Tom Warren, writing for The Verge: YouTube has been pissing me off for weeks. I'm starting to feel like I should pay $11.99 a month to subscribe to YouTube Premium just to get rid of the annoying pop-ups Google sends me almost daily. Google has decided to place pop-up ads in its own YouTube app for Premium subscriptions. This feels slightly acceptable at first, but Google has also decided these should spam you to death, sometimes full-screen, with no option to permanently dismiss them so you see them all the damn time. It's a classic growth hack designed to get more people to use YouTube Music or YouTube Premium because, honestly, who cares about either of those services? I already subscribe to Spotify, which is far superior to YouTube Music, and I'd never pay $11.99 just to have fewer YouTube ads and background playback of videos on my phone. It's a pointless subscription that Google is trying to lazily ram down my throat instead of improving its offering, competing fairly with others, and, most importantly, focusing on its customer experience. Google's efforts here have made sure I, and I bet many others, will never touch YouTube Music or YouTube Premium. I absolutely loathe both of these services to the point where I'm left swearing at my phone like an idiot, simply because these stubborn ads keep appearing on top of the YouTube videos I'm trying to watch.

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US military said it lost the unmanned aerial vehicle while it was assessing security over Libyan capital Tripoli.

Abdallah Chatila says he bought Nazi items at a Munich auction to stop them from falling into the hands of neo-fascists.

Defence lawyer says 31-year-old artist was prosecuted because of a song he co-wrote about youth struggles.

An anonymous reader writes: "HELLO, I'm Scout. Want to play?" My daughter has a toy dog that yaps and comes out with a few stock phrases. When it gets too annoying, I don't hesitate to turn it off. I sometimes think about "losing" Scout, or even "accidentally" breaking it, acts that would be cruel to my daughter but not to the dog. But for how much longer will this be true? Technology is getting better all the time. What will it mean if we can create a robot that is considered alive? If I find myself annoyed by such a robot, would it be wrong to turn it off? Would that be the same as killing it? The answer isn't obvious. Many people already regard robots more sensitively than I do. At Kofukuji temple near Tokyo, Japan, Buddhist priests conduct services for "dead" Aibo robot dogs. In Japan, inanimate objects are considered to have a spirit or soul, so it makes sense for Aibos to be commemorated in this way. Such sentiments aren't confined to Japan, however. Julie Carpenter, a roboticist in San Francisco has written about bomb disposal soldiers who form strong attachments to their robots, naming them and even sleeping curled up next to them in their Humvees. "I know soldiers have written to military robot manufacturers requesting they fix and return the same robot because it's part of their team," she says.

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Eighteen states rang in 2019 with minimum wage increases -- some that will ultimately rise as high as $15 an hour -- and so far, opponents' dire predictions of job losses have not come true. From a report: The data paint a clear picture: Higher minimum wage requirements haven't reduced hiring in low-wage industries or overall. Opponents have long argued that raising the minimum wage will cause workers to lose their jobs and prompt fast food chains (and other stores) to raise prices. But job losses and price hikes haven't been pronounced in the aftermath of a recent wave of city and state wage-boost laws. And more economists are arguing that the link between minimum wage hikes and job losses was more hype than science. What we're hearing: "The minimum wage increase is not showing the detrimental effects people once would've predicted," Diane Swonk, chief economist at international accounting firm Grant Thornton, tells Axios. "A lot of what we're seeing in politics is old economic ideology, not what economics is telling us today."

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The Conservatives are promising a deal to leave the EU while the Labour Party is promising to increase social spending.

Pro-democracy parties dominate district council election amid protests against Chinese rule in the semi-autonomous city.

Many protesters say Duque's call for talks is too little too late as discontent grows with right-wing government.

Thieves break into one of the world's oldest museums, making off with three 'priceless' sets of 18th century jewellery.

Law aims to ban successful candidates from forming blocs until a government is formed and to reduce age to fight polls.

Court sentences Nicola Corradi and Horacio Corbacho to more than 40 years for abusing children at a school for the deaf.

Demonstrators demanding a complete government overhaul were attacked by pro-Hezbollah gangs on Sunday.

diegocg writes: Linux 5.3 has been released, featuring the new kernel lockdown mode, intended to strengthen the boundary between UID 0 and the kernel; virtio-fs, a high-performance virtio driver which allows a virtualized guest to mount a directory that has been exported on the host; fs-verity, for detecting file tampering, like dm-verity, but works on files rather than block devices; dm-clone, which allows live cloning of dm targets; two new madvise() flags for improved app memory management on Android, support for new Intel/AMD GPUs, support for the exfat file system and removing the experimental status of the erofs file system; a new haltpoll cpuidle driver and governor that greatly improves performance for virtualized guests wanting to do guest-side polling in the idle loop; and blk-iocost, a new cgroup controller that attempts to calculate more accurately the cost of IO. As always, many other new drivers and improvements can be found in the changelog.

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Attitudes towards indigenous have begun to change after Evo Morales, who became Bolivia’s first indigenous president nearly fourteen years ago, was deposed.