An anonymous reader shares a report: The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating whether Boeing failed to complete required inspections on 787 Dreamliner planes and whether Boeing employees falsified aircraft records, the agency said this week. The investigation was launched after an employee reported the problem to Boeing management, and Boeing informed the FAA. "The FAA has opened an investigation into Boeing after the company voluntarily informed us in April that it may not have completed required inspections to confirm adequate bonding and grounding where the wings join the fuselage on certain 787 Dreamliner airplanes," the FAA said in a statement provided to Ars today. The FAA said it "is investigating whether Boeing completed the inspections and whether company employees may have falsified aircraft records. At the same time, Boeing is reinspecting all 787 airplanes still within the production system and must also create a plan to address the in-service fleet." The agency added that it "will take any necessary action -- as always -- to ensure the safety of the flying public."

Boeing VP Scott Stocker, who leads the 787 Dreamliner program, described "misconduct" in an April 29 email to employees in South Carolina. Boeing provided a copy of the email to Ars. "After receiving the report, we quickly reviewed the matter and learned that several people had been violating Company policies by not performing a required test, but recording the work as having been completed," Stocker wrote. "As you all know, we have zero tolerance for not following processes designed to ensure quality and safety. We promptly informed our regulator about what we learned and are taking swift and serious corrective action with multiple teammates."

Less than two weeks after President Biden signed a bill that will force TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the popular social media app or face a ban in the United States, TikTok said it sued the federal government on Tuesday, arguing the law was unconstitutional. From a report: TikTok said that the law violated the First Amendment by effectively removing an app that millions of Americans use to share their views and communicate freely. It also argued that a divestiture was "simply not possible," especially within the law's 270-day timeline, pointing to difficulties such as Beijing's refusal to sell a key feature that powers TikTok in the United States.

"For the first time in history, Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban, and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than one billion people worldwide," the company said in the 67-page petition it provided, which initiates the lawsuit. "There is no question: The act will force a shutdown of TikTok by Jan. 19, 2025." TikTok is battling for its survival in the United States, with the fight set to play out primarily in courts over the next few months. While lawmakers who passed the bill have said the app is a national security threat because of its ties to China, the courts must now weigh those concerns against TikTok's argument that a sale or ban would violate the First Amendment free-speech rights of its users and hurt small businesses that owe their livelihood to the platform.

The identity of the leader of one of the most infamous ransomware groups in history has finally been revealed. From a report: On Tuesday, a coalition of law enforcement led by the U.K.'s National Crime Agency announced that Russian national, Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev, 31, is the person behind the nickname LockBitSupp, the administrator and developer of the LockBit ransomware. The U.S. Department of Justice also announced the indictment of Khoroshev, accusing him of computer crimes, fraud and extortion.

"Today we are going a step further, charging the individual who we allege developed and administered this malicious cyber scheme, which has targeted over 2,000 victims and stolen more than $100 million in ransomware payments," Attorney General Merrick B. Garland was quoted as saying in the announcement. According to the DOJ, Khoroshev is from Voronezh, a city in Russia around 300 miles south of Moscow. "Dmitry Khoroshev conceived, developed, and administered Lockbit, the most prolific ransomware variant and group in the world, enabling himself and his affiliates to wreak havoc and cause billions of dollars in damage to thousands of victims around the globe," said U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger for the District of New Jersey, where Khoroshev was indicted.

Swedish energy company Stockholm Exergi and Microsoft have announced a 10-year deal that will provide the tech giant with more than 3.3 million tons of carbon removal certificates through bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. While the value of the deal was not disclosed, it stands as the largest of its kind globally. Carbon Herald reports: Scheduled to commence in 2028 and span a decade, the agreement underscores a pivotal moment in combatting climate change. Anders Egelrud, CEO of Stockholm Exergi, lauded the deal as a "huge step" for the company and its BECCS project, emphasizing its profound implications for climate action. "I believe the agreement will inspire corporations with ambitious climate objectives, and we target to announce more deals with other pioneering companies over the coming months," he said. Recognizing the imperative of permanent carbon removals in limiting global warming to 1.5C or below, the deal aligns with Microsoft's ambitious goal of becoming carbon negative by 2030.

