The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is not satisfied with Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc’s (WBA.O) plan to divest stores to win antitrust clearance for its acquisition of Rite Aid Corp (RAD.N), Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The FTC isn’t convinced that Walgreen’s proposal to sell 865 drugstores to Fred’s Inc (FRED.O) would do enough to preserve competition that would be lost in the $9.4 billion […]
Friday 05.10 GMT Overview Equities markets were mixed in Asian trading on Friday as the dollar ceded ground to regional currencies and China reported on-target economic growth ahead of the inauguration of US President-elect Donald Trump. Hot topic The dollar index measuring the greenback against a basket of peers fell 0.2 per cent after a two-day winning streak left it 0.8 per cent higher at Thursday’s close. […]
Over the past three posts, I have looked at a number of different Linux distributions for various models of the Raspberry Pi – including SUSE/openSUSE, Fedora, Manjaro and Ubuntu MATE, and PiCore Linux. What I haven’t done yet is look at the latest version of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s own Linux distribution, Raspbian with their PIXEL desktop. So I will look at that first, and then I […]
SYDNEY (AP) — Three nations shelled out around $160 million and years’ worth of work on the underwater search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The result: No plane. The only tangible — and arguably most important — clues into what happened to the aircraft have come courtesy of ordinary citizens, who bore the costs themselves. The deep-sea sonar search for the vanished Boeing 777 was suspended […]
US financial stocks have come under pressure since the start the year, denting a sharp rise that began after the election, in the latest sign that the Trump trade has begun to run out of steam. The S&P 500 financial sector has fallen 1.1 per cent since the end of 2016, bucking the broader index that has risen by 1.4 per cent. While the financial index was […]
There has been a lot of discussion about Twitter lately, most of it negative—it can’t make money on advertising, growth is down, and online bullies remain a problem. Meanwhile, Donald Trump tweets daily; more every day since the election. This alone, you’d think, would draw more attention to Twitter and make it more popular. Twitter actually does over $2.5 billion in revenue, but tech companies […]
YOUTUBE SAN FRANCISCO – An American journalist has reported on President Rodrigo Duterte’s use of a social media army of trolls to generate fake news and adulatory propaganda and attack his critics. Sean Williams details his finding in an article titled, “Rodrigo Duterte’s Army of Online Trolls,” published in this month’s issue of The New Republic. When Williams was reporting on the violence in the Philippines and in […]
A newly discovered species of moth found in the United States and Mexico was named after Donald Trump. Neopalpa Donaldtrumpi The new moth was named after Trump because the adult features yellowish-white scales on the head resembling the hair of the U.S. President-elect. Named Neopalpa donaldtrumpi, the moth was formally presented in the journal ZooKeys on Jan. 17, just a few days ahead before Trump will be […]
As we observed in yesterday morning’s market wrap, while US market were taking the day off for the MLK holiday, China was busy defending an accelerating selloff across its stock markets. During Monday trading, having traded quietly lower for the past few days, Chinese stocks tumbled in early trading on the mainland and in Hong Kong’s offshore market amid weakness in Asian equities. The Shanghai Composite Index […]
The adventurous spirit of The Flaming Lips extends to both music and words. The 15th album from the American psychedelic rockers is titled Oczy Mlody (pronounced “Oxlee Melody”), a Polish phrase chosen after frontman Wayne Coyne found it in a second-hand book he bought because he liked the cover. He didn’t care that the book, Blisko Domu (Almost Home), was in a language he does not speak. […]
Monday 02.10 GMT Overview Asian markets were mostly lower despite bank-led gains for Wall Street on Friday but the spotlight was on the British pound as it tumbled to a four-month low amid heightened expectations of a “hard Brexit”. Hot topic Sterling was down 1.3 per cent at $1.2027 after falling as low as $1.1986 in early Asian trading, ahead of a speech on Tuesday in which […]
In this Thursday, Nov. 5, 2015, file photo, 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokees appear on display at a Fiat Chrysler dealership in Doral, Fla. On Thursday, Jan. 12, 2017, the U.S. government alleged that Fiat Chrysler Automobiles failed to disclose that software in some of its pickups and SUVs with diesel engines allows them to emit more pollution than allowed under the Clean Air Act. The Environmental Protection […]
