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A firefighter has died during a flood rescue in Austria and one person has drowned in Poland, as torrential rain caused by Storm Boris continues to wreak havoc across Central and Eastern Europe.

The Austrian province surrounding Vienna has been declared a disaster area, with its leaders speaking of "an unprecedented extreme situation".

In Romania, where four people were killed on Saturday, the prime minister says two others are missing, while several remain unaccounted for in the Czech Republic.

The floods caused by Storm Boris proved deadly in Romania on Saturday, where four people were killed during floods in the south-eastern region of Galati.

"We are again facing the effects of climate change, which are increasingly present on the European continent, with dramatic consequences," Romanian President Klaus Iohannis said on Saturday.

Extreme precipitation is becoming more likely in Europe, as across much of the world, due to climate change.

A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, which can lead to heavier rainfall.

Storm Boris has already brought extreme amounts of rain across central and eastern Europe, with more torrential downpours in the forecast through until at least the end of Monday.

Some of the highest rainfall totals so far have been in the Czech Republic. At Lysa Hora in the mountains in the west of the country, 288mm of rain has fallen since Thursday. This is around three months’ worth of rain in just three days.

There isn’t much green in the Sahara Desert, but after an unusual influx of rain, the color can be seen from space creeping into parts of one of the driest places in the world.

Satellites recently captured plant life blooming in parts of the typically arid southern Sahara after storms moved there when they shouldn’t. It has also caused catastrophic flooding. Rainfall north of the equator in Africa typically increases from July through September as the West African Monsoon kicks into gear.

The phenomenon is marked by an increase in stormy weather that erupts when moist, tropical air from near the equator meets hot, dry air from the northern portion of the continent. The focus for this stormy weather – known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone – shifts north of the equator in the Northern Hemisphere’s summer months. Much of it sags south of the equator during the Southern Hemisphere’s warm months.

But since at least mid-July, this zone has shifted farther north than it typically should, sending storms into the southern Sahara, including portions of Niger, Chad, Sudan and even as far north as Libya, according to data from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

And this weather shift also affecting Atlantic hurricane season this year.

The situation can be complex because we don't know if these weather shifts will also affect the weather in other regions.

The Linux Mint project has at times forked various open-source projects to evolve them on their own such as the Cinnamon desktop starting out as forks of several GNOME 3 components. While their software forks and focus has mostly been at the desktop-level, they are going a bit further down the stack now to develop forks of several APT components that power package management on Debian/Ubuntu systems.

Google is under investigation by Europe’s privacy watchdog over its processing of personal data in the development of one of its artificial intelligence models, as regulators ramp up their scrutiny of Big Tech’s AI ambitions.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which is responsible for enforcing the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, said it had launched a statutory inquiry into the tech giant’s Pathways Language Model 2, or PaLM 2.

PaLM 2 was launched in May 2023 and predates Google’s latest Gemini models, which power its AI products. Gemini, which was launched in December of the same year, is now the core model behind its text and image-generation offering.

The inquiry will assess whether the company has breached its obligations under GDPR on the processing of the personal data of citizens of the EU and European Economic Area.

Under the framework, companies must conduct a data protection impact assessment before embarking on handling such information when the nature of the way it is used is likely to pose a high risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals.

Recently surfaced North Korean footage has captured the North Korean government's crackdown on citizens, including teenagers, for consuming banned South Korean media.

The footage, obtained by South Korean production company KBS Media, shows a public denunciation session where a group of young girls, including a 16-year-old student, are publicly humiliated and arrested for the offense.

Pyongyang maintains tight control over the flow of information within its borders, forbidding citizens from accessing foreign music, films, and TV series. Those caught violating these restrictions face severe penalties, including public shaming, imprisonment, and in some cases, execution.

Three rapidly growing Southern California wildfires have burned more than 100,000 acres in less than a week and continued to threaten homes in multiple communities as the state mobilized an all-hands-on-deck response to bolster front-line fire crews battling the raging flames.

Fueled by a punishing heat wave and fanned by gusting winds, the biggest blaze is the Bridge Fire, which ignited Sunday in the Angeles National Forest about 31 miles east of downtown Los Angeles and exploded overnight from about 4,000 acres on Tuesday to nearly 48,000 acres by Wednesday morning, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The fire remained out of control with 0% containment after spreading across Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties. Authorities issued widespread evacuation orders as the fire tore through the towns of Wrightwood and Mt Baldy, destroying at least 33 homes, several cabins, and racing through a ski resort.