"Leveraging existing biomass power plants is a crucial first step to building worldwide carbon removal capacity," Brian Marrs, Microsoft's Senior Director of Energy & Carbon Removal, said, highlighting the importance of sustainable biomass sourcing for BECCS projects, as is the case with Stockholm Exergi. The partners will adhere to stringent quality standards, ensuring transparent reporting and adherence to sustainability criteria. The BECCS facility, once operational, will remove up to 800,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, contributing significantly to atmospheric carbon reduction. With environmental permits secured and construction set to commence in 2025, Stockholm Exergi plans to reach the final investment decision by the end of the year.

Shell sold millions of carbon credits tied to CO2 removal that never took place [non-paywalled link] to Canada's largest oil sands companies, raising new doubts about a technology seen as crucial to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. FT: As part of a subsidy scheme to boost the industry, the Alberta provincial government allowed Shell to register and sell carbon credits equivalent to twice the volume of emissions avoided by its Quest carbon capture facility between 2015 and 2021, the province's registry shows. The subsidy was reduced and then ended in 2022.

As a result of the scheme, Shell was able to register 5.7mn credits that had no equivalent CO2 reductions, selling these to top oil sands producers and some of its own subsidiaries. Credits are typically equivalent to one tonne of CO2. Some of the largest buyers of the credits were Chevron, Canadian Natural Resources, ConocoPhillips, Imperial Oil and Suncor Energy. Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada, criticised these "phantom credits." Stewart added: "Selling emissions credits for reductions that never happened ... literally makes climate change worse."

Shell said carbon capture played "an important role in helping to decarbonise industry and sectors where emissions cannot be avoided" and that realising its potential "requires creating market incentives now." Alberta's environment ministry said the crediting support scheme had not resulted in "additional emissions" by industrial polluters.

A council has provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike after announcing it would ban apostrophes on street signs to avoid problems with computer systems. From a report: North Yorkshire council is ditching the punctuation point after careful consideration, saying it can affect geographical databases. The council said all new street signs would be produced without one, regardless of whether they were used in the past. Some residents expressed reservations about removing the apostrophes, and said it risked "everything going downhill." They urged the authority to retain them.

Sam, a postal worker in Harrogate, a spa town in North Yorkshire, told the BBC that signs missing an apostrophe -- such as the nearby St Mary's Walk sign that had been erected in the town without it -- infuriated her. "I walk past the sign every day and it riles my blood to see inappropriate grammar or punctuation," she said. Though the updated St Mary's sign had no apostrophe, someone had graffitied an apostrophe back on to the sign with a marker pen, which the former teacher said was "brilliant." She suggested the council was providing a bad example to children who spend a long time learning the basics of grammar only to see it not being used correctly on street signs.

Dr Ellie Rye, a lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of York, said apostrophes were a relatively new invention in our writing and, often, context allows people to understand their meaning. "If I say I live on St Mary's Walk, we're expecting a street name or an address of some kind." She said the change would matter to people who spend a long time teaching how we write English but that it was "less important in [verbal] communication."

Poor countries must demonstrate clearer accounting and transparency to back up their calls for trillions of dollars of climate finance, the president of global climate negotiations has said. From a report: Mukhtar Babayev, the ecology minister of Azerbaijan, who will lead the Cop29 UN climate summit in November, urged governments in developing countries to draw up reports showing their progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and their spending on the climate crisis. "It's very important to build this correct, good and honest trust between the parties," he said in an interview in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. "It's a very, very important step, the creation of a transparency mechanism between the countries."

At Cop29 in Baku, countries will be expected to come up with a new global goal on supplying climate finance to poorer countries, to help them cut their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather. Some governments from the global south are calling for the sums to reach more than $1tn a year. These pledges are expected to be subject to bitter wrangling at Cop29, as rich countries are unlikely to agree to provide anything like such sums from their taxpayers but the role of other sources of finance -- such as the private sector -- is still in question.

An international coalition of police agencies have resurrected the dark web site of the notorious LockBit ransomware gang, which they had seized earlier this year, teasing new revelations about the group. From a report: On Sunday, what was once LockBit's official darknet site reappeared online with new posts that suggest the authorities are planning to release new information about the hackers in the next 24 hours, as of this writing. The posts have titles such as "Who is LockBitSupp?," "What have we learnt," "More LB hackers exposed," and "What have we been doing?"

In February, a law enforcement coalition that included the U.K.'s National Crime Agency, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as forces from Germany, Finland, France, Japan and others announced that they had infiltrated LockBit's official site. The coalition seized the site and replaced information on it with their own press release and other information in a clear attempt to troll and warn the hackers that the authorities were on to them.

