Italian prosecutors plan to drop an investigation opened against Google for allegedly failing to pay taxes on earnings in Italy between 2015 and 2019 after the tech giant agreed to pay a €326 million (about $340 million) settlement. That’s a sizable sum even for Google, but nothing compared to the $1 billion fine it agreed to pay France in 2019 following similar tax disputes.
After frantically calling back laid-off nuclear workers last week, Donald Trump’s administration is still being hasty in its gutting of key federal workforces.
The Department of Agriculture is now trying to rehire “several” employees it fired who were working on tackling the H5N1 avian flu outbreak. The White House on Tuesday also decided at the last minute not to fire more than 1,000 probationary NASA staffers it was seeking to terminate.
The third and highest-grossing installment in the Sonic movie franchise will be available to watch on Paramount Plus in the US and Canada starting tomorrow. The Paramount streaming platform also carries the first two films and the Knuckles spin-off series to keep you satiated until Sonic the Hedgehog 4 hits theatres in 2027.
Machine learning scientist Jochem Gietema found that the Image Playground app struggled to consistently identify his skin tone and hair texture, and exhibited racial biases when following prompt directions. This isn’t uncommon for AI image generation models, but it’s a blunder that Apple missed despite limiting Image Playground to only faces in illustrated styles, in part to avoid such behavior.
Tesla sales have plummeted in several countries over the last month, dropping by 38 percent in Norway, 63 percent in France, and 75 percent in Spain. Only 1,277 new Teslas were registered in Germany in January, a 60 percent drop compared to the previous year.
While Tesla now faces stiffer competition in Europe, Wired says the decline is probably linked to Elon Musk’s increasingly controversial behavior — an understandable reaction from a region that’s unlikely to tolerate certain arm gestures at political rallies.
