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National Food Strategy: Tax sugar and salt and prescribe veg, report says

Sugar and salt should be taxed and vegetables prescribed by the NHS, an independent review of the food we eat has suggested.
The report, led by businessman Henry Dimbleby, said taxes raised could extend free school meal provision and support better diets among the poorest. England's National Food Strategy also wants GPs to try prescribing fruit and vegetables to encourage healthy eating. Boris Johnson said he was not attracted to extra taxes on hard-working people. The prime minister added he would study the report, and promised the government would respond with proposals for future laws within six months. Meanwhile, the food industry warned new taxes on wholesale sugar and salt could lead to higher food prices in shops. Ian Wright, of the Food and Drink Federation, which represents manufacturers, said: "Obesity and food is very much about poverty, and we need measures to tackle poverty and to help people to make choices they need to make."

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Clippy returns - as an emoji

Microsoft's much-maligned mascot Clippy is coming back from the dead - but only as an emoji.
Clippy the paperclip was a simplistic virtual assistant who offered tips and advice to Microsoft Office users, from 1997 and until the mid-2000s. Its constant pop-ups to suggest "help" with the simplest of tasks - such as writing a letter - annoyed many. But Microsoft says it is now bringing back the design, for its modern Office products. Clippy would replace the existing paperclip emoji in its Microsoft 365 products, including its cloud services and the modern, online version of Microsoft Office, the technology giant tweeted, but only it that tweet received 20,000 "likes" - and within hours, it had surpassed 100,000.

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Nasa set for attempt to fix Hubble's trouble

Nasa will attempt to fix a problem that has stopped the Hubble telescope from being used for astronomy.
It's the worst glitch in years to hit the venerated observatory. An onboard computer halted on 13 June, leading to the science instruments being put in "safe mode" - where all non-essential systems are shut down. Now, the possible origin of the malfunction has been traced to a control unit that supplies electricity to the failed computer. Ground controllers will begin switching over to back-up hardware on Thursday, in an effort to get one of the most important scientific tools in history up and running again. Although astronomy observations have been suspended since June, Nasa says the telescope itself and the science instruments are healthy.

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Microsoft announces Windows 365, a subscription cloud PC

Microsoft has announced a new "cloud PC" product where users can stream a Windows device from anywhere.
Windows 365 will work similarly to game streaming - where the computing is done in a data centre somewhere remotely and streamed to a device. That means all sorts of devices - including tablets or Apple Macs - can stream a full Windows desktop PC. It is being sold to businesses to begin with, as many firms move to a mix of office and remote working. Microsoft is marketing the new way of using a PC as "hybrid Windows for a hybrid world". The company says that every user's apps and settings will boot instantly from any device - allowing personalised Windows PCs to be accessed from anywhere.

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Cuba protests: Thousands rally against government as economy struggles

Thousands of Cubans have risked jail by joining the biggest protests for decades against the island's Communist government.
"There is no food, no medicine, there is no freedom. They do not let us live," one of Sunday's protesters named only as Alejandro told BBC Mundo. The protests are significant, because government critics face harsh punishments for dissent in Cuba. The island's president called for his supporters to "fight" the protesters. Cuba is in the midst of an economic crisis and has been hit hard by US sanctions and Covid. Cubans have been angered by the collapse of the economy, food and medicine shortages, price hikes and the government's handling of the pandemic. Protesters shouted "freedom" and "down with the dictatorship" in demonstrations across Cuba, including the capital Havana.

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Microsoft discovers critical SolarWinds zero-day under active attack

Flaws allow attackers to run malicious code on machines hosting Serv-U products.
SolarWinds, the company at the center of a supply chain attack that compromised nine US agencies and 100 private companies, is scrambling to contain a new security threat: a critical zero-day vulnerability in its Serv-U product line. Microsoft discovered the exploits and privately reported them to SolarWinds, the latter company said in an advisory published on Friday. SolarWinds said the attacks are entirely unrelated to the supply chain attack discovered in December.