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s attempt to take control of all levers of power and a mounting terrorist threat has begun to alarm investors, sending the Turkish lira down 4 per cent to an all-time low on Wednesday. The lira traded at 3.93 to the dollar, down 12 per cent since the beginning of January, clocking its worst performance since a failed coup in July which prompted […]
When it comes to web browsers, Chrome is on top, Safari is second, and once-dominant IE is now far back in third. For over a decade, Internet Explorer (IE), thanks to Microsoft’s illegal crushing of Netscape, ruled the web browser field. Competitors, such as Mozilla Firefox, made runs at IE, but they barely dented IE’s lead. Then came Google Chrome in 2008, and in short order, IE […]
To an outsider, it looked preposterous. The archaeologists were cataloging and storing absolutely everything, treating this physical material as though it were digital information — JPEGs of itself. And yet they couldn’t afford not to: Everything a Neanderthal came into contact with was a valuable clue. (In 28 years of excavations here, archaeologists have yet to find a fossil of an actual Neanderthal.) “This is like putting […]
Something remains very broken with the US labor market: while the unemployment rate remains just shy of the lowest print since August 2007, rising fractionally to 4.7%, wage growth for most workers, as reported earlier, rose just 2.5%, far below the 4.0% it was when the unemployment rate last hit 4.7%. This continues to vex economists who have vowed that if only one lowers the unemployment rate […]
Mexico’s central bank intervened in the foreign exchange markets to halt the peso’s record slide against the dollar but failed to provide anything more than temporary respite for its battered currency. The peso responded to the move, the first of its kind since the election of Donald Trump, with a 1.5 per cent rise against the dollar. Having tumbled to another all-time low of 21.61 pesos on […]
Disappointment again… Early exuberance in stocks – as overnight gains suggested panic buying at the US open, faded rapidly as financials and tech faded and crude plunged (despite better than expected data)… then after NYMEX closed VIX was smashed lower and stocks lifted… S&P was best on the day, Trannies were red (thanks to Ford news impacting rails)… NOTE – stocks ripped at the open, […]
Producers refute Mariah Carey’s ‘sabotage’ claim Dick Clark Productions has hit back at Mariah Carey’s claim the company sabotaged her live performance on its ‘New Year’s Rockin’ Eve’ special in Times Square. The star vocally stumbled through her set, failing to sing most of it, despite a pre-recorded track of her songs playing in the background. Carey’s representative Nicole Perna blamed technical difficulties and a faulty earpiece […]
The women cowered behind a flimsy bedroom door. One of them dialed 911. Another clutched a stubby kitchen knife. Continue reading the main story Since leaving the corps in 2012, Siatta had been unable to switch off the habits of war. He was hypervigilant and struggled to relax. He watched people, sizing them up and scanning for threats. In the varying situations of everyday life, he constantly […]
Investors’ positions fluctuated wildly this year after unexpected election results in the UK and US upended markets, ultimately propelling a global stock rally and selling of government bonds as portfolio managers readied for the arrival of fiscal stimulus and inflation. A $66bn rotation into US stocks over the past eight weeks reflects expectations for faster global growth and inflation in the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise US […]
Financial markets in 2016 endured an escalation of negative interest rates, the collapse and subsequent rebound in commodity prices and fluctuating stock market valuations. The test for investors began in week one, as fears of a China slowdown roiled stock indices weeks after the Federal Reserve began to normalise policy. Over the ensuing months, the Brexit vote and US election would prove significant mile markers, shift thinking […]
TOKYO Shares in Toshiba (6502.T) fell more than 19 percent in morning trade on Thursday, clocking a third day of heavy losses after the Japanese tech-to-nuclear conglomerate said earlier this week it faced a potential multi-billion dollar writedown. Late on Wednesday, Moody’s became the second rating agency to downgrade the group, pushing it deeper into “junk”, or non-investment grade territory, with a Caa1 rating, from B3. “Although […]
Iran’s rial hit a record low against the U.S. dollar on Monday in a sign of concern about the country’s ability to attract foreign money after U.S. president-elect Donald Trump takes office. The rial was quoted in the free market at 41,500 to the dollar, weakening from around 41,250 on Sunday and 35,570 in mid-September. Before this month, the record low was about 40,000, hit in late […]
