Government led investment is driving a surge in domestic tourism across Saudi Arabia – with experts predicting a 40 percent surge in the number of internal trips made between 2015 and 2020. The Euromonitor International Tourism Forecast report, prepared ahead of The Hotel Show Saudi Arabia 2017, has revealed record levels of domestic travel within the kingdom. Following the announcement of Saudi Vision 2030 – the country’s […]
Turkey gets Six Senses Turkey will get its first Six Senses resort on May 1, when the hotel group takes over the management of the Canyon Ranch Wellness Resort at Kaplankaya, on the country’s south-western coast. The property is situated in a wild area of the Aegean coast, a 50-minute drive from Bodrum, and has 141 guest rooms and 154 private residences. Further development will include a […]
President Jacob Zuma has sacked Pravin Gordhan, his finance minister, and eight other cabinet members, threatening turmoil for South Africa’s fragile economy and setting the stage for the biggest crisis yet for the ruling African National Congress under his leadership. Mr Zuma’s decision to fire Mr Gordhan as part of a late-night cabinet reshuffle sent the rand down 2 per cent on Friday, taking the currency’s decline […]
MANILA The Philippines on Friday ruled out declaration of a unilateral ceasefire ahead of the resumption of peace talks with communist rebels next week, saying it was more interested in a bilateral truce both sides could stick to. The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) plans to declare a unilateral ceasefire no later than Friday and had expected the government to do the same, in line with […]
By Praveen Menon and James Pearson | KUALA LUMPUR KUALA LUMPUR Three North Koreans wanted for questioning in the murder of Kim Jong Nam, the estranged half-brother of their country’s leader were believed to be returning home with the coffin of the victim on Friday after Malaysia agreed a swap deal with the reclusive state. Photographs obtained by Reuters from Japan’s Kyodo news agency show Hyon Kwang […]
President Trump’s Air Force Secretary nominee, Heather Wilson, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 30 that she had consulted honorably for four U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories years ago, even though she never produced a detailed written accounting of how she had spent her time while earning $20,000 a month. Wilson, a former Air Force pilot and House lawmaker who now runs the South Dakota School […]
BEIRUT/ANKARA: More than 5 million Syrians are now refugees, the UN said Thursday, as aid groups urged the international community to end the country’s six-year war and provide more assistance.The new figures mean around a quarter of Syria’s population has fled since the March 2011 start of a conflict that has killed over 320,000 people.The UN refugee agency UNHCR urged more international assistance, with spokeswoman Cecile Pouilly […]
One of the few regrets of Vint Cerf, who is often referred to as the ‘father of the Internet’, is the fact that encryption using public cryptography was not baked in the original ARPANET design. While the early Internet was meant to meet a number of requirements such as resilience and openness, encryption was not one of them. Some of this was because of the high cost […]
Heroin addiction and its use has increased rapidly in the United States in the past few years. The most impacted are the whites in the country, as well as people with low income and poor education. According to the CDC, in 2015, drug overdose killed 52,404 people in the United States. Out of this number, 63 percent died due to opioid addiction. Now, a study reveals that heroin addiction […]
DUBAI // Children in the UAE are at low risk from the measles outbreak sweeping southern Europe thanks to a stringent national immunisation programme, doctors said. This week, the World Health Organisation warned that the disease was spreading fast wherever immunisation coverage had dropped, and particularly in Italy and Romania. In January, Italy reported more than 200 cases, while Romania reported more than 3,400 cases and 17 […]
China’s factories stopped losing jobs in March for the first time in nearly five years as manufacturing activity grew at the fastest pace since 2012, according to an official gauge of the sector. The official purchasing managers’ index for China’s manufacturing sector came in at 51.8 in March, climbing further above the 50-point mark separating growth from contraction. But the biggest turnround came from a sub-index tracking […]
Solar wind and radiation are responsible for stripping the Martian atmosphere, transforming Mars from a planet that could have supported life billions of years ago into a frigid desert world, according to new results. (via WSJ)
