|By Arabian Post Staff| Saudi Arabia unveiled a $237 billion budget for 2017, an 8 percent increase from 2016, with projections of a record 33 percent decrease in the Kingdom’s national deficit. “Our economy is firm and it has sufficient strength to cope with the current economic and financial challenges,” said King Salman bin Abdulaziz.. “We have sought through this budget and its programs to improve the […]
By Lisa Barrington and Angus McDowall | BEIRUT BEIRUT Syrian rebels shelled Aleppo and air strikes resumed around the city on Friday as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his allies said the insurgents’ withdrawal from the city could pave the way towards a political solution for the country. A day after the last rebels left their remaining pocket of territory in the city, the Syrian Observatory for […]
By Melissa Fares and Andrew Osborn | WEST PALM BEACH, Fla./MOSCOW WEST PALM BEACH, Fla./MOSCOW U.S. President-elect Donald Trump upped the stakes on Friday in a back-and-forth exchange with President Vladimir Putin over nuclear weapons that tested the Republican’s promises to improve relations with Russia. Offering a glimpse of how he might conduct diplomacy after taking office on Jan. 20, Trump reportedly welcomed a nuclear arms race […]
RAMALLAH, West Bank A U.N. Security Council vote to adopt a resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlements marks “a day of victory,” a senior Palestinian official said on Friday. “This is a day of victory for international law, a victory for civilized language and negotiation and a total rejection of extremist forces in Israel,” Chief Palestinian Negotiator Saeb Erekat told Reuters. “The international community has told […]
Yubico announced its plans to support Microsoft’s Windows Hello platform back in September at the Ignite conference, with the goal of bringing strong, hardware-based authentication to Windows 10. Finally, after nearly two months of waiting, the YubiKey for Windows Hello app has landed in the Windows Store. It’s a strong solution for retrofitting the additional protection of Windows Hello on systems that don’t have support for facial […]
National Development & Investment Company (ASAAS) has announced plans to build a 1.5 million square metre entertainment and leisure destination to be built in Barka, a coastal city in the north of the country. The company said the project will feature an integrated theme park, a wildlife and waterpark, an equestrian centre and edutainment centre as well as several hotels, a residential zone and retail areas. Khalid […]
The U.S. Department of Justice has subpoenaed a high-profile whistleblower in its criminal investigation into Wells Fargo & Co’s (WFC.N) opening of accounts without customer permission. U.S. prosecutors in San Francisco have asked Wells Fargo banker Yesenia Guitron, who lost a private lawsuit against the fourth-largest lender, to testify before a grand jury in San Francisco on Tuesday, according to a subpoena dated Dec. 12, which was […]
If any global sound is on the verge of blowing up in 2017, it’s the pan-African mélange known as afrobeats. Or, depending on who you ask, afropop, afrofusion or afropolitan – but not to be confused with political Fela Kuti-style afrobeat (singular), nor with any of the traditional music that has tended to find its way into the “world music” section of western music shops. Rather, this […]
Just over six years ago, in December of 2010, we wrote “Charting America’s Transformation To A Part-Time Worker Society“, in which we predicted – and showed – that in light of the underlying changes resulting from the second great depression, whose full impacts remain masked by trillions in monetary stimulus and soon, perhaps fiscal, America is shifting from a traditional work force, one where the majority of […]
By Michelle Nichols | UNITED NATIONS UNITED NATIONS The Obama administration on Friday allowed the U.N. Security Council to adopt a resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlements, defying pressure from U.S. President-elect Donald Trump as well as Israel and several U.S. senators who urged Washington to use its veto. The resolution was put forward at the 15-member council for a vote on Friday by New Zealand, […]
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. Most of us can feel unavoidably like Mongo in Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles,” meaning a self-perception that “Mongo only pawn in game of life.” (YouTube) Yes, we all try to be philosophical but can lapse into merely being dim-witted, like […]
Dubai, United Arab Emirates- December 22, 2016-(ME NewsWire) Space Imaging Middle East (SIME) is pleased to announce that Crime Prediction- its latest predictive policing software- has been successfully launched by the Dubai Police force. The software, which is the first of its kind in the region, was developed in support of the UAE’s Smart Governance Initiative, and specifically designed to complement the Dubai Police force’s modernized approach […]