At least 33 homes in Wrightwood and Mt. Baldy have been destroyed and another 2,500 structures in the area are being threatened by the fire, according to Cal Fire.

You might sideload an Android app, or manually install its APK package, if you're using a custom version of Android that doesn't include Google's Play Store. Alternately, the app might be experimental, under development, or perhaps no longer maintained and offered by its developer. Until now, the existence of sideload-ready APKs on the web was something that seemed to be tolerated, if warned against, by Google.

This quiet standstill is being shaken up by a new feature in Google's Play Integrity API. As reported by Android Authority, developer tools to push "remediation" dialogs during sideloading debuted at Google's I/O conference in May, have begun showing up on users' phones. Sideloaders of apps from the British shop Tesco, fandom app BeyBlade X, and ChatGPT have reported "Get this app from Play" prompts, which cannot be worked around. An Android gaming handheld user encountered a similarly worded prompt from Diablo Immortal on their device three months ago.

Google's Play Integrity API is how apps have previously blocked access when loaded onto phones that are in some way modified from a stock OS with all Google Play integrations intact. Recently, a popular two-factor authentication app blocked access on rooted phones, including the security-minded GrapheneOS. Apps can call the Play Integrity API and get back an "integrity verdict," relaying if the phone has a "trustworthy" software environment, has Google Play Protect enabled, and passes other software checks.

Graphene has questioned the veracity of Google's Integrity API and SafetyNet Attestation systems, recommending instead standard Android hardware attestation. Rahman notes that apps do not have to take an all-or-nothing approach to integrity checking. Rather than block installation entirely, apps could call on the API only during sensitive actions, issuing a warning there. But not having a Play Store connection can also deprive developers of metrics, allow for installation on incompatible devices (and resulting bad reviews), and, of course, open the door to paid app piracy.

A group of wild otters viciously attacked a woman jogging in an inner-city park in Malaysia.

Mariasella Harun, 40, was chased and mauled by eight of the mammals on Wednesday morning in Tanjung Aru, in the northern Sabah state of Borneo island.

A graphic video of the aftermath showed the victim huddled on a pavement with deep gashes visible on her arms, as blood streaked her temple, T-shirt and leggings.

Another clip captured the bevy of otters – each as big as a small dog, with slick dark hair – charging across a car park moments before the attack.

It is the latest in a series of incidents involving humans and otters in the area. A man was recently taken to hospital after another unprovoked attack.

Otter attacks are increasing across the whole of South-East Asia, according to wildlife authorities.

Despite their somewhat cuddly appearance, otters have teeth and jaws that are strong enough to crack open shellfish.

They can weigh up to 14kg and grow up to 4ft, including their tail.

Vietnam has for days been battling landslides and floods caused by Super Typhoon Yagi the most powerful storm in 30 years, has also brought destructive floods to northern areas of Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. Which swept Vietnam over the weekend and has left more than 150 people dead according to preliminary estimates.

The Red River in Hanoi reached its highest level in 20 years on Wednesday, forcing residents to trudge through waist-deep brown water as they retrieved possessions from flooded homes.

Others fashioned makeshift boats from whatever materials they could find.

"This was the worst flooding I have witnessed," said Nguyen Tran Van, 41, who has lived near the Red River in the Vietnamese capital for 15 years.

A landslide smashed into the remote mountain village of Lang Nu in Lao Cai province, levelling it to a flat expanse of mud and rocks, strewn with debris and laced by streams.

State media said at least 30 people had been killed in the village, with another 65 still missing.

Vietnamese state media said the toll from Yagi -- the strongest storm to hit northern Vietnam in 30 years -- had risen to 155 across the country, with 141 missing.

It was not clear whether that total includes victims of Tuesday's landslide, where access remained difficult and internet was cut off, reports said.

A full bag of Cheetos, discarded by a subterranean visitor to the Big Room in Carlsbad Caverns national park in New Mexico, has led the US National Park Service to issue a warning that discarded food could have a “huge impact” on the cave’s delicate and at-risk ecosystem.

“At the scale of human perspective, a spilled snack bag may seem trivial, but to the life of the cave it can be world changing,” the park said in its post about the garbage that was recently discovered there, threatening the balance of the unique cave system environment.

“The processed corn, softened by the humidity of the cave, formed the perfect environment to host microbial life and fungi,” officials wrote. “Cave crickets, mites, spiders and flies soon organize into a temporary food web, dispersing the nutrients to the surrounding cave and formations. Molds spread higher up the nearby surfaces, fruit, die and stink. And the cycle continues.”