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It was the first water landing for a crewed US spaceship since the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission

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UAE Mars mission's deputy project manager Sarah Al-Amiri declares launch as "an indescribable feeling"

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Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook also would add tags to posts that are 'newsworthy' but violate platform rules

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The mission will be the first time astronauts have launched into space from US soil in a decade

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Through the Facebook Messenger application users will be able to start video call sessions that as many as 50 friends can join

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BlueDot, based in Toronto, also correctly predicted the countries in which the risk of contagion was most acute

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Christina Koch of NASA is expected to touch down in the Kazakh steppes with colleagues Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency and Alexander Skvortsov of the Russian space agency

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Representational image. Photo: File 

Facebook has  supposedly  laid aside any plans for introducing advertisements in Whatsapp,reported the Wall Street Journal.

According to the publication, the process of dropping the plan went as far as to be "deleted from WhatsApp's code" however, Facebook have future plans to introduce ads into the status feature at a later time in 2020.

Since the messaging app's acquisition in 2014, Facebook has been struggling to monetise the platform.

The introduction of ads would have been the first step towards monetisation since removing the 99 cent annual subscription fee in 2016.

As of now, the app's commercial counterpart WhatsApp Business allows businesses and customers to connect with a charge of a small "per message" fee, which in turn facilitates direct conversations with customers. However, it is unclear how much revenue the charge generates. 

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KARACHI:  Most of Asia will experience the last solar eclipse of this year on Thursday morning  (today morning), as well as some parts of eastern Africa and northern Australia, but a small region will witness an annular solar eclipse.

Sun Eclipse

A solar eclipse happens when the moon, orbiting the Earth, comes in between the sun and the Earth, due to which the moon blocks the sun’s light from reaching the Earth, causing an eclipse of the sun or a solar eclipse. There are three types of eclipses.

Total Solar Eclipse

A total solar eclipse happens when the moon appears large enough to cover the entire face of the sun. A total solar eclipse is visible only from a small area on Earth.  A total solar eclipse happens when the sun, moon and Earth are in a direct line.

Partial Solar Eclipse

Partial Solar Eclipse occurs when the shadow of the moon appears on a small part of the sun. 

During a solar eclipse the moon casts two shadows on the Earth, the first one is called the umbra, which gets smaller as it reaches the Earth. The second one is called the penumbra, which gets larger as it reaches the Earth. According to researchers, people standing in the umbra see a total eclipse and those standing in the penumbra see a partial eclipse.

Annular Solar Eclipse

An annular solar eclipse happens when the moon is farthest from the Earth, which is why it seems smaller. In this type of an eclipse, the moon does not block the sun completely, but looks like a "dark disk on top of a larger sun-colored disk" forming a "ring of fire".

In this type of eclipse, the Moon covers the sun's centre, leaving the sun's visible outer edges to form a "ring of fire" or annulus - around the moon. 

During an annular eclipse, experts use ground and space instruments to view this top layer when the sun’s glare is blocked by the moon.

But today, the moon will be near apogee, the point in its orbit when it is farthest away from the Earth. As a result, the moon will not quite be large enough to cover the entire sun, leaving behind a ring of light.

Safety

According to the experts and the researchers,  that the sun can be viewed safely using the naked eye only during a total eclipse, while during partial and annular solar eclipses, the sun should not be viewed without proper equipment and techniques. 

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SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook on Friday alerted employees that hard drives rich with information about those on the social network´s payroll were stolen from a car last month."We have seen no evidence of abuse and believe this was a smash and grab crime rather than an attempt to steal employee information," Facebook said in response to an AFP inquiry."This theft impacts current and former Facebook employees only and no Facebook user data was involved."The drives contained names, bank account numbers and other personal data of some 29,000 people who were on Facebook´s payroll in the US last year, according to the California-based internet titan, which confirmed a Bloomberg report.The car was being used by a member of the payroll department, and the hard drives were not supposed to have left the Facebook campus. The data storage hardware was in a bag the worker left in the car, according to a spokesperson for the company."Out of an abundance of caution, we have notified the current and former employees whose information we believe was stored on the equipment and are offering them free identity theft and credit monitoring services," Facebook said, adding that it was working with police investigating the theft.Disciplinary action was said to be taken in the matter, but details were not shared.Word of the theft came as Facebook faces continued pressure to earn trust when it comes to how well it safeguards user data.

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SHENZHEN: Chinese telecoms giant Huawei said on Thursday it has petitioned a US court to overturn a ban that prevents carriers in rural America from tapping an $8.5-billion federal fund to purchase the company´s equipment.Huawei´s petition said the ban -- imposed last month against the company and its Chinese rival ZTE on national security grounds -- failed to substantiate claims that Huawei was a threat and was a violation of due process.

