VIENNA Austria will hold a snap parliamentary election this year, probably in the autumn, Chancellor Christian Kern told ORF TV on Sunday, hours before the conservative party in his coalition was due to meet to choose a new leader. Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz, who is widely expected to take over as leader of the conservative People’s Party, has said he wants to hold a snap election, which […]
North Korea’s conducted its latest weapons test on Sunday, presenting South Korea’s Moon Jae-in with his first foreign policy challenge and raising fears that Pyongyang may have developed a new kind of missile. Japan’s defence minister said the missile had reached an altitude of 2,000km on its 700km journey, potentially indicating a new type of rocket. David Wright, a physicist and missile expert, wrote on the All […]
PARIS French President-elect Emmanuel Macron appointed Alexis Kohler on Sunday as secretary general of the Elysee palace, the top administrative role among the presidential staff. Kohler, a 44-year old graduate of France’s elite ENA administrative school, was Macron’s chief of staff when the incoming president was economy minister and has worked for the Treasury. Philippe Etienne, a 61-year old former ambassador to Berlin and also an ENA […]
India’s $1.6tn stock market broke new ground last week, with the benchmark index hitting an all-time high as confidence builds that the government’s reform agenda will strengthen growth and corporate earnings. But the stock market’s 14.9 per cent rally since January 1 has divided opinion among fund managers who disagree over whether Indian equities can make further gains. “The most common question that I am asked by […]
Narwhals are known as the unicorns of the sea because of their distinct tusk. The purpose of this long tooth has been unclear but a new drone video of the marine mammals that were taken in Tremblay Sound in Nunavat, Canada helps unveil this mystery. What Are Narwhals? Narwhals are a species of toothed whale that are characterized by their long tusks that can grow as long as […]
BEIJING British finance minister Philip Hammond said on Sunday Britain is a natural partner for China’s new Silk Road programme, and as it leaves the European Union (EU) it wants more trade with the world not less. China is one of the countries Britain hopes to sign a free trade agreement with once it leaves the EU, and London and Beijing have been keen to show that […]
Emmanuel Macron will formally become French president on Sunday and will immediately be put to the test by challenges from choosing a prime minister to pressing Germany to back a tougher EU stance on trade and investment. Mr Macron, a 39-year-old Europhile pro-business centrist, is taking over a country on edge after an unpopular Socialist presidency and a rollercoaster campaign marked by the qualification of the far-right […]
By Ju-min Park and Jack Kim | SEOUL SEOUL North Korea fired a ballistic missile on Sunday in defiance of calls to rein in its weapons programme, South Korean and U.S. officials said, days after a new leader took office in the South, pledging to engage it in dialogue. The U.S. Pacific Command said it was assessing the type of missile but it was “not consistent with […]
We’ve all know how security is among the top – if not actually the top – concern for CIOs when making decisions about moving workloads into the cloud. Less often spoken of is visibility: the ability to view in detail and to manage those assets when they’re parked on top of someone else’s infrastructure – whether that infrastructure is simply a datacentre facility or a hosted server. […]
LONDON British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party maintained a strong lead over the main opposition Labour Party, ahead of a June 8 national election, according to an ORB opinion poll for The Telegraph. The Conservatives were at 46 percent, unchanged from ORB’s previous poll, against Labour’s 32 percent, up 1 percent. The poll put the centrist Liberal Democrats on 8 percent and the anti-European Union UK […]
TUNIS Several thousand Tunisians marched through central Tunis on Saturday to protest against a bill that would grant amnesty to businessmen accused of corruption when autocrat Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali was in power. Critics of the Economic Reconciliation bill say it is a step back from the spirit of Tunisia’s 2011 revolution to oust Ben Ali but government officials say it is a way get the businessmen […]
Good morning. Here’s our morning roundup of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here. Washington was convulsed last night by icy nastiness, harsh language and people crying foul. Oh, that was the deciding game in a hockey playoff between the historically hard-luck Washington Capitals and Pittsburgh Penguins, just one of three major sports distractions […]
