of producing power by 2025. "You'll push a button," CEO and cofounder Bob Mumgaard told the Khosla Ventures CEO Summit this summer, "and for the first time on earth you will make more power out than in from a fusion plasma. That's about 200 million degrees — you know, cooling towers will have a bunch of steam go out of them — and you let your finger off the button and it will stop, and you push the button again and it will go." With an explosion in funding from investors including Khosla, Bill Gates, George Soros, Emerson Collective and Google to name a few — they raised $1.8 billion last year alone — CFS hopes to start operating a prototype in 2025....

One morning last December, the company fired up its newest supermagnet — a 10-ton, 8-foot-tall device made of hundreds of tightly-twisted coils — and quietly pushed its magnetic field beyond a whopping 20 tesla, a record for a magnet of its size. (Most MRIs operate at a strength of about 1 tesla.) Eventually, 18 of these magnets will surround the SPARC's tokamak, which CFS says could produce as much as 11 times more energy than it consumes, and at prices cheaper than fossil fuels.
Other fusion-energy companies profiled in the article:

• Southern California-based TAE Technologies, which uses a unique non-radioactive reaction between hydrogen and boron. (Since its founding in 1998 TAE has raised $1.2 billion, with $250 million in its latest round led by Google and Chevron's venture capital arm). TAE "says it plans to start delivering power to grids by 2030, followed by 'broader commercialization' during the next decade."

• General Atomics, of San Diego, California, which built eight of the magnet modules for the ground-breaking IITER facility, "including its wild Central Solenoid — the world's most powerful magnet."

• Canada-based General Fusion (backed by Jeff Bezos and building on technology originally developed by the U.S. Navy), which hopes to generate the data need to build a commercial pilot plant.

• Princeton Fusion Systems of Plainsboro, New Jersey, uses radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to generate a plasma formation in a magnetic bottle — holding the record for the longest time such a reaction has been stably held.

• UK-based Tokamak Energy has reached the 100 million Celsius threshold for commercially viable nuclear fusion, the first to do so with a spherical, privately-funded device.

• Helicity Space, based in Pasadena, California, has 10 employees and over $4 million in funding to pursue its goal of "enabling humanity's access to the solar system, with a Helicity Drive-powered flight to Mars expected to take two months, without planetary alignment."

• Magneto-Intertial Fusion Technologies, of Tustin, California.

"Even if all nuclear power plants were shut down today, there's a mountain of radioactive waste waiting to be disposed of," reports Ars Technica. "Yet only Finland has an approved solution for nuclear waste disposal, while projects in the US, UK, and Germany have failed for decades, and progress is also slow in other countries."

So how did Finland construct a safe nuclear waste repository? Ars Technica asked Antti Mustonen, who's a research manager with Posiva, the organization in charge of the Finnish repository: Finland has a lot of hard crystalline bedrock and many places that are potentially suitable for a repository. The country eventually chose an island on the Baltic coast for its Onkalo repository, and it hopes to seal off the first tunnel of nuclear waste sometime around 2025....

Even after it has cooled in ponds for decades, spent nuclear fuel gives out heat by radioactive decay, raising the temperature near the waste canisters. This heat could potentially corrode the canisters, compromise the bentonite, or even crack the rock face. Therefore, the Finnish and Swedish designs separate individual waste canisters in their own disposal shafts to avoid excessive heat buildup.... Posiva is currently conducting a long-term, full-sized demonstration using heaters in dummy canisters surrounded by bentonite and temperature probes. After three years, the temperature at the canister boundary is about 70Â C, Mustonen said. A similar test in Switzerland lasted 18 years and found that bentonite "remains suitable as a sealing material" up to at least 100 degrees C....

But to project how the rock and groundwater will affect humans living near the site in future millennia, the scientists must model that numerically using the tests and data as the starting point. "We have modeled to that million years... with different scenarios and what the likely releases [are], and it seems that the releases are acceptable," Mustonen told me.... Scientists then project what will happen to the waste over the next million years, assuming everything works as planned. They also model for several "what if" scenarios. This projection includes looking at the stresses and groundwater pressures caused by possibilities like being buried deep under a future ice sheet and then having that ice sheet melt away, sea level changes, changes in groundwater chemistry, and failures of canisters. At Onkalo, even in the worst case, scientists calculate that the maximum dose released to humans would be one-tenth of the regulatory limit, which itself is about a hundredth of the normal dose that Finns receive every year.
But the article also asks what Finland's experience can teach other countries. One person who worked on America's unsuccessful Yucca Mountain project was Dr. Jane Long, former associate director for energy and environment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Long tells the site that "They should have set requirements for an inherently safe site and then investigated whether the site met the requirements instead of choosing the site for political reasons and then trying to show the site was suitable."

