SANA, Yemen — The Houthi movement and its allies formed a new government in Yemen on Monday, a surprise that angered their Saudi-backed rivals and complicated United Nations efforts to end a conflict that has ravaged the Arab world’s poorest country for much of the past two years. The announcement of the new government, reported by the Houthi-run state television and Saba news agency, said it was […]
SHARJAH // Hundreds of residents decorated their cars and played traditional Emirati songs while roaming the streets of Sharjah to celebrate National Day. Naser Hammad, 39, from Al Dhaid, said that many people, Emiratis and residents alike, wait for this day to come together and celebrate the union. “It’s a day to celebrate the progress of this great nation, which is home to hundreds of nationalities all […]
BEIJING China’s Foreign Ministry has expressed concern after Yemen’s armed Houthi movement and its political allies formed a new government, in what appeared a blow to U.N.-backed efforts to end 20 months of war in the country. Diplomats had hoped the Houthis, who control the capital Sanaa, would hold off on putting together a cabinet of their loyalists and instead form a unity government with their Yemeni […]
Donald Trump risks opening up a major diplomatic dispute with China before he has even been inaugurated after speaking on the telephone on Friday with Tsai Ing-wen, the president of Taiwan. The call, confirmed by four people, is believed to be the first between a US president or president-elect and a leader of Taiwan since diplomatic relations between the two were cut in 1979. Although it is […]
By Chiekh Sadibou Mane and Thierry Gouegnon | BANJUL BANJUL Gambian leader Yahya Jammeh, who once vowed to rule the tiny West African nation for “a billion years”, said he had accepted his shock election defeat on Friday, 22 years after seizing power in a coup. Voting on Thursday against Jammeh was a rare show of defiance against a leader who has ruled by decree and who […]
DUBAI An American-Iranian dual national and his wife have been in detention in Iran without charge or access to lawyers since their arrest by elite Revolutionary Guards in July, a New York-based rights group said on Friday. The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI) said Karan Vafadari and his wife Afarin Niasari, who run an art gallery in Tehran, were being held in Tehran’s Evin […]
By Michelle Nichols | UNITED NATIONS UNITED NATIONS The United Nations General Assembly began talks on Friday on a draft resolution that would demand an end to fighting in Syria amid frustration by some states and rights groups over U.N. Security Council deadlock on the nearly six-year conflict. More than a third of the 193-member General Assembly this week asked for a formal meeting to be held […]
MANILA Philippine leader Rodrigo Duterte spoke of his sadness on Friday at having to forfeit his beloved motorcycles in becoming president, and offered tips on handling two wheels and why a Honda was better than a Harley. The 71-year-old reminisced about touring the Philippines by motorbike and how as a city mayor he used to ride every week on a motorcycle that his security team made him […]
The notion of machine-powered facial recognition is one that predates today’s actual technology for it by many years, thanks to robot POV shots from sci-fi films such as The Terminator and Robocop. But while many advances have been made, facial recognition software is far from infallible, as researchers from Carnegie Mellon University recently found. Here are the details from a report in Quartz: Researchers showed they could […]
By Alastair Macdonald | BRUSSELS BRUSSELS Islamic State will attack Europe again, security chiefs warned on Friday, and may add car bombs, cyber and chemical warfare to its local arsenal as European militants drift home after reverses in Syria and Iraq. Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union’s Counter-Terrorism Coordinator, said it was impossible to know for sure how many militants were already in Europe plotting. A report […]
Eight new rural solar energy projects are now operational across the Islamic Republic of Mauritania in western North Africa, doubling the UAE’s total contribution to the country’s clean energy capacity to 31.6 megawatts (MW). Delivered by Masdar, the Abu Dhabi clean energy company, the 16.6MW of additional solar power will supply up to 30 percent of the electricity demand of the remote communities of Boutilimit, Aleg, Aioune, […]
December 2, 2016 by: Maggie Fick, West Africa correspondent Voters in the tiny nation of Gambia appear to have unseated their president of more than two decades, who had pledged to rule for “a billion years”, an unexpected result after a year of elections that have cast doubt on the state of democracy in Africa. The Gambian electoral commission on Friday declared that Adama Barrow, the main […]