By William Schomberg | BARI, Italy BARI, Italy U.S. President Donald Trump’s economic policies risk creating growth that mostly benefits the rich and aggravates income inequality in the United States, Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton said. Trump was swept to power on promises of help for poorer Americans but Deaton said his proposals to roll back regulations on finance and industry and cut healthcare benefits would […]
Investors wiped $4.6bn from the market value of the US department store sector in the space of two days this week, as concern mounted about sliding sales and the effects of online competition. The consequences are spilling into the real estate and derivatives markets, and the latest bad news has intensified the focus on the sector ahead of more earnings reports from retail heavyweights next week. Five […]
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday he wants to move quickly to nominate a new FBI director to replace James Comey, who he fired this week. Trump told reporters traveling with him on Air Force One that he may be able to make his decision on the Federal Bureau of Investigation head before he leaves in his first foreign trip later next […]
Dr Ting Tiong Choon (right) with Sarawak DAP chairman Chong Chieng Jen and Sarawak DAP deputy chairman Chiew Chiu Sing (left) in Kuching May 12, 2017. — Picture by Sulok TawieKUALA LUMPUR, May 13 — A DAP leader who was disqualified as Pujut state representative by the Sarawak State Legislative Assembly yesterday may also be stripped of his Malaysian citizenship, a lawyer said today. Constitutional lawyer Nizam […]
Europe’s investment community has barely had time to breathe a sigh of relief following Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presidential elections before starting to fret about other latent threats to the eurozone. Some investors have hailed the election — in which Mr Macron, a pro-EU liberal defeated Marine Le Pen, the Eurosceptic rightwing candidate — as a sign that Europe’s economic recovery remains on track. This […]
Mother Jones on Friday announced a half-million dollar crowdfunding campaign to investigate any connections between the Trump administration and Russia, asking for reader support to “make sure truth prevails over power.” To raise money for the project, which Mother Jones is calling “Trumpocracy: The Russia Connection,” the bimonthly magazine is trying to sign up at least 1,000 new sustaining donors at $15 per month. They’ve already lined […]
If you are an investor wanting a safe, unexciting asset to make a bit of money, avoid South Africa’s rand. It is not that you cannot make money trading the currency. You very much can, and you might make it big and quickly. The problem is you can also lose much more than you gain and at a frightening pace. To play the rand, investors need not […]
The three beefy men sharing a laugh looked like old friends, not geopolitical adversaries. A smiling Donald Trump welcomed Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and its US ambassador Sergey Kislyak to the Oval Office on Wednesday, just a day after the president had fired the man investigating Moscow’s role in helping him enter the White House. The extraordinary scene was just the latest sign that Mr Trump […]
By Rory Carroll | LOS ANGELES LOS ANGELES Whether U.S. President Donald Trump will travel to Peru in September to promote Los Angeles’ 2024 Olympics bid is an open question but many believe the controversial leader would do more harm than good as the city vies with Paris for the Games. Trump’s executive order to temporarily ban travel from six Muslim-majority countries, which is currently being reviewed […]
Donald Trump capped a week of Watergate flashbacks in Washington on Friday, as he appeared to channel the ghost of Richard Nixon by threatening his recently sacked FBI director with the release of “tapes” of their private conversation. In a series of irate tweets, Mr Trump warned the former agency chief against leaking to the press amid conflicting accounts of events leading to the director’s sacking this […]
By Costas Pitas and Carlos Ruano | LONDON/MADRID LONDON/MADRID A global cyberattack leveraging hacking tools widely believed by researchers to have been developed by the U.S. National Security Agency hit international shipper FedEx, disrupted Britain’s health system and infected computers in dozens of other countries on Friday. Russian cyber security software maker Kaspersky Lab said its researchers had observed more than 45,000 attacks in 74 countries as […]
By Philip Pullella and Sergio Goncalves | FATIMA, Portugal FATIMA, Portugal Pope Francis, visiting one of Catholicism’s most famous sanctuaries, on Friday prayed for an end to wars he said were lacerating the world and urged the faithful to “tear down all walls” to spread justice and peace. At the start of a trip that will see him on Portuguese soil for less than 24 hours, Francis […]
