ROME — Ever since he broke out of Rome’s Rebibbia prison 20 years ago where he was facing murder charges, Gioacchino Gammino had managed to evade capture. He fled to Spain, changed his name and cut off ties with his family, creating a new life for himself, at one point working as a chef in an Italian restaurant. But last month, Italian investigators finally tracked down Mr. Gammino, 61, in a town northwest of Madrid, thanks in part to an unlikely tool: Google Maps. “They say that fortune… Source link

Aspirational visions of the metaverse peppered discussion at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where companies showed off products like a $270 body-tracking suit and an accessory that mimics heat and cold. The conference demonstrates the rush of industry momentum behind the metaverse, an immersive online experience across tech platforms that has become a key focus of Facebook (FB), renamed Meta in October. By now, all the tech giants are investing in the metaverse, Axios… Source link

“Our cookie consent controls provide people with greater control over their data, including a new settings menu on Facebook and Instagram, where people can revisit and manage their decisions at any time, and we continue to develop and improve these controls,” it said. Source link

The U.S. economy unexpectedly saw a slowdown in hiring in December compared to November, while the unemployment rate improved to a fresh pandemic-era low. The Labor Department released its December jobs report Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET. Here were the main metrics from the print, compared to consensus estimates compiled by Bloomberg: Non-farm payrolls: +199,000 vs. +450,000 expected and a revised +249,000 in November Unemployment rate: 3.9% vs. 4.1% expected and 4.2% in November  Average hourly… Source link

Will we get a close football game on Saturday? Just one of the three games on the docket has a point spread less than a touchdown at BetMGM as the NFL begins Week 18 and the FCS champion is crowned. Let’s start with the NFL, which kicks off Week 18 with the Kansas City Chiefs’ trip to Denver (4:30 p.m. ET, ESPN/ABC). The Chiefs are favored by 10.5 points as they hope to get the No. 1 seed in the AFC playoffs and the Broncos are already eliminated from playoff contention. The Chiefs need to… Source link

It has been a year since Microsoft’s Bing team partnered with Russian search engine Yandex to create and launch IndexNow. This is a new tool that allows website admins to tell search engines about changes to content on a site. Microsoft and Yandex are now updating the tool to make it more useful. This expediates a process that previously required the search engine to discover those content changes on its own. IndexNow is ideal because it provides a simple way for site owners to make… Source link

Underneath the surface, the tech stock heavy Nasdaq Composite is being shredded as traders fret about higher interest rates from the Federal Reserve this year.  Nearly 40% of the stocks on the exchange have been cut in half, according to new research from Sundial Capital Research’s Jason Goepfert. The research firm notes this kind of trading action on the Nasdaq (^IXIC) hasn’t been seen since at least 1999. “Bulls will suggest that most of the damage has been done, and the indexes should be… Source link

The new year has ushered in a slew of minimum wage increases across the country. A total of 81 states and cities will be raising their minimum wages in 2022, and 44 cities will be increasing theirs to above $15 an hour. “These raises that took effect this week, combined with others scheduled for later this year, are the largest wave of minimum wage raises that we’ve seen,” Paul Sonn, state policy program director at the National Employment Law Project, said on Yahoo Finance Live (video… Source link

If you ever feel like websites have turned the simple business of rejecting tracking cookies into a labyrinthine task that involves close-reading of multiple dialog boxes, then France’s data protection agency has your back. The watchdog (CNIL) has fined Google €150 million ($170 million) and Facebook €60 million ($68 million) for making it too confusing for users to reject cookies. The companies now have three months to change their ways in France. With Facebook, CNIL notes that in… Source link

This weekend, Google will release a Doodle celebrating what would have been Stephen Hawking’s 80th birthday. The two and a half minute-long video will go live in the US at midnight ET tonight (9pm PT) and includes a narration in the physicist’s own computer-generated voice (created and used with permission from his estate) outlining his work and painting a message of hope for the future. Hawking’s digital voice was one of the most recognizable characteristics of the late physicist,… Source link