Closing summary
The chief executive of the Post Office has said that no employee is “above the law” and denied that there are “untouchables” within the organisation who will never face disciplinary action over the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of post office operators.
The public inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal had heard that Nick Read, who joined as chief executive in 2019 with a pledge to “right the wrongs of the past”, has used the phrase “untouchables” on multiple occasions.
Read had reportedly used the term to describe a group of the organisation’s investigators involved in the pursuit and wrongful prosecution of post office operators who would never face disciplinary action over the scandal.
The US government may ask a judge to force the breakup of Google’s business as it attempts to challenge the tech corporation’s monopoly over the internet search market.
The Department of Justice has filed court papers that say it is considering enforcing “structural remedies” that would prevent Google from using some of its products such as Chrome, Android and Play, which the DoJ argues give the company an advantage over rivals.
Other actions being considered include blocking Google from paying to have its search engine pre-installed on smartphones and other devices.
Google, which is owned by Alphabet, said it would challenge any case by the DoJ and that the proposals marked an “overreach” by the government that would harm consumers.
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Thank you for reading. We’ll be back tomorrow. Take care – JK
Two scientists at Google DeepMind and an American biochemist have been awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry for breakthroughs in predicting and designing the structure of proteins.
Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s British founder, and John Jumper, who led the development of the company’s AI model AlphaFold– which predicts the structure of proteins based on their chemical sequence – share half of the prize.
The other half was awarded to Prof David Baker, of the University of Washington, whose computational research has led to the creation of entirely new kinds of proteins, with applications in vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors.
The winners were announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, and will share the 11m Swedish kronor (£810,000) prize for computational protein design and protein structure prediction.
