London's Heathrow airport is testing a surprising new system involving high-definition cameras, monitoring 50,000 arrivals in the month of March. Bloomberg reports: Views from the cameras will be fed into an artificial intelligence platform from Canada's Searidge Technologies Inc. that will interpret the images and reveal to controllers when a particular aircraft has cleared the runway, allowing them to clear the next flight to come in to land... If successful, the system will initially be deployed when Heathrow's 285-foot control tower is shrouded in cloud -- a situation that currently compels the airport to rely on radar readings to determine the position of jets. That in turn requires a bigger gap between flights, costing the hub nine landings an hour or 20 percent of the usual total... The same technology could also control the airport's $22 billion third runway due to open for flights by 2025, removing the need to construct a new control tower to oversee the strip north and west of the existing one. The smaller London City airport is removing its tower altogether and deploying a mast with zoom cameras, allowing flights to be managed from the Swanwick control center more than 80 miles away.

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An anonymous reader quotes CBS News: The governor of Washington state declared a state of emergency Friday over a measles outbreak that has sickened dozens of people in a county with one of the state's lowest vaccination rates. Gov. Jay Inslee said in a statement that the outbreak in Clark County "creates an extreme public health risk" that could spread throughout the state... Clark County Public Health has confirmed 30 measles cases since January 1 and identified another nine suspected cases. Twenty-six of the confirmed cases were people who were not immunized for measles, the agency said... Only 77.4 percent of all public students there complete their vaccinations, according to state records cited by the Oregonian...Most of the confirmed cases -- 21 -- were with children between 1 and 10 years old. Eight cases involved people 11 to 18 years old, and one case was someone 19 to 29. Time magazines also reports that authorities in the neighboring states of Oregon and Idaho "have issued warnings to residents." In November the World Health Organization warned that measles cases worldwide had jumped more than 30% from 2016 to 2017, according to AFP, "in part because of children not being vaccinated."

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Authorities set to examine graves in western Mai-Ndombe province where hundreds could have been killed.

A 38-year-old man, shot in the back during a confrontation with Israeli soldiers and settlers, succumbed to his wounds.

The US president denies giving in as he temporarily ends the longest government shutdown in US history.

An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: The future is now: Starting this week, Amazon is testing autonomous package delivery with adorable little robot vehicles in a northern Seattle suburb. Six of the Amazon Scouts, the company announced yesterday, are now delivering packages in Snohomish County in a trial run that complements its existing delivery options... The six-wheeled vehicles are fully electric and will move at "walking pace," for the time being only during daylight hours on weekdays while accompanied by Amazon employees for safety's sake.... [C]onsidering the drone delivery Prime Air program never got off the ground, Amazon Scout already seems like a more sensible solution to the last-mile problem: the time-intensive activity of getting packages from distribution centers to homes. Wired points out some particular problems, though: "A delivery robot can't open gates without hands, and it can't climb steps to get right to your door. And if the robot requires the customer to enter a PIN to get the package out, how can the robot leave the package if you're not home?" And compared to the orderly structure of roads, sidewalks are pure chaos, with people, pets and objects sharing the space. Whether autonomous delivery vehicles are allowed to share the sidewalks varies by state and by city too; San Francisco has severely restricted them since 2017. Amazon's road test in Seattle may determine whether the delivery method finally arrives.

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US envoy for peace in Afghanistan and Taliban officials say talks were productive but reject reports a deal was signed.

"Time and again, security experts and vendors alike will recommend to organizations and end users to keep software and systems updated with the latest patches," reports eWeek. "But what happens when the application infrastructure that is supposed to deliver those patches itself is at risk?" That's what open-source and Linux users were faced with this past week with a pair of projects reporting vulnerabilities. On January 22, the Debian Linux distribution reported a vulnerability in its APT package manager that is used by end users and organizations to get application updates. That disclosure was followed a day later, on January 23, with the PHP PEAR (PHP Extension and Application Repository) shutting down its primary website, warning that it was the victim of a data breach. PHP PEAR is a package manager that is included with many Linux distributions as part of the open-source PHP programming language binaries.... In the Debian APT case, a security researcher found a flaw, reported it, and the open-source project community responded rapidly, fixing the issue. With PHP PEAR issue, researchers with the Paranoids FIRE (Forensics, Incident Response and Engineering) Team reported that they discovered a tainted file on the primary PEAR website... Both PHP PEAR and Debian have issued updates fixing their respective issues. While both projects are undoubtably redoubling their efforts now with different security technologies and techniques, the simple fact is that the two issues highlight a risk with users trusting updating tools and package management systems.

