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According to figures released Tuesday by the Canadian Real Estate Association, the total housing sales fell 17.4 per cent during the month of December.

The prices of homes increased 1.6 per cent across Canada in December compared to the same month of the previous year. The price rise in Toronto was recorded at 6 per cent. Experts say that it a unique situation in the market as sellers are not ready to bring down prices and buyers are staying away from the housing market as they expect interest rates to remain stable but the prices to fall.

According to the latest figures released, customers in Ireland used their Visa cards to spend a whopping €15.5 billion during the previous year, setting a new record for the company in the country.

Building products maker, Boral has announced that it will cut about 700 jobs in its Australian operations by the month of March.

The company said that it has already made 200 positions redundant in Australia. The company is struggling to sustain its operations in a difficult industry and is planning to streamlining its operations and lowering its cost base to become sustainable. The company estimates that cutting 700 jobs at its Australian operations will allow it to save about $37 million this year and more form next year.

London, Jan 16 : Security researchers in China have discovered a huge botnet running on the smartphones of more than a million unsuspecting mobile users in the country.

The devices had been infected by a Trojan-based attack first discovered in 2011, news agency Xinhua reported.

The botnet can allow the smartphones to be hijacked remotely and potentially be used for fraudulent purposes, the BBC reported.

The warning comes as mobile Internet use in China has soared, growing by more than 18 percent in the past year.

Washington, Jan 16 : Facebook has overhauled its internal search engine to allow members to easily search through their friends' profiles.

Facebook unveiled its Graph Search at an event in Palo Alto, California, which will initially allow its members to search the social network's database of people, photos, places and interests.

According to the Telegraph, Mark Zuckerberg emphasised that the system did not allow members to search the web outside Facebook, quashing speculation before the event that it aimed to compete with Google more directly.

According to a new study, people from the Indian subcontinent reached Australia about 4,000 years ago, several hundreds of years before the Europeans colonizers arrived in the land down under.

A new research published on Tuesday found evidence indicating that the Australian aboriginal and Indian genes are mixed. The study conducted by researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany found evidence of a flow of between Indian population and Australia aboriginals about 4,000 years ago.