MANILA Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Wednesday he felt like a saint as the incoming U.S. president wanted to repair damaged bilateral relations between the two oldest security allies in this region. Duterte spoke on the phone with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump last Friday to congratulate him and renew close ties and friendship strained by Washington’s criticism on the rising death toll by Manila’s war on […]
Submitted by Brian Cloughley via Strategic-Culture.org, Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States are the world’s five «nuclear weapons states», a description officially recognised in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which lays down that «each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices…» It is apparent that the word ‘transfer’ involves ownership and not location, […]
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Monday he would name retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The following is a list of Republican Trump’s selections for top jobs in his administration. All the posts but that of national security adviser require Senate confirmation: DEFENCE SECRETARY: JAMES MATTIS Mattis is a retired Marine Corps general known for his tough talk, […]
Following a successful listing on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) on November 17 with a market capitalisation of AU$23 million, conversational commerce company Flamingo is now looking at Australia as a key market, with online lending marketplace DirectMoney being announced as its first local client. Born in Australia and based in the US, Flamingo is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that provides an “intelligent guided selling platform” to […]
Small wind farm with several turbines. Credit: sprisi /www.pixelio.de Wind energy has been remarkably successful in providing an increasing share of cheap renewable energy. But can this trend continue to supply more and more renewable energy for decades to come? A new study published by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, lowers the expectations of wind energy when used at large scales. […]
5G subscriptions are forecast to reach 20 million by 2022 in the Middle East and North East Africa, according to new research from tech giant Ericsson. Its Mobility Report for the Middle East and North East Africa also said mobile subscriptions are growing steadily across the region. They are expected to reach 690 million by the end of 2016, making up to 8 percent of the global […]
By Greg Torode and Marius Zaharia | HONG KONG/SINGAPORE HONG KONG/SINGAPORE As the impounding of Singaporean troop carriers in Hong Kong exposes rising tensions between China and Singapore, the Lion City is unlikely to budge on core security interests concerning Beijing – its military relationship with Taiwan, worries over the South China Sea and its hosting of the U.S. military. Singaporean officials, retired military officers and analysts […]
On Nov. 10, 2016, scientists on NASA’s IceBridge mission photographed an oblique view of a massive rift in the Antarctic Peninsula’s Larsen C ice shelf. Icebridge, an airborne survey of polar ice, completed an eighth consecutive Antarctic deployment on Nov. 18. Source link
Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto Neural networks, machine-learning systems, predictive analytics, speech recognition, natural-language understanding and other components of what’s broadly defined as ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) are currently undergoing a boom: research is progressing apace, media attention is at an all-time high, and organisations are increasingly implementing AI solutions in pursuit of automation-driven efficiencies. The first thing to establish is what we’re not talking about, which is human-level AI […]
By Michelle Nichols | UNITED NATIONS UNITED NATIONS The U.N. Security Council imposed new sanctions on North Korea on Wednesday aimed at cutting the Asian country’s annual export revenue by a quarter in response to Pyongyang’s fifth and largest nuclear test in September. The 15-member council unanimously adopted a resolution to slash North Korea’s biggest export, coal, by about 60 percent with an annual sales cap of […]
16.6MW of new solar power generation capacity doubles UAE’s total contribution to Mauritania’s clean energy output Abu Dhabi, UAE, 29 November 2016 Eight new rural solar energy projects have been completed, and are now operational, across the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, in western North Africa, doubling the UAE’s total contribution to the country’s clean energy capacity to 31.6 megawatts (MW). Delivered by Masdar, the Abu Dhabi Future […]
By Andrea Shalal | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON The United States has told China it will not recognize an exclusion zone in the South China Sea and would view such a move as “destabilizing,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work said on Wednesday. U.S. officials have expressed concern that an international court ruling expected in the coming weeks on a case brought by the Philippines against China over […]
