May 4, 2017 by: Katrina Manson in New York Donald Trump will visit Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Vatican on his first foreign trip as US president in an effort to unite a coalition against Islamist terrorism and Iran and extract more from traditional allies. The travel plans mark a departure from US foreign policy norms, which usually see new presidents visit neighbouring Canada or Mexico within a month of taking office. […]
Fun times, tan lines, and the threat of tick-borne diseases. Apparently, this is what summer has got in store for us this year. As if blacklegged ticks in the country aren’t already teeming with enough pathogens to make us go crazy, there’s a new tick infection to add to the list — Powassan virus. Rumor has it, it’s even worse than Lyme disease. What Is Powassan Virus? […]
FAI is a leading provider of mission-critical aviation services, based in Germany With 23 aircraft, FAI serves corporations, government agencies and NGOs including the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain, 4th May 2017 Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company (Mumtalakat), the sovereign wealth fund of the Kingdom of Bahrain, announced today its investment in a significant minority stake in Axtmann Aviation Holding […]
MOSCOW Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said on Thursday that authorities in Russia were stopping him going abroad to seek urgent medical treatment after an attack that left him mostly blind in one eye. Navalny said the authorities had unexpectedly issued him with an international passport of the kind Russians need to travel abroad after refusing to do so for the last five years. That had given him […]
As noted earlier, while European stocks and US equity markets have ignored the commodity crash in China, which in addition to iron ore plunging limit down, also saw rubber tumble 7% lower, and steel rebar, coke, coking coal plunge over 6% … … Axiom’s Gordon Johnson warns (as we did a month ago) that the worst is yet to come, and in fact, the “backdrop of […]
By Richard Cowan and Yasmeen Abutaleb | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON The U.S. House of Representatives was set on Thursday for a cliffhanger vote to repeal Obamacare, as Republican leaders worked to deliver President Donald Trump a win for one of his top legislative priorities. House Republican leaders have expressed confidence the bill would pass and several party moderates who previously objected to it got behind it on Wednesday, […]
11:00 am Suppose we could be brave, Bryce, and go with a pic of Jeffery Lacker as our portrait for today 11:01 am Well, he stepped down from the Richmond Fed after fessing up to helping a colleague at a sister publication — Medley — on a story 11:02 am 11:03 am I could give you a rival’s analysis of the story 11:03 am It’s not the […]
Still, the Iraqi forces face hundreds of militants who appear determined to fight to the end in neighborhoods still teeming with hungry and increasingly desperate civilians. Continue reading the main story The new operation will also require careful synchronization among the Iraqi Army, Interior Ministry troops and the Counterterrorism Service, which report to different authorities in Baghdad and sometimes seem to be fighting separate wars. Tensions among […]
What are the major drivers of Twitter take-up, in Australia and elsewhere? Do we connect around shared interests, shared location, or pre-existing offline relationships? And when, in the eleven-year history of the platform, did these structures form? These are the questions that guided a new, long-term study of the Australian national Twittersphere that my colleagues and I have undertaken. Drawing on , a major multi-institutional facility for […]
By Rishika Sadam and David Ingram Facebook Inc reported surging quarterly profit and revenue on Wednesday, helped by its fast-growing mobile ad business, but its shares dipped from a record high in after-hours trading as investors showed some nervousness about future earnings. The world’s biggest online social network, which is nearing the five-year anniversary of its initial public offering, is searching for new types of advertising features […]
China has rapidly emerged as the leading issuer of green bonds, spurring excitement among the green finance community that they will help the world’s largest emitter reduce its choking pollution. But although the amount raised is carefully tracked, how the money is being spent is less clear. China issued $36bn of green bonds in 2016, up from almost none the year before, and analysts expect it to […]
A crack that could create an iceberg the size of Delaware — and destabilize one of the largest ice shelves in the Antarctic — has branched out and begun to widen more quickly, a scientist said on Wednesday. The new fissure has turned toward the shelf’s ocean edge, potentially speeding up the iceberg’s process of breaking off, said Dan McGrath, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey […]
