Belgium's semi-finals tie against France will be held on Tuesday in St. Petersburg.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A&R, or "artists and repertoire," are the people who look for new talent, convince that talent to sign to the record label and then nurture it: advising on songs, on producers, on how to go about the job of being a pop star. It's the R&D arm of the music industry. [...] What the music business doesn't like to shout about is how inefficient its R&D process is. The annual global spend on A&R is $2.8bn, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, and all that buys is the probability of failure: "Some labels estimate the ratio of commercial success to failure as 1 in 4; others consider the chances to be much lower -- less than 1 in 10," observes its 2017 report. Or as Mixmag magazine's columnist The Secret DJ put it: "Major labels call themselves a business but are insanely unprofitable, utterly uncertain, totally rudderless and completely ignorant." In the golden age of the music industry, none of that really mattered. So much money was flowing in that mistakes could be ignored. There was no way to hear most music other than to buy a record, and when CDs entered the market in the 1980s -- costing little to produce, but selling for a fortune -- the major labels were more or less printing their own money. But then came the internet: first file-sharing, then streaming slashed sales of physical music so deeply that the record business became a safety-first game. Every label executive has always wanted hits, but these days the people who run the big imprints want guaranteed hits. The rise of digital music brought with it a huge amount of data which, industry executives realized, could be turned to their advantage. In his first public speech as CEO of Sony, in May 2017, Rob Stringer asserted: "All our business units must now leverage data and analytics in innovative ways to dig deeper than ever for new talent. The modern day talent-spotter must have both an artistic ear and analytical eyes." Earlier this year, in the same week as Warner announced its acquisition of Sodatone, a company that has developed a tool for talent-spotting via data, another data company, Instrumental, secured $4.2m of funding. The industry appeared to have reached a tipping point -- what the website Music Ally called "A&R's data moment." Which is why, wherever the music industry's great and good gather, the word "moneyball" has become increasingly prevalent.

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Preliminary analysis by global chemical weapons watchdog says chlorine was found in two locations in Douma.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A sculptor who created a replica of the Statue of Liberty for a Las Vegas casino was awarded $3.5 million in damages last week after the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) accidentally used a photo of his statue -- rather than a photo of the original statue in New York harbor -- on one of its most common stamps. If you bought a "forever" stamp between 2011 and 2014, there's a good chance that it showed the face of the Statue of Liberty replica that sculptor Robert Davidson constructed for the New York-New York Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The Post Office licensed a photo of Davidson's statue from the image service Getty for $1,500, initially believing it was a photograph of the original statue. (The license only covered the rights to Getty's photograph of the statue -- not the statue itself.) The stamp with the resulting image was released to the public in December 2010; it took four months before anyone pointed out the mistake to the Post Office. In March 2011, a spokesperson said that the USPS "still loves the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway." The Post Office continued using the photo for almost three years before retiring it in January 2014. The court reportedly awarded Davidson a five percent royalty for $70 million worth of unused stamps; it also awarded him $5,000 in damages for the nearly $5 billion worth of stamps that were used to pay postage. The total damages amounted to $3.55 million.

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Government and rebel representatives are expected to sign a new power-sharing agreement in Uganda on Saturday.

Authorities investigate cause of crash that killed at least 28 people and left five others injured.

US imposes $34bn worth of tariffs on Chinese imports, while China responds with its own tariffs of equal value.

To celebrate this week's holiday, The Vindicator, a small newspaper in Texas, posted sections of the Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident." "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States." Yadda, yadda. You get the idea. But a section of the text containing the phrase "Indian Savages" set off Facebook's hate-speech flags. The post was then temporarily taken down by Facebook, Business Insider reports. From a report: He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. After The Vindicator ran a story on the censorship, Facebook corrected the mistake. "The post was removed by mistake and restored as soon as we looked into it. We process millions of reports each week, and sometimes we get things wrong," a Facebook spokesperson said. And honestly, as far as Facebook getting things wrong, this is an ideal "mistake."

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An undercover investigation into the man at the heart of illegal wildlife trading. Is the Lizard King back in business?