More than 90% of stablecoin transaction volumes aren't coming from genuine users, according to a new metric co-developed by Visa, suggesting such crypto tokens may be far away from becoming a commonly used means of payment. Bloomberg: The dashboard from Visa and Allium Labs is designed to strip out transactions initiated by bots and large-scale traders to isolate those made by real people. Out of about $2.2 trillion in total transactions in April, just $149 billion originated from "organic payments activity," according to Visa.

Visa's finding challenges stablecoin proponents' argument that the tokens, pegged to an asset like the dollar, are poised to revolutionize the $150 trillion payments industry. PayPal and Stripe are among the fintech giants making inroads into stablecoins, with Stripe co-founder John Collison in April citing "technical improvements" for being bullish on the tokens. [...] Visa itself, which handled more than $12 trillion worth of transactions last year, is among companies that could stand to lose out should stablecoins become a generally accepted means of payment.

Wednesday Rest of World noticed an overlooked tech story in Argentina: Olga de León looked confused as she walked out of a nightclub on the edge of Buenos Aires on a recent Tuesday afternoon. She had just had her iris scanned. "No one told me what they'll do with my eye," de León, 57, told Rest of World. "But I did this out of need." De León, who lives off the $95 pension she receives from the state, had been desperate for money. Persuaded by her nephew, she agreed to have one of her irises scanned by Worldcoin, Sam Altman's blockchain project. In exchange, she received nearly $50 worth of WLD, the company's cryptocurrency.

De León is one of about half a million Argentines who have handed their biometric data over to Worldcoin. Beaten down by the country's 288% inflation rate and growing unemployment, they have flocked to Worldcoin Orb verification hubs, eager to get the sign-up crypto bonus offered by the company. A network of intermediaries — who earn a commission from every iris scan — has lured many into signing up for the practice in Argentina, where data privacy laws remain weak. But as the popularity of Worldcoin skyrockets in the country, experts have sounded the alarm about the dangers of giving away biometric data. Two provinces are now pushing for legal investigations. "Seeing that [iris scans have] been banned in European countries, shouldn't we be trying to stop it, too?" Javier Smaldone, a software consultant and digital security expert, told Rest of World.
Last month Worldcoin's web site announced that more than 10 million people in 160 countries had created a World ID and compatible wallet (performing 75 million transactions) — and that 5,195,475 people had also verified their World ID using Worldcoin's iris-scanning Orb.

But the article notes a big drop in the number of countries even allowing Worldcoin's iris-scanning — from 25 to just eight. While in less than a year Worldcoin opened nearly 60 centers across Argentina...

A "string of legal victories" by America's market-regulating Securities and Exchange Commission "has jolted some of crypto's biggest players," reports Politico — even as they're seeking more credibility with U.S. lawmakers: Judges have recently rebuked claims that the SEC lacks authority to police the market. Coinbase, the largest U.S. exchange, lost a bid to throw out charges that it is violating investor-protection rules. And a New York jury found one-time billionaire entrepreneur Do Kwon and his firm liable for fraud. Now, the crackdown is about to expand, with the SEC preparing for a new round of lawsuits. "The SEC just keeps winning," said John Reed Stark, a former agency attorney and prominent crypto critic. "The law is catching up...."

[I]t's the SEC crackdown that is raising foundational questions about crypto's future. [SEC Chairman Gary] Gensler has been among the industry's most implacable foes, saying most crypto tokens are unregistered securities that are being sold illegally and blasting the industry as "rife with fraud, scams, bankruptcies and money laundering." His opposition has been so unwavering that many in the industry are holding out hope that he leaves the agency after the November elections...

[T]he SEC's enforcement sweep appears to be on the brink of spreading across the crypto world. Consensys is facing potential charges from the agency, according to the company's lawsuit. And the SEC recently warned Uniswap Labs, a decentralized finance company that created one of the world's largest DeFi exchanges, that staff was preparing to sue.

Uniswap executives have vowed to fight the agency in court.

The Associated Press reports that an F-16 performing aerial combat tests at 550 miles per hour was "controlled by artificial intelligence, not a human pilot."

And riding in the front seat was the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force... AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning for an AI-enabled fleet of more than 1,000 unmanned warplanes, the first of them operating by 2028.

It was fitting that the dogfight took place at [California's] Edwards Air Force Base, a vast desert facility where Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound and the military has incubated its most secret aerospace advances. Inside classified simulators and buildings with layers of shielding against surveillance, a new test-pilot generation is training AI agents to fly in war. [U.S. Secretary of the Air Force] Frank Kendall traveled here to see AI fly in real time and make a public statement of confidence in its future role in air combat.

