En domstol i USA har slagit fast att regeringen ska lämna ut en promemoria som gav det rättsliga stödet inför drönarattacken som dödade den amerikanske medborgaren Anwar al-Awlaki i Jemen 2011. Domstolens tre domare var enhälliga i beslutet som upphävde ett motsatt beslut från en lägre domstol, rapporterar The New York Times. Det var tidningen som inledde rättsprocessen för att offentliggöra dokumentet.

Minst 26 människor dödades i Irak på måndagen i sammanlagt fem självmordsbombningar, enligt uppgifter från myndigheterna, samt polis- och sjukvårdskällor. I den dödligaste attacken mot en polisvägspärr söder om Bagdad dödades 13 människor och 35 skadades.

En misstänkt gängmedlem som stod inför rätta i en domstol i Utah, USA, sköts på måndagen av en polis i rättssalen, rapporterar CNN. Mannen sköts upprepade gånger i samband med att han attackerade en person i vittnesbåset, enligt domaren som därefter avbröt rättegången.

KTH-eleverna idag är sämre än förr. En av fem klarade inte ens grundskolans matte när kunskaperna testades. Gör du det? Testa själv med några exempel SvD valt ut från ett nationellt prov i årskurs nio. Kan du lösa den basala ekvationen i fråga 3 (vår fråga 1)? Rätt svar under bilden.

Minst fem personer har skadats svårt vid ett gängbråk i Norrköping i kväll, uppger landstinget i Östergötland för TT.

En misstänkt skottlossning har ägt rum i stadsdelen Hageby i södra delarna av Norrköping, skriver nt.se. Polisen skriver på sin hemsida att flera personer, oklart hur många, har skadats.

Maintenance update with important security fixes and other improvements. (Free update, 113 MB)

 

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Maintenance update with important security fixes and other improvements. (Free update, 113 MB)

 

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "It looks like a standardized test question: Is the sum of two numbers on the left or the single number on the right larger? Rhesus macaques that have been trained to associate numerical values with symbols can get the answer right, even if they haven't passed a math class. The finding doesn't just reveal a hidden talent of the animals—it also helps show how the mammalian brain encodes the values of numbers. Previous research has shown that chimpanzees can add single-digit numbers. But scientists haven’t explained exactly how, in the human or the monkey brain, numbers are being represented or this addition is being carried out. Now, a new study helps begin to answer those questions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dr. Drang writes about varying support for Atom’s content type="xhtml".

I strongly disliked like this part of the Atom spec.

The thing about this feature is that the HTML tags are included as naked tags in the XML. That is, they’re not escaped or placed in a CDATA section.

From the good doctor’s example:

<content type="xhtml" xml:lang="en-US" xml:base="​http://lancemannion.typepad.com/​lance_mannion/">
<div xmlns="​http://www.w3.org/​1999/xhtml"><p><em>Barnes & Noble. Thursday. April 17, 2014. Six forty five p.m.</em></p>…
</content>

Just look at it. This feature is a giant invitation to screwed-up feeds. The HTML — which is probably a blog post, typed by a human — has to be valid XML. People writing scripts to generate these feeds have to make sure they can turn that HTML into valid XML.

Feeds are already screwed-up often enough. This could only make it worse.

The second issue: how can a parser handle this? What an RSS/Atom parser really wants is everything between <content> and </content> as a string.

I remember writing this code for NetNewsWire, which still supports this feature. (I checked. I have no idea if they’ve touched my code or not.)

I’m going from memory, but I’m pretty sure this is what I did.

NetNewsWire used libxml2’s SAX parser, which meant it gets called when the XML parser encounters the beginning and end of a tag and when it encounters a range of characters. There was no easy way — that I know of; correct me if I’m wrong — to tell the parser to treat everything inside a tag (<content> and </content>) as a string when there are XML tags inside that tag.

So I wrote the Atom parser to rebuild the HTML. It maintained a string and pushed stuff on it. If it encountered a tag and (optionally) attributes, it would create a string version and push it. When it encountered characters it would push those. When it encountered the end of a tag it would create a string version and push that. Once the </content> was reached then it had the entire string.

The end result was equivalent HTML, but not necessarily character-for-character the same, since little things like quote characters could change.

It worked. But boy was I coding angry that day.

PS Luckily I didn’t see this feature used very often. Still had to write the code, though.

PPS I still wonder if there’s an easier way. (Using a SAX parser. No way would I give up SAX. Performance and memory use considerations require SAX.)

PPPS For a great list of other ways feeds get screwed up, see Brian’s Stupid Feed Tricks.

Suicide car bombings, roadside bombing and shooting spree kill 33 as the country counts down to crucial elections.

Suicide car bombings, roadside bombing and shooting spree kill 33 as the country counts down to crucial elections.