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16 Aug 2025

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9yo among homeless youth seeking help as the streets claim two of their own
“This year, we lost two of our brothers. They were young men, full of life and potential, but they died without a safe and stable home.”

‘The consequences are lifelong,’ for ex partner of stalker shooter
A man who stalked his ex partner and shot her boyfriend in the head, causing lifelong injuries, told the Parole Board he “did not feel great at all”.

Funding for disability sport is at risk - and Willow’s story shows why it matters
Disability sport leaders warn a government bill could gut the funding they rely on, threatening inclusion, participation and key community programmes.

Meta’s AI rules permitted ‘sensual’ chats with minors and racist comments
According to an internal Meta policy document, leaked to Reuters, the company’s AI guidelines allowed provocative and controversial behaviors, including “sensual” conversations with minors. Reuter’s review of the policy document revealed that the governing standards for Meta AI (and other chatbots across the company’s social media platforms) permitted the tool to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” generate false medical information, and help users argue that Black people are “dumber than white people.” The policy document reportedly distinguished between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” language, drawing the line at explicit sexualization or dehumanization but still allowing derogatory statements. Meta confirmed the document’s authenticity, but claims that it “removed portions which stated it is permissible for chatbots to flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children.” One spokesperson also said that Meta is revising the policy document, clarifying that the company has policies that “prohibit content that sexualizes children and sexualized role play between adults and minors.” Nevertheless, the authenticated document was reportedly “approved by Meta’s legal, public policy, and engineering staff, including its chief ethicist, according to the document.”

This restaurant is asking people to sign a contract before taking leftovers home
Some eateries are asking customers to sign agreements accepting any responsibility before packing their leftover food into a doggy bag.

From babysitter to abuser: Why it took 25 years for this child sex offender to face justice
When a church’s leaders learned a child had been sexually abused they stripped the perpetrator of privileges, but didn’t alert police.

Seaway crude oil pipeline system resumes full operations after leak

US manufacturing production stalls in July

First two Venezuelan oil cargoes by Chevron after license depart to US

Steam’s new performance monitor beats Task Manager, says Valve
Not all PC gamers are obsessed with hardware and performance… which is kind of like saying not all Porsches are fast. If you’ve dropped four figures into a machine specifically to play games, you probably want to quantify at least some of that performance. The latest Steam beta has improved its in-game overlay performance monitor, and according to Valve, it’s even better than the one in Windows. Well, the part that monitors your graphics card, anyway. In the notes for the latest Steam beta release, Valve says it uses a new method to compute GPU utilization—one that’s been optimized to more accurately reflect changes when other processes beyond the game you’re playing utilize the GPU. (More common now as browsers and apps are optimized for more powerful graphics cards, including integrated graphics.) As PC Gamer notes, the tool will sometimes report higher GPU utilization than the built-in monitor in Windows Task Manager, which Valve claims “appears to also under report in similar situations to our prior implementation.” Granted, unless you really know your computer science, you’ll have to take Valve’s word and trust that its implementation is interested in showing you data that’s fully optimized for gamers. Other changes in the beta include various bug fixes and wider format Steam game store pages that should look better on bigger monitors. Exactly when these changes will make it to the wider Steam release wasn’t shared, so presumably they need a bit more testing.