Technology

Malta has vaccinated 70% of its adult population with at least one COVID-19 shot, becoming the first European Union country to achieve so-called herd immunity, Health Minister Chris Fearne said on Monday. The tiny Mediterranean island has had an average of three new virus cases each day in the past week, with the test positivity rate at a low of …

NEW DELHI: Indian police said on Monday they visited a Twitter office to serve notice to its country managing director about an investigation into the social media giant’s tagging of a post by a ruling party spokesman as “manipulated media”. Leaders of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party last week shared portions of a document on Twitter they said …

DUBLIN: Ireland’s data regulator has given Facebook six weeks to respond to an investigation that may trigger a ban on the social media giant’s transatlantic data transfers following a High Court ruling that the probe could resume. The case stems from European Union concerns that U.S. government surveillance may not respect the privacy rights of EU citizens when their personal …

China’s Mars rover drove from its landing platform and began exploring the surface on Saturday, state-run Xinhua news agency said, making the country only the second nation to land and operate a rover on the Red Planet. The launch last July of the Tianwen-1 Mars probe, which carried the Zhurong rover, marked a major milestone in China’s space programme. Tianwen-1 …

STOCKHOLM: Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has set her sights on changing how the world produces and consumes food in order to counteract a trio of threats: carbon emissions, disease outbreaks and animal suffering. In a video posted on Twitter on Saturday, Thunberg said the environmental impact of farming as well as disease outbreaks such as COVID-19, which is believed …

Google is rolling out a convenient accessibility feature for people with visual disabilities similar to iOS which announces the caller ID after the phone rings. The new feature will enable users to manually set the app for the Caller ID announcement every time the phone rings or when the phone is connected to a headset or never, according to 9to5Google. Google’s …

NEW YORK: Google announced plans on Thursday for its first-ever physical retail store, set to open in New York this year, as the tech giant moves increasingly into gadgetry in competition with Apple. The retail outlet will open this summer in the Chelsea neighbourhood, where Google has a large regional office with many of its 11,000 New York employees. “At …

Apple Inc made more than $100 million in commissions from Epic Games’ “Fortnite” during the two years the online game was on the App Store, an Apple executive testified on Wednesday. Michael Schmid, Apple’s head of game business development for the App Store, took the stand during the third week of an antitrust trial in federal court in Oakland, California. …

MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Wednesday hailed close ties between their countries as they launched via videoconference work on Russian-built nuclear power plants in China. The heads of state initiated work on pouring concrete into new units of the Tianwan and Xudabao nuclear power plants. Built jointly with Russia, the Tianwan plant has …

Bitcoin tumbled below the $40,000 mark on Wednesday to a 3-1/2 month low and dragged down the prices of other digital coins after China imposed fresh curbs on transactions involving cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin , the biggest and best-known cryptocurrency, had already been under pressure from a series of tweets from Tesla boss Elon Musk, but the news from China sent it …