Thousands of broadband users who were hit with bills despite cancelling their service have received £2.5 million in compensation, it emerged today.

The refunds and goodwill payments were made to 62,000 customers after regulator Ofcom took action against TalkTalk and its Tiscali UK subsidiary following the receipt of more than 1,000 complaints relating to incorrect bills.

The watchdog is still receiving complaints and warned it could issue TalkTalk with a fine if it found evidence that the firm had continued to breach regulations.

TalkTalk has been dogged by customer service problems following its takeover of rival Tiscali's UK business in 2009.

After the Fulham vs Chelsea game recently there was an overheated article in the Guardian about how Glenn Hoddle had walked into a 'racism' row over remarks he made on Sky.

Clearly the paper was appealing to it's leftie readership (the story was picked up elsewhere too) and Glenda was forced into an apology.

The 'appalling racist slur' came after Chelsea's £50m striker, Fernando Torres, miscontrolled a ball played over the top of the Fulham defence: Hoddle remarked: "When it's not going for you, it's not going for you. It's come off his chest, his knee and his toe. It's almost like the Chinese player Knee Shin Toe."

Is making a pun on a made-up name racist? [Clearly people are watching Sky Sports very closely in a bid to flan-up stories like this, so I suppose the story should be seen in this context]

Well those leftie leaning online readers didn't agree.

Result of the poll in yesterday's sports section answering the question: Should Glenn Hoddle have apologised for his 'Knee Shin Toe' joke? Yes 16 per cent No 84 per cent.

Consumers have upped their online spending by almost a quarter on last year, most of it on cheap furniture and summer holidays, new figures show.

Shoppers in the UK spent £5.1 billion online in January, a year-on-year increase of 21%, according to the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index.

But they appear to have used their limited disposable income for seasonal discounts on furniture and early annual holiday bookings instead of the high street January sales, the report said.

Cybercrime costs the UK more than £27 billion a year, figures have showed.

Attacks on computer systems, industrial espionage and theft of company secrets costs businesses alone at least £21 billion.

Security Minister Baroness Neville-Jones said the answer lies in private firms and the Government working together to disrupt criminal networks rather than prosecution.

A space probe has sent back close-up pictures of a city-sized comet that scientists hope will shed more light on the icy solar system bodies.

Speeding at 24,000 mph, Nasa's Stardust zoomed by comet Tempel 1 on Monday night, snapping more than 70 high-resolution pictures along the way. At nearest approach, the craft passed within 112 miles of the potato-shaped comet - closer than the original prediction.

Instead of erupting in cheers, mission controllers at the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory puzzled over why images from the flyby were not downloading in the order that they want.

Above: This pair of images shows the before-and-after comparison of the part of comet Tempel 1 that was hit by the impactor from NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft.

Radiohead are to release a new album The King Of Limbs by the end of the week - and are again bypassing major labels.

The hugely successful band will issue their eighth studio album on Saturday as a download from their website.

They had a long association with EMI's Parlophone label but opted to go it alone for 2007 album In Rainbows.

Below: Thom Yorke of Radiohead

British scientists have played a key role in creating the first 360-degree images of the sun.

The pictures have been captured by Nasa's twin STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) spacecraft, which are orbiting on opposite sides of the Earth's nearest star.

Researchers at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory in Didcot, Oxfordshire, designed the cameras used to take the groundbreaking images.

Chris Davis, project manager for the STEREO mission at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory, said: "The UK is very good at creating innovative design solutions.

"That's why Nasa turned to us to make these cameras, which have already shown us some wonderful sights."

Below: Nasa handout photo of a 360-degree image of the sun captured by Nasa's twin STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) spacecraft.

Two newspapers which republished tweets written by a civil servant have been cleared of intruding on her privacy by the Press Complaints Commission (PCC).

Sarah Baskerville, who works at the Department of Transport, complained after several tweets were published in articles in the Daily Mail and The Independent on Sunday.

The Daily Mail story, which was headlined "Oh please, stop this twit from Tweeting, someone" quoted a tweet in which she wrote she was hungover at work.

Much written this week about the new police.uk website which crashed under a massive weight of first day interest.

I watched as various members of our staff, trying to get a news line ready for the next day about city crime statistics spent most of the day staring at blank screens.

More than five million people an hour and 75,000 per minute were trying to log on.

Needless to say, today it's working fine.

It's one of those sites which will be of massive interest. Once.

Everyone will log on to see how their street rates and then forget about it and never log on again.

I suppose people might track it down again when moving house - but given the number of odd results, homeseekers should take the information there with a pinch of salt.

So, an interesting site, and at a cost of £300,000 to set up, pretty cost effective.

I have to say thought, that any criticism for the first day problems is wide of the mark - why on earth a cheapo new scheme should have to provide the server space for the entire country logging on at once - traffic never to be remotely repeated - is beyond me!

Nasa's planet-hunting telescope is finding whole new worlds of possibilities in the search for alien life, the space agency said today.

An early report from a cosmic census indicates that relatively small planets and stable multi-planet systems are far more plentiful than previous searches showed.

Nasa released new data today from its Kepler telescope on more than 1,000 possible new planets outside our solar system - more than doubling the count of what astronomers call exoplanets.

Below: This artist rendering provided by NASA, shows Kepler-11, a sun-like star around which six planets orbit.