Samsung, whose booth at this year’s Mobile World Congress is shown here, is unveiling a new personal assistant ‘Bixby’ that will challenge rivals including Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa Samsung announced Monday that a voice-powered digital assistant named “Bixby” will debut with a flagship Galaxy S8 smartphone set to be unveiled by the South Korean consumer electronics giant. Bixby enters a crowded field of digital assistants powered […]
OK, hands up, who knows what High-Level Data Link Control (HDLC) is? It’s an archaic networking data framing protocol that’s used in modems, X.25, frame-relay, ISDN, and other now uncommon networking technologies. I know it because I used to work with them back in the day. You’ll get to know it now because a researcher discovered a security hole hidden within the Linux kernel driver that implements […]
SEOUL Ousted South Korean President Park Geun-hye apologised to the country on Tuesday as she arrived at prosecutors’ offices for questioning as a criminal suspect in a widening corruption investigation that has already cost her the presidency. “I am sorry to the people. I will faithfully cooperate with questioning,” Park said in front of media at the steps of the office building, in her first comments directly […]
Rhetoric has recently trumped reality. It has become a misconceived bit of common “knowledge” that the United States of America is a bastion of free trade. Little could be further from the truth. The “freest” nation on earth, as we are taught to believe, imposes a staggering number of tariffs, import and export bans, sanctions and embargoes. Yet somehow “free trade” is blamed for the financial ills […]
By Matt Spetalnick and David Brunnstrom | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON The Trump administration is considering sweeping sanctions aimed at cutting North Korea off from the global financial system as part of a broad review of measures to counter Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile threat, a senior U.S. official said on Monday. The sanctions would be part of a multi-pronged approach of increased economic and diplomatic pressure – especially on […]
By Sarah N. Lynch | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON Shareholder activists are pushing back against a major business trade group’s request that the White House use its influence on the U.S. securities regulator to make it harder to get governance, political or environmental issues onto corporate ballots, according to a letter seen by Reuters on Monday. Company boards and CEOs have increasingly faced requests by investors to include various […]
Bollywood A-lister Anushka Sharma has dismissed reports in the Indian media that her latest film, the Punjab-set romantic comedy Phillauri, was inspired by animated fantasy Corpse Bride. “I have seen those stories,” says Sharma. “I think what happens is when people see a film the first thing all they do is think of another film, and because there is a ghost and a love story, it is […]
Airline passengers travelling from eight Middle Eastern nations, including Jordan and Egypt, will be barred from carrying large electronic devices into the main cabin under new regulations from the Trump administration. The rules, which come into effect on Tuesday, also apply to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to a US official. Passengers from the eight countries will have to check laptop computers and other […]
By Steve Holland | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi thanked U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday for removing Iraq from a travel ban affecting several Muslim-majority countries and said he sought stronger cooperation in fighting Islamic State militants. The two leaders sat down face to face at the White House for the first time since Trump took office on Jan. 20. Abadi is trying to […]
NEW YORK Eric Trump, the 33-year-old middle son of U.S. President Donald Trump, said on Monday that his wife Lara was expecting to give birth to their first child in September. “We are adding a boy to #TeamTrump,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “It’s been an amazing year. We are blessed!” Eric Trump and his wife, formerly Lara Yunaska, married in November 2014 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in […]
ATHENS Greek police intercepted eight suspect packages at a postal sorting centre in Athens on Monday, after the dispatch of booby-trapped deliveries to the International Monetary Fund in Paris and the German Finance Ministry. Authorities were on the lookout after the two packages laced with gunpowder slipped through checks last week. A Greek urban guerrilla group that sent letter bombs to foreign embassies in Athens and European […]
St. Stephen Middle School student Lakaysha Governor works on her Chromebook on Monday, March 20, 2017, on a school bus recently outfitted with WiFi by tech giant Google, as College of Charleston professor RoxAnn Stalvey looks on in St. Stephen, S.C. Lakysha is one of nearly 2,000 students in South Carolina’s rural Berkeley County benefiting from a grant from Google, which on Monday unveiled one of its […]
