We apparently now live in an era of “alternative facts”, so it is perhaps not surprising that the alternative-history genre has been making something of a comeback in film and on television in recent years. Ben Wheatley’s film adaptation of J G Ballard’s High-Rise was a surprise indie box-office hit last year, while in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine travelled back in time […]
©AFP WASHINGTON — Thousands of scientists and people from other walks of life turned out in Washington and New York on Saturday for Earth Day events that organisers have framed as a “celebration” of science to counter a growing disregard for evidence-based knowledge. The “March for Science” festivities included “teach-ins” on the National Mall and parades in midtown Manhattan and hundreds of other cities and towns. The […]
“Thousands of new doors opened and rents soared. This created a bubble, and like housing, that bubble has now burst.” – Richard Hayne, Urban Outfitters CEO, March 2017 The devastation in the US retail sector is accelerating in 2017, and in addition to the surging number of brick and mortar retail bankruptcies, it is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in the soaring number of store closures. […]
As her email mess was growing, Hillary Clinton scheduled the first national TV interview of her campaign with Brianna Keilar of CNN. It went poorly. But wait. It now turns out that Clinton aide Huma Abedin had meant “Bianna,” not “Brianna” when she disclosed her belated intent to a communications aide. She wanted what she figured would be a non-threatening session with Yahoo! News’ Bianna Golodryga, who […]
By Brian Ellsworth | CARACAS CARACAS Venezuela’s opposition prepared to march in silence on Saturday to honor a dozen people killed in three weeks of protests demanding that the government of President Nicolas Maduro hold delayed elections and address a growing economic crisis. Twelve people have been killed in a renewed wave of demonstrations this month in incidents primarily involving security forces or armed civilians. Another eight […]
WASHINGTON President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he would visit wounded U.S. veterans at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the armed forces hospital located in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington. Trump announced the visit at midday in a Twitter post. “Getting ready to visit Walter Reed Medical Center with Melania,” he wrote, referring to his wife Melania Trump. In the tweet, Trump said, “Looking forward to […]
By Barbara Goldberg | NEW YORK NEW YORK American Airlines on Saturday apologized to a female passenger and suspended an employee after a video showing an onboard clash over a baby stroller went viral, in the latest embarassment for a U.S. carrier over how it treated a customer. The clip, posted to Facebook on Friday by a bystander on the flight, shows a woman in tears with […]
By Bate Felix and Daniel Pardon | PARIS/PAPEETE, French Polynesia PARIS/PAPEETE, French Polynesia French overseas territories and French residents in the United States and Canada began voting on Saturday in France’s presidential election, a day before the main first-round of a poll that could change the global political landscape. Of nearly 47 million registered French voters, there are fewer than a million resident in far-flung places like […]
WASHINGTON Member countries of the International Monetary Fund on Saturday pledged to work to reduce global imbalances but failed to repeat their past pledge to resist all forms of protectionism. The International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), the IMF’s steering body, also repeated its past commitments on currency exchange rates. “We will refrain from competitive devaluations, and will not target our exchange rates for competitive purposes,” the […]
The mountain-sized 2014 JO25 asteroid safely avoided Earth in its close flyby on April 19 but left behind a heap of data for researchers to analyze. Besides sparking avid discussions on how humanity would perish in a big asteroid collision, the event provided astronomers with the perfect opportunity to study the enormous space rock and gather as much information as possible on the general characteristics of asteroids. This […]
More than half of the pupils in UAE schools are classed as overweight or obese. Weight problems are even being identified in infants. Warnings such as these are becoming alarmingly common and leave little doubt that childhood obesity in the country has reached epidemic proportions. These particular findings come from a 2015 study by Mohammed bin Rashid School of Government. As well as discovering that 14 per […]
Around 10,000 scientists and their supporters marched through London on Saturday — one of more than 500 demonstrations worldwide celebrating “robustly funded and publicly communicated science as a pillar of human freedom and prosperity”. As the London demonstrators marched from the Science Museum to Parliament Square, they waved hundreds of colourful placards made in labs and homes across Britain, with messages ranging from “Nature isn’t fooled by […]
