Current Affairs

Twitter says all 336 million users should change their passwords

Twitter has recommended its 336 million users change their passwords. The company announced on Thursday it discovered a bug that saved user passwords unprotected on an internal log.

Twitter said it has since fixed the issue. Although the company said there is no evidence passwords have been leaked or misused, it is urging its users to update their passwords.

"As a precaution, consider changing your password on all services where you've used this password," the company tweeted.



Amazon and Walmart may battle for India's Flipkart

Amazon is reportedly seeking to take a 60% stake in Indian e-commerce firm Flipkart, which would challenge Walmart's interest in the company.

News of Amazon's offer comes days after reports that Walmart was close to a deal of its own for Flipkart.

Walmart has been expanding its online offerings and is looking to gain a presence in India.

Amazon's duelling bid was reported by CNBC-TV18, the Indian affiliate of business news channel CNBC.



Sridevi wins first National Award for MOM; Boney Kapoor says it's unfortunate that the honour is posthumous

Mumbai: Sridevi's husband and producer Boney Kapoor says the late actress gave her best to all the films that she did in her career and it is unfortunate that she is getting her first National Film Award after her death.

Boney on Thursday was with his two daughters Jahnvi and Khushi to receive the Best Actress posthumous honour the 65th National Film Awards ceremony. Jahnvi wore her mother's sari for the occasion, revealed designer and close family friend Manish Malhotra.



Radhakrishnan Nair appointed ICICI Bank independent director

MUMBAI: ICICI Bank today said its board has appointed Radhakrishnan Nair as an additional (independent) director of the bank for five years.

The appointment is subject to the approval of shareholders, the private sector lender said in a regulatory filing.

Nair (63) is also an independent director of three subsidiaries of the bank - ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company, ICICI Prudential Trust and ICICI Securities Primary Dealership. He is also a director at several other companies.



IAS officer Subhash Chandra Khuntia is new IRDAI chairman

Subhash Chandra Khuntia, a 1981-batch Indian Administrative Services (IAS) officer who was a former Karnataka Chief Secretary, has been appointed as Chairman of Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI).

The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) has approved Khuntia's appointment for a period of three years. The post was vacant for more than two months after TS Vijayan’s tenure came to an end on February 21.



Facebook is using billions of Instagram images to train artificial intelligence algorithms

Your Instagram photo of a perfectly composed plate of pancakes or an exquisitely framed sunset is helping Facebook train its artificial intelligence algorithms to better understand objects in images, the company announced today at its annual F8 developer conference.

Facebook says the approach, which culls images from publicly available hashtags, is a way to amass and train software with billions of images without the need for human workers to laboriously analyze the data and annotate it. The end result is a training system that created algorithms Facebook says beat top-of-the-line industry benchmarks.



Cabinet approves continuation of PMSSY beyond 12th Five Year Plan to 2019-20

NEW DELHI: In a major boost to expansion of healthcare infrastructure in the country, the Union Cabinet today approved the continuation of the Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana (PMSSY) beyond 12th Five Year Plan to 2019-20.

The PMSSY, which is a central sector scheme, aims at correcting the imbalances in the availability of affordable tertiary health care facilities in different parts of the country in general, and augmenting facilities for quality medical education in the under-served states in particular.



World Press Freedom Day being observed today

World Press Freedom Day is being observed on Thursday, May 3, with the aim to pay tribute to the journalists around the world sacrificing their lives in the line of duty, reported by Radio Pakistan.

Theme of the Day for this year is 'Keeping Power in Check: Media, Justice and The Rule of Law'.

The Day focuses on an enabling legal environment for press freedom and gives special attention to the role of an independent judiciary in ensuring legal guarantees for press freedom and the prosecution of crimes against journalists.



WHO polluted cities list: Government claims pollution dipped in 2017

"Data for the year 2017 for PM 2.5 shows an improvement over 2016 and so far in 2018, it shows a further improvement, as compared to 2017,” said a statement from the Environment Ministry.


Responding to the air pollution data released by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on Wednesday, the government claimed that various measures have led to pollution levels actually falling in 2017.

At 143 microgrammes/cubic metre, Delhi’s PM (2.5) levels in 2016 — as reported by the WHO — made it the sixth most polluted city in the world.



Cambridge Analytica closing after Facebook data harvesting scandal

Cambridge Analytica, the data firm at the centre of this year’s Facebook privacy row, is closing and starting insolvency proceedings.

The company has been plagued by scandal since the Observer reported that the personal data of about 50 million Americans and at least a million Britons had been harvested from Facebook and improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica denies any wrongdoing, but says that the negative media coverage has left it with no clients and mounting legal fees.