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GENEVA There has been no new wave of killings prompted by the Philippines’ war on drugs, and reports to the contrary are “alternative facts”, an ally of President Rodrigo Duterte told the U.N. Human Rights Council on Monday. Duterte has received widespread condemnation in the West for failing to curtail the killings and address activists’ allegations of systematic, state-sponsored murders by police of drug users and dealers, […]

MOGADISHU At least three Somali soldiers on a ordnance-clearing mission were killed on Monday by a roadside bomb just 90 km (60 miles) north of the capital, from where Islamists militants were routed six years ago. Al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab claimed responsibility for the attack at a checkpoint on the outskirts of the town of Shalanbood in the Lower Shabelle region. “We went out of town in […]

ABU DHABI // Doctors hope that Eman El Aty will be able to sit upright in a chair within two months – the first time she has been able to move out of her bed in 12 years. The Egyptian, who weighed 500 kilograms in February this year, is being treated at VPS Burjeel Hospital after being flown from a hospital in India last week on a […]

In the early 1990s, the Dubai-based Spanish craftsman Pedro de Aranda was called upon to create a sculpture of a solid-gold falcon for Sheikh Zayed, the founding President of the UAE. De Aranda rendered the piece in his Paris workshop and brought it over to Abu Dhabi. A few months later, the then president of France was gifted the bird when he visited the UAE, and it […]

(Image: file photo via CBS News/CBS Interactive) The FBI spent $900,000 on a hack that allowed federal agents into the San Bernardino terrorist’s encrypted iPhone, according to a Democratic senator. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) confirmed the figure this week during an open hearing. FBI director James Comey was testifying in regarding the agency’s work, the events in the run-up to the 2016 elections, and the upcoming reauthorization […]

By Irene Klotz | CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. The U.S. military’s experimental X-37B space plane landed on Sunday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, completing a classified mission that lasted nearly two years, the Air Force said. The unmanned X-37B, which resembles a miniature space shuttle, touched down at 7:47 a.m. EDT (1147 GMT) on a runway formerly used for landings of the now-mothballed […]

Results exceed analyst expectations; backed by strong Air Arabia passenger demand and ongoing cost control measures Sharjah, UAE; May 07, 2017 Air Arabia PJSC today reported strong financial results for the first quarter of 2017 exceeding analyst expectations, as the Middle East’s first and largest low cost carrier continued to deliver solid commercial and operational results.   Air Arabia reported a net profit of AED103 million for […]

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RAS AL KHAIMAH // A man was killed in a car accident when his vehicle veered off the road on Sunday morning in RAK. The 37-year-old Asian man was a passenger in the car of his friend, 27, who is from the same Asian country. The driver lost control of his car and hit a lamppost at 8am on Al Shuhada Road. Brig Hassan Ibrahim Ali, deputy […]

Uber is once again potentially in hot water with US regulators following the disclosure of a program used to track and avoid government officials. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has launched a criminal investigation into Uber concerning the Greyball program, software which helped drivers avoid local authorities while remaining on the road. Greyball, disclosed in March by the New York Times, was a secretive system used […]

Invesco’s move to snap up Source, the London-based exchange traded fund provider, has thrust the US asset manager into the centre of an increasingly ferocious battle across Europe’s passive investment industry. European fund managers now face another formidable US competitor in addition to the existing heavyweights BlackRock and Vanguard, which are pursuing a cut-throat ETF price war as they expand their presence in Europe. Atlanta-based Invesco already […]

Shifti­ng of cases from FBR HQ to ‘inexpe­rience­d’ field format­ions raises eyebro­ws PHOTO: AFP ISLAMABAD: After a one-year hiatus, the government has shifted over 400 cases against persons named in the Panama Papers from the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) Headquarters to its field formations, raising concerns that the authorities intend to bury the issue like many other high-profile cases. The decision shows that the federal government has […]

Wall Street people underestimated how nasty and political the struggle over the post-Brexit fate of European clearing houses would become. This week the European Commission offered threats to London-based clearing houses and inducements for their customers to move their trade to the EU. €650bn Value of euro-denominated trades that clear through London each business day UK negotiators in turn demand that euro derivatives clearing should stay in […]

