Quarterly earnings reports already read like they've been written by robots, but the next step will make that a reality: Going forward, the Associated Press will be using automated technology to write the majority of articles on company returns.

In a statement released on Monday, the news service dubbed the move as "a leap forward" that will allow its journalists to focus on writing other types of business-related stories while advanced algorithms - designed by Automated Insights using data from Zacks Investment Research - take over the drier responsibility of reporting company numbers.

According to the AP's managing editor Lou Ferrara, the company's human journalists provide readers with roughly 300 earnings reports every quarter - a number that will be dwarfed by the amount of stories the new automated algorithms can put together. Under its new system, Ferrara estimates that 4,400 earnings reports will be released each quarter.

"Zacks maintains the data when the earnings reports are issued. Automated Insights has algorithms that ping that data and then in seconds output a story. The structure for the earnings reports stories was crafted by AP with Automated Insights. All conform to AP Style," Ferrara said on the news outlet's blog.

Systematic undercounting of sexual assaults in the US disguises a hidden rape crisis.

Earlier this month, a 911 dispatcher in Ohio was recorded telling a 20-year-old woman who had just been raped to "quit crying." After she provided a description of her assailant, the caller went on to say, "They're not going to be able to find him with the information that you've given." This incident had its viral moment, sparking outrage at the dispatcher's lack of empathy. But it also speaks to the larger issue of how we are counting rapes in the United States. Sixty-nine percent of police departments surveyed in 2012 said that dispatchers like this one, often with little training, are authorized to do the initial coding of sexual assault crimes.

That's important, because miscoding of such crimes is masking the high incidence of rape in the United States. We don't have an overestimation of rape; we have a gross underestimation. A thorough analysis of federal data published earlier this year by Corey Rayburn Yung, associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, concludes that between 1995 and 2012, police departments across the country systematically undercounted and underreported sexual assaults.

Yung used murder rates - the statistic with the most reliable measure of accuracy and one that is historically highly correlated with the incidence of rape - as a baseline for his analysis. After nearly two years of work, he estimates conservatively that between 796,213 and 1,145,309 sexual assault cases never made it into national FBI counts during the studied period.

That's more than 1 million rapes.

The estimates are conservative for two reasons. First, in order to consistently analyze the data over time, Yung looked only at cases defined by the FBI's pre-2012 definition of rape (one established in 1927): "carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will." This definition did not include anal or oral rape, cases involving drugging or alcohol, or the rape of boys and men. The Federal Criminal Code was recently broadened to include these categories. Second, the FBI and crime experts estimate that anywhere from 60 percent to 80 percent of rapes are never reported to the police.

Yung's analysis, which focused on cities with populations of more than 100,000, found that 22 percent of the 210 studied police departments demonstrated "substantial statistical irregularities in their rape data."

"It's probably true that in all cities there is undercounting," explains Yung. "However, forty-six outlier cities appear to be undercounting on a consistent, high level, which makes sense because you have to show [improved crime statistics] results year over year, and you get into a trap where you have to improve upon already low numbers." Even worse, the number of jurisdictions that appear to be undercounting has increased by 61 percent during the period studied.

How are police departments undercounting sexual assault?

A community is devastated after a suicidal teenager was shot to death by police following a family's call for help.

Christian Alberto Sierra, 17, was a popular student and athlete at Loudoun Valley High School. His friends noticed his good-natured demeanor begin to slip into a depression and ultimately toward the unthinkable. On May 24, 2014, he suffered a breakdown and threatened suicide.

While at a friend's house on a Saturday afternoon, he began to act erratically and harmed himself with a knife. The Washington Post describes what happened:

Nicole Smith is terrified that her rapist, a former police officer, is up for parole soon and could be released from prison, possibly as early as September 2015. Smith's name has been changed due to potential retribution from her attacker, should he be released.

Smith said that, upon first meeting this man, she trusted him because he was a police officer, and felt more comfortable and safe around him after seeing him in uniform and in his patrol car. When they started dating for a short time, she went to visit him in an undisclosed city one weekend.

She could never have predicted he would viciously attack her during their stay in a hotel room.

Art experts have called for Tracey Emin's My Bed to be put on public display, after it emerged her art dealer Jay Joplin had bought the "iconic" work on behalf of an unnamed client.

