OSCE monitors at the site of the MH17 crash say that pieces of the plane have been cut into or changed - Natalia Antelava reports from the scene.

There has been an increase in the number of slugs in Britain's gardens due to the warm and damp weather.

Today, Xiaomi announces the next version of their flagship smartphone, the Mi 4. Much like the OnePlus One, this device is effectively a high end device at a mid-range price. For the most part, this device is very much like the OnePlus One, although there are some crucial differences. The display is smaller, at 5 inches diagonal it makes for a device that is easier to use with one hand. The front facing camera is eight megapixels rather than five, and both cameras have a wider f/1.8 aperture. As always, a full list of specs can be seen below.

  Xiaomi Mi 4 SoC MSM8974AC 2.45 GHz Snapdragon 801 RAM/NAND 3 GB LPDDR3, 16/64GB NAND Display 5" 1080p IPS LCD by JDI/Sharp Network 2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Qualcomm MDM9x25 UE Category 4 LTE) Dimensions 139.2 x 67.5 x 8.9mm, 149 grams Camera 13MP rear camera, 1.12 µm pixels, 1/3.06" CMOS size Sony IMX 214, F/1.8. 8MP F/1.8 FFC 1/4" Battery 3080 mAh (11.704 Whr) OS MIUI v5 Connectivity 802.11a/b/g/n/ac + BT 4.0, USB2.0, GPS/GNSS, MHL, DLNA, NFC SIM Size MicroSIM

While some details are lacking (namely, dimensions) it's generally clear that this phone is designed to try and be the best phone of the Snapdragon 801 generation. The use of even wider apertures will help with light collection but there is potential for increased aberration as a result, which would be important to evaluate. The display is also said to be 84% NTSC, which would correspond to about 128% of the sRGB colorspace, so it'll be important to see whether or not there's an accurate sRGB calibration in this device.

This time around, Xiaomi seems to be trying to improve the in hand feel of their devices, by using a stainless steel band around the phone for improved feel. The back cover is still plastic, but Xiaomi is introducing swappable back covers with different materials and colors to try and alleviate the issue. This definitely seems to be a move inspired by the StyleSwap covers that OnePlus is releasing for the One. The covers can be seen below.

Keeping with tradition, the Mi 4 will be priced extremely competitively. The 16GB version will sell for the equivalent price of 320 USD, and the 64GB variant for 400 USD. There's no word on availability for other coutnries, but the phone will be available for pre-order in China on July 29th.

Gallery: Xiaomi Mi 4

Indonesia's next president faces challenges including cutting the country's controversial fuel subsidies.

Version:3.12.25 (longterm) Released:2014-07-22 Source:linux-3.12.25.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.12.25.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.12.25.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.12.25

More and more jellyfish are being spotted on the UK's coastline during the summer months, and now scientists have decided to try and find out why.

BBC News hears from a 17-year-old in Zambia who was forced into marriage against her will.

Prince George celebrates his first birthday on Tuesday and to mark the occasion two new pictures have been released by Kensington Palace.

Israel's defence minister says that the offensive in Gaza will continue 'as long as necessary to stop the Hamas rocket attacks.

There hasn't been a strong El Niño in over a decade, which causes problems for some climate models. NOAA

Spend any amount of time reading climate arguments on the Internet, and you'll undoubtedly hear some version of the following argument: the Earth hasn't warmed in 17 years, and none of the climate models predicted that. Although there are a lot of problems with that statement (including the fact that it has warmed a bit), it's probably safe to say that the warming hasn't been as intense as many scientists expected.

Of course, to a scientist, unmet expectations are an opportunity, so a variety of papers have looked into why this has happened. They've found that, while volcanic eruptions seem to have contributed to the relatively slow rise in temperatures, a major player has been the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which has been stuck in a cool, La Niña state for most of the last decade. And, since climate models aren't expected to accurately forecast each El Niño, there would be no reason to expect that they would match the actual atmospheric record.

At least not intentionally. But some researchers have found that, simply by chance, a few of the models do produce an accurate ENSO pattern. And when those models are examined in detail, it turns out they match the existing temperature record pretty well.

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A Ukrainian train with bodies from the Malaysia Airlines plane crash heads for the eastern city of Kharkiv from rebel-held areas amid worsening fighting.

Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. Diliff

A startup has told Los Angeles city officials that it wants to build a citywide fiber-to-the-home broadband network and that it also hopes to build nationwide Wi-Fi and cellular networks.

The proposal sounds unlikely to succeed, but it's certainly ambitious. It comes in response to a Los Angeles city government request for information (RFI) regarding a plan to build a fiber and Wi-Fi network. The Los Angeles request itself struck telecom experts as unrealistic. The city wants a vendor to build a fiber network at an estimated cost of $3 billion to $5 billion, offer free Internet to all residents (while charging for faster speeds), and make the infrastructure available to any other service provider on a wholesale basis.

The RFI deadline passed Friday, and only one company has made its full response to the city public. It's a Dutch company called Angie Communications, which claims it will build fiber and mobile networks in the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, France, and the US.

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Smartphone gamers don't have a wealth of quality first-person shooter options, but in spite of its unoriginal name, Gameloft's Modern Combat games have been solid enough to lead the mobile sales charts. Ahead of the series' fifth release, Gameloft celebrated Modern Combat 5: Blackout's upcoming launch by awarding early free downloads to fans via social network contests.

