"Linus Torvalds has just released the Linux 5.13 kernel as stable," reports Phoronix: Linux 5.13 brings initial but still early support for the Apple M1 with basic support but not yet accelerated graphics and a lot more to iron out moving ahead. There are also new Linux 5.13 security features like the Landlock security module, Clang control flow integrity support, and optionally randomizing the kernel stack offset at each system call. There is also AMD fun this cycle around FreeSync HDMI support, initial Aldebaran bring-up, and more. Intel has more work on Alder Lake, a new cooling driver, and more discrete graphics bring-up. There are also other changes for Linux 5.13 around faster IO_uring, a generic USB display driver, and other new hardware enablement.
"5.13 overall is actually fairly large," Linus Torvalds posted on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, calling it "one of the bigger 5.x releases, with over 16,000 commits (over 17k if you count merges), from over 2,000 developers. But it's a "big all over" kind of thing, not something particular that stands out as particularly unusual..."

The Wall Street Journal reports: Authorities in the U.K. and Japan took aim at affiliates of Binance Holdings Ltd., the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange network, in the latest regulatory crackdown on the wildly popular trade in bitcoin and other digital assets. The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority, the country's lead financial regulator, told consumers Saturday that Binance's local unit wasn't permitted to conduct operations related to regulated financial activities...

Binance Markets Ltd., the company's U.K. arm, applied to be registered with the Financial Conduct Authority and withdrew its application on May 17. "A significantly high number of cryptoasset businesses are not meeting the required standards" under money-laundering regulations, said a spokesperson for the FCA in an email. "Of the firms we've assessed to date, over 90% have withdrawn applications following our intervention."

Japan's financial watchdog issued a statement on June 25, saying that Binance isn't registered to do business in the country...

As of April, Binance operated the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by trading volume, allowing tens of billions of dollars of trades to pass through its networks, according to data provider CryptoCompare. It was founded in 2017 and initially based in China, later moving offices to Japan and Malta. It recently said it is a decentralized organization with no headquarters... The FCA move doesn't ban customers from using Binance completely; U.K. customers can continue to use Binance's non-U.K. operations for activities the FCA doesn't directly regulate, such as buying and selling direct holdings in bitcoin.
The Financial Times called the move "one of the most significant moves any global regulator has made against Binance" and "a sign of how regulators are cracking down on the cryptocurrency industry over concerns relating to its potential role in illicit activities such as money laundering and fraud, and over often weak consumer protection." But more countries are also taking action, Reuters reports: Last month, Bloomberg reported that officials from the U.S. Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service who probe money laundering and tax offences had sought information from individuals with insight into Binance's business. In April, Germany's financial regulator BaFin warned the exchange risked being fined for offering digital tokens without an investor prospectus.
And CoinDesk adds: Binance is no longer open for business in Canada's most populous province, apparently choosing to close shop rather than meet the fate of other cryptocurrency exchanges that have had actions filed against them for allegedly failing to comply with Ontario securities laws.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an interesting report from Science Alert: Thunderstorms that roil across the Southern Great Plains of the US are amongst the strongest of such storms on Earth... Their intensity and frequency have been increasing, yet our best climate models still struggle to predict just how and when they'll arise.

To help refine climate models for the Southern Great Plains, paleoclimatologist Christopher Maupin from Texas A&M University and colleagues used oxygen and hydrogen isotopes to track the ferocity of past storms. Water molecules based on elements wielding an additional neutron or two tend to require a little more energy to vaporize, and release more energy as they condense. This leaves a clear signature in the ratios of isotopes separated by rainfall under various conditions. By comparing the results of analyses taken today with historic ratios of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes found trapped by stalactites in Texan caves, the researchers developed an accurate picture of weather events in the past...

Using another set of isotopes, this time measuring those of uranium and thorium, the team dated the stalactites and stalagmites to around the last Ice Age, 30-50 thousand years ago. Measuring the shifts in oxygen and hydrogen isotopes down their lengths allowed the researchers to see the storms cycled from weakly to strongly organized, roughly every thousand years. The more strongly organized the complex of storms becomes, the more intense and damaging they are. They discovered these changes in thunderstorm intensities coincided with well-known, abrupt shifts in global climate, known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events.

The researchers also found these intensity increases coincide with a reduction in rain in southwestern US and greater atmospheric upwelling in the Santa Barbara Basin area. They believe the observed pattern suggests an increased frequency or intensity of the giant global atmospheric waves that drive the weather, called Rossby waves, may be providing the extra lift needed to fuel these greater storms. "Modern anthropogenic climate forcing has increasingly favored an amplification of these synoptic factors," the team wrote in their paper.

"This work will help predict trends of storms in the future," explained geoscientist Courtney Schumacher.