The Occupy Central movement is planning more protests in Hong Kong over Beijing's restriction of democratic elections.

Three more districts quarantined as nearly 600 people have died of the virus in Sierra Leone and two eastern districts have been isolated since the beginning of August

Four men are arrested after a tonne of cocaine, thought to be worth £63m, is seized off the south west coast of Ireland.

Version:next-20140925 (linux-next) Released:2014-09-25

Dubai has constructed the first environment friendly mosque in a region which is among the worst polluters in the world

Dubai has constructed the first environment friendly mosque in a region which is among the worst polluters in the world

Forza Horizon 2 is the latest installment of Microsoft’s console racing franchise, and it brings the driving-meets-MMO concept to the Xbox One. As with its predecessor, Forza Horizon 2 is built from Forza Motorsport DNA, which UK-based Playground Games have combined with experience gleaned from titles like Project Gotham Racing, TOCA, and DiRT. Once again, the result is a driving game with that familiar Forza look and feel, but it's tuned to appeal to a slightly different audience.

Forza Horizon 2 swaps its predecessor's open roads of Colorado for digital versions of Southern France and Northern Italy. The Horizon music festival has crossed the Atlantic, and, as the game begins, you’re given the job of ferrying the new Lamborghini Huracan to the opening event. From here, you begin the career mode, which has you driving between France and Italy along the coast and through the mountains. You’re guided from event to event by Ben, the festival organizer, imbued by British actor Sean Maguire with just enough charisma to keep him the right side of being horribly annoying.

Sights and Sounds

A real high point of the first Forza Horizon game was its soundtrack, carefully curated by British DJ Rob Da Bank. He’s back with Forza Horizon 2 and a much larger soundtrack, now with seven different radio stations (although some of these have to be unlocked as you progress through the game). Da Bank is particularly good at curating a good driving soundtrack. These are the kinds of songs you might expect to hear in commercials for the next few years after being first exposed to them here.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

New recommendations on dealing with the residues of pesticides in food are expected to be made by the UN's food and health agencies.

New recommendations on dealing with the residues of pesticides in food are expected to be made by the UN's food and health agencies.

The family of Ghoncheh Ghavami, a British-Iranian woman being held in Iran after going to a men's volleyball match, appeal for her release.

The "Constructing Worlds" exhibition opening at London's Barbican Centre features powerful photographs of modern architecture, from the first skyscrapers in New York to the tower blocks of Venezuela, to modern construction around China's Three Gorges Dam.

Version:3.4.104 (longterm) Released:2014-09-25 Source:linux-3.4.104.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.4.104.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.4.104.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.4.104

Brazilian researchers release thousands of mosquitoes infected with a bacterium that suppresses Dengue fever into the environment in Rio de Janeiro.

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});Photographer Alex Wild really knows his bugs. That's because his love of the craft grew out of an appreciation for the insects, "an aesthetic complement to scientific work," as he notes in his bio. Wild is a biologist with a Ph.D. in Entomology from the University of California-Davis, where he focused on ant evolution; he got serious about photography in 2002. Nowadays he's taught both science (entomology and beekeeping at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and skill (his BugShot insect photography workshops).

Wild was kind enough to share with Ars his personal experiences of being a copyright-reliant photographer in the Internet age. His imagery has recently appeared on billboards, YouTube commercials, pesticide spray labels, website banners, exterminator trucks, T-shirts, iPhone cases, stickers, company logos, e-book covers, trading cards, board games, video game graphics, children’s books, novel covers, app graphics, alt-med dietary supplement labels, press releases, pest control advertisements, crowdfunding promo videos, coupons, fliers, newspaper articles, postage stamps, advertisements for pet ants (yes, that’s a thing), canned food packaging, ant bait product labels, stock photography libraries, and greeting cards.

And that list includes only the outlets that displayed his work without permission.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A worker honey bee covered in pollen. Honey bees add about 20 billion dollars a year to the US economy, mostly through their pollination services. Urbana, Illinois, USA. Alex Wild

Here is a true story about how copyright infringement costs my small photography business thousands of dollars every year.

Or, maybe it isn’t. It could also be a true story of how copyright infringement earns me thousands of dollars every year. I can’t be sure. Either way, this is definitely the story of how copyright infringement takes up more of my time than I wish to devote to it. Copyright infringement drains my productivity to the point where I create hundreds fewer images each year. And it's why, in part, I am leaving professional photography for an academic position less prone to the frustrations of a floundering copyright system.

I have an unusual, and an unusually fun, job: I photograph insects for a living. I love what I do in no small part because the difference between my profession and getting paid to be an overgrown kid, is… not that much, really. I collect ants and beetles, I play with camera gadgets, I run around in the woods. Meanwhile, publishers, museums, and the pest control industry send me enough in licensing fees that I haven’t starved to death. By nature photographer standards, business is booming. I cover a modest mortgage in a working class neighborhood. I even afford a new lens or two every year.

Read 41 remaining paragraphs | Comments

BBC Pop Up reports on the consequences and impact of Colorado's new gun control laws

The BBC's Manveen Rana spoke to a man from Raqqa shortly after US air strikes hit the city.

The International Criminal Court has opened a formal probe into war crimes in the Central African Republic (CAR).

Disagreements between company executives and the army of PR people who serve them always raise a smile. Public relations teams work so hard to control corporate messaging, and then execs who should know better ignore it.

Next week, Microsoft is having an event in San Francisco. The official purpose of this event is to show off "what's next for Windows and the enterprise." That's a little vague; it could mean a new version of Windows, or a new update, or anything in between. But Alain Crozier, president of Microsoft France, told employees earlier this week that Windows 9 was going to be shown off at the event, as spotted by ZDNet France.

But it turns out that wasn't suitably on-message. Microsoft PR got in touch with ZDNet to tell them that the next version of Windows doesn't actually have a name. So it's not Windows 9 at all.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

I'm sure many of you have at least heard of Tiny Core Linux—legends of how small it is, how little it takes it to run a system with it and even now how it's been ported to run on Raspberry Pi. It's an esoteric minimalist distribution. more>>