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
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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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World’s oldest rock art discovered in IndonesiaUnder the Radar Ancient handprint on Sulawesi cave wall suggests complexity of thought, challenging long-held belief that human intelligence erupted in Europe
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Claude Code: the viral AI coding app making a splash in techThe Explainer Engineers and noncoders alike are helping the app go viral
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‘Human trafficking isn’t something that happens “somewhere else”’Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
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China’s Xi targets top general in growing purgeSpeed Read Zhang Youxia is being investigated over ‘grave violations’ of the law
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Panama and Canada are negotiating over a crucial copper mineIn the Spotlight Panama is set to make a final decision on the mine this summer
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Why Greenland’s natural resources are nearly impossible to mineThe Explainer The country’s natural landscape makes the task extremely difficult
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Iran cuts internet as protests escalateSpeed Reada Government buildings across the country have been set on fire
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US nabs ‘shadow’ tanker claimed by RussiaSpeed Read The ship was one of two vessels seized by the US military
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How Bulgaria’s government fell amid mass protestsThe Explainer The country’s prime minister resigned as part of the fallout
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Femicide: Italy’s newest crimeThe Explainer Landmark law to criminalise murder of a woman as an ‘act of hatred’ or ‘subjugation’ but critics say Italy is still deeply patriarchal
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Brazil’s Bolsonaro behind bars after appeals run outSpeed Read He will serve 27 years in prison