As mourners carried the coffin of a slain Hezbollah commander, they moved quickly to wipe away blood still dripping from his body — it had been washed in haste as it was rushed from the battlefields of Aleppo to its final resting place in Lebanon. While Russian war planes and bombs have dominated headlines about outside intervention in Syria’s five-year conflict, thousands of those fighting on the […]
Zayed Future Energy Prize leads discussion on innovation for sustainable development in UAE during Innovation Week in Masdar City Abu Dhabi-UAE: 24 November 2016 The Zayed Future Energy Prize convened a majlis of business, science, technology and youth leaders in Masdar City today, to explore ways in which innovation can unlock potential in the economy to sustainably deliver on the goals of the UAE Vision 2021. Entitled […]
Russia has conducted successful intercontinental ballistic missile tests intended for its Barguzin “nuclear-train” program. The tests for Russia’s “railway-based combat rocket system” took place on Plesetsk cosmodrone two weeks ago, Interfax reports and were “fully successful” according to a military source, which would “pave the way for further flight tests.” The tests were held to test the missiles’ launch readiness, Russian press added. A BZhRK with a […]
South Korea on Wednesday signed a military intelligence-sharing pact with Japan aimed at better managing the threat from North Korea’s increasingly active missile and nuclear weapons programmes. The deal, which comes as Seoul scrambles to adjust to the region’s shifting geopolitical landscape, has faced fierce domestic opposition from critics who slam it as an example of embattled President Park Geun-hye’s unilateral decision-making. Ms Park is embroiled in […]
In late October, when it was still conventional wisdom that Hillary was “guaranteed” to win the presidency, the WaPo explained that among the neo-con, foreign policy “elites” of the Pentagon, a feeling of calm content had spread: after all, it was just a matter of time before the “pacifist” Obama was out, replaced by the more hawkish Hillary. As the WaPo reported, “there is one corner of […]
While relations between Russia and the US may finally be on the mend following a phone call between Putin and Trump, in which the Russian leader expressed hope for a reset and renormalization of the current “unsatisfactory” bilateral relations between the two countries, treatment of Russia in Europe remains on the downswing. The latest example of this took place on Friday when military aircraft with Swiss fighter […]
Held in Bangkok, Thailand, the conference theme for 2016 is “Collaboration in the Digital Economy” and featured sessions on collaborative regulation, smart sustainable cities, fostering SME innovation, gender inclusive development and digital financial services for financial inclusion LAGOS, Nigeria, November 17, 2016/ Nigeria’s government and private sectors have made a pitch to foreign investors at the 2016 International Telecommunication Union conference, Telecoms World, where they presented the […]
BEIRUT/MOSCOW/ANKARA: Backed by huge Russian support, the Syrian army captured the Dahiyet Assad district of western Aleppo on Saturday, reversing all the gains made by rebels two weeks into their counter-attack against government-held areas, a war monitor and rebel official said. In a related development, a flotilla of Russian warships is ready in the eastern Mediterranean off the Syrian coast after being sent to reinforce Russia’s military […]
MOSCOW: The Russian Defense Ministry said on Saturday it would need the UN mission in Syria to formally confirm its ability to deliver aid to eastern Aleppo before Moscow agreed to any new humanitarian pauses in fighting in the shattered Syrian city.Moscow says previous temporary cease-fires on the ground, to allow aid deliveries and the evacuation of the wounded and civilians, have come to nothing because rebels […]
Conflicted Care When Dr. Rosecrans worked briefly at the Navy’s hospital at Guantánamo as a young psychiatrist in 1999, it was a sleepy assignment. She saw only a few outpatients each week, and there was no psychiatric ward on the base, which was being downsized. But after Al Qaeda’s 2001 terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the subsequent American-led invasion of Afghanistan, detainees began […]
UAE. Middle East businesses embracing digital transformations in order to gain business advantage and drive innovation are being warned to place digital trust and cyber security at the heart of such change. The advice has been issued by two new senior experts in IT, digital transformation and cyber security appointed by PA Consulting Group Middle East and North Africa as part of an aggressive recruitment phase to […]
Thanks to a new deep learning system called Caffe2Go, Facebook now lets users of its mobile app transform videos with artwork-inspired special effects in real time. The platform enables such on-the-fly style transfers by dramatically improving how efficiently artificial intelligence (AI) processes images and videos. With the help of Caffe2Go, users of Facebook’s iOS or Android app can quickly change the look of their photos or videos […]