The Authority marks the day with a range of internal and external initiatives to spread joy inside the Authority and beyond to the whole community 20 March 2017 Dubai, UAE – Dubai Culture & Arts Authority, the Emirate’s dedicated entity for culture, arts and heritage, has celebrated International Happiness Day 2017 with a range of internal and external initiatives that have spread joy inside the Authority and […]
By Marwa Rashad and Celine Aswad | RIYADH/DUBAI RIYADH/DUBAI Saudi Arabia plans to tighten restrictions on foreign workers to pressure companies into hiring more Saudi citizens and reduce unemployment among Saudis, government sources said on Monday. The new policy could help the conservative kingdom achieve one goal of economic reforms launched last year to ease joblessness among Saudis from the current 12.1 percent to 9 percent by […]
By Julia Fioretti | BRUSSELS BRUSSELS The European Commission wants to scrap restrictions placed on EU airlines leasing planes and crew from U.S. carriers, to resolve a long-standing dispute between the two sides. The leasing of crewed planes from another airline – known as wet-leasing – is a common practice in the industry and the 10-year-old EU-U.S. Open Skies aviation services agreement envisaged a liberal regime for […]
NEW YORK // A chilly climate isn’t keeping Norway from basking in the glow of being named the world’s happiest country. It surged from fourth place in last year’s UN assessment all the way to the top spot, according to the World Happiness Report 2017 released on Monday. Other top countries on the list included Nordic neighbours Denmark and Iceland, as well as nearby Switzerland. “All of […]
When Jhumpa Lahiri decided to learn Italian, she took the plunge. The Namesake author moved her entire family to Rome in 2013 and spent several years refusing to read or write another word in English. Born to Bengali-speaking Indian parents in London and raised in the United States, 49-year-old Lahiri decided the only way to fully immerse herself in an unfamiliar language was to renounce her own. […]
When Tim Armour graduated from Middlebury College, a liberal arts institution in Vermont, he faced a conundrum. He could either accept a graduate programme slot at a West Coast investment group, or go and run a windsurf shop in Florida. Because he loved to windsurf but did not want to turn down a more sensible job, he asked the asset manager whether he could put off the […]
I am a writing teacher, not a beat reporter. No one calls me “scoop.” So it was fun last September to help break the news that the Daily Beast was about to publish a new piece of work from Jimmy Breslin. It was a pleasure to analyze the essay, part of a fictionalized memoir, and reflect on the work of the famous/infamous New York City columnist, who […]
By Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON Democrats raised questions on Monday about whether Neil Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee, would rule against abortion rights and gun control while favouring corporations as his Senate confirmation hearing began, with the court’s ideological balance at stake. Judiciary Committee Republicans praised Gorsuch, the conservative appeals court judge from Colorado nominated by Trump on Jan. 31, […]
It has been clear for months that Mosul will be liberated. And sure enough, Iraqi forces backed by U.S. assistance and firepower are now moving to clear the remaining western neighborhoods of Iraq’s second-biggest city. Islamic State leaders have reportedly fled the city and military operations will soon be complete. Success in Mosul is a testament to the determination of the Iraqi forces that have lead this […]
WASHINGTON FBI Director James Comey on Monday confirmed the agency was investigating possible Russian government efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election including any links between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Moscow. Comey told a congressional hearing on Russian activities that the probe “includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any […]
NEW YORK Billionaire philanthropist David Rockefeller, former head of Chase Manhattan Corp and patriarch of one of the most famous and influential American families, died on Monday, a family spokesman said. He was 101. Rockefeller, who reportedly gave away nearly $2 billion in his lifetime, died in his sleep of congestive heart failure at his home in Pocantico Hills, New York, spokesman Fraser Seitel said in a […]
BOSTON The football jersey that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady wore in last month’s Super Bowl victory in Houston, Texas, which disappeared hours after the stunning come-from-behind win, has been found in Mexico, the National Football League and police said Monday. Both the jersey worn in Brady’s fifth league championship over the Atlanta Falcons, and the one he’d worn two years earlier when the team topped […]
