● [Tech] Scammers abuse net domain languages. ︴ ︴

▼ Cyber-criminals are abusing multilingual character sets to trick people into visiting phishing websites. The non-English characters allow scammers to create "lookalike" sites with domain names almost indistinguishable from legitimate ones. Farsight Security found scam sites posing as banks, loan advisers and children's brands Lego and Haribo. Smartphone users are at greater risk as small screens make lookalikes even harder to spot. Targeted attack The Farsight Security report looked at more than 100 million domain names that use non-English character sets - introduced to make the net more familiar and usable for non-English speaking nations - and found about 27% of them had been created by scammers. It also uncovered more than 8,000 separate characters that could be abused to confuse people. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [Tech] 'Unfair' mouse team banned from competing for $15m prize. ︴ ︴

▼ A Peruvian e-sports team has been banned from taking part in a $15m (£11m) tournament after one of its players was accused of cheating. The Thunder Predator team was taking part in a qualifying match for the Dota2 International that offers the massive prize pool. It was disqualified because a player called Atun used a programmable mouse that let him speed up in-game actions. Thunder Predator denounced the ban saying it had not used a "hack" to win. Fast movement The Dota2 game pits two teams of five against each other across a small map. Each player controls a hero and the aim is to invade and destroy the enemy's stronghold. The fast-moving game demands quick reactions as many of the heroes have special abilities that are only triggered under certain conditions or are boosted if used in conjunction with those of other player-controlled characters. Thunder Predator was one of several teams taking part in the South American qualifying competition for the Dota2 International that will take place in August. The cheating is alleged to have taken place during one of the semi-finals for the event in which Thunder Predator took on Brazilian team Pain Gaming. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [Tech] European readers still blocked from some US news sites. ︴ ︴

▼ Major American news sites, including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News, remain unavailable to readers in the EU, a month after new data protection rules were implemented. The websites went dark in Europe after the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law came into force on 25 May. GDPR gives EU citizens more rights over how their information is used. A statement on the blocked websites says the publishers are "committed to looking at options" to allow EU access. News sites within the Tronc and Lee Enterprises media publishing groups are affected. Tronc's high-profile sites include the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel and the Baltimore Sun. The company recently sold the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune to billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong. Its websites carry the same message they did one month ago. It reads: "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market." Websites belonging to the Lee Enterprises publishing group are also blocked. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [Science] A Man's Testosterone Levels May Depend on Where He Spent His Childhood. ︴ ︴

▼ Testosterone: It's the key hormoneinvolved in muscle mass, male fertility and the onset of male puberty. And a new paper now suggests that your testosterone levels aren't determined by such factors as genetics or race, as some folk wisdom says, but instead by where you lived as a child. In the study, researchers at Durham University in England compared different groups of men to one another based on where they spent their childhood — either in Bangladesh or London — and whether they had Bangladeshi or European ancestors. Their results, publishedin the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution yesterday (June 25), showed that childhood environment was the more important factor in determining everything from the men's current testosterone levels, to their height, to the age the men reached when they entered puberty. The researchers compared five groups of men for the study: Well-off men born in Bangladeshwho still live there, men born in Bangladesh who moved to London as children, men born in Bangladesh who moved to London as adults, men born in the United Kingdom whose parents immigrated there from Bangladesh and men who were born in the United Kingdom and had European ancestry. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [Science] Palm oil: Are your beauty products killing orangutans? ︴ ︴

▼ Does your lipstick threaten the future of one of our closest living relatives, the orangutan? Is that slobbering slice of pizza you're having in front of the World Cup on TV worth the life of a tiger? Pizza, biscuits, and beauty treatments are some of the thousands of products that contain palm oil, which threaten iconic species through deforestation. But this new studysays that planting alternative oils could pose an even bigger danger to living things. Why is this story important? Palm oil has often been held up as a truly terrible blight on the environment, responsible for the clearing of tropical forests and posing huge threats to iconic species. But this report says the reality is very complex. While palm oil is only responsible for 0.4% of global deforestation it is having dramatic impacts in some locations in Indonesia and Malaysia, causing 50% in some locations. Simply banning palm wouldn't work say the authors because the world will still need vegetable oils. What's also worrying say the authors is that efforts to boost demand for responsibly sourced palm oil haven't worked so far. How does lipstick threaten species? (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [Science] Aliens May Be Rearranging Stars to Fight Dark Energy, Awesome Study Suggests. ︴ ︴

▼ How to dominate the universe in three easy steps … Step 1: Harvest all of your planet's resources. Step 2: Harvest all of your nearest star's energy. Step 3: Harvest all the energy from all the stars in your local galaxy; then move on to another galaxy. Congratulations! Your species now has all the elbow room it needs to grow into a universal superpower. That's one Russian astronomer's perspective, anyway. Astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev first proposed these three phases (called Level I, II and III) of galactic expansion — which he referred to as the three "types" of technologically advanced civilizations — in 1962 as a way to measure the energy consumption of increasingly powerful societies. Recently, a paper posted June 13to the preprint journal arXiv.orghas revived Kardashev's model and added a new, apocalyptic twist. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [Science] Why biologists are so excited to find a bunch of puny manta rays Young manta rays have a sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico. ︴ ︴

▼ “They’re super friendly, they’re interested in you, they’re curious.” G.P. Schmahl/NOAA Late in the evening, a government-owned catamaran departs from Galveston, Texas nearly every week of the summer. It travels through the night, a hundred miles down the Gulf of Mexico, to reach a series of reefsthat rise up from the seafloor. The boat parks beside the coral for several days, abutting the edge of the continental shelf. There, biologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) can plumb the water’s depths to survey its creatures. The reefs lie within Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, home to boulders of corals, barracudas, whale sharks, and sea turtles. The sanctuary also harbors scores of young giant manta rays—the first nursery habitat proposed in the world, according to research published earlier this month. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [International News] Indian foreign minister the latest victim of social media attacks on women Sushma Swaraj highlights abuse she received after her office intervened in a passport case, angering Hindu nationalists. ︴ ︴

▼ Sushma Swaraj received tweets calling her a traitor and demanding her resignation. Photograph: Yoan Valat/EPA India’s top diplomat has become the latest high-profile woman to be targeted by trolls on social media, an endemic problem for Indian women that has attracted United Nations scrutiny. External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj has been highlighting a selection of the abuse she has received in recent days after her office intervened in a passport case that has angered Hindu nationalists. Swaraj, who has 11.8m followers on Twitter, has been pioneering in her use of the platform to respond to complaints and distress calls by Indians overseas. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [International News] Migrant family separations: States sue Trump administration. ︴ ︴

▼ Seventeen US states have sued the Trump administration over its "cruel and unlawful" break-up of migrant families. Democratic attorneys general from states including Washington, New York and California launched the lawsuit. The legal action objects to the policy of refusing entry to asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border. Meanwhile, Vice-President Mike Pence has warned undocumented immigrants not to "risk the lives of your children" by trying to enter the US illegally. At a news conference in Brazil, Mr Pence said he had a message "straight from my heart" for those planning a journey to America: "If you can't come legally, don't come at all." "Don't risk your lives or the lives of your children by trying to come to the United States on a road run by drug smugglers and human traffickers," Mr Pence added. Massachusetts, Delaware, Iowa, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia plus the District of Columbia are the other states suing President Donald Trump's administration. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [International News] The India WhatsApp video driving people to murder. ︴ ︴

▼ A video of a child apparently getting kidnapped in India has gone viral in India, leading people to attack strangers. Warning: This video contains scenes of graphic violence. Video by Dan Johnson, Varun Nayar and Shalu Yadav. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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