India has just adopted tough new rules guaranteeing an open and fair internet for nearly half a billion people. From a report: The government has taken an "unambiguous stand" on the issue by endorsing net neutrality rules proposed last November, India's telecom regulator said on Thursday. Net neutrality rules require internet providers to treat all online content the same, preventing them from favoring -- or withholding -- access to certain websites, services or apps. The principle is under attack in America, where the Trump administration repealed federal laws last month, but has been staunchly defended in India in the face of attempts by global tech companies such as Facebook to offer stripped-down internet access.

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Parliament votes to extend the tenure of President Salva Kiir until 2021, a move opposition dubbed illegal.

The Justice Department will appeal the AT&T-Time Warner merger approval, according to a court document filed Thursday. In one of the largest U.S. antitrust cases in decades, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled last month that the merger could go on despite the government's resistance. The feds did not seek a stay that would have prevented the merger from taking place, and AT&T and Time Warner closed the deal directly after Leon's ruling.

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After almost 30 years of overseeing the development of the world's most popular language, Python, its founder and "Benevolent Dictator For Life" (BDFL), Guido van Rossum, has decided to remove himself entirely from the decision process. From a report: Van Rossum isn't leaving Python entirely. He said, "I'll still be there for a while as an ordinary core dev, and I'll still be available to mentor people -- possibly more available." It's clear from van Rossum's note he's sick and tired of running the organization. He wrote, "I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP (Python Enhancement Proposals) [PEP 572 Assignment Expressions] and find that so many people despise my decisions." In addition, van Rossum hints he's not been well. "I'm not getting younger... (I'll spare you the list of medical issues.)" So, "I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL, and you all will be on your own." From the email: I am not going to appoint a successor. So what are you all going to do? Create a democracy? Anarchy? A dictatorship? A federation? I'm not worried about the day to day decisions in the issue tracker or on GitHub. Very rarely I get asked for an opinion, and usually it's not actually important. So this can just be dealt with as it has always been. At Slashdot, we had the privilege of interviewing Guido van Rossum, a Computer History Museum honoree, in 2013.

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Tens of thousands left without drinking water and electricity, while thousands sleep in school gymnasiums.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Canadian wireless users have some of the lowest data usage in the world, but Canadian telecom companies make the most money off the customers they have, a new report shows. A study by telecom comparison site Tefficient looked at data usage per SIM card in 36 countries worldwide in 2017, and how much money telecoms made per gigabyte of wireless data used. Canadians used about 1.3 GB of data per month per SIM card last year. There were only five countries where wireless customers used less than that -- the Czech Republic, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, and Greece. By contrast, Indian telecoms had the lowest revenue per gigabyte, and showed the highest growth in data usage in 2017 -- more than 300 percent.

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State TV says the army hoisted the flag near the post office, as President Assad takes further control of the country.

theodp writes: In a Monday blog post, the outgoing Head of Education for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Chan Zuckerberg Initiative made the claim that "we've made investments that enabled our partners to double the number of Black and Latinx students and girls taking AP Computer Science." The claim is an apparent reference to the highly-promoted and wildly-successful new AP Computer Science Principles course (dubbed "Coding Lite" by the NY Times), which the NSF and College Board began development on in 2009. Zuckerberg's CZI LLC was created in late 2015.

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Capture of province's capital is a symbolic victory for the Bashar al-Assad regime in the more-than-seven-year war that has seen rebels lose most of their territory.

The US appeal to EU leaders comes as some of Tehran's biggest oil customers appear to be succumbing to the US pressure.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A research team at the University Medical Center Gottingen has created a cochlear implant that uses light to restore auditory responses in deaf gerbils. The study provides a proof-of-concept that combining optical stimulation with genetic manipulation can successfully restore sound perception, and could lead to a new generation of more accurate cochlear implants. Approximately 360 million people worldwide have hearing impairment. Traditional cochlear implants can partially restore the ability to hear in many of these patients by stimulating ear cells with electrical signals. In such devices, however, the generated current tends to spread around each point of contact, activation of a large population of neurons and limiting the resolution and clarity of sound signals. Christian Wrobel and colleagues tackled this obstacle by designing a light-based cochlear implant. Optical stimulation promises spatially confined activation of neurons in the auditory nerve, potentially yielding spatially precise ear cell stimulation with limited spreading.

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The exhibition by Mel Chin shows the observer the links between the shipping that helped make New York City a global commercial hub and the consumption that drives climate change.

What if, instead of a black and white X-ray picture, a doctor of a cancer patient had access to color images identifying the tissues being scanned? From a post: This is now a reality, thanks to a New-Zealand company that scanned, for the first time, a human body using a breakthrough color medical scanner based on the Medipix3 technology developed at CERN. Father and son scientists Professors Phil and Anthony Butler from Canterbury and Otago Universities spent a decade building and refining their product. Medipix is a family of read-out chips for particle imaging and detection. The original concept of Medipix is that it works like a camera, detecting and counting each individual particle hitting the pixels when its electronic shutter is open. This enables high-resolution, high-contrast, very reliable images, making it unique for imaging applications in particular in the medical field. Hybrid pixel-detector technology was initially developed to address the needs of particle tracking at the Large Hadron Collider, and successive generations of Medipix chips have demonstrated over 20 years the great potential of the technology outside of high-energy physics.

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Washington claims Pyongyang violated restrictions and asks UN to halt all deliveries of oil products to North Korea.

Microsoft is giving its Notepad app for Windows a surprising amount of new features. From a report: You'll soon be able to do wrap around find and replace alongside the ability to zoom into text by holding down the ctrl key and using the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Microsoft is also adding in extended line ending support so that Unix/Linux line endings (LF) and Macintosh line endings (CR) are supported in Notepad. The status bar will now be enabled by default in Notepad, and it includes the ability to display line and column numbers when word-wrap is enabled.

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