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SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 16 (Reuters) - Intel (INTC.O) lost out on a contract to design and fabricate Sony’s PlayStation 6 chip in 2022, which dealt a significant blow to its effort to build its fledgling contract manufacturing business, according to three sources with knowledge of the events.

The effort by Intel to win out over Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O)in a competitive bidding process to supply the design for the forthcoming PlayStation 6 chip and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (2330.TW) as the contract manufacturer would have amounted to billions of dollars of revenue and fabricating thousands of silicon wafers a month, two sources said.

Intel and AMD were the final two contenders in the bidding process for the contract.

Winning the Sony (6758.T) PlayStation 6 chip design business would have been a victory for Intel's design segment and would have doubled as a win for the company's contract manufacturing effort, or foundry business, which was the centerpiece of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger’s turnaround plan.

Mark Zuckberg’s Meta is to go ahead with controversial plans to use millions of UK Facebook and Instagram posts to train its artificial intelligence (AI) technology, in a practice that is effectively outlawed under EU privacy laws.

Meta said it had “engaged positively” with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) over the plan, after it paused similar proposals in June in the UK and EU. The pause came after the ICO warned tech firms to respect the privacy of users when building generative AI.

On Friday, the ICO made it clear it has not provided regulatory approval for the plan, but will instead monitor the experiment after Meta agreed changes to its approach. These include making it easier for users to opt out of allowing their posts to be processed for AI.

On Monday morning, students from various political factions arrived at the University of Haifa’s Students’ Union office. They were there to submit their candidacy for the upcoming campus election, but they hadn’t had long to get themselves organized: usually held in December, this year’s was quietly brought forward by the current administration, which had buried the announcement deep in the union’s website.

This is not, however, only the story of a corrupt student election. It also appears to have been a concerted plan to keep Palestinians out — who, despite making up around 50 percent of the University of Haifa’s student body, are not represented in the current union administration at all. Lists aligned with the Palestinian parties Balad and Hadash and the Jewish-Arab socialist movement Standing Together, as well as several independent candidates, were all denied the chance to contest a fair election.

“The announcement that the window was open for submitting lists was published at the bottom of the union’s website — we learned about it only five days before the deadline,” Udi Ghanayem, head of the Hadash student group at the university, told Local Call and +972. “We managed to assemble a list of candidates from all departments and on Monday morning we arrived at the office to register. They were surprised to see us and wouldn’t let us in.

“There were three other students in front of us, each of whom spent around an hour registering inside, even though registration shouldn’t take more than a few minutes,” he continued. “Then they told us registration was closed, despite the fact that we were already there. In every election in the world, if you arrive before the deadline, you have the right to vote or participate. Here, they refused to let us register, and brought security personnel to remove us from the building.

DNA testing giant 23andMe has agreed to pay $30 million to settle a lawsuit over a data breach that exposed the personal information of 6.4 million customers in 2023.

The proposed class action settlement, filed Thursday in a San Francisco federal court and awaiting judicial approval, includes cash payments for affected customers, which will be distributed within ten days of final approval.

"23andMe believes the settlement is fair, adequate, and reasonable," the company said in a memorandum filed Friday.

Google announced on Wednesday that its AI note-taking and research app, NotebookLM, is adding an “Audio Overview” feature. Audio Overview will give users another way to digest and comprehend the information in the documents they have uploaded to the app, such as course readings or legal briefs.

Since its launch, NotebookLM has used text to summarize and explain source materials, but now, it can do so out loud using audio. The feature is geared toward people who grasp materials better by listening to explanations as opposed to reading them.

Jordan’s Islamist opposition party has topped the country’s parliamentary elections but fell short of securing a majority, according to official election results.

The Islamic Action Front (IAF), the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, won 31 out of 138 seats in the Parliament of Jordan, tripling its representation in the House of Representatives, the country’s election commission announced on Wednesday.

Al-Adailah told Reuters their win was a “popular referendum” that backs their platform of support for the Palestinian group Hamas, their ideological allies, and their demand to scrap the country’s peace treaty with Israel.

Israel is lobbying members of Congress to press South Africa to drop its legal proceedings in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the war in Gaza, according to an Israeli foreign ministry cable obtained by Axios.

Why it matters: South Africa has until Oct. 28 to give the top UN court its arguments for continuing the case against Israel over alleged violations of the Genocide Convention during the war in Gaza.

• Israeli officials say they want members of Congress to make clear to South Africa that there will be consequences for continuing to pursue the case.

Behind the scenes: Israeli officials said the Israeli foreign ministry started a diplomatic campaign in recent weeks to press South Africa not to push forward with the case at the ICJ. The U.S. congress is a main tool in the effort.

• On Monday, the Israeli foreign ministry sent a classified cable to the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC and to all Israeli consulates in the U.S. about South Africa's ICJ case.

• "We are asking you to immediately work with lawmakers on the federal and state level, with governors and Jewish organizations to put pressure on South Africa to change its policy towards Israel and to make clear that continuing their current actions like supporting Hamas and pushing anti-Israeli moves in international courts will come with a heavy price," the cable read.

In a Q&A session that Tom's Hardware attended at IFA 2024, AMD revealed that the next generation of its Ryzen handheld gaming processor, AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme, will arrive early next year. The Z2 Extreme is the successor to AMD’s current Z1 Extreme, which powers devices like the ROG Ally X and Legion Go.

One AMD representative said, “So, we’ve our Z1 Extreme and Z1 in market today, right? Z2 is in the works. We’re working with a number of partners across the OEM ecosystem on that, and it will be coming to market probably in the early part of 2025.”

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) says world leaders pressured him not to apply for arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister and defense minister on allegations of war crimes in Gaza, the BBC reported on 5 September.

Karim Khan told the BBC, “Several leaders and others told me and advised me and cautioned me,” he said.

Khan explained the ICC needed to request warrants for leaders on both sides of the conflict so that the court is viewed as applying “the law equally based upon some common standards.” “If one had applied for warrants in relation to Israeli officials and not for Gaza, [some would] say: 'Well, this is an obscenity' and, ‘How on earth is that possible?’” he said.

Though several months have passed since Khan's application, ICC judges have not issued any arrest warrants.

Germany finds itself at a historic turning point that could redefine what it stands for and what it wants to project to the world. As the far right makes significant electoral inroads, the country is in a deep identity crisis, facing serious structural economic and societal challenges.

While in the Weimar Republic a century ago, demagogues and populists thrived on “othering” German Jews, today this “other” is the migrant - more specifically, those with Muslim backgrounds.

As in other European countries, this broad-brush approach to political Islam has become widely accepted in the German mainstream, where any form of Islamic activism is regarded as a potential “gateway drug” to the world of jihadism.

The Islamist bogeyman is a beautifully simplistic narrative in populist fear-mongering. Mirroring the story told in the video posted by Bavaria’s interior ministry, any contact with Islamic discourse is portrayed as automatically putting the participant on a conveyer belt from moderate Islamism to al-Qaeda-style terrorism.

The oft-debunked “conveyer belt theory” has been pushed by Israeli and Emirati networks in the counter-extremism space in an effort to securitise political Islam in all its diverse shapes and forms.

The Israeli prison authorities in Raman and Nafha Prisons have told lawyers that scheduled visits to prisoners have been cancelled on the pretext that a quarantine has been imposed due to the spread of scabies among inmates, according to the Palestinian Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club.

No details were provided about how long the visits will be cancelled.