The US Supreme Court has thrown out a $399m patent damages award against Samsung to Apple, in a unanimous verdict in favour of the Korean electronics group. The five-year-old case between the two smartphone market leaders could now continue for much longer, after the justices ordered the lower Federal Circuit court of appeals to reconsider the basis upon which the damages were originally calculated. While the decision does not […]
A Turkish-Arab fund plans to spend up to about 300 million euros ($322 million) to redevelop a luxury seaside resort outside Greece’s capital Athens, bringing significant foreign investment into the cash-strapped country, the fund said on Tuesday. Greece concluded in October the sale of a 90 percent stake in the Astir Palace hotel complex to the Jermyn Street Real Estate Fund as part of a key privatisation […]
DUBAI An investigative body set up by the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen said on Tuesday it should apologise for a deadly attack on a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital in August that the group said killed 11 people. But the Joint Group to Assess Incidents found the coalition was not responsible for or had legitimately targeted fighters in four other incidents that rights groups blamed on […]
Popular web hosting company GoDaddy has acquired start-up company WP Curve, which offers services and support for WordPress sites. GoDaddy Buys WP Curve Dan Norris and Alex McClafferty created WP Curve three years ago as a catch-all services provider for WordPress sites. It offers services such as boosting security, increasing search engine traffic and more. It has almost 1,000 subscribers and over 44,000 orders completed since its conception. Specific details […]
A man holds up his mobile phone showing a M-Pesa mobile money transaction page for the photographer at an open air market in Kibera in Kenya’s capital Nairobi (Reuters/Noor Khamis). This post features a conversation with Georgia Levenson Keohane, executive director of the Pershing Square Foundation, adjunct professor of social enterprise at Columbia Business School, and author of Capital and the Common Good: How Innovative Finance is […]
Hedge fund manager Pierre Andurand has returned almost 15 per cent this year by betting on a recovery in oil prices and he forecasts the rally has further to run after Opec’s agreement last week to cut supplies. The French founder of Andurand Capital, which has grown to be one of the world’s largest oil funds, returned 6.1 per cent in November as he positioned for crude’s […]
By Crispian Balmer | ROME ROME When former Italian president Giorgio Napolitano tapped Matteo Renzi as prime minister in February 2014, he urged his younger colleague to change the constitution in order to make it easier to govern Italy. Early this year, Napolitano fretted that Renzi was taking the wrong approach in doing so. A referendum on the constitutional changes had been called. But instead of focusing […]
Image: Dropbox Dropbox on Tuesday announced the launch of Dropbox Mobile Offline Folders. The cloud-based file sharing service provider says the new premium feature will let users stay on task on their smartphones even when data and Wi-Fi is unavailable. With mobile offline folders, users can tag an entire folder to have its contents synced automatically to their phone or tablet, as opposed to marking each individual […]
“It’s something different,” Rose said recently. “Something to relax you. Something to stimulate your mind and help you out in the long term as far as clearing your mind. There’s different things you can do; I don’t take it for granted. Whenever I see those types of things, I try to focus in on it because you never know whether it gives you an advantage if you […]
NEW DELHI—Jayaram Jayalalithaa, the powerful chief minister of the state of Tamil Nadu whose fervent following was matched by few other Indian politicians, died late Monday after she failed to recover from cardiac arrest. The daughter of an actress in Tamil-language films, Ms. Jayalalithaa’s first career was in show business. She was featured in more than 100 movies, which catapulted her to fame before she turned to the political arena […]
By Angus McDowall , John Davison and Stephanie Nebehay | BEIRUT/GENEVA BEIRUT/GENEVA Syria’s army and allies closed in on areas near Aleppo’s Old City on Tuesday, looking closer than ever to achieving their most important victory of the five year civil war by driving rebels out of their last urban stronghold. Rebels said on Tuesday they would never abandon Aleppo, after reports that U.S. and Russian diplomats […]
Solar panels, which convert sunlight into electricity, are a key player in the fast-growing renewable energy sector, which also includes water- and wind-generated electricity The climate-friendly electricity generated by solar panels in the past 40 years has all but cancelled out the polluting energy used to produce them, a study said Tuesday. Indeed, by some calculations, the so-called “break-even point” between dirty energy input and clean output […]
