Author: admin@primenews

A renowned British crocodile expert has admitted to 60 charges, relating to bestiality and child abuse material. An Australian court heard Adam Britton filmed himself torturing dozens of dogs until almost all died. He would then post videos of the incidents online, where he also accessed child abuse material. A leading zoologist who has worked on BBC and National Geographic productions, Mr Britton will be sentenced at a later date. At a hearing in the Northern Territory (NT) Supreme Court on Monday, prosecutors laid out the case against him. Much of the details of Mr Britton’s crimes are too graphic…

There was a time before ChatGPT when the tech world was talking about something entirely different. Remember the metaverse? For a while it dominated tech news. A virtual reality world that would be so immersive, so engaging, that we would want to spend part of our lives in it. Driving the metaverse narrative was Mark Zuckerberg. The tech billionaire was so committed that in October 2021 he changed Facebook’s name to Meta. “The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence,” the Meta boss said, announcing the change. “Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate…

Gatwick will cancel around 82 departures over the coming week because of short-term sickness and Covid in the air traffic control tower. Airport boss Stewart Wingate said he was “very frustrated” by a series of problems at Gatwick’s air traffic control. Around 30% of air traffic control staff are not available, Mr Wingate said. The largest number of cancellations will be on Friday 29 September, with 33 departures affected. No cancellations are expected for Tuesday or Saturday. The cancellations amount to around 3% of planned departures at Gatwick over the period. The staff work for Nats, which was formerly known…

UK workers are taking more sick days than at any point in the last decade, new research suggests. Staff took on average 7.8 sick days in the past year, up from 5.8 before the pandemic, the Chartered Institute for Professional Development (CIPD) found. The trade group said the rise was a “worry” and blamed stress, Covid and the cost-of-living crisis. These conditions were having “profound impacts on many people’s wellbeing”, it added. The research analysed rates of absence in more than 900 organisations, representing 6.5 million employees. It was conducted by Simplyhealth, a healthcare company that provides outpatient support. The…

Nissan will accelerate plans towards electrification by committing that all vehicles sold in Europe will be electric by 2030. The announcement comes despite the UK postponing its 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars to 2035. Nissan’s boss said the firm’s move was “the right thing to do”. Car trade body the SMMT has voiced concerns that the postponement of the ban would see consumers delay the switch to electric vehicles. Nissan will also introduce new battery technology by the end of the decade that it said will reduce both the charging time and cost of…

A row has broken out after the founder of popular photo blog Humans of New York criticised a similar Indian platform’s take on copyright. Humans of Bombay, which follows the same format as Brandon Stanton’s New York blog, started in Mumbai in 2014. It recently filed a suit against People of India, which started a few years later, of copyright infringement. All three tell stories of people in the form of interviews or posts alongside their photos. Earlier this month, Humans of Bombay (HOB) filed a lawsuit in the Delhi High Court saying People of India (POI) was an “identical…

The boss of Spotify says he has no plans to completely ban content created by artificial intelligence from the music streaming platform. Earlier this year the platform pulled a track featuring AI-cloned voices of the performers Drake and The Weeknd. Daniel Ek told the BBC there were valid uses of the tech in making music – but AI should not be used to impersonate human artists without their consent. He said using AI in music was likely to be debated for “many, many years”. Mr Ek, who rarely speaks to the media, said that he saw three “buckets” of AI…

A US journalist who captured the moment Taylor Swift stepped out with her rumoured new love interest has said it has been “the craziest 24 hours of my life”. Jarrett Payton recorded a video clip of Swift, who was spotted on Sunday for the first time with Travis Kelce, a star American football player with the Kansas City Chiefs. Swift was at the Chiefs’ home game against the Chicago Bears, sitting in a box with Kelce’s mother, Donna. As he watched the game, Jarrett Payton, who is also a former National Football League player, set an objective for himself. “My…

The US is “in a space race with China to go back to the moon”, says Nasa chief Bill Nelson. In a BBC interview, Mr Nelson says he wants to make sure “we get there first”. His comments revive memories of the 1960s and 1970s, when Nasa was in a space race with the Soviet Union. But half a century later, Nasa is employing private companies to do much more of the work. Mr Nelson says they are crucial because it allows for the huge costs to be shared, and for Nasa to draw on “the creativity of entrepreneurs in…

A growing stream of ethnic Armenian refugees are fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh following Azerbaijan’s seizure of the disputed region last week. More than 6,500 people have so far crossed into Armenia from the enclave, which is home to a majority of some 120,000 ethnic Armenians. They left after the government in Yerevan announced plans to move those made homeless by the fighting. Armenia’s PM has warned that ethnic cleansing is “under way” in the region. “That’s happening just now, and that is very unfortunate fact because we were trying to urge international community on that,” Nikol Pashinyan told reporters. Azerbaijan has said…