US President-elect Donald Trump is sending another strong signal that he plans to take a pro-growth and business friendly approach to economic policy, with leading New York investors Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross on his short list for Treasury and Commerce secretary. The pair on Tuesday won the endorsement of billionaire investor and Trump backer Carl Icahn who turned to Twitter after speaking with the incoming Republican […]
DUBAI // The delivery of more than 1,000 books for children in Pakistan has been on hold for almost seven months after the shipment was caught up in red tape. In April the first batch of books in the Kitaabie initiative, which aims to establish libraries every 100km in Pakistan, were due to leave the UAE but they have been held up in the courier’s storage space […]
If you’ve been salivating over Snapchat’s Spectacles, the company’s video-recording plaything unveiled back in September, you’ll be pleased to know Vuzix’s Blade 3000 series of upcoming smart glasses functions far beyond what Snapchat is poised to accomplish. Similar smart glasses have not ambled well in the past, keenly exemplified by the lukewarm reception of the Google Glass, whose future still remains foggy. There are only a few […]
ABU DHABI // More than 280,000 cases of diabetes were diagnosed in the UAE last year – a rise of 35 per cent on 2014. The International Diabetes Federation estimates that last year there were 1,086,300 diabetics in the country, compared with 803,940 in 2014. Experts blame obesity, lifestyle and greater awareness of the disease for the soaring figures. “Definitely there is an expected increase in the […]
After an election filled with rhetoric about big and brash bankers running amok on Wall Street, Donald Trump has turned to the biggest and the brashest of them all: Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase. The transition team of the president-elect called Mr Dimon on Wednesday night to sound him out about serving as Treasury secretary, according to a Reuters report that the FT […]
For an American public that relies on data for everything from where to find the best taco to the likely victor in a baseball game, Election Day offered a jarring wake-up: The data was wrong. Donald Trump’s stunning electoral win came despite prognosticators’ overwhelming insistence he would lose. And it has forced many to question not just political polling, but other facets of life that are being […]
ERBIL, Iraq — More than two years ago, a Christian farmer in his 70s named Mosa Zachariah fled his village near Mosul with, as he put it, only the pants he was wearing. He left behind his house, “tons of wheat” and a BMW. But now that his town, an early target of the Iraqi security forces as they advance on Mosul itself, has been cleared of […]
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Much about Yasir Arafat remains an enigma, in death as in life. The man who came to embody the Palestinian national cause was variously born in Jerusalem, or Gaza, or Cairo. It was never entirely clear what led to his death in a French military hospital in November 2004. The Yasir Arafat Museum will proffer answers to these questions when it opens to […]
TEHRAN — For all of Iran’s attractions — breathtaking scenery and numerous World Heritage sites, among other things — there are plenty of downsides to vacationing in the Islamic republic. Alcohol is forbidden. There is very little night life, at least in public. All women, including visiting foreigners, are obliged to wear a head scarf. Then there are Iran’s politics: its strident anti-Western stance; seemingly random arrests […]
|By Matein Khalid| The fall in oil prices since 2014 has triggered a liquidity crunch and higher funding costs in the UAE banking system. EIBOR is almost double the London interbank rate LIBOR. Non-performing loan (NPL) have begun to rise as property prices have fallen 20% from their peak and corporate/SME borrowers are hit by a sharp downturn in the business cycle. DIB shares reflect these macro […]
UAE. (ME NewsWire )–Despite the fact that FinTech has been causing significant digital disruption to global finance for almost a decade, the sector is still in need of strong guidance against regulatory hurdles, says a new report from ACCA (the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants). The report, FinTech – transforming finance, finds that while FinTech’s impact on finance and banking is proving to be as revolutionary to […]
/By MAYA KOSOFF/Vanity Fair/Apple, which reportedly spends more than a billion dollars a year to outsource its cloud infrastructure to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, is working on a secret project to ditch its competitors. The internal initiative, code-named “McQueen”— yes, like that Steve McQueen—is Apple’s attempt to break its reliance on other cloud providers by creating its own platform,Re/code reports. Sources said Apple could break even on […]
