Interactive MARCH 24, 2017 After earning $800,000 in 2015 by sneaking migrants into Turkey, a smuggler says he has left the guilt and complications of his business behind — mostly. And a Syrian refugee boy, homeless and out of school, must keep roaming the country to find farm work and help his family survive. This is the third part in the State of Emergency series, in which […]
While the American Healthcare Act, President Trump’s first major legislative effort, is going to a vote in the House of Representatives on Friday – no matter what; for many years now, the American healthcare system has been flawed. As Statista’s Feliz Richter illustrates in the chart below, U.S. health spending per capita (including public and private spending) is higher than it is anywhere else in the world, […]
Once upon a time, the Universe was just a hot soup of particles. In those days, together with visible particles, other particles to us hidden or dark might have formed. Billions of years later scientists catalogued 17 types of visible particles, with the most recent one being the Higgs boson, creating the ‘Standard Model’. However, they are still struggling to detect the hidden particles, the ones that […]
Google has announced plans to reduce the trust in Symantec TLS certificates until a point is reached in early 2018 where Chrome 64 will only trust certificates issued for 279 days or less from the security giant and its subsidiaries. Posting to the Blink development mailing list, Google engineer Ryan Sleevi said that following a “series of failures” by Symantec, Google believes its users face significant risk. […]
HONG KONG Hong Kong authorities have launched a prosecution against the captain of the ship and shipping agent involved in transporting nine Singaporean armoured vehicles seized in the city last November. Hong Kong customs officers seized the Terrex troop carriers as they were being shipped home from military exercises in Taiwan. Singapore’s armed forces have maintained long-standing if low key military training facilities in Taiwan, and Beijing […]
By Henning Gloystein | SINGAPORE SINGAPORE Oil prices edged up on Friday, supported by a fall in Saudi exports to the United States, but overall markets remained under pressure on the back of a world market awash with fuel. Prices for front-month Brent crude futures LCOc1, the international benchmark for oil, were at $50.63 per barrel at 0343 GMT, up 7 cents from their last close. In […]
By Venus Wu and Jess Macy Yu | HONG KONG HONG KONG Hong Kong on Sunday will likely select Beijing’s favoured candidate for its next leader who some say will further divide a city where middle class families have become increasingly disaffected by political tension and economic hardship. The former British colony, governed under a “one country, two systems” arrangement, was promised a high degree of autonomy […]
Putting on your make-up can be a struggle if the lighting is dim and space on your table is sparse. If not stored properly, lipsticks can go missing, foundation bottles can slip and crash, and brushes can lose their shape. Hand in hand with the contouring, baking and strobing beauty trends comes the need for a well-organised make-up station, where compacts are colour coordinated and lipsticks stand […]
Chu Jeong Woo and his tour group from South Korea were supposed to visit Britain’s Houses of Parliament on Thursday. But with the area cordoned off, they had to settle for selfies with the symbol of British democracy — and the scene of Wednesday’s lethal terror attack — as a backdrop. “Change in plans,” Mr Chu, a student, explained as many in his group snapped pictures of […]
SYDNEY China is not militarising the South China Sea, Premier Li Keqiang said on Friday, although he acknowledged that defence equipment on islands in the disputed waterway had been placed there to maintain “freedom of navigation”. China has drawn international criticism for large-scale building in the South China Sea, although Li told reporters in Australia the development was for civilian purposes only. “China’s facilities, Chinese islands and […]
By David DeKok | HARRISBURG, Pa. HARRISBURG, Pa. Got $1.5 million to spare? If so, tiny Reduction, a one-time company town built to house workers at a long-vanished garbage-processing plant in western Pennsylvania, could be yours for the asking. The aptly named town is home to 60 residents, down from 400 in its heyday. They live in 19 tidy brick houses, paying rent to the Stawovy family, […]
By Michael Holden | BIRMINGHAM, England BIRMINGHAM, England Before he killed at least four people in Britain’s deadliest attack since the 2005 London bombings, Khalid Masood was considered by intelligence officers to be a criminal who posed little serious threat. A British-born former teacher and Muslim convert, Masood had shown up on the periphery of previous terrorism investigations that brought him to the attention of Britain’s MI5 […]