"It's a security risk not to have it. At this point, we have to have it," Kendall said in an interview with The Associated Press after he landed... At the end of the hourlong flight, Kendall climbed out of the cockpit grinning. He said he'd seen enough during his flight that he'd trust this still-learning AI with the ability to decide whether or not to launch weapons in war... [T]he software first learns on millions of data points in a simulator, then tests its conclusions during actual flights. That real-world performance data is then put back into the simulator where the AI then processes it to learn more.
"Kendall said there will always be human oversight in the system when weapons are used," the article notes.

But he also said looked for to the cost-savings of smaller and cheaper AI-controlled unmanned jets.

Slashdot reader fjo3 shared a link to this video. (More photos at Sky.com.)

Last month Reuters reported that Venezuela's state-run oil company "plans to increase digital currency usage in its crude and fuel exports as the U.S. reimposes oil sanctions on the country, three people familiar with the plan said." [The oil company] since last year had been slowly moving oil sales to USDT, a digital currency also known as Tether whose value is pegged to the U.S. dollar and designed to maintain a stable value. The return of oil sanctions is speeding up the shift, a move to reduce the risk of sale proceeds getting frozen in foreign bank accounts due to the measures, the people said...

Tether said in an email it respects the U.S. Treasury's list of sanctioned entities and "is committed to working to ensure sanction addresses are frozen promptly."
This week Reuters reported that now experts are saying the situation "will require greater scrutiny by regulators and law enforcement." They spoke to Kristofer Doucett, national security leader at U.S. blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, who said "Structures must be set up to combat this type of money laundering." Reuters writes: Technology for digital transactions is changing fast and transactions are rapidly growing in developing regions including Latin America and Africa benefiting people without access to the banking system. But some corrupt governments are moving faster, making it difficult to prevent fraud, the experts said. Doucette and Sigal Mandelker, a lawyer who previously worked at the U.S. Treasury Department, said during a conference organized by the Wilson Center in Washington that the U.S. administration is making efforts to increase regulation and encourage other countries to improve supervision.
Slashdot reader RossCWilliams asks a loaded question. Whether this is "the beginning of the end of unregulated cryptocurrencies... the recognition of cryptocurrency as a national security threat that threatens international financial controls."

Come 2029, all cars sold in the U.S. "must be able to stop and avoid contact with a vehicle in front of them at speeds up to 62 mph," reports Car and Driver.

"Additionally, the system must be able to detect pedestrians in both daylight and darkness. As a final parameter, the federal standard will require the system to apply the brakes automatically up to 90 mph when a collision is imminent, and up to 45 mph when a pedestrian is detected." Notably, the federal standardization of automated emergency braking systems includes pedestrian-identifying emergency braking, too. Once implemented, the NHTSA projects that this standard will save at least 360 lives a year and prevent at least 24,000 injuries annually. Specifically, the federal agency claims that rear-end collisions and pedestrian injuries will both go down significantly...

"Automatic emergency braking is proven to save lives and reduce serious injuries from frontal crashes, and this technology is now mature enough to require it in all new cars and light trucks. In fact, this technology is now so advanced that we're requiring these systems to be even more effective at higher speeds and to detect pedestrians," said NHTSA deputy administrator Sophie Shulman.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

The blog It's FOSS is "pissed at the casual arrogance of Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical..... The sheer audacity of not caring for its users reeks of Microsoft-esque arrogance." If you download a .deb package of a software, you cannot install it using the official graphical software center on Ubuntu anymore. When you double-click on the downloaded deb package, you'll see this error, "there is no app installed for Debian package files".

If you right-click and choose to open it with Software Center, you are in for another annoyance. The software center will go into eternal loading. It may look as if it is doing something, but it will go on forever. I could even livestream the loading app store on YouTube, and it would continue for the 12 years of its long-term support period.
Canonical software engineer Dennis Loose actually created an issue ticket for the problem himself — back in September of 2023. And two weeks ago he returned to the discussion to announce that fix "will be a priority for the next cycle". (Though "unfortunately we didn't have the capacity to work on this for 24.04...)

But Its Foss accused Canonical of "cleverly booting out deb in favor of Snap, one baby step at a time" (noting the problem started with Ubuntu 23.10): There is also the issue of replacing deb packages with Snap, even with the apt command line tool. You use 'sudo apt install chromium', you get a Snap package of Chromium instead of Debian
The venerable Linux magazine argues that Canonical "has secretly forced Snap installation on users." [I]t looks as if the Software app defaults to Snap packages for everything now. I combed through various apps and found this to be the case.... As far as the auto-installation of downloaded .deb files, you'll have to install something like gdebi to bring back this feature.

