Ford has spent the last few years transforming itself from a car company into a technology and transportation company. Ford still wants to sell cars, but increasingly the company focuses on how those vehicles interact with city infrastructure, other vehicles, and the passengers themselves. One of the executives leading that imitative is Don Butler, Director of Connected Vehicles and Services at Ford. I spoke with […]
By Emily Stephenson and Steve Holland | NATIONAL HARBOR, Md./WASHINGTON NATIONAL HARBOR, Md./WASHINGTON President Donald Trump said he would make a massive budget request for one of the “greatest military buildups in American history” on Friday in a feisty, campaign-style speech extolling robust nationalism to eager conservative activists. Trump used remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an organization that gave him one of his first […]
If you’ve read the latest headlines about Britain’s tech industry, you’d think the country hadn’t be rocked by the greatest political and economic uncertainty since the Second World War. Not only are UK startups raising record amounts of funding year on year, but tech giants like Amazon are investing and doubling down on the UK economy, as if the mood music was taken straight from a dance scene […]
By Michelle Martin and Thorsten Severin | BERLIN BERLIN German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives held a narrow opinion poll lead on Friday over the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), whose support has surged in recent weeks. The Ipsos poll put the conservative bloc at 32 percent while the SPD, enjoying a revival in fortunes since nominating former European Parliament President Martin Schulz as its candidate to replace Merkel, […]
Saudi Arabia’s King Salman starts a month-long Asian tour on Sunday to build ties with the world’s fastest growing importers of Saudi oil and promote investment opportunities, including the sale of a stake in its giant state firm Saudi Aramco. The octogenarian monarch, who has overseen the launch of an ambitious economic reform plan since his accession two years ago, is expected to visit Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan […]
Battery-operated medical devices implanted in human bodies have saved countless lives. A common implant, the cardioverter defibrillator, sends a jolt of electricity to the heart when needed, preventing a heart attack or heart failure. While patients’ lives are improved by this technology, if the device causes an infection or the battery needs to be replaced, more invasive procedures are necessary. Mehdi Kiani is seeking a better solution. […]
By SOPHENG CHEANG, Associated Press PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Cambodia needs more than $400 million in aid to remove by 2025 all of the land mines that are a legacy of years of civil war, the country’s prime minister said Friday. Prime Minister Hun Sen said in a statement marking his nation’s Mine Awareness Day that the mines remain a threat and kill or maim nearly 100 […]
RIYADH Saudi Arabia’s King Salman starts a month-long Asian tour on Sunday to build ties with the world’s fastest growing importers of Saudi oil and promote investment opportunities, including the sale of a stake in its giant state firm Saudi Aramco. The octogenarian monarch, who has overseen the launch of an ambitious economic reform plan since his accession two years ago, is expected to visit Malaysia, Indonesia, […]
OSLO Aid agencies must get food to close to 3 million people by July to avert a famine in Africa’s Lake Chad region caused by drought, chronic poverty and Islamist insurgents Boko Haram, the United Nations said on Friday as it launched a funding appeal. International donors at a conference in Oslo pledged $672 million for the next three years in new money, $457 million of which […]
BERLIN All A400M transport plane engines affected by an order from European safety regulators have been inspected and no further cracks were found in their combustion chambers, a spokesman for the European planemaker Airbus (AIR.PA) said on Friday. “All the engines affected have been inspected and this is a unique incident,” Airbus spokesman Florian Taitsch told Reuters. Taitsch said the European Aviation Safety Agency ordered the inspections […]
The onset of the Trump era forced economists to confront their doubts about their usefulness to the public. They shared this ordeal with political forecasters, Democrats, logicians and journalists. Maybe we all deserved the anguish. Those economists who remain in a funk should nonetheless snap themselves out of it. One reason is that the sappy self-loathing economist is now embarrassingly cliché. Take it from a sappy self-loathing […]
By Balazs Koranyi | FRANKFURT FRANKFURT Devastated by the collapse of its iconic wine industry over a century ago, France may have inadvertently discovered the ideal way for central banks to aid an economy in crisis – open up the purse strings. The Great French Wine Blight, caused by an infestation of phylloxera aphids, laid waste to much of the French countryside in the second half of […]