Chartbeat and CrowdTangle today announced a major expansion of a tool for measuring how stories are performing on social platforms. The two companies began a beta version of the Offsite Social service in September 2016. Two months later Facebook acquired CrowdTangle. The announcement says that Facebook is now making a “robust” (but unspecified) additional investment in expanding what’s measured and taking the service global including to European […]
DUBAI // Emiratis need to feel a “higher sense of responsibility” to help solve the conflicts around them, the head of a student programme says. “We’ve been able to write the first draft of a national document, which includes the world’s concerns, tolerance, women’s status, conflict and peace, and the skills that are taught to the students to reach this culture,” said Dr Ibrahim Al Dabal, general […]
In almost any other part of the world, a friendly, on-camera hug between two senior politicians at a public event would have raised no eyebrows. But in the febrile atmosphere of a Hong Kong bracing itself for the “election” of its fourth chief executive since the former British colony was handed back to China in 1997, Tung Chee-hwa’s embrace of Carrie Lam during a public ceremony in […]
By Jane Chung and Geert De Clercq | SEOUL/PARIS SEOUL/PARIS South Korea’s KEPCO (015760.KS), the likeliest suitor for Toshiba Corp’s (6502.T) troubled nuclear business, is holding off from making an approach because of question marks over the scale of damage at the unit and political uncertainty in both South Korea and the United States, people with direct knowledge of the matter say. Japanese TV-to-rail conglomerate Toshiba has […]
MOSCOW — It’s 2017, and the new Cold War is in full swing. The West is winning, for now. U.S. sanctions have impoverished Russia. But the two sides are poised at a critical juncture. The Russians have come up with new technology to drill for gas that could send their economy skyrocketing again, putting the West on the back foot. And so, the CIA sends President Donald […]
Astronomers have directly observed a pair of Milky Way-like galaxies seen when the universe was only eight percent of its current age. These progenitors of today’s giant spiral galaxies are surrounded by ‘super halos’ of hydrogen gas that extend many tens-of-thousands of light-years beyond their dusty, star-filled disks. (via WSJ)
By Silke Koltrowitz | BASEL, Switzerland BASEL, Switzerland Swiss watchmakers expect the market to stay challenging this year with the United States, their second-biggest market, showing no signs of recovering, executives told Reuters at an industry fair in Basel. Swiss watchmakers are grappling with declining sales in their biggest markets — Hong Kong and the United States — and have been hit by tourist shoppers avoiding Europe […]
Donald Trump suffered a big blow as Republican leaders postponed a vote on the party’s healthcare bill following their failure to unite conservatives around the effort to replace the Obamacare law that they had spent years vowing to repeal. Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House, abandoned the vote on Thursday afternoon after a final effort by the White House to convince conservative rebels to support […]
CAIRO — Ten Egyptian soldiers and 15 militants were killed during a raid on an Islamist insurgent base in the restive Sinai Peninsula, a military spokesman said Thursday. The deaths underscored the strength of the Sinai insurgency, led by an Islamic State affiliate, despite almost four years of concerted Egyptian counterterrorism operations. In recent months Sinai militants have expanded their area of operations, targeted Christian civilians and […]
Investors rushed to participate in Volkswagen’s return to European bond markets on Thursday, with the German carmaker’s first benchmark issue following the emissions scandal attracting huge demand. The €8bn euro-denominated bond attracted €24bn of orders by late afternoon, when books were closed ahead of final pricing. Bankers said the deal was launched with a spread 15 basis points tighter than initial indications. “There was a lot of […]
One of the brightest lights in local journalism suffered a setback late last year when Raleigh Agenda, the sister site of Charlotte Agenda, closed its doors after failing to find a sustainable business model. But the closure of the site didn’t prevent the parent company from banking a comfortable profit in 2016, said Ted Williams, Charlotte Agenda’s cofounder and publisher. The company brought in about $875,000 in […]
By Robin Emmott and Alissa de Carbonnel | BRUSSELS BRUSSELS Hours before Wednesday’s attack in London, the head of the European Union police agency Europol warned that a large group of radicalised individuals posed a constant threat to Britain and Europe. “Some of these are likely to succeed in the future,” Rob Wainwright, who is British, wrote in a blog to commemorate the attacks in Brussels that […]