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Trump wonders why the Democrats are so united. For the answer, he just has to look in the mirror.

To many Aboriginal people the day signifies the beginning of genocide and systemic oppression.

Damascus says Turkey's presence in Syria breaches 1998 Adana deal, but Ankara insists deal gives it right to intervene.

A Canadian diplomat on Thursday contradicted what he'd said on Wednesday, according to a story shared by hackingbear: John McCallum, Canada's ambassador in China, appeared to provide legal advice to Meng Wanzhou, who is fighting extradition to the U.S. over fraud allegations. Saying she had a "strong case", McCallum outlined numerous weaknesses of the legal proceedings: political interference from Donald Trump, the extraterritorial nature of the charges and the fact that Canada is not party to American sanctions against Iran. "I regret that my comments with respect to the legal proceedings of Ms Meng have created confusion. I misspoke," McCallum said in a statement released late on Thursday afternoon. "These comments do not accurately represent my position on the issue. As the government has consistently made clear, there has been no political involvement in this process." But ABC News reports that the same diplomat then said Friday that it would be "great" for Canada if the U.S. dropped its extradition request, "in what seem like off script remarks again...." "The Canadian government didn't return multiple messages in response to questions about whether McCallum is speaking for the Canadian government."

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Russia accuses US of orchestrating a "coup" attempt, as US secretary of state urges support for opposition leader.

Iran says entering into a direct war with Israel is a decision for the Syrian government, but experts fear the escalating tensions between Israel and Iran.

"Russian oligarchs and Kremlin apparatchiks may find the tables turned on them," writes Kevin Poulsen at The Daily Beast, reporting on a new leak site that's unleashed "a compilation of hundreds of thousands of hacked emails and gigabytes of leaked documents." "Think of it as WikiLeaks, but without Julian Assange's aversion to posting Russian secrets." Slashdot reader hyades1 shared their report: The site, Distributed Denial of Secrets, was founded last month by transparency activists. Co-founder Emma Best said the Russian leaks, slated for release Friday, will bring into one place dozens of different archives of hacked material that, at best, have been difficult to locate, and in some cases appear to have disappeared entirely from the web. "Stuff from politicians, journalists, bankers, folks in oligarch and religious circles, nationalists, separatists, terrorists operating in Ukraine," said Best, a national-security journalist and transparency activist. "Hundreds of thousands of emails, Skype and Facebook messages, along with lots of docs...." The site is a kind of academic library or a museum for leak scholars, housing such diverse artifacts as the files North Korea stole from Sony in 2014, and a leak from the Special State Protection Service of Azerbaijan. The site's Russia section already includes a leak from Russia's Ministry of the Interior, portions of which detailed the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine at a time when the Kremlin was denying a military presence there. Though some material from that leak was published in 2014, about half of it wasn't, and WikiLeaks reportedly rejected a request to host the files two years later, at a time when Julian Assange was focused on exposing Democratic Party documents passed to WikiLeaks by Kremlin hackers. "A lot of what WikiLeaks will do is organize and re-publish information that's appeared elsewhere," said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute. "They've never done that with anything out of Russia." The Russian documents were posted simultaneously on the DDoSecrets website and on the Internet Archive, notes the New York Times, adding that the new site has also posted a large archive of internal documents from WikiLeaks itself. "Personally, I am disappointed by what I see as dishonest and egotistic behavior from Julian Assange and WikiLeaks," Best tells the Times. "But she added that she had made the Russian document collection available to WikiLeaks ahead of its public release on Friday, and had posted material favorable to Mr. Assange leaked from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has lived for more than six years to avoid arrest."

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