Following yesterday's report from Israeli publication CTech that Apple has decided not to use an Intel 5G modem called "Sunny Peak" in future iPhones, Intel has denied part of the report -- and the publication has updated its story to remove its central claim. From a report: "Intel's 5G customer engagements and roadmap have not changed for 2018 through 2020," a spokesperson told VentureBeat. "We remain committed to our 5G plans and projects." When asked whether this meant that Apple is a customer for an Intel 5G modem, the spokesperson said only that "the Intel 5G modem part of the story is inaccurate." The updated report explains that Sunny Peak was not in fact a 5G modem, and did not -- as initially claimed -- combine 5G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth on one chip. Rather, the unannounced component is only a combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip and was expected to include support for 802.11ad WiGig Wi-Fi, but it ran into engineering issues.

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The Trump administration is suppressing an Environmental Protection Agency report that warns that most Americans inhale enough formaldehyde vapor in the course of daily life to put them at risk of developing leukemia and other ailments, a current and a former agency official told POLITICO. The news outlet adds: The warnings are contained in a draft health assessment EPA scientists completed just before Donald Trump became president, according to the officials. They said top advisers to departing Administrator Scott Pruitt are delaying its release as part of a campaign to undermine the agencyâ(TM)s independent research into the health risks of toxic chemicals. Andrew Wheeler, the No. 2 official at EPA who will be the agency's new acting chief as of Monday, also has a history with the chemical. He was staff director for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2004, when his boss, then-Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), sought to delay an earlier iteration of the formaldehyde assessment. Formaldehyde is one of the most commonly used chemicals in the country. Americans are exposed to it through wood composites in cabinets and furniture, as well as air pollution from major refineries.

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A campaign in Jordan to help those fleeing fighting in Syria gathers pace amid calls to the government to open border.

The team behind Gentoo Linux has revealed the reasons for the recent hack of its GitHub organization account. The short version: shoddy security. From a report: It seems that the hackers were able to gain access to the GitHub organization account by using the password of one of the organization administrators. By the team's own admission, poor security meant that the password was easy to guess. As the Register points out, "only luck limited the damage," but the Gentoo Linux team is keen to let it be known that it has learned a lot from the incident. In an entry on the Gentoo Linux wiki, there is a fairly detailed breakdown of what happened, how it happened, and what is being done to prevent it from happening again. The wiki entry summarizes the hack attack as follows: "An unknown entity gained control of an admin account for the Gentoo GitHub Organization and removed all access to the organization (and its repositories) from Gentoo developers. They then proceeded to make various changes to content. Gentoo Developers & Infrastructure escalated to GitHub support and the Gentoo Organization was frozen by GitHub staff. Gentoo has regained control of the Gentoo GitHub Organization and has reverted the bad commits and defaced content."

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Japan's computer giant Fujitsu and RIKEN, the country's largest research institutes, have begun field-testing a prototype CPU for a next-generation supercomputer they believe will take the country back to the leading position in global rankings of supercomputer might. From a report: The next-generation machine, dubbed the Post-K supercomputer, follows the two collaborators' development of the 8 petaflops K supercomputer that commenced operations for RIKEN in 2012, and which has since been upgraded to 11 petaflops in application processing speed. Now the aim is to "create the world's highest performing supercomputer," with "up to one hundred times the application execution performance of the K computer," Fujitsu declared in a press release on 21 June. The plan is to install the souped-up machine at the government-affiliated RIKEN around 2021. If the partners achieve those execution speeds, that would place the Post-K machine in exascale territory (one exaflops being a billion billion floating point operations a second). To do this, they have replaced the SPARC64 VIIIfx CPU powering the K computer with the Arm8A-SVE (Scalable Vector Extension) 512-bit architecture that's been enhanced for supercomputer use, and which both Fujitsu and RIKEN had a hand in developing. The new design runs on CPUs with 48 cores plus 2 assistant cores for the computational nodes, and with 48 cores plus 4 assistant cores for the I/O and computational nodes. The system structure uses 1 CPU per node, and 384 nodes make up one rack.

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