World's richest woman, L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt dead at 94

Agencies
September 22, 2017

New Delhi, Sept 22: Liliane Bettencourt, the world's richest woman and heiress to the L’Oreal cosmetics fortune passed away at the age of 94.

Confirming the news, her daughter Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers in a statement, said that she died in the early hours of Thursday at her home in Paris.

"She would have been 95 on 21 October," she added. "My mother left peacefully," the Independent UK quoted her saying.

Bettencourt was ranked the richest woman in the world in 2016 by Forbes, with a fortune of $39.5bn (£29bn), which also gave her the status of the 14th richest person in the world.

As per the report in the Independent UK, L'Oréal chairman and CEO Jean-Paul Agon expressed his condolences to the family and said: “We all had a deep admiration for Liliane Betterncourt who has always watched over L'Oréal, the company and its employees, and who was very attached to its success and development.

After leaving the board of the French company in 2012, her public appearances reduced to a large extent, but grabbed headlines after members of her team were charged with exploiting her as her mental health deteriorated.

She had been under the guardianship of family members since the court fight, known as the "Bettencourt affair", ended with a ruling in 2011 that she was incapable of looking after her fortune because she suffered from dementia and had been exploited.

The case - brought by her daughter Françoise and which soured relations between the two - centred on Francois-Marie Banier, a celebrity photographer who befriended Bettencourt in the 1980s and received lavish gifts from her, including life insurance policies worth $400 million.

According to a report, the French celebrity photographer was sentenced to two and a half years.

Another strand of the sprawling affair later led to allegations of illegal payments by Bettencourt to members of the French government associated with former president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2010. Sarkozy was eventually cleared in the case.

L'Oréal was founded by Bettencourt's parents Louise Madelaine Berthe and Eugene Schueller. She was their only child and was born in Paris.

She lost her mother when she was just five-years-old and she joined the family business at the age of 15, before inheriting the L'Oréal empire when her father died in 1957.

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Agencies
March 18,2020

Thiruvananthapuram, Mar 18: To raise awareness about protective measures against coronavirus, Kerala Police released a dance video on the State Police Media Centre's Facebook page promoting the washing of hands, here on Tuesday.

In the video, the police officers were seen dancing to the tunes of Kalakkatha from the Malayalam action-drama thriller Ayyappanum Koshiyum while demonstrating the right technique for washing hands.

The video gained over 27,000 likes and over 2,400 comments and more than 33,000 netizens shared the video.

The video has received a positive response with users congratulating Kerala Police for the initiative.

"Congrats Kerala police media for this kind of initiative," one user commented on Facebook. Another user thanked the police in the comments section saying, "Super super thanks to KL (Kerala) police."

The number of people who have tested positive for the coronavirus in Kerala is 25.

The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in India has reached 147, including 122 Indians and 25 foreign nationals, said the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare earlier today.

Globally, the virus has infected more than 184,000 people and killed more than 7500, as per the data available on the World Health Organisation website.

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Agencies
February 23,2020

Google has indexed invite links to private WhatsApp group chats, meaning anyone can join various private chat groups (including several porn-sharing groups) with a simple search.

According to a report in Motherboard, invitations to WhatsApp group chats were being indexed by Google.

The team found private groups using specific Google searches and even joined a group intended for NGOs accredited by the UN and had access to all the participants and their phone numbers.

Journalist Jordan Wildon said on Twitter that he discovered that WhatsApp's "Invite to Group Link" feature lets Google index groups, making them available across the internet since the links are being shared outside of WhatsApp's secure private messaging service.

"Your WhatsApp groups may not be as secure as you think they are," Wildon tweeted on Friday, adding that using particular Google searches, people can discover links to the chats.

According to app reverse-engineer Jane Wong, Google has around 470,000 results for a simple search of "chat.whatsapp.com", part of the URL that makes up invites to WhatsApp groups.

WhatsApp spokesperson Alison Bonny said: "Like all content that is shared in searchable public channels, invite links that are posted publicly on the internet can be found by other WhatsApp users."

"The links that users wish to share privately with people they know and trust should not be posted on a publicly accessible website," Bonny told The Verge.

Danny Sullivan, Google's public search liaison, tweeted: "Search engines like Google & others list pages from the open web. That's what's happening here. It's no different than any case where a site allows URLs to be publicly listed. We do offer tools allowing sites to block content being listed in our results."

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Agencies
February 17,2020

Google on Monday announced it is gradually winding down its free public Wi-Fi Station programme currently available at over 400 railway stations in India, and will work with the Indian Railways and Railtel Corporation to help them with existing sites so they can remain useful resources for people.

Google launched its Station initiative in India in 2015 to bring fast, free public Wi-Fi to over 400 of the busiest railway stations in the country by mid-2020.

"We crossed that number by June 2018 and implemented Station in thousands of other locations around the country in partnership with telecommunications companies, ISPs and local authorities," Caesar Sengupta, Vice President, Payments and Next Billion Users, Google, said in a statement.

"Over time, partners in other countries asked for Station too and we responded accordingly. We're grateful for these partnerships, especially with the Indian Railways and the Government of India, that helped us serve millions of users over the last few years," he added.

According to Google, the decision to shut Station has been taken keeping the affordable mobile data plans and mobile connectivity in mind that is improving globally including in India.

"India, specifically now has among the cheapest mobile data per GB in the world, with mobile data prices having reduced by 95 per cent in the last 5 years, as per TRAI in 2019," said Sengupta.

The Indian users consume close to 10GB of data, each month, on average, according to reports.

"Our commitment to supporting the next billion users remains stronger than ever, from continuing our efforts to make the internet work for more people and building more relevant and helpful apps and services," Sengupta noted.

Global networking giant Cisco last year teamed up with Google to roll out free, high-speed public Wi-Fi access globally, starting with India.

The first pilot under the partnership was rolled out at 35 locations in Bengaluru.

Sengupta said that in addition to the changed context, the challenge of varying technical requirements and infrastructure among our partners across countries has also made it difficult for Station to scale and be sustainable, especially for our partners.

"And when we evaluate where we can truly make an impact in the future, we see greater need and bigger opportunities in building products and features tailored to work better for the next billion user markets," he said.

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