As a journalism professor, Louise Kiernan often talks with her students about jobs. On Thursday, she talked with her investigative journalism class about her own new job in investigative journalism. Kiernan, an associate professor and head of the social justice and investigative program at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, was named the first editor in chief of ProPublica Illinois earlier this week. “My students are […]
By Mubasher Bukhari | LAHORE, Pakistan LAHORE, Pakistan Pakistani officials on Friday said a blast that killed 10 people at a shopping centre in the eastern city of Lahore was most probably an accident caused by a gas leak, not a bomb, as initially described. Panic gripped the city on Thursday after the blast at an upscale market, which also wounded 32 people. Soon after, a burst […]
YANGON Around 100 Buddhist monks and nationalists in Myanmar staged a protest against Thailand on Friday, denouncing the government of the neighbouring country for its actions against a temple that has defied orders to hand over a wanted monk. For the past week, Thai police and soldiers have surrounded the Dhammakaya temple outside the capital, Bangkok, to try to bring in the former head abbot who is […]
Alphabet contends that a manager at its autonomous car subsidiary Waymo took technical data with him when he left to launch a competing venture that went on to become Otto, Uber’s self-driving vehicle unit The race to develop self-driving vehicles took a new turn on Thursday when Google’s parent company Alphabet filed a lawsuit against Uber, accusing it of stealing technology. Alphabet contends that a manager at […]
BEIJING China on Friday dismissed renewed pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump over its role in North Korea, saying the crux of the matter was a dispute between Washington and Pyongyang. Trump told Reuters in an interview on Thursday that China could solve the national security challenge posed by North Korea “very easily if they want to”, turning up pressure on Beijing to exert more influence to […]
TOKYO Asian shares took a breather on Friday, slipping from 1-1/2-year highs as material shares were hit by sudden falls in copper and other commodity prices while investors assessed Washington’s stance on tax and currency policies. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS was down 0.5 percent, giving back part of this week’s gains, though it is likely to log its fifth straight weekly advance. […]
Submitted by Daniel Mitchell via The Foundation for Economic Education, Early last month, in a column on my hopes and fears for 2017, I fretted about fiscal chaos in Italy leading to default and bailouts. Simply stated, I fear that Italy, along with certain other “Club Med” nations, has passed the point of no return in terms of big government, demographic decline, and societal dependency. And this […]
Google has announced that it has cracked the Secured Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) cryptographic function, marking a milestone that spells both danger and opportunity for the computing world. The unprecedented feat was achieved through the real-world collision attack on the cryptographic algorithm, which led to the production of two PDF files that contain similar SHA-1 signature. What Is SHA-1? As a mathematical algorithm, the SHA-1 is capable […]
Should we try to time the market? And has the boom in passive investments brought any problems in its wake? The problems are linked and urgent. The move from traditional actively managed funds to passive indexed funds, which aim merely to track and index and reduce costs, continues to intensify. Meanwhile, if ever there was a point when it might seem right to time the market, and […]
By Marja Novak | LJUBLJANA LJUBLJANA Slovenia permitted same-sex marriages for the first time from Friday under a law giving gay couples largely the same rights as heterosexuals though barring them from jointly adopting children. The head of the unit in charge of weddings in Slovenia’s second largest city Maribor, Ksenija Klampfer, told Reuters the first lesbian wedding would take place there on Saturday. “We are very […]
Tesla Tesla has revealed plans to construct a total of five Gigafactories to cater to increased solar panel and electric vehicle (EV) battery demands. In a letter to shareholders (.PDF), the EV manufacturer, founded by entrepreneur Elon Musk, Tesla said the company plans to finalize the locations for at least two more Gigafactories, if not three. “Later this year, we expect to finalize locations for Gigafactories 3, […]
So much for sticking “nuclear weapons” in carriers’ dumb pipes. Shine, last year’s enfant terrible of mobile ad blocking is pivoting (again!) — in both tone of voice and business model. It’s also rebranding to, er, Rainbow. So, to keep tabs, since 2011 this Disrupt startup battlefield alum has moved from trying to sell mobile antivirus (Shine Security), to threatening network-level mobile ad blocking (Shine Technologies), to — its latest pivot — […]
