New checkouts will let you pay with a smile
And other stories from the stranger side of life

New shop checkouts will allow you to pay with a smile, reported The Telegraph. Under plans unveiled by Mastercard, customers will soon be able to pay by smiling or waving at checkouts after signing up for the company’s “biometric checkout programme”. Customers will be asked to take a picture of their face or scan their fingerprint to register with an app, before linking a credit card to their biometric data. This will allow them to pay for goods and services in-store by smiling into a camera or waving their hand over a reader to pay.
Veterans ‘told to keep mouths shut’ over UFOs
The US military has recorded around 400 UFO sightings, a top Pentagon intelligence official told Congress yesterday. Senior Pentagon officials said that although no evidence of extraterrestrial origins had been discovered to date, they would “go wherever the data takes us” in an “all hands on deck” approach. Meanwhile, three army veterans told the Daily Mail they were told to “keep their mouths shut” after they encountered what they thought was a UFO at a Middle East US military base in 2014.
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Oasis guitar sells for £325,000
A guitar that was damaged backstage at an Oasis concert and culminated in the band breaking up has sold for €385,500 (£325,000) at an auction in Paris. Noel Gallagher’s red Gibson was broken at the French capital’s Rock en Seine festival in 2009. Jonathan Berg, a guitar expert and co-founder of the Artpèges gallery that held the auction, told The Guardian that the guitar marked “a cult moment” in music history.
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