And they seem to agree in Finland: "More than the geology, I think it's socio-economic aspects" that determine if a project can go ahead, Mustonen told me. A key lesson is that the top-down designation of sites for nuclear waste disposal has generally failed. The UK failed in 1987, 1997, and 2013. In the US, politicians campaigned against the Yucca Mountain project, characterizing its authorization as the "Screw Nevada Bill...."

Yucca Mountain's wasted $15 billion pales in comparison to the roughly $50 billion in damages that American taxpayers have had to pay to nuclear utilities because the government was unable to honor its commitment to receive nuclear waste by 1998. Meanwhile, more waste is piling up.
Thanks to Slashdot reader atcclears for submitting the story.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A British judge has ruled that a case against the kingdom of Saudi Arabia brought by a dissident satirist who was targeted with spyware can proceed, a decision that has been hailed as precedent-setting and one that could allow other hacking victims in Britain to sue foreign governments who order such attacks. The case against Saudi Arabia was brought by Ghanem Almasarir, a prominent satirist granted asylum in the UK, who is a frequent critic of the Saudi royal family. At the centre of the case are allegations that Saudi Arabia ordered the hacking of Almasarir's phone, and that he was physically assaulted by agents of the kingdom in London in 2018. The targeting and hacking of Almasarir's phone by a network probably linked to Saudi Arabia was confirmed by researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, who are considered among the world's leading experts in tracking digital surveillance of dissidents, journalists and other members of civil society. Saudi Arabia is known to be a former client of NSO Group, whose powerful Pegasus hacking software covertly penetrates and compromises smartphones.

Saudi Arabia's attempt to have the case dismissed on the grounds that it had sovereign immunity protection under the State Immunity Act 1978 was dismissed by the high court judge. In the ruling, against which Saudi Arabia is likely to appeal, Justice Julian Knowles found that Almasarir's case could proceed under an exception to the sovereign immunity law that applies to any act by a foreign state that causes personal injury. He also found that Almasarir had provided enough evidence to conclude, on the balance of probabilities, that Saudi Arabia was responsible for the alleged assault. Saudi Arabia's claim that the case was too weak or speculative to proceed was dismissed. [...] The decision could have profound implications for other individuals targeted or hacked by NSO's spyware within the UK. They include Lady Shackleton and Princess Haya, the former wife of Dubai's ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. Both were hacked by the sheikh using NSO spyware during lengthy court proceedings between Haya and her former husband in London. In a statement praising the decision, Almasarir said: "I no longer feel safe and I am constantly looking over my shoulder. I no longer feel able to speak up for the oppressed Saudi people, because I fear that any contact with people inside the kingdom could put them in danger. I look forward to presenting my full case to the court in the hope that I can finally hold the kingdom to account for the suffering I believe they have caused me."

Young adults in the UK are spending more time scrolling on social media site TikTok than watching broadcast television, according to an Ofcom report on Wednesday that highlights the growing generational divide in media habits. From a report: In its annual survey of consumption trends, the media regulator found that those aged 16 to 24 spent an average of 53 minutes a day viewing traditional broadcast TV, just a third of the level a decade ago. By contrast, people over the age of 65 spent seven times as long in front of channels such as BBC One or ITV, viewing almost six hours' worth of broadcast TV a day -- a figure that has risen since 2011. The faster take-up of streaming services and social media among young people poses an ever greater challenge to broadcasters as they try to cope with an economic slowdown, satisfy their most loyal older viewers and invest to keep pace with fast-changing consumption habits.

Researchers have discovered a second impact crater on the other side of the Atlantic that could have finished off what was left of the dinosaurs, after an asteroid known as Chicxulub slammed into what is now the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago. The BBC reports: Dubbed Nadir Crater, the new feature sits more than 300m below the seabed, some 400km off the coast of Guinea, west Africa. With a diameter of 8.5km, it's likely the asteroid that created it was a little under half a kilometre across. The hidden depression was identified by Dr Uisdean Nicholson from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK. [...] "Our simulations suggest this crater was caused by the collision of a 400m-wide asteroid in 500-800m of water," explained Dr Veronica Bray from the University of Arizona, US. "This would have generated a tsunami over one kilometre high, as well as an earthquake of Magnitude 6.5 or so. "The energy released would have been around 1,000 times greater than that from the January 2022 eruption and tsunami in Tonga."