Alaska Air Group Inc (ALK.N) is likely to get the U.S. Justice Department’s approval for its $2.6 billion acquisition of Virgin America Inc (VA.O) soon, a person close to the deal told Reuters. Separately, a government official said an announcement of the approval was scheduled for Tuesday, but neither source said what conditions would be put on the deal. Experts had previously said they expected Alaska to […]
The petrochemical sector helped carry Saudi Arabia’s stock market to a fresh one-year closing high on Tuesday after crude oil prices hit a 17-month peak. The main Saudi index added 0.7 percent to 7,155 points in extremely heavy turnover with gainers outnumbering losers 139 to 18. The index is now up 3.5 percent year-to-date. The petrochemical sector stayed strong; it has been contributing to the market’s positive […]
By Costas Pitas | LONDON LONDON When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Britain last year and went for a drink with then Prime Minister David Cameron, he walked away with a smile on his face. Now China has walked away with the pub. “The Plough at Cadsden” in the heart of the English countryside will go down as one of the more unusual UK buys for Chinese […]
Several European companies in China have been unable to remit dividends abroad following new exchange controls, in the first confirmation that a complicated approval process for making payments out of China is having a wider impact than first indicated. The EU Chamber of Commerce in Beijing said the payment difficulties experienced by EU companies were “disruptive to business operations”. The measures, introduced on November 28, appear designed […]
By Ahmed Rasheed and Patrick Markey | BAGHDAD/ERBIL, Iraq BAGHDAD/ERBIL, Iraq Iraqi army units surged towards the centre of Mosul on Tuesday in an attack from the city’s southeastern edges that could give fresh impetus to the seven-week-old battle for Islamic State’s Iraqi stronghold. Campaign commander Lieutenant General Abdul Ameer Rasheed Yarallah was quoted by Iraqi television as saying troops had entered Salam Hospital, less than a […]
Pouncer: Next year the compay plans to demonstrate the drones being launched from a C130 Hercules cargo aircraft.” Illustration:Windhorse Aerospace A UK company is developing lightweight and edible food drones to bring supplies to hard-to-reach areas in times of disaster. The Somerset-based Windhorse Aerospace last week presented its Pouncer design to Priti Patel, the UK’s Secretary of State for International Development. The drone is nine feet wide, […]
There are differences in the way men and women observe visual information, reports a team of researchers from Queen Mary University of London. From the way the people scan the faces, it is possible to tell if the participant was a male or a female with accuracy of 80 percent, notes the researchers. ( Cindy Ord | Getty Images for Garrett Leight California Optical ) A team […]
If you set out to make a positive investment case for Italy 20 years ago, the best hope was to play down the myriad structural inefficiencies that blighted the corporate sector and argue that this was a good economy burdened by an unworkable state. Now, after years of no growth accompanied by stubbornly high public debt, a positive case looks even harder to make, especially after the […]
By Gavin Jones | ROME ROME Italy could have an election as early as February, a minister in Matteo Renzi’s outgoing government said on Tuesday after speaking with the prime minister. The comments will heighten support for a quick vote as the only way to avoid protracted political limbo in the euro zone’s third largest economy following Sunday’s “No” vote on Renzi’s constitutional reforms. The two largest […]
Good morning. Here’s our daily summary of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here. It’s so quaint that politicians still get pissed at the press and utter some version of Mark Twain’s, “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.” That was underscored again Monday by Donald Trump, who tweeted, […]
By Rinat Harash | KISUFIM, Israel KISUFIM, Israel A battalion of soldiers crawls across the desert sand with assault rifles cocked. It’s a routine exercise, but these are no ordinary troops – they are Arabs who have chosen to fight for the Jewish state. While the vast majority of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are Jews – and nearly all their conflicts have been against Arab nations […]
By Jonathan Cable | LONDON LONDON Britain will most likely leave the European Union having signed a bilateral trade agreement, according to a Reuters poll of economists on Tuesday that also suggested there remains little chance of the country slipping into recession. Since the June 23 decision to leave the EU, Britain’s economy has performed much better than had been previously feared. The Bank of England is […]
