Google said Thursday it fired 48 employees in the past two years, including 13 “senior” executives, as a result of sexual harassment allegations, citing “an increasingly hard line” on inappropriate conduct.   The US tech giant issued the statement from chief executive Sundar Pichai in response to a New York Times report that one senior Google employee, Android creator Andy ...

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 ...

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 ...

Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported. In some locations, the amount of oxygen available could even keep alive a primitive, multicellular animal such as a sponge, they reported in the journal Nature Geosciences.   “We ...

Theresa May has said she is prepared to “explore every possible option” to break the deadlock in Brexit talks.   She told MPs 95% of the terms of exit were agreed but the Irish border was still a “considerable sticking point”.  While willing to consider extending the UK’s transition period beyond 2020, she said this was “undesirable” and would have ...

Search engine giant Google has created a new Doodle on its homepage celebrating the life of Bangladeshi poet, columnist and journalist Shamsur Rahman on the occasion of his 89th birth anniversary, UNB reports.   Shamsur Rahman (23 October 1929 – 17 August 2006) who emerged in the latter half of the 20th century wrote more than sixty books of poetry ...

British Prime Minister Theresa May, right, speaks with European Council President Donald Tusk after a group photo an EU-ASEM summit in Brussels, Friday, Oct. 19, 2018.   London, Oct 22 : British Prime Minister Theresa May is urging Parliament to support her as        Brexit looms, saying Britain’s divorce deal with the European Union is 95 percent compl May’s office says ...

Is Mercury’s core liquid or solid, and why — on the smallest planet in our solar system — is it so big? What can the planet closest to the Sun tell us about how our solar system came into being?   An unmanned European-Japanese space mission, dubbed BepiColombo, blasted off early Saturday morning from French Guiana, to probe these and ...

Photo: British Prime Minister Theresa May. London, Oct 21 : The vast majority of British firms are poised to implement their Brexit contingency plans by Christmas if there isn’t greater clarity over the country’s exit from the European Union, a leading business lobby group warned Sunday. The Confederation of British Industry said these could include cutting jobs, adjusting supply chains ...