UK's competition watchdog on Friday said social media giant Meta Platforms Inc had offered to limit the use

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 10, 2023--

Vodafone and CK Hutchison unveiled the merger of their British operations, creating the country's largest mobile operator. Hutchison

TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 19, 2023--

Welcome to Money Diaries where we are tackling the ever-present taboo that is money. We’re asking real people how they spend their hard-earned money during a seven-day period — and we’re tracking every last dollar.

The EU has opened an investigation into Elon Musk's X over the possible spread of terrorist and violent content, and hate speech, after Hamas' attack on Israel. The EU's industry chief, Thierry Breton, confirmed on Thursday the bloc had sent Twitter/X a "formal request for information" to determine whether the platform was complying with the Digital Services Act (DSA) - a law designed to protect users of big tech platforms which came into effect November, as misinformation about the conflict between Israel and Hamas spreads on social media. In a statement on Thursday, the EU said “the European Commission services sent to X a formal request for information under the Digital Services Act (DSA)”. “This request follows indications received by the Commission services of the alleged spreading of illegal content and disinformation, in particular the spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech. The request addresses compliance with other provisions of the DSA as well.” In his letter to Musk, Breton said "violent and terrorist content" had not been taken down from X, despite warnings. Breton did not give details on the disinformation he was referring to in the letter, but said instances of "fake and manipulated images and facts" were widely reported on the social media platform. Responding on X, Musk said: "Our policy is that everything is open and transparent, an approach that I know the EU supports. "Please list the violations you allude to on X, so that the public can see them." X chief executive Linda Yaccarino also said earlier on Thursday the platform had removed hundreds of Hamas-affiliated accounts and taken action to remove or label tens of thousands of pieces of content since Saturday's attack. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Scientists have found material from outside of our solar system for the first ever time, according to a controversial Harvard Professor. The “spheres” were found in the Pacific Ocean in June. But early analysis has now indicated that the material came from outside of our solar system, carried by an interstellar object that crashed into the Earth in 2014, according to Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University. The material could even be of “extraterrestrial technological origin” because of some unusual characteristics of the material, he said. Professor Loeb has previously claimed that the asteroid may have been artificial, such as an alien spacecraft. “This is a historic discovery because it represents the first time that scientists analyze materials from a large object that arrived to Earth from outside the solar system,” Professor Loeb wrote in his announcement. Professor Loeb has made a number of claims about potential extraterrestrial life and visitors from other solar systems. While has made a number of contributions to astrophysics, he is perhaps best known for his suggestions that Oumuamua, the first interstellar object to visit our solar system, could have been an “alien probe”. His regular and often unusual claims have led to some censure from fellow scientists, who say that he is given to sensationalism and is damaging the usual process of discovery. His pronouncements can be attention-grabbing and undermine the usual work of science to check extraordinary claims with extraordinary evidence, they have said. “People are sick of hearing about Avi Loeb’s wild claims,” Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, told The New York Times in July, when Professor Loeb revealed details of his search. “It’s polluting good science — conflating the good science we do with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room.” Professor Loeb made the most recent claims on Medium, where he has been documenting his trip to the Pacific Ocean to collect materials. In recent years he has been taken with a fireball that fell to Earth in 2014 – and has been looking to collect any fragments from it. He has claimed that details about the fireball indicate that it had come from outside of our solar system. Those claims have proven controversial – though they have been accepted for publication in the prestigious Astrophysical Journal, after initially being rejected – because scientists have argued there is not significant enough proof to indicate it really was an interstellar visitor. Nonetheless, in recent months Professor Loeb and his team have been scouring the Pacific Ocean for any fragments from that object, and in June they announced that they had successfully gathered some examples. Those samples have since undergone testing by scientists. Now Professor Loeb says that analysis shows that the materials are “from a meter-size object that originated from outside the solar system”. A number of details about the material indicated that it was of interstellar origin, he said. He pointed particularly to the amount of beryllium, lanthanum and uranium (or BeLaU) in the objects. That set them apart from other samples not found in the path of the object – and also from objects that would normally be expected to have been formed on the Earth, the Moon or Mars, he said. Professor Loeb said he he was confident that more objects would be found like “IM1”, the name he has given to that object he claimed to be an interstellar visitor. He suggested that there could be “a few million such objects reside within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun at any given time” and that “some of them may represent technological space trash from other civilizations”. He also criticised those many scientists who have expressed scepticism about his claims, joking that he was “running away from colleagues who have strong opinions without seeking evidence, and I am running towards a higher intelligence in interstellar space” and saying that he wishes his critics “happiness and prosperity”. Read More We just received the first ever pictures taken near the Moon’s uncharted south pole Rare blue supermoon brightens the night sky this week India set to launch spacecraft to Sun after successful moon landing Rare blue supermoon brightens the night sky this week India set to launch spacecraft to Sun after successful moon landing Japan forced to suspend launch of historic first Moon lander