Dr Nicholson's team has to be cautious about tying the two impacts together. Nadir has been given a very similar date to Chicxulub based on an analysis of fossils of known age that were drilled from a nearby borehole. But to make a definitive statement, rocks in the crater itself would need to be pulled up and examined. This would also confirm Nadir is indeed an asteroid impact structure and not some other, unrelated feature caused by, for example, ancient volcanism. [...] Prof Sean Gulick, who co-led the recent project to drill into the Chicxulub Crater, said Nadir might have fallen to Earth on the same day. Or it might have struck the planet a million or two years either side of the Mexican cataclysm. Scientists will only know for sure when rocks from the west African crater are inspected in the lab. "A much smaller cousin, or sister, doesn't necessarily add to what we know about the dinosaurs' extinction, but it does add to our understanding of the astronomical event that was Chicxulub," the University of Texas at Austin researcher told BBC News.

A Saudi woman has been sentenced to 34 years in prison for retweeting activists through her Twitter account and sharing posts that spoke in favor of the right of women to drive. The Verge reports: Salma al-Shehab was a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds in the UK and was detained in January 2021 after returning to Saudi Arabia for a vacation. Shehab was initially sentenced to six years for using social media to "disturb public order and destabilize the security and stability of the state," based on having reshared tweets from Saudi activists living in exile who called for the release of political prisoners in the kingdom. The incident was reported in an editorial board piece from The Washington Post, which called it "yet another glimpse at the brutal underside of the Saudi dictatorship under its crown prince and de facto head of state, Mohammed bin Salman."

The Post reports that prosecutors in the appeal to Shehab's case argued for a more severe punishment under Saudi cybercrime and anti-terrorism laws, leading to a drastically increased sentence of 34 years, handed down on August 8th. The Freedom Initiative nonprofit, which advocates for the rights of prisoners detained in the Middle East, states that this is the longest known sentence for a women's rights activist in Saudi Arabia.

Germany plans to keep its remaining nuclear power plants open for longer in a major U-turn as it scrambles to keep the lights on this winter with less Russian gas. The Telegraph reports: Officials have concluded the plants are needed due to gas shortages and they can be kept open without safety concerns, the Wall Street Journal reported. Germany pledged to phase out nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011, which hardened opposition to the technology. Berlin has been under pressure to change course since the invasion of Ukraine to limit the impact of the gas crisis on manufacturers and households. Germany has three plants left, operated by E.ON, EnBW and RWE, supplying about 6pc of the country's electricity. They are currently due to close at the end of the year. Any extension has yet to be officially adopted and details remain under discussion, the Wall Street Journal added. It came as Norway warned it could not do more to help Germany avoid a gas crisis this winter as Russia restricts supplies.

"Netflix now has a million fewer subscriptions than rival Disney..." reports the Independent. "But it does not necessarily mean that Netflix has fewer subscribers. If a person is subscribed to two of Disney's offerings, that will count as two subscriptions, and the company does not divulge how many individuals are signed up to its services." (Digital Trends notes that "Following its acquisition of 21st Century Fox, Disney also controls Hulu," as well as the streaming sports site ESPN+.)

If you just want a straight Netflix-to-Disney+ comparison, the Independent reports Netflix with 220.67 million total subscribers, while IndieWire reported that at the end of June, Disney+ had 152.1 million subscribers. (Disney's chief executive says between March and June, Disney+ added 14.4 million subscribers, according to the Independent.)

IndieWire goes on to say that ESPN+ reported 22.8 million subcribers earlier this year, while Hulu had reported 46.2 million subscribers, so, "combined the subscriptions for the individual services making up the Disney Bundle just surpassed Netflix's overall paid global subscriber count." Here, we'll point out that Hulu is still the only one of the Bundle that makes money. However, its operating income declined in Q3, while losses at both Disney+ and ESPN+ increased.

Disney+ is expected to reach profitability in 2024, executives said Wednesday on Disney's Q3 conference call.

In January a California startup named Autonomy began "stocking up on EVs from pretty much every company that makes them," reports Bloomberg (including Tesla, Ford, and Polestar). Their plan? Collect a $5,900 "start fee," then charge $490 to $690 a month for an electric vehicle subscription with up to 1,000 miles of driving (but with no maintenance or registration fees): The subscription model has some logic for consumers. In part because of fast-evolving technology, EVs have traditionally shed value much quicker than gas-powered cars. On a depreciation scale, consumers typically lump them in with cell phones.... But EV ownership is also looking better by the day. The depreciation curve is flattening thanks to longer-range machines, and car companies are getting more vocal about things like battery longevity. A three-year-old Chevrolet Bolt, for example, will recoup 84% of its value today, in line with the average resale of all three-year-old cars in North America, according to CarEdge.com, a consumer-facing market research platform.