LONDON More than 4,000 homeless people in Britain are expected to use temporary shelters set up over Christmas by charity Crisis, which said the number of people sleeping rough was rising sharply. Staffed by an army of around 13,000 volunteers, the charity will provide food, shelter, haircuts, massages and dentistry services at shelters until Dec. 30. According to government statistics from 2015, more than 3,500 people sleep […]
BRUSSELS Belgian police found and neutralised a potential explosive device in a bag left outside an office used by a Turkish cultural association in Brussels on Friday. Police were called after a plastic bag was left in front of the building at around 1.30 p.m. (1230 GMT). Brussels prosecutors said the suspected device included gas cylinders and experts were still examining it to establish, for example, if […]
By Andrew Osborn and Vladimir Soldatkin | MOSCOW MOSCOW Russia’s Vladimir Putin said on Friday he was unfazed by President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to boost the U.S. nuclear arsenal, praising Trump for being in touch with U.S. public opinion while branding the Democrats sore election losers. Speaking at his annual news conference in Moscow, the Russian president said earlier comments he had made about his country’s own […]
Wall Street treaded water in light pre-holiday trading on Friday, with the three major indexes on track to post weekly gains. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which came within spitting distance of the historic 20,000 mark earlier this week, looked set to record its seventh straight weekly gains. “There’s really nothing to move the market one way or another,” said Mohannad Aama, managing director at Beam Capital […]
Aamir Khan’s new film Dangal is a weighty biopic in more ways than one. One of Bollywood’s most acclaimed actors, he put on a staggering 27 kilograms to play the role of former wrestler Mahavir Singh – then shed it all in just five months to shoot scenes of a younger, fitter version of the character during his wrestling heyday. Dangal, which is now showing at UAE […]
Photo Passengers leaving the hijacked Afriqiyah Airways plane at Malta International Airport on Friday. Credit Matthew Mirabelli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images CAIRO — All 109 passengers and crew members on board a hijacked Libyan airliner en route to the capital, Tripoli, were released on Friday, hours after two men claiming to be carrying explosives forced the plane to divert to Malta, Malta’s prime minister said. The hijackers, […]
By Wa Lone and Simon Lewis | YANGON YANGON Before entering the courthouse in the capital of eastern Myanmar’s Shan State, Maw Maw Oo said it was ominous that several blue police vans were already waiting in the parking lot. “But I don’t want to guess what the court’s decision will be,” she told a Reuters reporter by phone. Hours later she was jailed for a month […]
VALLETTA All passengers were freed from a hijacked plane in Malta on Friday, but some crew remained on board with hijackers believed to be loyalists of late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The aircraft was on an internal flight in Libya on Friday morning when it was diverted to Malta, 500 km (300 miles) north of the Libyan coast, after a man told crew he had a hand […]
Fotowatio Renewable Ventures (FRV), a developer of large-scale solar power plants and part of Saudi-based Abdul Latif Jameel Energy, has been awarded a 30-year 300MW solar project in Mexico. With this build-operate-own agreement, FRV said it is extending its global footprint into the Mexican market at a rate of $26.99/MWh for the first 15 years of the project. The construction of the plant will begin in mid-2018 […]
Shortly after the Berlin truck terrorism suspect Anis Amri was killed in a shoot out with Milan police, railway tickets found on Amri’s body showed he had traveled from Chambery in south-eastern France to Turin and then on to Milan, according to Italy’s Ansa. Which is strange because while he kept ticket stubs, he had virtually nothing else on him: Milan police said Amri was carrying few […]
MOSCOW President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that Russia, Iran, Turkey and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had all agreed that the Kazakh capital of Astana should be the venue for new Syrian peace talks. Russia, Iran and Turkey held talks in Moscow on Tuesday after which they said they were ready to help broker a Syrian peace deal. Putin has proposed holding the negotiations in Kazakhstan, a […]
WASHINGTON U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, asked for clarification his Thursday Twitter post about nuclear weapons, said: “Let it be an arms race,” MSNBC said on Friday. “We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all,” Trump said in an interview with MSNBC, the network reported, one day after the president-elect called for an expansion of U.S. nuclear capabilities in a tweet that alarmed nonproliferation experts. […]