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Jovenel Moïse: Foreign hit squad killed Haiti's president, police say

A group of 28 foreign mercenaries, including retired Colombian soldiers, assassinated Haiti's President Jovenel Moïse earlier this week, police say.
After a gun battle in the capital Port-au-Prince, 17 were detained, some at the house they were using, others after entering Taiwan's diplomatic compound. Three suspects were killed by police and eight are still being sought. Bloodied and bruised, arrested suspects were shown to the media on Thursday, along with a slew of seized weapons. It is still unclear who organised the attack and with what motive. The attack took place in the early hours of Wednesday, when gunmen broke into the president's home in Port-au-Prince, shooting him dead and wounding his wife. Mr Moïse, 53, was found lying on his back with 12 bullet wounds and a gouged eye, according to authorities.

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The Windows 11 insider build is surprisingly unpolished and unfinished

Windows 11 looks to be a decent upgrade, but not one to lose sleep over missing.
Microsoft made early Windows 11 builds available via its Windows Insider program the week after its first major announcement, and we've spent quite a few hours kicking the tires. When Windows 11 publicly releases, it's likely to be a fine operating system—but right now, it's an unpolished, unfinished mess. Of course, this isn't a surprise—Windows 11 is still only available in the Dev channel of the Insider program. The three Insider channels are Release Preview, Beta, and Dev; Dev roughly corresponds to a software alpha, and Microsoft itself describes it as "the newest code," with "rough edges and some instability."

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Spanish ministers clash over campaign to eat less meat

A Spanish minister has been roasted by members of his own coalition government over his efforts to reduce meat consumption in the country.
This week consumer affairs minister, Alberto Garzón, launched a campaign to encourage Spaniards to eat less meat. "Eating too much meat is bad for our health and for the planet," Mr Garzón said in a video on Twitter. But for some cabinet ministers, his plea for moderation was difficult to swallow. "It seems to me the campaign is unfortunate," agriculture minister Luis Planas said in an interview with a local radio station. Mr Planas said the "Less meat, more life" campaign was "unfair" for Spain's meat industry, which is a major contributor to the country's economy. Those views were echoed in an open letter to Mr Garzón, penned by six meat-producing associations.

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Microsoft’s emergency patch fails to fix critical “PrintNightmare” vulnerability

Game-over code-execution attacks are still possible even after fix is installed.
An emergency patch Microsoft issued on Tuesday fails to fully fix a critical security vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows that allows attackers to take control of infected systems and run code of their choice, researchers said. The threat, colloquially known as PrintNightmare, stems from bugs in the Windows print spooler, which provides printing functionality inside local networks. Proof-of-concept exploit code was publicly released and then pulled back, but not before others had copied it. Researchers track the vulnerability as CVE-2021-34527.

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Surfside tower collapse: 'Zero' hope of finding survivors

Rescue teams combing the rubble of a collapsed apartment building in Florida are switching from a search-and-rescue mission to a recovery effort.
The decision comes about two weeks after the 12-storey Champlain Towers South fell in the middle of the night. Forty-six victims have been found and 94 are still missing, Surfside city officials said. No survivors have been found since the initial collapse, and rescue crews say many victims were found in their beds. News that the rescue mission was ending came during a private meeting on Wednesday between families of the missing and Miami-Dade Assistant Fire Chief Raide Jadallah.

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Trump sues Twitter, Google and Facebook alleging 'censorship'

Former US president Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against tech giants Google, Twitter and Facebook, claiming that he is the victim of censorship.
The class action lawsuit also targets the three companies' CEOs. Mr Trump was suspended from his social accounts in January over public safety concerns in the wake of the Capitol riots, led by his supporters. On Wednesday, Mr Trump called the lawsuit "a very beautiful development for our freedom of speech". In a news conference from his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, Mr Trump railed against social media companies and Democrats, who he accused of espousing misinformation. "We are demanding an end to the shadow-banning, a stop to the silencing, and a stop to the blacklisting, banishing, and cancelling that you know so well," he said.