That could be why auto executives are pushing to round up that sweet, sweet software revenue in smaller chunks. BMW, to much outcry, is selling an $18-a-month subscription for heated seats in the UK, and General Motors turned its OnStar voice navigation into a $1,500 "mandatory" subscription on every new Buick, GMC and Cadillac Escalade. Even without a la carte add-ons, one of the major forces propping up prices for used EVs is, ironically, their ability to update remotely — the same technology carmakers are using to nickel-and-dime drivers with subscription services.

A contemporary car is nothing if not a dense stack of software, which means subscriptions on wheels are not entirely bonkers. But a car is also an appliance, and consumers aren't accustomed to renting a refrigerator, let alone paying a monthly fee to use the ice-maker. Luckily for Autonomy, the simplest pitch may be the best one. If it can bigfoot individual EV orders by jumping to the head of the queue, the startup could find scads of subscribers — simply because it will have available cars.

On Thursday the International Atomic Energy Agency's director "warned that parts of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant had been knocked out due to recent attacks, risking an 'unacceptable' potential radiation leak," according to CNN: "IAEA experts believe that there is no immediate threat to nuclear safety," but "that could change at any moment," Grossi said.... Ukraine's nuclear agency Energoatom said 10 shells landed near the complex on Thursday, preventing a shift handover. "For the safety of nuclear workers, the buses with the personnel of the next shift were turned back to Enerhodar," the agency said. "Until the situation finally normalizes, the workers of the previous shift will continue to work."

Energoatom said radiation levels at the site remained normal, despite renewed attacks.

Several Western and Ukrainian officials believe that Russia is using the giant nuclear facility as a stronghold to shield their troops and mount attacks, because they assume Kyiv will not return fire and risk a crisis.
Later CNN added: Ukraine and Russia again traded blame after more shelling around the plant overnight on Thursday, just hours after the United Nations called on both sides to cease military activities near the power station, warning of the worst if they didn't.

"Regrettably, instead of de-escalation, over the past several days there have been reports of further deeply worrying incidents that could, if they continue, lead to disaster," UN secretary general, António Guterres, said in a statement....

Energoatom, Ukraine's state-run nuclear power company, accused Russian forces on Thursday of targeting a storage area for "radiation sources," and shelling a fire department nearby the plant. A day later, the company said in a statement on its Telegram account that the plant was operating "with the risk of violating radiation and fire safety standards."

Ukraine's Interior Minister, Denys Monastyrskyi, said Friday that there was "no adequate control" over the plant, and Ukrainian specialists who remained there were not allowed access to some areas where they should be.... Last weekend, shellfire damaged a dry storage facility — where casks of spent nuclear fuel are kept at the plant — as well as radiation monitoring detectors, making detection of any potential leak impossible, according to Energoatom. Attacks also damaged a high-voltage power line and forced one of the plant's reactors to stop operating.
Tonight the BBC reported on a response from Ukraine's president. In his nightly address on Saturday, Volodymyr Zelensky said any soldier firing on or from the plant would become "a special target" for Ukraine. He also accused Moscow of turning the plant into a Russian army base and using it as "nuclear blackmail"...

Zelenskiy added that "every day" of Russia's occupation of the plant "increases the radiation threat to Europe"....

A BBC investigation revealed earlier this week that many of the Ukrainian workers at the site are being kept under armed guard amid harsh conditions.
UPDATE (8/14): "Ukraine's military intelligence agency said that on Saturday, Russian artillery fire hit a pump, damaged a fire station and sparked fires near the plant that could not be immediately extinguished because of the damage to the fire station," reports the New York Times: Engineers say that yard-thick reinforced concrete containment structures protect the reactors from even direct hits. International concern, however, has grown that shelling could spark a fire or cause other damage that would lead to a nuclear accident.

The six pressurized water reactors at the complex retain most sources of radiation, reducing risks. After pressurized water reactors failed at the Fukushima nuclear complex in Japan in 2011, Ukraine upgraded the Zaporizhzhia site to enable a shutdown even after the loss of cooling water from outside the containment structures, Dmytro Gortenko, a former plant engineer, said in an interview....

"Locals are abandoning the town," said the former engineer, who asked to be identified by only his first name, Oleksiy, because of security concerns. Residents had been leaving for weeks, but the pace picked up after Saturday's barrages and fires, he said.

The Independent reports that the UK's National Health System is experiencing a major outage "expected to last for more than three weeks" after a third-party supplying the NHS's "CareNotes" software was hit by ransomware.

