A journalist investigates land disputes in the Amazon and how Brazil's government uses misinformation as a smokescreen.

In an interview, Xbox chief Phil Spencer downplayed VR as an "isolating" experience, saying that "nobody's asking for VR" -- at least, from his customer base. From a report: He said, "the vast majority of our customers know if they want a VR experience, there's places to go get those" he explained, though he also said "nobody's selling millions and millions" of VR headsets. For these reasons, the company isn't planning to support VR on its next Xbox console, codenamed Project Scarlett. [...] Spencer's take apparently didn't sit well with Sony's Shuhei Yoshida, who led the company's worldwide studios through much of the growth of PlayStation VR -- a headset that has, in fact, sold well over 4 million units. This morning, Yoshida tweeted that "we oftentimes work hard to make things that no customers are asking for," a fairly gentle retort that recalls the supposed quote from car pioneer Henry Ford, "if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

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Amazon says it will shut down a program that sends shoppers free samples based on what it thinks they want to buy. From a report: The program, which Amazon began testing earlier this year, used machine-learning tools to discern shoppers' buying habits, then sent them free product samples curated to their tastes. Samples included items such as Maybelline mascara, Calvin Klein perfume and Kind bars, among other things. While Amazon likened it to the site's product recommendation tools, the program raised privacy concerns among some consumers who have grown increasingly wary of data mining and targeted advertising across the web. Now, Amazon says it is winding down the program. "Amazon is constantly testing and launching new offerings to innovate on behalf of customers," an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC. "At this time, we have decided to discontinue the sampling program in 2020."

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Protesters storm UN buildings and accuse peacekeepers of not protecting them from rebel attacks.

Committee will hear from legal experts as they examine the constitutional grounds for impeachment.

Emily Mullin, writing for OneZero: Around this time last November, Chinese scientist He Jiankui stunned the world when he revealed the birth of the first known gene-edited babies. Working in relative secrecy, he had used CRISPR to modify human embryos in the lab and then established pregnancies with those embryos. Twin girls with edited genomes were born as a result. The scientific community's condemnation of He was harsh and swift. He had edited the germline, making a heritable genetic change. There were safety questions about the effects on the twins, and he had not meant to fix a genetic defect or prevent disease. Instead, he tweaked a gene in an attempt to bestow an uncommon, protective genetic trait: resistance to HIV. In the aftermath, leading scientists and ethicists published an open letter in the journal Nature calling for a temporary moratorium on human germline gene editing -- that is, editing eggs, sperm, or embryos to make genetically modified children. But it's been a year, and there is still no unified set of rules to dictate whether or how scientists should conduct this research. Some scientists have rejected a blanket moratorium in favor of self-regulating, believing that they can chart a path toward responsible germline editing to prevent a number of inherited diseases. But how to do so remains a point of contention. Meanwhile, at least one scientist is already planning more gene-edited children. In June, Russian molecular biologist Denis Rebrikov said he wanted to use CRISPR to create more HIV-resistant babies, but in a more ethical way than He's experiment. His plans have since shifted to editing embryos of couples with inherited deafness in an attempt to make hearing babies. "The horse has already left the barn," Jennifer Doudna, one of CRISPR's inventors, tells OneZero.

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Vox has doubled its number of MPs, and could remain influential for some time, analysts warn.

At least 41 dead in Kinshasa as the city is battered by torrential rains and landslides, says top city official.

Midfielder Mohammed Qasim Majid scores twice for the visiting side, as regional tournament kicks off in Doha.

Fortinet, a vendor of cyber-security products, took between 10 and 18 months to remove a hardcoded encryption key from three products that were exposing customer data to passive interception. From a report: The hardcoded encryption key was found inside the FortiOS for FortiGate firewalls and the FortiClient endpoint protection software (antivirus) for Mac and Windows. These three products used a weak encryption cipher (XOR) and hardcoded cryptographic keys to communicate with various FortiGate cloud services. The hardcoded keys were used to encrypt user traffic for the FortiGuard Web Filter feature, FortiGuard AntiSpam feature, and FortiGuard AntiVirus feature. A threat actor in a position to observe a user or a company's traffic would have been able to take the hardcoded encryption keys and decrypt this weakly encrypted data stream.

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For 3+ years reporters won't cross the line re Trump and Russia. Every story ends with the same puzzle. Why does Trump love Russia? We don't know. We just don't know. It's like the line in Harry Met Sally where Carrie Fisher says "He'll never leave her, I know, I know he'll never leave her." Everyone says it at some point. We can recite it along with them. "No one thinks he'll ever leave her," says Meg Ryan. At some point you hope she gets the clue. Everyone but the reporters knows why Trump loves Russia. At some point it would be useful if the reporters would just use it in their reporting.

United American Indians of New England has held the solemn remembrance on every Thanksgiving Day since 1970.

Discontent over inequality, education, Duque's slow implementation of the 2016 peace deal has been simmering for months.

The cost of living in China has outstripped the 3% government target for the first time in a decade, and a big part of the problem is the soaring price of pork, which is being driven up by a widespread outbreak of African swine fever (ASF). From a report: Pork is a big deal in China. The average Chinese person gets through about 30kg (66 pounds) of pork a year (by comparison, people in US eat about 26kg of beef a year and UK consumers about 18kg). Since August 2018, when China notified the World Organisation for Animal Health that ASF was in the country, the disease has spread with extraordinary speed. Some 40% of Chinese pigs -- hundreds of millions of animals -- have now been lost, and the result has been a chronic shortage of pork and rocketing prices. The Chinese government has been forced to dig into its gigantic emergency reserves of frozen meat. "The producer price has risen 125% since July," said Rupert Claxton of international food consultancy Girafood. That increase has helped drive up China's inflation rate, which in October broke through the government target of 3% to hit 3.8%.

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At least 330 people have been killed since the start of mass unrest in Baghdad and southern Iraq in early October.