It was on a recent break in Bali that we found out that our teenage son is an excellent swimmer. The discovery was a source of amazement, because, whether in the sea or a pool, Calvin only floats on his back, politely declining requests to get some exercise and show us his best freestyle and butterfly strokes. At the hotel in Nusa Dua, our 15-year-old spent all […]
LONDON Oil held near $53 a barrel on Friday, but was on course for its biggest weekly drop in a month due to doubts that an OPEC-led production cut will restore balance to an oversupplied market. Brent futures LCOc1 were at $53.01 a barrel at 1107 GMT, up 2 cents from their last close and set for a 5.15 percent weekly drop, their biggest fall since the […]
ROME The number of migrants crossing Niger to reach Libya has declined, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said on Friday, after Europe pledged Niger money to help it fight people-smuggling. The IOM monitors trucks carrying migrants at a desert crossroads in eastern Niger commonly used to reach Libya, where more than half a million have set out on flimsy boats for Europe in the past three […]
Although Google is processing more requests, it’s also producing data for a smaller share of them. Image: Google Government requests for Google user data in the second half of 2016 were the highest since the firm first reported the figures in 2009. As Google notes in its latest Transparency Report, it received 45,549 government requests for user data in the second half of 2016, of which about […]
© Seb Jarnot I arrive at La Méditerranée, a traditional fish restaurant in a literary quarter of the Left Bank, Paris, at 7pm to find its blue doors firmly bolted. Charlotte Rampling has just confirmed our reservation, but our dining slot appears to have fallen foul of that particularly French timetable that decrees that no civilised person would ever want to eat before 8pm. In a panic, […]
It was money that kept Bill O’Reilly in his bulletproof bully’s pulpit at Fox News despite sordid sex harassment claims dating back 13 years. And in the end, it was money — not morals — that catapulted him out. For two decades, O’Reilly has been the acid-tongued, anti-political correctness muse and megaphone of the populist right and scolder of the mainstream media — a role that crowned […]
PARIS French centrist Emmanuel Macron is set to come out on top in the first round of France’s presidential election on Sunday as far right leader Marine Le Pen fell further behind him in an Elabe poll published on Friday. However, neither is totally assured a spot in the May 7 runoff round as both conservative Francois Fillon and hard-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon were seen narrowing Macron […]
US mortgage group Ocwen has lost more than half its market value after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued it over “systemic” misconduct, a reminder of the power wielded by the Washington regulator that Republicans have vowed to rein in. Several states are also taking action as they prepare to revoke operating licenses for the New York-listed company, which was founded in 1988 and employs more than […]
BEIRUT Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and hardline rival Ebrahim Raisi were both approved to run in May’s presidential election by a government vetting body, while former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was disqualified, state media reported on Thursday. The approval of Rouhani, a moderate, and Raisi, a political hardliner thought to have the backing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sets up a showdown between rival political camps. Four […]
PARIS One policeman was killed and another wounded in a shooting incident in central Paris on Thursday night, a police source said. A person who fired on police on the Champs-Elysees shopping boulevard just days ahead of France’s presidential election has been killed, the source said. A police source also said there had been two assailants, and a witness told Reuters that one man got out of […]
Following years of acrimony between OPEC and the hedge fund community, which the cartel dismissed simply as “speculators”, things suddenly changed in 2016 when the two groups got so close, there were outright reports of collusion between the two on various occasions. We documented this last month in “Why OPEC Is Colluding With Hedge Funds.” However, as Reuters’ energy analyst John Kemp pointed out on twitter this […]
The exciting discovery of a giant nearby exoplanet has researchers wondering about the possibility of finding the first trace of extraterrestrial life. The massive super-Earth is located 40 light-years away from our home planet, in the Cetus (“Sea Monster”) constellation, and has been dubbed the “best place to look for signs of life beyond the solar system.” Telescopes around the world, including the HARPS instrument at La Silla […]