The Washington Post reports that wind turbines "only take up five percent of the land where they've been built, new research shows." The rest of the space can be used for other purposes, such as agriculture, according to a study published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Technology. This means developers could fit turbines in places that are often perceived as unsuitable for a wind farm.

The new study highlights that turbines and existing human development, such as agriculture, cannot only share the same area, but also that building wind farms where there are already roads and other infrastructure could help reduce impacts on the land. "Clever siting, use of existing infrastructure, multiple use of landscapes — all these things ... can really contribute to solutions in areas where wind power is acceptable to the local people," said Sarah Jordaan, the study's principal investigator.

Historically, planning studies for wind farms have often assumed that turbines would disturb all the land at the site and leave the area unusable for anything else, said Jordaan, an associate professor in the department of civil engineering at McGill University. The study's findings provide a more accurate accounting of how much land is needed for wind farms, she added.

Markos Moulitsas is the poll-watching founder of the political blog Daily Kos. Thursday he wrote that in 2021, future third-party presidential candidate RFK Jr. had sued their web site.

"Things are not going well for him." Back in 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sued Daily Kos to unmask the identity of a community member who posted a critical story about his dalliance with neo-Nazis at a Berlin rally. I updated the story here, here, here, here, and here.

To briefly summarize, Kennedy wanted us to doxx our community member, and we stridently refused.
The site and the politician then continued fighting for more than three years. "Daily Kos lost the first legal round in court," Moulitsas posted in 2021, "thanks to a judge who is apparently unconcerned with First Amendment ramifications given the chilling effect of her ruling."

But even then, Moulitsas was clear on his rights: Because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, [Kennedy] cannot sue Daily Kos — the site itself — for defamation. We are protected by the so-called safe harbor. That's why he's demanding we reveal what we know about "DowneastDem" so they can sue her or him directly.
Moulitsas also stressed that his own 2021 blog post was "reiterating everything that community member wrote, and expanding on it. And so instead of going after a pseudonymous community writer/diarist on this site, maybe Kennedy will drop that pointless lawsuit and go after me... consider this an escalation." (Among other things, the post cited a German-language news account saying Kennedy "sounded the alarm concerning the 5G mobile network and Microsoft founder Bill Gates..." Moulitsas also noted an Irish Times article which confirmed that at the rally Kennedy spoke at, "Noticeable numbers of neo-Nazis, kitted out with historic Reich flags and other extremist accessories, mixed in with the crowd.")

So what happened? Moulitsas posted an update Thursday: Shockingly, Kennedy got a trial court judge in New York to agree with him, and a subpoena was issued to Daily Kos to turn over any information we might have on the account. However, we are based in California, not New York, so once I received the subpoena at home, we had a California court not just quash the subpoena, but essentially signal that if New York didn't do the right thing on appeal, California could very well take care of it.

It's been a while since I updated, and given a favorable court ruling Thursday, it's way past time to catch everyone up.
New York is one of the U.S. states that doesn't have a strict "Dendrite standard" law protecting anonymous speech. But soon the blog founder discovered he had allies: The issues at hand are so important that The New York Times, the E.W.Scripps Company, the First Amendment Coalition, New York Public Radio, and seven other New York media companies joined the appeals effort with their own joint amicus brief. What started as a dispute over a Daily Kos diarist has become a meaningful First Amendment battle, with major repercussions given New York's role as a major news media and distribution center.

After reportedly spending over $1 million on legal fees, Kennedy somehow discovered the identity of our community member sometime last year and promptly filed a defamation suit in New Hampshire in what seemed a clumsy attempt at forum shopping, or the practice of choosing where to file suit based on the belief you'll be granted a favorable outcome. The community member lives in Maine, Kennedy lives in California, and Daily Kos doesn't publish specifically in New Hampshire. A perplexed court threw out the case this past February on those obvious jurisdictional grounds....

Then, last week, the judge threw out the appeal of that decision because Kennedy's lawyer didn't file in time — and blamed the delay on bad Wi-Fi...

Kennedy tried to dismiss the original case, the one awaiting an appellate decision in New York, claiming it was now moot. His legal team had sued to get the community member's identity, and now that they had it, they argued that there was no reason for the case to continue. We disagreed, arguing that there were important issues to resolve (i.e., Dendrite), and we also wanted lawyer fees for their unconstitutional assault on our First Amendment rights...