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Haiti President Jovenel Moïse killed in attack at home

Haiti's President Jovenel Moïse has been killed and his wife injured in an attack on their home in the nation's capital, Port-au-Prince.
Unidentified gunmen stormed the property at 01:00 local time (05:00 GMT), interim PM Claude Joseph said. He has called for calm and declared a state of emergency nationwide. Mr Moïse had led Haiti, one of the poorest nations in the world, since 2017 but had faced widespread protests demanding his resignation. The nation's recent history has been plagued by coups, political instability and widespread gang violence. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted that he was "saddened at the death of Mr Moïse", calling it "an abhorrent act" and appealing for calm. US President Joe Biden offered condolences to the people of Haiti for the "horrific assassination".

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Microsoft issues urgent security warning: Update your PC immediately

Microsoft is urging Windows users to immediately install an update after security researchers found a serious vulnerability in the operating system.
The security flaw, known as PrintNightmare, affects the Windows Print Spooler service. Researchers at cybersecurity company Sangfor accidentally published a how-to guide for exploiting it. The researchers tweeted in late May that they had found vulnerabilities in Print Spooler, which allows multiple users to access a printer. They published a proof-of-concept online by mistake and subsequently deleted it -- but not before it was published elsewhere online, including developer site GitHub.

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Microsoft’s Windows 11 blue screen of death to become black

Microsoft’s so-called blue screen of death (BSoD) will turn black in the new Windows 11 operating system, according to those with access to a preview of the software.
The screen appears when users have a problem on their computer, often prompting a restart. A black background will replace blue, matching the logon and shutdown screens in the new system, the Verge reported. The BSoD allows IT professionals to diagnose hardware and memory issues.

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Then and now: Arctic sea-ice feeling the heat

The shrinking sea-ice in the Arctic is not only a sign of climate change, it is causing the planet to warm more quickly. This is because more sunlight is being absorbed by the darker ocean, rather than being reflected back into space.
Arctic sea-ice plays an important role in controlling the planet's temperature, and any problem with this natural thermostat is a cause for concern. Figures from the US space agency (Nasa) suggest the loss of the minimum Arctic sea-ice extent is in the region of 13.1% per decade, based on the 1981 to 2010 average. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 concluded that the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as a result of human activity was primarily responsible for the decline in sea-ice extent in the region.

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OpenZFS 2.1 is out—let’s talk about its brand-new dRAID vdevs

dRAID vdevs resilver very quickly, using spare capacity rather than spare disks.
Friday afternoon, the OpenZFS project released version 2.1.0 of our perennial favorite "it's complicated but it's worth it" filesystem. The new release is compatible with FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE and up, and Linux kernels 3.10-5.13. This release offers several general performance improvements, as well as a few entirely new features—mostly targeting enterprise and other extremely advanced use cases.

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OneWeb rocket launch to enable commercial service

OneWeb, the London-headquartered tech company trying to develop a global internet service delivered from space, reaches a key milestone on Thursday.
The firm is launching another 36 satellites, taking its in-orbit mega-constellation to 254. Although many more are needed to complete the network, this number is enough to start offering a commercial service to a great swathe of the Northern Hemisphere. This should start at the year's end. "These things don't happen overnight; there's been a tremendous amount of hard work taking place over the last few months. But this launch is special," said OneWeb CEO Neil Masterson. "This is the one that gives us connectivity from 50 degrees North latitude to the North Pole, and covers Northern Europe, the UK, Greenland, Canada, Alaska and Iceland," he told BBC News.

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Tim Berners-Lee sells web source code NFT for $5.4m

The original source code for the world wide web has been sold as a non-fungible token, making $5.4m (£3.9m).
NFTs are certificates of ownership for digital assets, which often do not have a physical representation. They do not necessarily include copyright control - and critics say they are get-rich-quick schemes that are bad for the environment. World-wide-web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee sold the NFT to an unidentified buyer, through auction house Sotheby’s. The highest bid stood at $3.5m for most of the last day of the auction - but there were a flurry of bids in the closing 15 minutes.

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Starlink’s “next-generation” user terminal will cost a lot less, Musk says

Musk expects near-global coverage in August and up to 500,000 users in one year.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said his company's Starlink division is trying to cut the price of its user terminal from $500 to as low as $250. Starlink has been charging $99 a month for Internet service during its beta phase, plus $500 up front for the user terminal/satellite dish, and it's losing money on the sale of each dish.