As reported by Polygon, that move backfired when one of the contest winners cracked the iOS version and uploaded its IPA file over the weekend, allowing the game to be pirated in droves ahead of its launch. The news began to spread once Touch Arcade editor Eli Hodapp—the kind of gamer who would have early access to a mobile shooter—noticed thousands of players pop up in Modern Combat 5 multiplayer sessions during the pre-release period.

In a Facebook post on the game's official community page, Gameloft representative Florian Weber confirmed that this activity was due to the game's pirated leak, and he didn't mince words. "As you can imagine I am really pissed off," Weber said.

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The Air Force's failed ECSS logistics system cost more than putting a few GPS satellites in orbit. United States Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Mike Meares

A full two years after its cancellation, Congress is still taking the Air Force to task for the failure of an eight-year logistics system project that was intended to consolidate somewhere between 175 and over 900 legacy software systems—depending on who you asked and when. In a Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs investigative report (PDF) completed on July 7 and publicly released last week, Senate investigators called the Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS) “a cautionary tale” of poor management practices and horrific technology choices.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects in government and business over the past decade, especially since the software the Air Force attempted to use to solve its problems was an off-the-shelf package that was supposed to be only superficially modified to meet the needs of the Air Force. But ERP systems aren’t just software projects—they often require a total restructuring of organizational processes to make them fit the software rather than just making existing processes more efficient.

“The Air Force failed in its procurement of [ECSS]… because it lacked a clear objective and the organizational will to implement changes to its internal business processes vital to integrating ECSS into the organization,” the Senate investigators wrote in the report. “In doing so, the Air Force violated many crucial guidelines and best practices for information technology acquisition.”

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At least five people have been killed and 70 injured by an Israeli strike on a hospital in Gaza, Palestinians say.

Whitney

Last year, the website Extortion Letter Info (ELI) was slapped with an extraordinary "gag order" forcing it to remove more than 2,000 posts related to Linda Ellis, a writer who has a long record of sending copyright demand letters over "The Dash," a poem Ellis claims she composed in 1996.

The broad order got the attention of other activists—bloggers like the author of Fight Copyright Trolls, as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which called the Georgia order "overbroad and dangerous."

Now it looks like a Georgia appeals court has recognized that the 2,000-post takedown is actually a big deal.

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Mark Stevens

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has sued the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in an attempt to compel the government agency to hand over documents relating to a relatively new comprehensive intelligence database of people and cargo crossing the US border.

EPIC’s lawsuit, which was filed last Friday, seeks a trove of documents concerning the “Analytical Framework for Intelligence” (AFI) as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. EPIC’s April 2014 FOIA request went unanswered after the 20 days that the law requires, and the group waited an additional 49 days before filing suit.

The AFI, which was formally announced in June 2012 by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), consists of “a single platform for research, analysis, and visualization of large amounts of data from disparate sources and maintaining the final analysis or products in a single, searchable location for later use as well as appropriate dissemination.”

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"I can't breathe! I can't breathe! I can't breathe! I can't breathe!"

Those were the last words captured on amateur video of an African-American man who died after New York Police Department officers subdued him during an arrest.

The death of Eric Garner, who appeared to be wrestled to the ground with a chokehold (a move that is banned by the NYPD), is the latest example of the surveillance society turned on its head. In the Digital Age, no longer is it just the watchers watching the watched.

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Israel sent ground troops into Gaza on Thursday, saying the ground operation is necessary to target Hamas' network of tunnels.

Samsung's original Galaxy Gear was one of the first in an initial wave of Android smartwatches. It ran Android at a time where a smartwatch was not a form factor that Google had anticipated for their operating system. Because of issues with software support and battery life, Samsung began releasing smartwatches that ran on their own Tizen operating system. Samsung also committed to updating the original Galaxy Gear from Android to Tizen. This staged rollout began earlier in May of this year, and it is now rolling out to Galaxy Gear users in United States. Samsung is promising that the update gives users access to a greater catalog of apps, along with software improvements that bring it closer to feature parity with the Gear 2 smartwatch. 

The move to Tizen brings new features and additions to existing features. Many of these lie in the fitness and lifestyle capabilities of the Galaxy Gear. On Tizen the Galaxy Gear can keep track of a user's sleeping patterns using Sleep Mode, and it can keep track of workout routines in exercise mode which is an improvement over the original Android firmware which could only go as far as tracking footsteps. Unfortunately due to hardware limitations, features that utilize the heart rate monitor on the Gear 2 have not been brought over to the original Galaxy Gear

Samsung is also including a built in music player with the ability to store tracks right on the smartwatch. This is an interesting feature because it allows the Galaxy Gear to function on its own to some degree, which is a different smartwatch strategy than Google is taking with their Android Wear operating system which acts purely as an extension of your current smartphone. Another new app is the Controls application which acts as a settings app for changing brightness and volume as well as setting custom fonts, wallpapers, and icon sizes.

Beyond new apps and features, Samsung is promising that the move to Tizen brings significant increases in battery life which is great news for Galaxy Gear owners as battery life is one of the biggest concerns with smartwatches and the original Galaxy Gear running Android definitely struggled in this regard.

The update is rolling out in the United States starting today. Users will need to connect their phone to their computer and use Samsung's Kies software to download and install the update. While this isn't likely to be an issue for most users, Samsung makes a point of noting that there is no way to return to Android once the Galaxy Gear has been updated to Tizen.