In news that will shock absolutely nobody, LG and Sony continue to struggle when it comes to selling smartphones. An anonymous reader shares a report: Despite posting record second-quarter and first-half revenues and operating profit totaling $559.4 million -- largely due to strong home appliance sales -- LG's Mobile Communications division continues to underperform. Sales of $1.38 billion equate to a 21.3% drop compared with the same period last year, although it is an increase of 6.8% over the previous quarter. The company blames the usual factors for these results: stagnant demand across the whole sector and "continued aggressive pricing by Chinese brands." Further improvement is expected in Q3 with new products coming to market and greater demand for 5G products, apparently. It's a similar story over at Sony, whose sales in the Electronics Products & Solutions division that smartphones are now a part of reached $776 million, marking a 15% decrease year-on-year. The Japanese company attributes the poor performance to a drop shipments of not just smartphones, but also televisions and digital cameras, two areas that Sony usually does better in.

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Azimjon Askarov was convicted for killing a policeman and jailed for life following ethnic clashes in 2010.

Father of four-year-old says he was warned by the police, leaving his son traumatised by the experience.

The source of a gigantic, mysterious leak of radioactive material that swept across Europe in 2017 has been traced to a Russian nuclear facility, which appears to have been preparing materials for experiments in Italy. From a report: The leak released up to 100 times the amount of radiation into the atmosphere that the Fukushima disaster did. Italian scientists were the first to raise the alarm on 2 October, when they noticed a burst of the radioactive ruthenium-106 in the atmosphere. This was quickly corroborated by other monitoring laboratories across Europe. Georg Steinhauser at Leibniz University Hannover in Germany says he was "stunned" when he first noticed the event. Routine surveillance detects several radiation leaks each year, mostly of extremely low levels of radionuclides used in medicine. But this event was different. "The ruthenium-106 was one of a kind. We had never measured anything like this before," says Steinhauser. Even so, the radiation level wasn't high enough to impact human health in Europe, although exposure closer to the site of release would have been far greater.

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Gaid Salah rejects opposition's preconditions, says elections are needed to end crisis in North African country.

Without offering detials, opposition envoy says talks between Guaido and Maduro representatives will resume this week.

South African athlete will not defend 800m title in September after Swiss court reverses reprieve on testosterone rules.

As end of support for the still-popular Windows 7 draws near, risks of unpatched operating systems are likely to be a significant security concern in the near future. intensivevocoder writes: There is a relatively old -- though still fundamentally true -- adage about Windows: Microsoft's biggest competition is Microsoft, as a specific subset of users (and businesses) only upgrade to the latest version of Windows kicking and screaming. According to SpiceWorks' Future of Network and Endpoint Security report, published Tuesday, 32% of organizations still have at least one Windows XP device connected to their network, despite extended support for XP ending in 2014. (Notably, the last variant of XP, Windows POSReady 2009, reached end of life in April 2019 .) With the looming end of free support for Windows 7, this reticence of users and enterprises to upgrade to newer versions of Windows is likely to create significant security issues. Presently, 79% of organizations still have at least one Windows 7 system on their network, according to SpiceWorks, which also found that two thirds of businesses plan to migrate all of their machines off Windows 7 prior to the end of support on January 14, 2020, while a quarter will only migrate after that deadline. Separately, a Gartner market forecast from April forecasted that only 75% of professional PCs will be on Windows 10 by 2021.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Baseball's future has arrived in the Atlantic League, a collection of eight independent professional teams that span from New Britain, Conn., to Sugar Land, Texas. Last week marked the introduction of the most significant innovation: an automated strike zone, shifting responsibility for calling balls and strikes from a person to an emotionless piece of technology free of the biases and inconsistencies of mere humans. And if the test goes well, the days of big-league players imploring umps to schedule an eye exam could soon come to an end. Ducks manager Wally Backman predicted that MLB will adopt the system within five years. "It's going to happen," he said. "There have been a few pitches that are questionable, but not as many as if it was a human. The machine is definitely going to be more right than they are." Every Atlantic League stadium, including the Patriots' TD Bank Ballpark in Central New Jersey, now features a TrackMan device perched high above the plate. It uses 3-D Doppler radar to register balls and strikes and relays its "decision" through a secure Wi-Fi network to the umpire, equipped with an iPhone in his pocket connected to a wired earbud. That umpire, positioned behind the plate as normal, hears a man's voice saying "ball" or "strike" and then signals the verdict.

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Even if law withstands likely challenge, Trump could avoid requirements by not to competing in California's primary.

Nigeria's government has labelled the Islamic Movement of Nigeria a 'terrorist' organisation.

At least 26 injured in blast that took place in the car park of the city police station in Quetta.

An anonymous reader shares a report: More than two years ago, Facebook revealed it was working on a project for typing words onto a computer right from your brain, without requiring invasive surgery to make it work. The company has been working with several universities on the effort, including the University of California, San Francisco. Facebook helped pay for UCSF researchers to study whether electrodes placed in the brain could help us learn to "decode" speech from brainwaves in real time. As it turns out, this is possible: A study published Tuesday showed that researchers could instantly see -- as text on a computer screen -- a word or phrase that a participant was thinking from brain activity, as long as it was a response to a limited set of questions. The study includes three epilepsy patients voluntarily implanted with electrodes. Facebook is also footing the bill for a new, year-long study that UCSF is currently conducting where it will try to use brain activity to help a person who can't speak communicate. The social network hopes the efforts could help reveal which brain signals are key for that non-invasive wearable that it's planning for in the years ahead. "We expect that to take upwards of 10 years," Mark Chevillet, a research director at Facebook Reality Labs who runs its brain-computer interface group, told CNN Business of the overall project. "This is a long-term research program."

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From Israel and Palestine to China, where do leading Democratic presidential contenders stand on foreign policy issues?

From Israel and Palestine to China, where do leading Democratic presidential contenders stand on foreign policy issues?