On Thursday, in a unanimous decision, a four-judge New York Supreme Court appellate panel ordered the case to continue, keeping the Dendrite issue alive and also allowing us to proceed in seeking damages based on New York's anti-SLAPP law, which prohibits "strategic lawsuits against public participation."
Thursday's blog post concludes with this summation. "Kennedy opened up a can of worms and has spent millions fighting this stupid battle. Despite his losses, we aren't letting him weasel out of this."

Natron Energy, a pioneer in sodium-ion battery technology, has officially commenced mass production of its lithium-free sodium batteries in its Holland, Michigan facility, offering an alternative energy storage solution with benefits such as faster cycling, longer lifespan, and safer usage compared to lithium-ion batteries. New Atlas reports: Not only is sodium somewhere between 500 to 1,000 times more abundant than lithium on the planet we call Earth, sourcing it doesn't necessitate the same type of earth-scarring extraction. Even moving beyond the sodium vs lithium surname comparison, Natron says its sodium-ion batteries are made entirely from abundantly available commodity materials that also include aluminum, iron and manganese. Furthermore, the materials for Natron's sodium-ion chemistry can be procured through a reliable US-based domestic supply chain free from geopolitical disruption. The same cannot be said for common lithium-ion materials like cobalt and nickel.

Sodium-ion tech has received heightened interest in recent years as a more reliable, potentially cheaper energy storage medium. While its energy density lags behind lithium-ion, advantages such as faster cycling, longer lifespan and safer, non-flammable end use have made sodium-ion an attractive alternative, especially for stationary uses like data center and EV charger backup storage. [...] Natron says its batteries charge and discharge at rates 10 times faster than lithium-ion, a level of immediate charge/discharge capability that makes the batteries a prime contender for the ups and downs of backup power storage. Also helping in that use case is an estimated lifespan of 50,000 cycles.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Oil and gas equipment intended to cut methane emissions is preventing scientists from accurately detecting greenhouse gases and pollutants, a satellite image investigation has revealed. Energy companies operating in countries such as the US, UK, Germany and Norway appear to have installed technology that could stop researchers from identifying methane, carbon dioxide emissions and pollutants at industrial facilities involved in the disposal of unprofitable natural gas, known in the industry as flaring. Flares are used by fossil fuel companies when capturing the natural gas would cost more than they can make by selling it. They release carbon dioxide and toxic pollutants when they burn as well as cancer-causing chemicals. Despite the health risks, regulators sometimes prefer flaring to releasing natural gas -- which is 90% methane -- directly into the atmosphere, known as "venting".

The World Bank, alongside the EU and other regulators, have been using satellites for years to find and document gas flares, asking energy companies to find ways of capturing the gas instead of burning or venting it. The bank set up the Zero Routine Flaring 2030 initiative at the Paris climate conference to eradicate unnecessary flaring, and its latest report stated that flaring decreased by 3% globally from 2021 to 2022. But since the initiative, "enclosed combustors" have begun appearing in the same countries that promised to end flaring. Experts say enclosed combustors are functionally the same as flares, except the flame is hidden. Tim Doty, a former regulator at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said: "Enclosed combustors are basically a flare with an internal flare tip that you don't see. Enclosed flaring is still flaring. It's just different infrastructure that they're allowing.

"Enclosed flaring is, in truth, probably less efficient than a typical flare. It's better than venting, but going from a flare to an enclosed flare or a vapor combustor is not an improvement in reducing emissions." The only method of detecting flaring globally is by using satellite-mounted tools called Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite of detectors (VIIRS), which find flares by comparing heat signatures with bright spots of light visible from space. But when researchers tried to replicate the database, they saw that the satellites were not picking up the enclosed flares. Without the satellite data, countries were forced to rely mostly on self-disclosed reporting from oil and gas companies, researchers said. Environmentalists fear the research community's ability to understand pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector could be jeopardized.

Senior Department arms control official Paul Dean on Thursday urged China and Russia to declare that artificial intelligence would never make decisions on deploying nuclear weapons. Washington had made a "clear and strong commitment" that humans had total control over nuclear weapons, said Dean. Britain and France have made similar commitments. Reuters reports: "We would welcome a similar statement by China and the Russian Federation," said Dean, principal deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence and Stability. "We think it is an extremely important norm of responsible behaviour and we think it is something that would be very welcome in a P5 context," he said, referring to the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.