Unfortunately, this leaves doctors unable to see their notes on patients, and the mental health trusts that provide care "across the country will be left unable to access patient notes for weeks, and possibly months." Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust has declared a critical incident over the outage, which is believed to affect dozens of trusts, and has told staff it is putting emergency plans in place. One NHS trust chief said the situation could possibly last for "months" with several mental health trusts, and there was concern among leaders that the problem is not being prioritised.

In an email to staff, Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust chief executive Nick Broughton, said: "The cyberattack targeted systems used to refer patients for care, including ambulances being dispatched, out of hours appointment bookings, triage, out of hours care, emergency prescriptions and safety alerts. It also targeted the finance system used by the trust.... An NHS director said: "The whole thing is down. It's really alarming...we're carrying a lot of risk as a result of it because you can't get records and details of assessments, prescribing, key observations, medical mental health act observations. You can't see any of it...Staff are going to have to write everything down and input it later."

They added: "There is increased risk to patients. We're finding it hard to discharge people, for example to housing providers, because we can't access records."
"'Weeks' is an unreasonable period," argues Slashdot reader Bruce66423, wondering why it couldn't be resolved with a seemingly simple restore from backups?

And Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, warns the Guardian that "Even if it was ransomware ... that doesn't mean data was not stolen."

The British government declared a drought for parts of southern, eastern and central England on Friday as the country, unaccustomed to such extreme heat, endured another day of scorching conditions. From a report: The declaration came after a group of officials and experts, including the National Drought Group, met to discuss the government's response to "the driest summer in 50 years," the Environment Agency said in a statement. Extreme-heat warnings have also been issued for parts of southern England and Wales, just weeks after Britain withered under some of its highest temperatures on record. "We are currently experiencing a second heat wave after what was the driest July on record for parts of the country," Britain's water minister, Steve Double, said in a statement released after the drought group's meeting.

"Action is already being taken by the government and other partners," to deal with the drought, he added. The drought announcement will allow water companies to impose stricter conservation measures. Several water companies have temporarily banned the use of hoses to water yards and gardens and to wash vehicles. The Met Office, Britain's national weather service, issued an extreme-heat warning through Sunday for much of the southern half of England and for parts of Wales, underscoring that the soaring temperatures could not only disrupt travel but also raise the risk of heat-related illnesses for certain groups.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: China has overtaken the US as the world leader in both scientific research output and "high impact" studies, according to a report published by Japan's science and technology ministry. The report, which was published by Japan's National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTP) on Tuesday, found that China now publishes the highest number of scientific research papers yearly, followed by the US and Germany. The figures were based on yearly averages between 2018 and 2020, and drawn from data compiled by the analytics firm Clarivate.

The Japanese NISTP report also found that Chinese research comprised 27.2% of the world's top 1% most frequently cited papers. The number of citations a research paper receives is a commonly used metric in academia. The more times a study is cited in subsequent papers by other researchers, the greater its "citation impact." The US accounted for 24.9% of the top 1% most highly cited research studies, while UK research was third at 5.5%. China published a yearly average of 407,181 scientific papers, pulling ahead of the US's 293,434 journal articles and accounting for 23.4% of the world's research output, the report found. China accounted for a high proportion of research into materials science, chemistry, engineering and mathematics, while US researchers were more prolific in research into clinical medicine, basic life sciences and physics. "China is one of the top countries in the world in terms of both the quantity and quality of scientific papers," Shinichi Kuroki of the Japan Science and Technology Agency told Nikkei Asia. "In order to become the true global leader, it will need to continue producing internationally recognized research."

The FCC is canceling $886 million in funding for Starlink to expand access in rural areas, citing the satellite internet system's cost and doubts over whether it can supply fast enough speeds. PC Magazine reports: The agency today announced it had rejected "long-form applications" from both SpaceX and an ISP called LTD Broadband to secure funding from the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. "The Commission determined that these applications failed to demonstrate that the providers could deliver the promised service," the FCC said in a statement. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel added: "We cannot afford to subsidize ventures that are not delivering the promised speeds or are not likely to meet program requirements."

In December 2020, the FCC awarded $886 million to SpaceX to help its Starlink service supply high-speed broadband to 642,925 locations in 35 states. However, it came with a requirement that SpaceX provide a long-form application about how Starlink would meet its obligations before the federal funding could be fully secured. The FCC's goal with the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund is to supply gigabit internet speeds to over 85% of the selected rural locations and at least 100Mbps download speeds for all 99.7% of the locations in the coming years. "Starlink's technology has real promise," Rosenworcel said. "But the question before us was whether to publicly subsidize its still developing technology for consumer broadband -- which requires that users purchase a $600 dish -- with nearly $900 million in universal service funds until 2032."