Photo He was the only man I saw when we entered the nearly empty village in northern Iraq, which had just recently been liberated from the Islamic State. The first thing he did when he approached our car was ask my colleague for a light. That’s when I noticed the pack of cigarettes sticking out of Mohamed Ahmed Saleh’s shirt pocket. Just over a week after the […]
Researchers found that certain search terms revealed AI bias. Credit: Princeton University In debates over the future of artificial intelligence, many experts think of the new systems as coldly logical and objectively rational. But in a new study, researchers have demonstrated how machines can be reflections of us, their creators, in potentially problematic ways. Common machine learning programs, when trained with ordinary human language available online, can […]
Ajman Tourism Development Department to promote the Emirate’s Tourism Attractions at ATM 2017 22 April 2017 Ajman – The Ajman Tourism Development Department (ATDD) will participate in the Arabian Travel Market exhibition (ATM) which will be held at Dubai World Trade Centre from 24-27 of April 2017. The ATDD stand will be located in hall number four on stand ME4230. Through this participation, the ATDD will promote […]
The Power of Networks: Six Principles that Connect Our Lives • By Christopher G. Brinton and Mung Chiang • Princeton University Press • 310 pages • ISBN: 978-0-691-17071-8 • £27.95 We don’t normally think of our lives this way, but each of us is enmeshed in myriad networks — the real-life one of people, social media like Twitter and Facebook, and technical networks (internet, cellular). According to […]
By Ginger Gibson | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON President Donald Trump’s promised “big announcement” next week on overhauling the U.S. tax code, a top campaign pledge, will consist of “broad principles and priorities,” an administration official said on Saturday. The president unexpectedly said on Friday at a Treasury Department event that there would be “a big announcement on Wednesday having to do with tax reform.” In a Twitter message […]
BERLIN Thousands of people in Berlin turned out for the first March for Science being held in more than 600 cities worldwide on Saturday due to growing concern about U.S. President Donald Trump’s climate change skepticism and cuts to research funding. Demonstrators carried signs reading “We love experts – those with evidence” and “Science not Silence” for the march from Humboldt University toward the Brandenburg Gate, led […]
Submitted by Jonathan Roth of RiskHedge In an exclusive video interview with RiskHedge, a long-time geopolitical expert says there is an alternate story making the rounds about the United States’ April 7 missile strike on Syria’s Shayrat Airbase in response to the Syrian regime’s alleged use of sarin gas on its own people. “Not all missiles made their target,” says Dr. Theodore Karasik, a senior advisor to […]
By Michelle Martin | COLOGNE, Germany COLOGNE, Germany The co-leader of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) suffered an embarrassing defeat on Saturday when delegates refused to discuss her motion to shift the party into the “mainstream”, putting it on course to turn further right. The party, a pariah in German politics, has seen its support drop in recent months, and thousands turned up to protest the […]
This article is part of an ongoing series on digital tools for journalists. We’ve spent the past few weeks talking about tools for keeping reporters and their sources safe. This week, Poynter’s Ren LaForme is focusing on a tool that will help you find which information about you is on the internet, what you may want to clean up and what you can discover about sources. So, […]
Data-driven analytics applications are eating the world and transforming every domain. But the world is also being eaten up in a different way by several non-sustainable practices. On Earth Day, we look at what we know about the relation between big data and the environment: how big data is used to measure sustainability and inform action, and what is the impact they have on the environment as […]
BOSTON Officials of two large California public retirement systems said Friday they are voting against nine of 15 Wells Fargo & Co directors up for election at the bank’s annual meeting next week, citing the bank’s phony-account scandal. Leaders of the largest U.S. state pension system, known as CalPERS, said in an email it is voting about 13.9 million shares against the bank nominees, including its chairman, […]
The echoes of safe sex and planned parenthood are reverberating in many campuses. UC Davis became the first campus in the United States in donning a liberal shade by installing a vending machine to dispense emergency female contraceptives such as the morning-after pill. The machine has been fondly named the Wellness to Go machine. Reports have said that nationwide, there are four colleges selling contraceptives. But they are […]