Tania Buckrell Pos, head of specialist art consultancy Arts & Management International, said: "It is a pivotal piece, it belongs in a museum. Hopefully whoever he bought it for will pass it to an institution."

The best place for it, she continued, would be the Tate, saying: "That's absolutely where it should be."

The White Cube would only confirm that "we were involved in the purchase on behalf of a client" adding it was "very early days at this stage".

During last night's pounding thunderstorm, a facade under the Brooklyn Bridge on the Brooklyn side collapsed, injuring numerous people.

It happened at Washington and Prospect Streets, near the exit ramp to Tillary Street and Cadman Plaza. The Daily News reports:

"Jerome Dilligard, 52, said his wife noticed water seeping from between the heavy stones of the facade as they took shelter under the Brooklyn Bridge. The retired correction officer decided to run for their car.

As soon as Dilligard left, the wall collapsed - burying his wife, Teresa, and their 8-year-old daughter, Kaylah, as well as his 30-year-old daughter, LaToya Jackson, her son, Khmani, 10, and little Kiarra in debris. The baby was knocked to the street, her grandfather said.

"A stranger picked her up," Dilligard said. "They were right under the wall when it came down.

"My wife had to dig them all out. It's a miracle they got out with their lives.""

Streets and walkways around the Brooklyn Bridge reopened Thursday morning after part of the stone facade of a bridge underpass crumbled to the ground during a thunderstorm Wednesday evening, injuring eight people who were taking shelter from the heavy rain under the bridge.

The collapse, at Prospect Street and Washington Street in Dumbo, Brooklyn, brought nearly a dozen fire trucks and paramedics to the bridge just before 8 p.m. on Wednesday, a Fire Department spokeswoman said. She said five adults and three children were treated for minor injuries at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan.

A spokeswoman for the city's Office of Emergency Management, Nancy Greco-Silvestri, said investigators had determined on Wednesday that there were no structural issues at the bridge. The streets in the area, which were clogged Wednesday night with emergency vehicles, have reopened, and a temporary walkway has been built for pedestrians, she said.

Publishers must fight back against this indirect challenge to press freedom, which allows articles to be 'disappeared'. Editorial decisions belong with them, not Google.

When you Google someone from within the EU, you no longer see what the search giant thinks is the most important and relevant information about an individual. You see the most important information the target of your search is not trying to hide.

Stark evidence of this fact, the result of a European court ruling that individuals had the right to remove material about themselves from search engine results, arrived in the Guardian's inbox this morning, in the form of an automated notification that six Guardian articles have been scrubbed from search results.

The first six articles down the memory hole - there will likely be many more as the rich and powerful look to scrub up their online images, doubtless with the help of a new wave of "reputation management" firms - are a strange bunch.

This morning the BBC received the following notification from Google:

Notice of removal from Google Search: we regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/thereporters/ robertpeston/2007/10/merrills_mess.html

What it means is that a blog I wrote in 2007 will no longer be findable when searching on Google in Europe.

Which means that to all intents and purposes the article has been removed from the public record, given that Google is the route to information and stories for most people.

So why has Google killed this example of my journalism?

Well it has responded to someone exercising his or her new "right to be forgotten", following a ruling in May by the European Court of Justice that Google must delete "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" data from its results when a member of the public requests it.

The Russian Culture Ministry has hired lawyers to prepare an appeal to the Netherlands concerning the return of Scythian gold from Crimea to Russia, Interfax reports Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky saying. "A well-known international law company which will defend the interests in the event of litigation, which we hope will never happen", media cites the official saying.

"We have lawyers drafting the relevant complaints. I am very hopeful that our counterparts in the Netherlands will approach the matter from the viewpoint not of petty politics but that of the law," Medinsky told reporters in Moscow on Thursday.

Netherlands promised to resolve the issue of the Scythian gold collection that came from Crimea by the end of September, however, Russia still sought legal advice in the case that it does come to court, Medinsky said on Thursday.

"Crimean museums filed official requests to according to which the collection has to be returned and the Dutch have promised to consider them at the end of the summer or in September," minister said.

"At this stage the exposition has been extended due to excessive politicization of this issue," Medinsky added.