Britain’s Information Commissioner (ICO) has slapped Facebook with a fine of £500,000, the maximum possible, for its behaviour in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.   The ICO’s investigation found that between 2007 to 2014, Facebook processed the personal information of users unfairly by giving app developers access to their information without informed consent.  The fine was the maximum allowed under the ...

From virtual reality police training programmes to gun-toting drones and iris scanners, a public security expo in China showed the range of increasingly high-tech tools available to the country’s police.   The exhibition, which ran Tuesday to Friday in Beijing, emphasised surveillance and monitoring technology just as the Communist government’s domestic security spending has skyrocketed.  Facial-recognition screens analysing candid shots ...

US authorities pressed ahead Thursday with an all-out probe into who was behind pipe bombs sent to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, other top Democrats, and CNN, all of them hate figures for supporters of President Donald Trump. Trump critics accused him of encouraging violence just days before a bitterly divided America votes November 6 in elections.   Trump reacted to ...

The Israeli military says it has struck several Hamas militant sites in Gaza following a rocket attack on southern Israel. The military says its jets struck eight military targets in three Hamas compounds in the Gaza Strip early on Thursday.   The strikes were in response to an overnight rocket attack — the first firing from Gaza since a missile ...

A Yemeni hospital official says the death toll from an airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition near the flashpoint Red Sea port of Hodeida has climbed to 19. The director of the Bayt el-Faqih hospital, Abdullah Shahawi, says all the victims are civilians.   The airstrike, which hit an outdoor fruit and vegetable market on Wednesday in the town of Bayt ...

The killing of a journalist has abruptly transformed Saudi Arabia’s crown prince from a partner to a liability in the eyes of Washington — which nonetheless now enjoys more leverage over the ambitious heir apparent. President Donald Trump had enthusiastically endorsed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s consolidation of power, with the 33-year-old forging a close, chatty relationship with Trump’s son-in-law ...

Former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and his ex-treasury chief have been jointly charged with criminal breach of trust involving 6.64 billion ringgit ($1.6 billion). The six new charges against Najib on Thursday come on top of 32 earlier counts of corruption, breach of trust and money laundering that he face linked to the multibillion-dollar looting of the 1MDB state ...

Wall Street fell on Wednesday in another day of losses, erasing the gains posted this year for two of the three main indexes. The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 2.4% to 24,583.4 points, while the S&P 500 plunged 3.1% to 2,656.1 points.   The losses pushed the two indexes into negative territory for the year.   The sell-off spread to ...

Facebook on Tuesday announced an overhaul of its Messenger smartphone app in an effort to simplify the service for its 1.3 billion monthly global users.   The social network began rolling out a redesigned version featuring three tabs instead of nine, saying it was “going back to its roots” seven years after the standalone app’s launch.  “We build one feature ...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been named as the recipient of 2018 Seoul Peace Prize, a biennial award instituted to crystallise the wishes of the Korean people for peace on the Korean Peninsula and the rest of the world. According to a statement issued by the External Affairs Ministry on Wednesday, Modi has been awarded “in recognition of his dedication ...