By Michelle Nichols | NEW YORK NEW YORK The United States’ diplomatic policy on Syria for now is no longer focussed on making the war-torn country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, leave power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said on Thursday, in a departure from the Obama administration’s initial and public stance on Assad’s fate. The view of the Trump administration is also at odds with European […]
SINGAPORE: Former presidential hopeful Tan Cheng Bock has called on the Government to make the upcoming Presidential Election an open election. Speaking to reporters at a press conference on Friday (Mar 31), he asked if it was correct to make the upcoming election, which must be held by August, a reserved one. He pointed out that the Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC) had advised the Prime Minister to count […]
By Nichola Saminather | SINGAPORE SINGAPORE The dollar extended its overnight gains in early Asian trade on Friday on signs of strong U.S. economic growth, while the euro inched up after sliding overnight on data suggesting slowing growth in Europe. Stock markets in Asia were off a bit despite solid gains on Wall Street as investors awaited China’s official manufacturing purchasing managers index data for March. The […]
The Tyrannosaurus rex is a fearsome dinosaur during prehistoric times. Now, a new dinosaur discovery suggests that the T-rex and other tyrannosaurs may have faces covered with highly sensitive scales that gave them the ability to detect the slightest changes such as the presence of a prey attempting to avoid detection. T-Rex Relative Daspletosaurus Horneri A newly discovered species of the tyrannosaur was found to have remarkably sensitive […]
By Cynthia Kim and Ju-min Park | SEOUL SEOUL A South Korean court on Friday approved a warrant to arrest ousted president Park Geun-hye, the country’s first democratically elected leader to be thrown out of office, on accusations of bribery and abuse of power. Park can be held in a cell for up to 20 days while she is investigated over allegations that she colluded with a […]
BuzzFeed is closing its in-house, open-source innovation lab in October after two years of experimentation at the crossroads of technology and media. BuzzFeed’s Open Lab for Journalism, Technology, and the Arts, which is housed at BuzzFeed’s San Francisco bureau, will wind down in October after the current fellowship class finishes its work, BuzzFeed San Francisco Bureau Chief Mat Honan wrote in a note to employees obtained by […]
Why Hamburg? The recent opening of Hamburg’s state-of-the-art concert hall, the Elbphilharmonie, has transformed Germany’s second biggest city from an under-the-radar destination into one of Europe’s current hotspots. And the Elbphilharmonie is only the tip of Hamburg’s vibrant music scene. There is Germany’s oldest Opera House, a concert hall dedicated to Brahms, plus dozens of live music clubs in the St Pauli neighbourhood, still going strong since […]
SpaceX on Thursday became the first space company to use a recycled rocket to send a payload into orbit, paving the way for a sharp drop in launch costs that is a key part of its long-term plan to carry passengers to Mars. The Los Angeles-based company sent a rocket into orbit using a main booster stage that first flew on April 6 last year. It also […]
But it was not immediately clear whether the approval of the new settlement was meant to be a provocative move to scuttle the prospect of a revival of peace talks. Mr. Netanyahu said he was following through on a pledge he made a few weeks ago to 40 settler families who were evacuated from the illegal Amona outpost in the West Bank. That outpost was removed by […]
There ends a third and perhaps final attempt to unite the London Stock Exchange Group and Deutsche Börse. Do they remain independent or prizes for rivals? One supposed reason for the deal was that without it both the LSE and Deutsche Börse viewed themselves as takeover targets. Now we are about to see whether that is truly the case. There are only three other global operators with bigger equity […]
American Michael Sharp told his mother two years ago he was committed to helping the Congolese people in his role as a U.N. investigator and was “not afraid to die,” she recalled Thursday after he was murdered this week along with a colleague in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “He said the hardest thing for him was to think about pain he would cause his family,” Michele […]
By Gayathree Ganesan and Sruthi Ramakrishnan The steep drop in Lululemon Athletica’s (LULU.O) stock price, following a sales warning that resulted from poor color choices in the company’s spring collection, turns the spotlight on slowing growth in the athleisure category pioneered by the Canadian yogawear retailer. Shares of rivals Nike Inc (NKE.N) and Under Armour (UAA.N) also were down on Thursday, raising questions of whether athletic leisure […]