A number of huge tunnels that were discovered in South America at the turn of the century may have been made by giant sloths. At the turn of the century, professor of geology, Heinrich Frank, spotted a strange hole on a highway in Brazil, and crawled inside. There, he realised the tunnel was 4.5 meters (15 feet) long. He also found a collection of giant claw marks on the ceiling. “There’s no geological process in the world that produces long tunnels with a circular or elliptical cross-section, which branch and rise and fall, with claw marks on the walls,” Frank told Discover, adding he's "seen dozens of caves that have inorganic origins, and in these cases, it’s very clear that digging animals had no role in their creation.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The tunnel, along with many others that he and others discovered in Brazil and Argentina, are thought to be made by extinct giant sloths 8-10,000 years ago that were around the size of an African elephant. In the Rio Grande do Sul area, Frank and his team found over 1,500 tunnels made by these sloths beasts, with the longest stretching for 609 meters (2,000 feet) and standing at 1.8 meters (6 feet) tall. Goodness. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Following Lance Reddick’s death in March, Keith David has been cast to replace the actor by playing Commander Zavala in ‘Destiny 2’.

It’s lonely at the top – just ask Elon Musk’s former colleagues. The Twitter owner tells the same jokes and anecdotes “over and over” and “seems quite alone,” according to a former senior executive at the company. Esther Crawford, who went viral last year after being pictured sleeping on the floor of Twitter’s office while trying to meet a tough deadline set by Musk, shared her thoughts in a post on the platform which was recently renamed X. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Crawford joined Twitter when it bought her startup in 2020, well before the billionaire took over the social media platform in a $44bn deal last year. The former head of product development, who was sacked in February as part of a round of 200 layoffs, said: “Elon is oddly charming and he's genuinely funny. He also has personality quirks like telling the same stories and jokes over and over. “The challenge is his personality and demeanour can turn on a dime going from excited to angry. “Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him.” She said Twitter employees feared being called into meetings with him or having to deliver bad news. “At times it felt like the inner circle was too zealous and fanatical in their unwavering support of everything he said.” “Product and business decisions were nearly always the result of him following his gut instinct, and he didn't seem compelled to seek out or rely on a lot of data or expertise to inform it. “I saw a person who seemed quite alone because his time and energy was so purely devoted to work.” Meanwhile, Musk appeared to put more faith in random feedback and Twitter polls than in his employees who were working to troubleshoot problems. She said: “His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful.” However, she didn’t pull any punches about the previous management either, calling it “bloated” and “soft and entitled” where “teams could spend months building a feature and then some last-minute kerfuffle meant it'd get killed for being too risky.” Musk recently killed off the iconic bluebird Twitter logo, replacing it with a white X. He has said he wants to create a super-app inspired by China’s WeChat which would offer messaging and payments as well as social media. That vision may be difficult to make a reality, after the collapse of the platform’s advertising business as marketers soured on Musk’s decision to fire thousands of employees and dial down its content moderation efforts. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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Months after the spectacular launch of ChatGPT, the AI revolution is well underway but hints of caution are emerging, especially over letting one...