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NEW YORK: US online sales are set to hit a new record on this week's "Cyber Monday," Adobe Analytics said, as e-commerce outlets gear up to lure shoppers in the opening days of the holiday season.Internet purchases are expected to reach $9.4 billion, a jump of nearly 19 percent over last year's record-setting $7.9 billion take, according to a Sunday estimate from the company, which measures transactions from 80 of the 100 largest US online retailers.US merchants have long viewed the days after the Thursday Thanksgiving holiday as a prime time to part shoppers from their money, particularly during the "Black Friday" sales following the holiday.This year's expected record-setting shopping comes as Price Waterhouse Cooper found for the first time that a majority of people surveyed said they would rather shop online than in a brick-and-mortar store.Shoppers spent $7.4 billion online on Friday, according to Adobe. Some 40 percent of these purchases were made using smartphones. On Thanksgiving Day, US consumers spent $4.2 billion online.Online sales on "Small Business Saturday" amounted to $3.6 billion, up 18 percent over last year.This increase was "fueled by strong gains from both large and small retailers alike," said Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe."The weekend between Black Friday and Cyber Monday is emerging as a truly lucrative period for online commerce," he added.The hottest toys included L.O.L. Surprise dolls and items linked to Disney blockbuster movie "Frozen 2." In the video game category, the top sellers were FIFA 20, Madden 20 and Nintendo Switch.The most popular electronics were Apple laptops, AirPods and Samsung TVs.Adobe expects shoppers to spend a total of $143.8 billion during the entire holiday season.According to a study released on Sunday by the International Council of Shopping Centers, an estimated 160 million people flocked to stores over the Thanksgiving weekend and spent on average just over $500 each.That's up from 151 million shoppers last year.

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NEW YORK:  In New York, a city famous for always being on the go, grocery shopping can be time consuming.But grocery company FreshDirect promises to deliver within mere hours fruit, fish and bottles of water ordered online, and it relies on its high-tech Bronx warehouse to keep up with demand.Orders ramping up ahead of Thanksgiving, when families across the United States gather round the table for a huge feast. Everything at the FreshDirect depot is as well-regulated as a Swiss clock, thanks to the computer system.On the ground, employees manage palettes, scan labels and sort products. But above their heads, huge orange and green plastic bins -- the company´s signature colors -- seem to have a life of their own.They zip along on conveyor belts that spiral up to the ceiling, carrying the bins through countless levels of shelves.As soon as a customer starts placing a FreshDirect online order, the system recognizes them."The system knows you, where you live, what amount of groceries you usually buy, what truck it will fit on, and based on that, what time can be offered," explained Timothy Knoll, the chief operating officer.Orders are grouped by destination, and the boxes can then be sent out.- Nine miles -The conveyor belts run for almost nine miles (15 kilometers), criss-crossing the 400,000 square foot (37,000 square meter) depot. But their layout was designed to limit bins´ trips, which last between 25 to 30 minutes on average.For small products, robots will pick them out one by one from the massive shelving units and bring them to one of six packing stations.Once there, employees scan them, package them and put them in boxes that are quickly sent on their way with the touch of a big red button.Bottles of water, the most popular item, are stored near the conveyor belts.For fruits and vegetables, employees can see which products have been requested on tablets and employees set aside any that are damaged.In a refrigerated room, other workers cut the fish of the day, still soft in their boxes of ice."About 90 percent of our fresh connections are... with the farmers and the people that actually grow and raise our food," said Scott Crawford, the chief merchandising officer. This allows FreshDirect to eliminate middlemen and save time."You can order a pound of codfish seven days from now, that fish is still swimming in the ocean for another four or five days before we actually have it in-house," said Knoll.In order to accurately predict supply and avoid waste, "we are confident with our vendors, and we´re comfortable with how we handle things in the building to control the inventory," he added.Each item has a barcode denoting the type of product, where it came from and its expiration date.FreshDirect also relies on 20 years of data accumulated since its launch in 1999. The company knows how to anticipate consumer habits as accurately as traffic patterns, including by accounting for weather conditions.- Path to profitability -The company is not as prevalent as it has been in New York, but it still dominates: FreshDirect makes 68 percent of the grocery delivery market in the Big Apple, well ahead of Instacart (13 percent), Peapod (nine percent) and Amazon Fresh (nine percent), according to the data analysis firm Earnest Research.Sales slumped slightly just after the Bronx depot opened in the summer of 2018. As the system worked out any kinks, customers complained of incomplete or late orders.FreshDirect has regained some ground since then.The company, which has offered same-day delivery since March, said that online business "continues to grow, and we are operating better than ever before.""An online grocer´s biggest enemy is not Amazon -- it´s itself," said Paula Rosenblum, a retail technology analyst for RSR Research."There is clearly a market. There is just no clear path to profitability," she added, noting that sales margins for groceries are generally "pretty low."FreshDirect has not released specific figures, saying only that they have "thousands of orders daily."In any case, the company has already seen multiple economic cycles -- the average size of a Thanksgiving turkey varies in relation to economic growth -- and various consumer habits."Maybe 15 years ago, you would see more frozen fruits and vegetables being sold for the holiday," said merchandising chief Crawford.But now "people want to have that fresh broccoli and those fresh brussel sprouts.""If you don´t get it right in New York City," Crawford added, "you won´t be doing it long."