The campaign team of French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron says it has been the victim of a “massive and co-ordinated” hacking operation ahead of Sunday’s election. Around nine gigabytes of data were posted online to Pastebin, a document-sharing site that allows anonymous posting. It was not immediately clear who was responsible for releasing the files.  The documents, posted on Friday night, appeared to contain details of emails […]

By Adrian Croft and Geert De Clercq | PARIS PARIS France sought to keep a computer hack of frontrunner Emmanuel Macron’s campaign emails from influencing the outcome of the country’s presidential election with a warning on Saturday it could be a criminal offence to republish the data. Macron’s team said a “massive” hack had dumped emails, documents and campaign financing information online just before campaigning ended on […]

The Week in Fact-Checking is a newsletter from the American Press Institute and Poynter. Want it in your inbox every week? Subscribe here. In 2016, U.S. fact-checkers drew record traffic — but the Pants-on-Fire candidate still became the Pants-on-Fire president. This complicated reality could have led to big changes to the ways fact-checking is conducted in America. Yet the formats, tone and methods adopted by fact-checkers have […]

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan Taliban militants captured a district just outside the northern Afghan city of Kunduz on Saturday, officials said, pointing to renewed pickup in fighting after the insurgents announced their annual spring offensive last week. Mahfouz Akbari, a police spokesman for eastern Afghanistan, said security forces had pulled out of Qala-i-Zal district, west of Kunduz city, on Saturday to avoid further civilian and military casualties after more […]

May 6, 2017 by: Jeevan Vasagar in Singapore and Michael Peel in Bangkok Puma Energy, the fuel storage and petrol station business backed by Swiss commodities trading house Trafigura, wants to expand in Myanmar across a range of fuel and petroleum products after opening a $100m storage facility at the southern port of Thilawa. The new terminal, with a capacity of 91m cubic metres, opens the prospect […]

By Isabel Coles | HULAYLA, Iraq HULAYLA, Iraq Iraqi forces pushed further into Mosul from the north on the second day of a new push to speed up the nearly seven-month attempt to dislodge Islamic State, commanders said on Friday. Islamic State tried to block the troops’ northerly advance into their de facto Iraqi capital with suicide car bombs and sniper fire, Brigadier General Walid Khalifa, deputy […]

By Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON A draft of President Donald Trump’s new counterterrorism strategy demands that U.S. allies shoulder more of the burden in combating Islamist militants, while acknowledging that the threat of terrorism will never be totally eliminated. The 11-page draft, seen on Friday by Reuters, said the United States should avoid costly, “open-ended” military commitments. “We need to intensify operations against […]

By Lucia Mutikani | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON U.S. job growth rebounded sharply in April and the unemployment rate dropped to 4.4 percent, near a 10-year low, pointing to a tightening labor market that likely seals the case for an interest rate increase next month despite moderate wage growth. Nonfarm payrolls surged by 211,000 jobs last month after a paltry gain of 79,000 in March, the Labor Department said […]

ENEC completes handover of Unit 1 systems to KHNP for commissioning, marking end of initial construction activities for the first of four units of the Barakah Project KHNP will lead the commissioning work of the first UAE-based APR-1400, as part of the scope of the 2009 Prime Contract Federal regulatory approval from FANR, in addition to international nuclear assessments from IAEA and WANO, will be […]

Significantly, the agreement to establish the de-escalation zones has not been accepted by all opposition groups, and it left loopholes for Syria to continue undiminished attacks on the rebels, factors that combined to hinder the last attempt by Iran, Russia and Turkey to forge a cease-fire. Continue reading the main story Nevertheless, one of the representatives of the Syrian opposition groups at talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, Col. […]

By Tife Owolabi | YENAGOA, Nigeria YENAGOA, Nigeria At least six Nigerian soldiers have been killed in new military campaign against militants in the country’s restive Niger Delta oil hub, security officials said on Friday. The southern swampland has been largely quiet since the start of the year because militants halted attacks against oil pipelines to give the government a chance to conduct peace talks. But in […]

Saudi Arabia is seeking foreign investment in its healthcare industry as it plans to turn hundreds of government-owned hospitals and thousands of primary care centres into better-run corporations, Health Minister Tawfig Al-Rabiah said. Nearly 80 percent of health care in Saudi Arabia is provided by the government, Al-Rabiah said in an interview in Boston. But the kingdom “is trying to move the private sector to invest more,” […]

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