By Ahmed Elumami | TRIPOLI TRIPOLI Rival armed factions battled overnight and into Friday in the worst outbreak of fighting in the Libyan capital Tripoli for more than a year. Black smoke rose into the sky and explosions reverberated around the Abu Salim and Hadba districts, and an eyewitness said a major road nearby had been blocked off with shipping containers. Gunfire echoed across several other neighbourhoods. […]
Britain’s new surveillance law would, among other measures, require websites to keep customer browsing history for up to a year and allow law enforcement access The British parliament this week gave the green light to new bulk surveillance powers for police and intelligence services that critics have denounced as the most far-reaching of any western democracy. The Investigatory Powers Bill would, among other measures, require websites to […]
By Matthias Inverardi and Harro Ten Wolde | FRANKFURT FRANKFURT Aixtron (AIXGn.DE) will have to take action to balance income and costs, including potential job cuts, if U.S. President Barack Obama blocks its takeover by China’s Fujian Grand Chip Investment Fund (FGC). Shares in the German semiconductor equipment maker fell more than 5 percent on Friday following a report by Bloomberg, citing sources, that said Obama was […]
Symantec After four years of investigation, Europol, and other agencies have moved against the prominent Avalanche botnet platform which acted as a hub for malware campaigns worldwide. Europol publicly disclosed the operation on Thursday, made possible through partnerships with the FBI, the US Department of Justice (DoJ), the German Public Prosecutor’s Office Verden Eurojust and technology firms including Shadowserver and Symantec. Law enforcement agencies moved 30 November […]
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. Since Jim VandeHei and John Harris proved most everybody to be idiots, VandeHei can only hope that reflexive suspicion of his new gambit again proves to be entrepreneurial bliss. The two journalists famously pitched the notion of an all-politics digital […]
By Aradhana Aravindan and Marius Zaharia | SINGAPORE SINGAPORE A Singapore minister said on Friday the threat of an extremist attack was higher now than earlier this year as hardline Islamists are increasingly pushing their agenda in neighbouring Indonesia. Law and Home Affairs Minister Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam, speaking to the Foreign Correspondents Association in Singapore, did not specify whether the threat had increased just in the city state […]
In late July, Moussa Aksar, the director of Niger’s L’Évènement newspaper, answered his phone and heard a familiar voice warning him that he was, once again, in danger. “Be careful,” a friendly source told Aksar. “Look out for yourself and be careful what you say on the phone.” Aksar had just published Niger’s first exposé from the Panama Papers, the investigation based on a leak of documents […]
India, China and Russia on Thursday held their first round of consultation on Asia-Pacific Affairs which included regional security architecture, coordination within regional and multilateral fora, anti-terrorism and other regional issues, according to PTI as reported by The Statesman. The consultation was attended by representatives from Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia and Ministry of External Affairs of India, an Indian […]
A terrorist cell formed by a group seeking recognition from the ISIS terror network is already operating and planning a big attack in Manila. This comes as the Philippine capital was placed on its highest terror alert for the first time in 16 years following the arrest of two alleged militants over a makeshift bomb planted near the US Embassy on Monday. A senior police officer, who […]
By Greg Torode and Marius Zaharia | HONG KONG/SINGAPORE HONG KONG/SINGAPORE As the impounding of Singaporean troop carriers in Hong Kong exposes rising tensions between China and Singapore, the Lion City is unlikely to budge on core security interests concerning Beijing – its military relationship with Taiwan, worries over the South China Sea and its hosting of the U.S. military. Singaporean officials, retired military officers and analysts […]
By Joseph Guyler Delva and Makini Brice | PORT-AU-PRINCE PORT-AU-PRINCE The winner of Haiti’s presidential election, Jovenel Moise, vowed on Thursday to reform the constitution and tackle corruption when he takes office next year. The electoral council said Moise won a majority of votes and prevailed by more than 25 percentage points, according to preliminary results for the Nov. 20 vote that Haitians hoped would put the […]
Communication is broken, according to Twilio’s VP of Product Management Patrick Malatack, who thinks the root of the problem is that businesses are overlooking the fact that their customers are human. Speaking at StartCon in Sydney, Malatack said there’s a belief among businesses that personalised communication experiences are not scalable, that you can’t humanise communications and serve a wide customer base at the same time. “That’s no […]