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PARIS: Gamers were counting down to Tuesday´s launch of Google´s feature-rich, on-demand offering Stadia. But is its bang as big as its much-advertised buck?AFP had a chance to gain a first impression at the web behemoth´s Paris office in advance of the launch as Google bids to raise the bar to new ultra high-definition heights in a gambit to win greater heft in a global video game industry worth an estimated $135 billion.A screen problem forced the Google team to scale back resolution to high-definition television quality while sampling four of the 12 games that will be available at launch.Notwithstanding the glitch, the graphic quality certainly stood out. According to estimates by the US tech giant the computing power under the hood is ample enough to allow players not to worry about technical limitations of their own hardware causing lags or snaps in the action.The depth of field, design finesse and color rendition all stood out for the showcasing of games from Mortal Kombat, Destiny 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider as well as Gylt, an original production exclusively for Stadia from Spanish studio Tequila Works.Image fluidity was also up to the mark. While Google´s Chromecast Ultra device must be plugged into a TV for Stadia sessions, a custom Stadia controller connects via WiFi directly to Google servers where game software is hosted.In essence, screens are just windows for viewing in-game activity being handled at data centers.In usage terms, it´s on par with using a home console in terms of seamless on-screen response to joystick movements -- although beyond that Stadia is touting much shorter boot-up times.Whereas it can take some hours to install a purchased game on a console, Stadia gets to the starting line in seconds.Even a small-scale test run using few servers could not erase all question marks, a key one being the quality and stability of the connection once there is the expected onrush of competitors firing up on November 18 and thereafter.- Does commute compute ? -Another unknown is the extent to which one can play away from one´s own home on a variety of media. Stadia is promising to allow gamers the possibility of starting off a session on one´s television and then switching to a smartphone during, for example, a commute.That functionality will not immediately be available although it may be possible to switch between media provided one uses a Google Pixel or a computer -- and connects using WiFi to make sure game play data moves quickly and reliably over the internet.A roaming option is envisaged but when it will be available is not yet clear.In addition, a corded connection is for the time being required to connect the controller to a computer or smartphone with TV gaming the only wireless option immediately.Another issue with Stadia´s current configuration is its limited catalogue. Just 12 games are available to date -- a drop in the ocean compared with PC or console title offerings.A keen gamer seeking out very high graphic quality and almost no fluidity lag or downscaling will have to cough up for the privilege, with a 4K-capable TV, a top drawer smartphone and a high-speed internet connection.

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Musk announces new Tesla factory will be in GermanySAN FRANCISCO: A new Tesla auto factory to serve the European market will be based in Germany, chief executive Elon Musk said Tuesday.Musk said during a ceremony at Germany’s Golden Steering Wheel awards that the new "Gigafactory" would be "in the Berlin area."He said the company planned the facility "near the new airport" in Berlin and that Tesla would also set up a design center in the area."Everyone knows that German engineering is outstanding and that’s part of the reason we are locating our Gigafactory Europe in Germany," he said on stage."We are also going to create an engineering and design center in Berlin because I think Berlin has some of the best art in the world."The news highlights a further global expansion for the electric car maker, which last month said its factory in China had started production.Musk offered few details, but reports have said the company hopes to begin European production by 2021."Giga Berlin," Musk tweeted, bookending the words with heart emojis."Will build batteries, powertrains & vehicles, starting with Model Y," he added in another tweet.Tesla is estimated to have some 30 percent of the European market for battery-powered cars.Musk’s announcement is good news for the German auto industry, according to professor Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer of the Center for Automotive Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen.Tesla producing electric cars in Germany could wave a checkered flag at the local competition, such as Volkswagen, BMW, and Daimler, speeding up innovation in the sector there, Dudenhoeffer said.Tesla last month announced that it posted a profit in the recently ended quarter instead of taking a loss as analysts expected.Tesla said it is producing vehicles "on a trial basis" at its recently opened "Gigafactory" in Shanghai, which will help boost global production and sales.Musk was optimistic that the Shanghai factory could begin cranking out Model Y vehicles by the middle of next year, and believed the new model has the potential to be a huge seller.The company has been dogged by concerns it may not be able to ramp up production to meet demand and that Musk may have overstated Tesla’s goals for sales and technology improvements.Musk expected the Shanghai factory to hit "volume production" in a few months, and that it could be possible to significantly ramp up Tesla production. He noted that a battery plant was also being built on the Chinese site.Tesla’s first "Gigafactory" was constructed in the US state of Nevada, and its vehicles are built mostly at a factory in Northern California.

