Author: admin@primenews

The Italian city of Venice is expected to approve the trial of a €5 (£4.30; $5.35) daily fee for visitors, in a bid to control tourism. All visitors over the age of 14 will have to pay the charge and book their entry to the city in advance. City council member for tourism Simone Venturini says the trial will run during peak tourist periods next year. “Venice is among the most visited European cities… [and so] suffers the most from excess tourism,” he said. Over-tourism is widely recognised as an urgent issue for Venice. The city is just 7.6 sq…

One of the creators of the world’s first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, has died at the age of 79. Prof Sir Ian Wilmut’s work, at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, laid the foundations for stem cell research. That technology aims to cure many of the diseases of ageing by enabling the body to regenerate damaged tissue. His legacy is the creation of a field known as regenerative medicine, which has huge potential to enable more people to live longer, healthier lives. The creation of Dolly in 1996 was arguably one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 20th Century.…

The head of Spotify has denied claims that users can repeatedly listen to their own uploaded 30-second track to rake in monthly royalties. Finance analysts at JP Morgan had said that Spotify subscribers could make $1,200 (£960) a month by listening to their song on repeat, 24 hours a day. The claim suggested Spotify’s royalty payment structure could be manipulated. But Daniel Ek, the streaming giant’s CEO, says that is not how the platform’s royalties work. The theory was first reported in the Financial Times, and then tweeted about by Julian Klymochko, founder of Accelerate, a Canadian-based investment company. “If that…

Threads, the much-hyped social media app from Facebook-parent Meta, is taking heat for blocking searches for “coronavirus,” “Covid,” and other pandemic-related queries. The tech giant’s decision to block coronavirus-related searches on its service comes as the United States deals with a recent uptick in Covid-19 hospitalizations, per CDC data, and more than three years into the global pandemic. News of Threads blocking searches related to the coronavirus was first reported by The Washington Post. A Meta spokesperson told CNN that the company just began rolling out keyword search for Threads to additional countries last week. “The search functionality temporarily doesn’t provide results for…

Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer could fuel a $500 billion jump in the electric vehicle maker’s market value, analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a note Monday. Shares of Tesla jumped more than 6% during early trading Monday morning, on the heels of the rosy prediction from Morgan Stanley’s team about the automaker’s supercomputing efforts. The Morgan Stanley team, lead by longtime Tesla analyst Adam Jonas, predicted that the massive drive in value could come from Dojo potentially unlocking new revenue streams through the wider adoption of robotaxis and software services. The analysts compared the potential of Dojo at Tesla to the…

One of China’s most popular livestreamers has offered a teary apology after getting into a viral online spat in which he questioned whether a viewer had been working “hard enough” to make enough money to afford a product he was selling. The backlash highlighted the ongoing economic challenges faced by workers in the world’s second largest economy, which is experiencing record youth unemployment, a slump in export demand and tepid consumer spending. Li Jiaqi, who has 76 million followers on Taobao’s livestreaming platform, is one of the country’s biggest internet celebrities. He once sold 15,000 lipsticks in five minutes during a sales competition against Alibaba founder Jack Ma,…

Walter Isaacson’s highly anticipated biography on Elon Musk is hitting shelves on Tuesday — and he is already walking back a major claim. Isaacson reported in his book that Musk had abruptly turned off Ukraine’s access to his Starlink satellite internet system last year just as the country was launching an underwater drone attack on a Russian fleet in Crimea, depriving the Eastern European country’s forces of critical communications for the assault and rendering the offensive a failure. “He secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast,” fearing the sneak attack would lead…

Fueled by a resurgent stock market and rising home values, US household wealth hit a record $154.3 trillion during the second quarter of this year, according to federal data. Consumer wealth has now completely recovered from the recent inflation-driven drop in stock prices and real estate holdings. Household and nonprofit net wealth increased by $5.5 trillion, or 4%, between the end of March and the end of June, Federal Reserve data released on Friday showed. This follows an increase of $3 trillion during the first three months of the year. The data is not adjusted for inflation. This bump in wealth was driven mostly by a…

Wage growth has caught up with rising prices for the first time in more than a year, according to the latest official figures. Regular pay, excluding bonuses, rose by 7.8% in May to July compared with the same period last year. Inflation, a measure of how fast prices of goods and services are rising, rose at the same pace over the same period. “This means people’s real pay is no longer falling,” said the Office for National Statistics (ONS). “Earnings in cash terms continue to increase at a record rate outside the pandemic-affected period,” Darren Morgan, director of economic statistics…

Just a few years ago, a crackdown in the US to curb the might of America’s tech giants seemed at hand. Bosses from Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook had been hauled before Congress and President Joe Biden was putting in place a slew of officials known for their tough-on-tech views. But efforts by Congress to write new rules tackling issues such as privacy and disinformation are all but dead, and in the courts tech firms have won a series of high-profile victories in cases challenging their responsibility for content on their platforms and their right to buy up other firms.…