Can the woolly mammoth be brought back from the dead? Scientists say it’s only a matter of time. In fact this year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature issued its first official set of guidelines on resurrecting extinct species. What’s more, university research labs and non-governmental agencies have projects in motion to bring back extinct species. But is all of this a good idea? A new […]
Engineers at the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland (UMD) demonstrate in a new study that windows made of transparent wood could provide more even and consistent natural lighting and better energy efficiency than glass. In a paper just published in the peer-reviewed journal Advanced Energy Materials, the team, headed by Liangbing Hu of UMD’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and […]
By ISABEL KERSHNER August 12, 2016 KIBBUTZ SDE BOKER, Israel — The rare, intimate and reflective interview with Israel’s founding prime minister was filmed nearly 50 years ago, but it never aired. David Ben-Gurion, at 82 and five years out of office, spoke in the six-hour interview of state-building and the biblical prophets that guided him; the security imperative of his young nation and Israel’s quest for spiritual and […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Marya Group, headquartered in Abu Dhabi, announced an increase to its investment portfolio, bringing the total invested to more than $ 1 billion. Marya Group focuses on making private and public equity investments in cash-generating business with strong fundamentals across core economic sectors that are resilient: education, health care, food and beverage processing as well as real estate. Its investments are centered on […]
INTERNATIONAL. – Higher GDP per capita alone does not determine real quality of life. This is according to the Social Progress Index (SPI) 2016 published recently by US-based nonprofit, the Social Progress Imperative. The Index ranks Finland the world’s most socially progressive country, Canada in second place tops the G7 nations. Economic growth is not the sole determinant of quality of life The 2016 Index finds that whist […]
New discoveries about spider silk could inspire novel materials to manipulate sound and heat in the same way semiconducting circuits manipulate electrons, according to scientists at Rice University, in Europe and in Singapore. A paper in Nature Materials today looks at the microscopic structure of spider silk and reveals unique characteristics in the way it transmits phonons, quasiparticles of sound. The research shows for the first time […]
JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — For most of his adult life, Ahmed Qassim al-Ghamdi worked among the bearded enforcers of Saudi Arabia. He was a dedicated employee of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice — known abroad as the religious police — serving with the front-line troops protecting the Islamic kingdom from Westernization, secularism and anything but the most conservative Islamic practices. […]
Researchers have created a robotic mimic of a stingray that’s powered and guided by light-sensitive rat heart cells. The work exhibits a new method for building bio-inspired robots by means of tissue engineering. Batoid fish, which include stingrays, are distinguished by their flat bodies and long, wing-like fins that extend from their heads. These fins move in energy-efficient waves that emulate from the front of the fin […]
The Interpreter By MAX FISHER When three suicide bombers attacked Istanbul’s main airport on Tuesday, killing at least 41 people, Turkey began a ritual that it has refined with so many recent bombings: looking for hints as to which of the country’s two major terror threats was responsible. Over the past year, Turkey has endured at least 14 major terrorist attacks, killing more than 200 people. The […]
SAUDI ARABIA. Saudi Arabia approved the National Transformation Plan (NTP) on Tuesday June 7, 2016, as part of Saudi Vision 2030 and goal to reduce reliance on oil. The NTP aims to boost non-oil revenue to 530 billion riyals (US$141 billion) by 2020 through more than 500 initiatives including the implementation of new taxes and increasing government fees and taxes on “harmful products”. Minister of State Mr. […]
ABU DHABI // Vitamin D deficiency, consanguinity and obesity are major reasons that the Gulf’s rate of infertility is higher than that of the West, doctors say. “Today, infertility is globally acknowledged to be a major health problem,” said Dr Human Fatemi, medical director of IVI Middle East Fertility Clinic in Abu Dhabi. “It is estimated that infertility affects 15 per cent of the global population of […]
UAE. Boardrooms’ awareness of cyber risks has been recently growing in Europe, Middle East and Africa, with cyber security ranking far up on the agendas of non-executive directors in the region, according to Deloitte’s recent report entitled “EMEA 360 Boardroom Survey: Agenda priorities across the region.” The report reveals that innovation is also gaining ground with 60% of respondents ranking it as a very important issue. These […]