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Facebook apologises after black workers complain of biasSAN FRANCISCO: Facebook apologised on Friday after black employees anonymously shared feelings of workplace bias in an online post.The post shared at Medium by a "FB Blind" profile laid out perceived slights by managers, white colleagues, and the human resources department."No one at Facebook, or anywhere, should have to put up with this behavior," corporate communications vice president Bertie Thomson said in response to an AFP query."We are sorry. It goes against everything that we stand for as a company. We´re listening and working hard to do better."Incidents described in the Medium post included being targeted for negative performance reviews or snide comments."On the inside, we are sad. Angry. Oppressed. Depressed," the post read."And treated every day through the micro and macro aggressions as if we do not belong here."The anonymous post maintained that the atmosphere at Facebook has worsened in the past year when it came to non-white workers being recognized, empowered and treated equitably."The problem is not just with black employees of different genders," the post read."We are remaining anonymous because Facebook creates a hostile culture where anyone that is non-white is made to feel fear for their job and their safety to report any bad behaviors."

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Instagram test of hiding ‘likes’ spreading to USSAN FRANCISCO: Instagram chief Adam Mosseri on Friday said that a test of hiding "likes" at the image and photo sharing social network will spread to the US."Heads up! We’ve been testing making likes private on Instagram in a number of countries this year," Mosseri said in a tweet."We’re expanding those tests to include a small portion of people in the US next week."Facebook in September confirmed it is dabbling with no longer making a public display of how many "likes" are racked up by posts.Such a change could ease pressure to win approval with images, videos or comments and, instead, get people to simply focus on what is in the posts.Facebook-owned Instagram earlier this year announced it was testing hiding like counts and video view tallies in more than a half-dozen countries, with account holders still able to see the numbers but masking amounts from others.Twitter has also experimented with hiding numbers of times tweets were "liked" or "retweeted," according to product lead Kayvon Beykpour.Twitter found that people engaged less with tweets when they couldn’t see the counts."When you remove engagement indicators, people engage less," Beykpour said while briefing journalists at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco earlier this year.

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Lawsuit accuses Facebook ad targeting of abetting biasA lawsuit filed on Thursday accuses Facebook of letting ad targeting tools be used to exclude women and older people from offers regarding loans, investments and other financial services.Two law firms have filed a discrimination suit in San Francisco federal court on behalf of a 54-year-old woman living in Washington and will ask a judge to grant the case class-action status."Women and older persons are entitled to full and equal services of businesses such as Facebook, and the financial services companies that advertise on Facebook's platform," attorney Matthew Handley said in a statement."Purposeful targeting of advertisements away from these members of our community unlawfully denies them these guarantees."The suit contends that women and older people were denied the benefits of ads for financial services because Facebook tools allow messages to be targeted at specific age ranges or genders.Facebook said it is reviewing the complaint."We've made significant changes to how housing, employment and credit opportunities are run on Facebook and continue to work on ways to prevent potential misuse," a spokeswoman for the leading social network told AFP."Our policies have long prohibited discrimination and we're proud of the strides we're making in this area."Facebook announced earlier this year that it was revamping how it uses targeted advertising in a settlement with activist groups alleging it discriminated in messages on jobs, housing, credit and other services.Under those changes, housing, employment or credit ads would no longer be allowed to target by age, gender or zip code — a practice critics argued had led to discrimination.In the settlement, Facebook agreed to take "far-reaching measures to stop advertisers from using age, gender, and other protected traits to target job, housing, and credit ads," according to the law firms involved in the new suit."Today's lawsuit alleges that Facebook has not taken any action to stop advertisers from excluding older persons and women from getting financial services ads on Facebook, other than in the limited area of credit ads," the law firms said.