It’s springtime. Flowers are blooming, birds are chirping, and love is in the air. That can only mean one thing: It’s time to send pictures of your bits and pieces! If you’ve ever used your phone to send someone special a picture of your thing(s), you’re not alone. Data shows that sexting is a highly popular pastime enjoyed by men and women alike. As you […]
By Adam Jourdan | SHANGHAI SHANGHAI German sports apparel brand adidas AG (ADSGn.DE) expects its huge operating margin in China to shrink slightly in the long term, while its small U.S. margin grows markedly in the near term, its new chief executive officer said on Thursday. Kasper Rorsted, on his first visit to China since taking the helm in September, said adidas’ margin in Greater China of […]
By Pallavi Dewan and Nikhil Subba American Express Co’s (AXP.N) first-quarter profit fell less than expected as its card members spent more and the company expressed more confidence over its full-year results, amid fierce competition in the industry. AmEx’s shares rose 2.5 percent after the bell on Wednesday as the results and guidance indicated the company was starting to mitigate some of the impact of losing key […]
Fund managers are buying eurozone equities and shunning Wall Street, as a major survey of global money managers this month revealed the fifth-biggest rotation from US to European stocks since the start of monetary union in 1999. The survey of 203 fund managers by Bank of America Merrill Lynch showed a record number — a net 83 per cent — believe US stocks are overvalued and that […]
LONDON OPEC plans to meet with non-OPEC oil producers on the same day as its scheduled May 25 conference, sources familiar with the arrangements said, as they decide whether to extend supply cuts into the second half of the year. Ministers from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries will convene at their Vienna headquarters. Joint talks with non-OPEC oil ministers will also take place that day, […]
newslide Actor Kevin Spacey will host Broadway’s Tony Awards, the year’s honours for actors on stage This is the first time Spacey will host the event, which will take place in New York on June 11. Recent hosts Neil Patrick Harris, Hugh Jackman and James Corden all won raves from critics but apparently were unavailable to do the honours again this year. “I was their second choice […]
By Jose Cabezas and Nelson Renteria EL MOZOTE, El Salvador Survivors of 1981’s El Mozote massacre are closer than ever to justice after the reopening of an investigation begun more than a quarter-century ago into the army-led killing of about 1,000 people, casting light on a horrific symbol of the unaccountability for atrocities in El Salvador’s civil war. The killings went unpunished because of an amnesty law that […]
|By Saifur Rahman| Intex Technologies Ltd, an Indian technology accessories manufacturer with an annual turnover of US$1 billion, is investing INR 25 billion that will push its annual turnover ten-fold to US$10 billion in 5 years, a senior official told The Arabian Post. India is currently the world’s second-largest telecommunications market and has registered strong growth in the past decade and half.The total mobile services market revenue in […]
The near-5 per cent advance in the $20tn benchmark S&P 500 this year has been reliant on the performance of only a few dozen stocks — with gains by the likes of Apple and Facebook accounting for more than 20 per cent of the index’s climb. Ten stocks in the index, including ecommerce behemoth Amazon, Google owner Alphabet as well as the more defensive cigarette maker Philip […]
Last summer Betsy O’Donovan, the incoming Executive Director of The Daily Tar Heel, wrote an essay on Medium charting the dire financial situation of UNC-Chapel Hill’s student newspaper. It started pretty bluntly: “The Daily Tar Heel is a news organization, and we don’t dodge the facts: This 123-year-old institution has two years to figure out its finances.” The Daily Tar Heel, like many news organizations these days, […]
Microsoft’s Windows has long been the world’s most popular operating system, but not anymore. Windows is no longer on top. For the first time ever, Google’s Android mobile operating system has managed to trump Windows and become the world’s most popular OS. This further goes to prove how mobile has soared and in today’s mobile-driven world, Android rules the game. Android Dethrones Windows Web analytics firm StatCounter […]
Greek ministers and the country’s bailout monitors were on Tuesday trying to strike a deal on the pension and labour market reforms needed to unlock further financial aid. With the clock ticking down to more than €6bn in debt repayments that Athens must make in July, negotiators say an accord on the main elements of the policy package must be reached soon to stave off the risk […]
