24 May 2013
Last updated at 08:02 ET
Around two million customers use the bank’s mobile app service
RBS has apologised for the second time in two months after customers were unable to log in to their accounts through their mobile phone app.
Many customers of the RBS Group, which includes NatWest and Ulster Bank, were unable to use the app for two and a half hours on Friday.
A similar problem occurred at the end of March, when the app’s users were unable to check their accounts.
RBS is 81% owned by the taxpayer [...]
Second RBS apology for app glitch
24 May 2013
Last updated at 08:02 ET
Around two million customers use the bank’s mobile app service
RBS has apologised for the second time in two months after customers were unable to log in to their accounts through their mobile phone app.
Many customers of the RBS Group, which includes NatWest and Ulster Bank, were unable to use the app for two and a half hours on Friday.
A similar problem occurred at the end of March, when the app’s users were unable to check their accounts.
RBS is 81% owned by the taxpayer [...]
Gov. Christie boosts Jersey Shore with Memorial Day weekend road trip
Destinations
26 minutes ago
After famously telling hurricane-weary tourists in 2011 to “get the hell back on the beach,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is on another, softer, mission to lure visitors back to his state’s sandy shores.
With the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy last fall still on the minds of many vacationers, Christie is spending Memorial Day weekend – the unofficial start of the summer season – traveling up and down the Jersey Shore, visiting boardwalks and beaches to show that the region [...]
Houses in the clouds: Sou Fujimoto’s best buildings
Sou Fujimoto’s buildings are designed, he says, with people’s behaviour in mind. The resulting spaces are captivating and intriguing, and evoke forests, caves, nests and clouds. As the Japanese architect prepares to present London’s Serpentine Gallery with its latest temporary summer pavilion, we look at a selection of his groundbreaking work
Seven Must-Read Stories (Week Ending May 24, 2013)
Another chance to catch the most interesting, and important, articles from the previous week on MIT Technology Review.
Zoo keeper mauled by tiger ‘broke safety rules’
A zoo keeper who was mauled to death by a tiger had no reason to be in its enclosure, according to the animal park’s owner.
Sarah McClay, 24, was attacked by a Sumatran tiger at South Lakes Wild Animal Park, in Dalton-in-Furness, Cumbria, on Friday afternoon. She was taken by air ambulance to Royal Preston Hospital but died later from her injuries.
Cumbria police said the tiger was locked in its enclosure following the attack and that members of the public were not at any risk during the incident. Police and Barrow borough council a [...]
BBC suspends CTO after DMI failure
The BBC has suspended its chief technology officer and admitted wasting nearly £100m on a five-year project intended to make the corporation “tapeless”, saying that to continue with the project would be “throwing good money after bad”.
The Digital Media Initiative (DMI) was supposed to create a production system linked to the BBC’s huge broadcasting archive, but flaws in the system peaked in April when instead of streamlining access to old video footage, it caused chaos following Margaret Thatcher’s dea [...]
French army begins Mali withdrawal
25 May 2013
Last updated at 04:17 ET
France says troop numbers in Mali will be down to 1,000 by the end of the year
France has begun the first major stage of its military withdrawal from Mali, four months after sending troops to push Islamist rebels out the north.
A convoy of lorries left a French base outside the capital, Bamako, on its way south to Ivory Coast.
France began withdrawing some of its 4,000 troops from the country in April.
They plan to gradually hand over to the Malian army and a UN peacekeeping force, whi [...]
On the road: Kia pro_cee’d 1.6 CRDi S ISG
How do you turn a cee’d into a pro_cee’d? Take away two doors. No, it wasn’t supposed to be a joke. I was just explaining the difference, OK? This is just the coupe version. But because it’s Kia, they can’t simply call it a c’eed coupe – they have to commit further atrocities against language (having already inserted that apostrophe) by adding a prefix and an underscore. And – cleverly (they probably thought) – it kind of makes a new word: pro_cee’d, proceed, meaning move forward, which is sending [...]
The hottest French It girl of 2013: Julia Restoin Roitfeld
As a four-year-old, Julia Restoin Roitfeld would sit on her mother Carine Roitfeld‘s lap at fashion shows in Paris. At 10, she was photographed by Mario Testino for Vogue Bambini. In her 20s, she became an art director, muse, model and Parisian It girl, before moving to New York. The designer Tom Ford described her as “exactly what beauty is to me” and, when she gave birth last year, he gave her a pair of black suede kitten heels in baby size for her newborn daughter.
As the scion of a Paris fashion dynasty – her mother [...]
Internet users’ privacy concerns may mean cookies start to crumble
When the Cookie Directive, officially known as the EU e-Privacy Directive, was first drafted two years ago, tablets hadn’t been adopted in their millions, and smartphones had nothing like their present-day ubiquity.
Their rise in popularity raises a number of difficult issues for publishers and other website owners when it comes to the directive, which has now been in place for 12 months, not least because of the way mobile devices deal with cookies, those small bits of code left by web browsers on your computer or mobile devices th [...]
Pakistan bus fire kills 16 children
25 May 2013
Last updated at 03:54 ET
The fire broke out as the bus was taking the children to school
At least 16 children have been killed as their school bus caught fire in eastern Pakistan, police have said.
At least seven more children were taken to hospital after the incident on the outskirts of the city of Gujrat.
Initial reports said the bus’s gas cylinder had exploded, but a local police chief told AFP news agency it was later found intact.
He said a teacher also died in the blaze. Another police officer tol [...]
The future of media measurement should be people-based | David Gosen
When it comes to the development and distribution of content, the pace of innovation has been breathtaking. Today, people consume media on multiple platforms and devices and, with the rise of mobile technologies, they do it any time and in any place. So, how should this proliferating and diverse consumption be measured?
Some, such as Frédéric Filloux in his Monday Note post on 20 May, argue that a site-centric approach using server logs is required. At Nielsen, though, we believe this overlooks some of the essential aspects of media meas [...]