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WASHINGTON: Ten minutes charging time to add 200 miles of driving range: scientists in the US have claimed a technological breakthrough that could resolve one of the key concerns surrounding all-electric vehicles.Writing in the journal Joule on Wednesday, researchers at The Pennsylvania State University said that such a speedy charge rate required a battery to rapidly take in 400 kilowatts of energy.Current generation vehicles are not capable of this feat as it risks the lithium plating, the formation of metallic lithium around the anode, which would severely deteriorate battery life.To get around this constraint, the researchers raised the temperature of their experimental battery to 60 degrees Celsius during the charge cycle, then lowered it back down as it was used.What this does is "limit the battery´s exposure to the elevated charge temperature, thus generating a very long cycle life," said senior author Chao-Yang Wang, a mechanical engineer at The Pennsylvania State University.But scaling up the design and bringing it to market may take a decade, Rick Sachleben, a member of the American Chemical Society told AFP.Makers will need to make sure that rapidly raising the temperature is safe and stable, and doesn´t lead to explosions given the phenomenal amount of energy that is being transferred."Fast charging is one of the holy grails of electric vehicles," he said. "It´s one of the things that is necessary for them to compete with petroleum-fueled internal combustion engines."Current generation Tesla vehicles require about 30 minutes for a partial charge.

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LOS ANGELES: With two young daughters, Mery Montenegro is preparing to add Disney+ to her list of streaming subscriptions, which already includes Netflix, Hulu and Amazon -- and, when combined with her cable TV bill, costs her almost $1,500 per year.Her eldest Victoria, 6, asks every day when the new platform will launch, with its impressive catalogue of films and series from all of Disney´s studios.The answer is November 12: Mery, who works at an advertising agency in Washington, knows the date well. It´s the day she´ll start paying $6.99 more per month.Disney+, HBO Max (AT&T), Peacock (Comcast), Apple TV+ and the new short video platform Quibi are all players in a streaming war that will only grow worse at a time when more Americans prefer streaming to cable."It´s going to have a huge impact on people´s budgets," said Tom Nunan, an Oscar-winning film producer and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Theater, Film and Television."I don´t think that there is enough room for subscription relationships with all of these streamers for a typical American."In a Deloitte survey published in March, 69 percent of respondents said they had at least one streaming subscription, while 65 percent said they had cable.And while many households have cut the cord to go cable-free with the advent of streaming, 43 percent of those surveyed were paying for both.Mery, 36, is in the third group, and not by choice.In her neighborhood of Alexandria, west of the US capital, she says she found no internet-only option cheaper than her current plan, so she pays $90 per month for a cable subscription she "hardly" uses, other than for news or the occasional baseball game.To that, she adds $5.99 each month for Hulu -- the service´s cheapest plan, with commercials -- and $16 for Netflix, which she considers essential."I use it on the subway when I go to work, to cook, to watch something at home," she explained.Mery also pays $12.99 per month for e-commerce giant Amazon´s Prime membership, which includes its streaming service. Prime is also useful for renting movies, which Mery prefers over the cinema, curling up with a glass of wine after the girls have gone to bed.That´s $124.98 per month, soon plus $6.99 for Disney+. Total: $131.97 per month, or $1,583.64 per year.- The irony of cable -That´s where Mery draws the line, since she doesn´t want to spend her whole paycheck on subscriptions. But the streaming options are limitless.From YouTube, which has a Premium version for $11.99 per month, to platforms for Broadway lovers or wrestling fans, to all professional sports leagues, which offer different packages for fans.The Los Angeles Times previously listed 40 streaming options, which would cost a total of $353.43 per month, but the Deloitte survey mentioned up to 300 different streaming services.Almost half of people surveyed (47 percent) said they were "frustrated by the growing number of subscriptions and services," which make it "harder to find the content they want," the study said."Back at the beginning, it wasn´t a hard decision... to sign up for Netflix or Amazon. It was just two streamers," said Nunan."But am I really going to sign up for six streamers or seven? As the normal consumer, I doubt it," he said.Gene Del Vecchio, a marketing professor at the University of Southern California (USC) who specializes in entertainment, estimated that users will end up with the same complaint that currently causes them to drop cable: they spend a lot of money for a lot of programs they don´t watch."I think what may happen is that they will look for one a la carte menu," he said."They will start to say, I just want these individual shows, and I don´t want to pay for all of this other programming that I never watch."Amazon already allows people to buy episodes or seasons, without subscribing to Prime Video.Del Vecchio also thinks subscription rates will increase over the next decade to finance original shows, and that streamers will seek to end the current strategy where several friends or family members share one account, in an effort to gain new paying users.Another strategy, similar to cable plans, will be to offer discounted annual contracts. Disney+ is already doing this, as is Amazon."Here´ the ironic thing: five, 10 years from now, it´s going to look like the cable industry all over again," predicted Del Vecchio.

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