T-Mobile just announced its plans for a true nationwide 5G network, not long after AT&T announced that it would roll out its 5G Evolution Network to 20 U.S. cities by the end of this year. In particular, T-Mobile was sternly disparaging AT&T, with CEO John Legere calling its 5G Evolution “bull****” in a vlog published on Tuesday, May 2. T-Mobile emphasized that its 5G network will leverage its […]
Sign up to receive FirstFT by email here The Federal Reserve said it believed the recent slowdown in US growth was likely to prove temporary as it stayed on course for a further increase in short-term interest rates as soon as June. The US central bank kept its target range for the federal funds rate at 0.75 per cent to 1 per cent following its latest two-day meeting. In […]
Modern smartphones have become increasingly bigger, but a new handset called Jelly comes as the world’s smallest 4G smartphone and runs Android 7 Nougat out of the box. In recent years, there’s been a constant push to make smartphones increasingly larger and some truly blur the line between smartphones and tablets. The tiny new Jelly smartphone, however, is quite the opposite. Unlike large smartphones from the likes of […]
ABU DHABI // The UAE on Wednesday hailed a meeting in Abu Dhabi between two rival Libyan leaders as a significant breakthrough in talks aimed at ending the conflict. The UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs voiced optimism over the meeting between Fayez Al Sarraj, prime minister of Libya’s UN-backed government, and Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, the country’s most powerful military commander, the state news agency, Wam, reported. […]
Mr. Abbas, 82, who was among the negotiators on hand for the historic signing of the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn in 1993, indicated that he did feel optimistic that nearly a quarter-century later Mr. Trump might be the president who finally builds on that initial agreement to forge a final resolution to the conflict. Continue reading the main story Praising Mr. Trump’s “courageous leadership,” […]
By Samia Errazzouki and Patrick Markey | RABAT/ALGIERS RABAT/ALGIERS A Moroccan phosphate ship has been held in a South African port by a complaint from Western Sahara Polisario movement that it transported cargo unlawfully from the disputed territory, a lawyer and Polisario said on Wednesday. The seizure of the vessel, carrying 50,000 tonnes of phosphate to New Zealand, may be a test for the Polisario’s use of […]
BEIRUT: A large explosion shook a rebel-held Syrian town along the border with Turkey on Wednesday, killing at least five people and wounding others.The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a car bomb went off in the town of Azaz close to the offices of the Syrian interim government, which represents the opposition in rebel-held areas. The Observatory and the activist-run Azaz Media Center confirmed the […]
By Bryn Stole | BATON ROUGE, La. BATON ROUGE, La. U.S. Justice Department officials were expected to announce on Wednesday that they will not bring federal charges against two white officers in the fatal shooting of a black man in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, last summer, according to news media reports. The shooting of Alton Sterling, 37, was one of a series of high-profile killings of black men […]
By Nick Carey and Joseph White | DETROIT DETROIT Automotive supplier Delphi Automotive Plc (DLPH.N) on Wednesday said it plans to spin off operations tied to internal combustion engines and focus on technology for electrically powered and self-driving vehicles, boosting its share price and highlighting the challenges for legacy auto industry players. Vehicles driven by humans and powered with petroleum will dominate roads from Shanghai to San […]
“All the Rivers,” the new English title of the book, was published last week in the United States by Random House, and Ms. Rabinyan, 44, seemed a little nervous. She wanted Americans to read the book for what she said it is — a story of a specific love and its boundaries — and not because of the free speech controversy here or the backdrop of a […]
TEHRAN — Dozens of miners were trapped on Wednesday after a large explosion at a coal mine in northern Iran, state-run news media reported. Ambulances, helicopters and other rescue vehicles were sent to the site of the accident in the province of Golestan as the authorities tried to determine the scale of the disaster at the mine, which has more than 500 workers. The head of the […]
By Karolin Schaps | LONDON LONDON Oil prices rebounded from near 2017 lows on Wednesday after preliminary data showed a much higher-than-expected fall in U.S. crude stocks, reviving bullish sentiment about easing oversupply. Benchmark Brent crude LCOc1 was up 37 cents at $50.83 a barrel at 0815 GMT. On Tuesday the futures had settled at their lowest since Nov. 30, when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting […]
