FUJAIRAH // Mystery surrounds how a three-metre-long shark ended up dead on a boat, with the sailor saying it leapt aboard and attacked his crew and experts saying it looks like the shark had been hunted illegally. Emirati sailor Hamza Al Sharaa said he and his crew of five were attacked by the shark that leapt onto the deck of their boat in the dark in the […]
FATAL ANTI-DALIT BIAS OF MODI’S MINISTERS
By Amulya Ganguli
In a voice choked with (feigned?) emotion, Narendra Modi told the Ambedkar University convocation last Friday that Rohith Vemula was forced to take his own life. But he did not specify who forced the Dalit student although the prime minister knew that the “culprits” were in his cabinet. Moreover, they are likely to continue in their posts despite their guilt – unless they are booked for the abetment of suicide.
The two “guilty” ministers, however, must be wondering what they did wrong. After all, when labour minister Bandaru Dattatreya shot off a letter to the “high school girl” – SmritiIrani has studied only up to Class XII – in the human resource development ministry, complaining about how Hyderabad University has become a “den of casteism, extremism and anti-national politics”
The $15 trillion rout in global equity markets since May is reawakening the lure of gold for investors seeking safety. Hedge funds more than doubled their net-long position in bullion last week, just three weeks after they were the most-bearish ever. Investor holdings of gold through exchange-traded products are expanding at the fastest pace in a year, and the value of the ETPs has jumped by $3 […]
Senior Saudi and Iranian figures clashed behind closed doors at a private meeting convened by the World Economic Forum in Davos this week to try to promote peace in Syria, participants said. The barbed exchange between Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif at an invitation-only meeting on Wednesday underlined the hostility between the two Gulf rivals, who are waging proxy wars in Syria, […]
DUBAI // A young lioness that escaped from her owner is believed to have roamed the streets for more than three hours before she was captured by a team of Dubai Municipality animal welfare officers. Dubai Police said they received reports of the lioness prowling the streets of Al Barsha neighbourhood, one of the newer residential developments on the city’s west side, at about 7pm on Thurday. […]
Microsoft‘s latest update to Skype now hides a user’s IP address by default. The change is likely to be noticed most by gamers who in the past have been targeted for online harassment and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks via user details found through their Skype accounts. Skype recently rolled out the ability for users to hide their IP address from others they communicated with using […]
Saudi Arabia’s move to isolate Iran raises the specter of deepening conflicts in the volatile Middle East after the biggest meltdown in relations between the two regional powers in almost three decades. The Saudi government and staunch ally Bahrain severed diplomatic ties, giving Iranian ambassadors 48 hours to leave after protesters set the Saudi embassy in Tehran on fire over the weekend following the execution of Saudi cleric […]
Oil gained for a second day as Saudi Arabia cut ties with Iran a day after its embassy in Tehran was attacked to protest the Saudis’ execution of a prominent Shiite cleric. Futures rose as much as 3.5 percent in New York, extending Thursday’s 1.2 percent advance. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned of repercussions and protesters armed with rocks and firebombs attacked the Saudi embassy […]
India’s rupee fell the most since November on speculation demand for riskier assets will be hurt as tensions in the Middle East intensify and poor Chinese economic data adds to concern over global growth. Emerging-market stocks and currencies dropped Monday as manufacturing in China weakened for a fifth straight month, the longest such streak since 2009. Saudi Arabia cut ties with Iran and expelled the Islamic Republic’s diplomats, […]
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Saudi rulers will face repercussions after the kingdom executed an outspoken Shiite cleric. “The divine hand of revenge will take the Saudi politicians by the throat,” Khamenei, Iran’s highest authority, said on Sunday. Cleric Nimr al-Nimr “was neither encouraging people to armed protests, nor plotting secretly, all he did was to openly criticize,” said Khamenei, who frequently lashes out at […]
Russia’s Telecoms Minister Nikolai Nikiforov attends an interview with Reuters at his office in Moscow December 9, 2013. Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin/Files MOSCOW A social network account of Russia’s communications minister was temporarily blocked on Sunday in a cyberattack carried out by hackers presenting themselves as a Turkish activist group and parading images of a warplane and Turkish flags. Russia’s ties with Turkey suffered a severe blow when a […]
Emaar Properties PJSC slid the most in more than two weeks, leading a decline in Dubai stocks, on concern a fire that ripped through its hotel on New Year’s Eve will curb earnings. Abu Dhabi shares also fell. Emaar dropped as much as 4.4 percent, before paring its slide to 3.5 percent at 10:31 a.m. local time. The developer of the world’s tallest tower was the biggest contributor […]
|By Matein Khalid| Emerging markets were an entirely predictable horror story once again in 2015. The oil/mining bust, currency meltdowns, China’s hard landing, sovereign credit downgrades, banking system crises, corruption scandals and geopolitical crises from Ukraine to Syria, the Black Sea to the South China Sea devastated investor wealth in emerging markets. India’s Sensex and Nifty were down 9% while the rupee has depreciated to 66 […]
LONDON The BBC’s [TBBC.UL] online services, including its news website and iPlayer catch-up TV platform, were taken down on Thursday by a large web attack, the British broadcaster reported. The BBC’s sites, which rank only behind Google and Facebook in visitor numbers in Britain, according to Internet analytics firm comScore, were hit from 0700 GMT, with many users receiving an error message rather than content. The broadcaster […]
Gulfnews.com A convoy of ambulances carrying more than 125 fighters from the besieged rebel-held Syrian town of Zabadani arrive at the Masnaa border crossing between Lebanon and Syria, December 28, 2015. Beirut: A rare UN-backed deal between Syria’s warring sides saw hundreds of fighters and civilians evacuate three towns on Monday, as bomb blasts in the regime-held city of Homs killed at least 14 people. President Bashar […]
A North Korean operating system is seen in this screen shot taken in Seoul December 23, 2015. Reuters/James Pearson SINGAPORE/SEOUL North Korea’s homegrown computer operating system mirrors its political one, according to two German researchers who have delved into the code: a go-it-alone approach, a high degree of paranoia and invasive snooping on users. Their research, the deepest yet into the secretive state’s Red Star OS, illustrates the […]
A map of China is seen through a magnifying glass on a computer screen showing binary digits in Singapore in this January 2, 2014 photo illustration. Reuters/Edgar Su/Files BEIJING China’s parliament passed a controversial new anti-terrorism law on Sunday that requires technology firms to hand over sensitive information such as encryption keys to the government and allows the military to venture overseas on counter-terror operations. Chinese officials […]
While plenty of cyberattacks are still conducted by the stereotypical “hacker in a basement,” state-sponsored hacking is also on the rise — prompting Yahoo to become the latest tech company to offer warnings of such attacks. In a blog post earlier this week, chief information security officer Bob Lord said Yahoo will offer specific security suggestions to users who appear to be the targets of state-sponsored attacks. […]
Sanrio, the Japanese owner of the Hello Kitty brand, on Monday said it was investigating a report that its database was hacked and private information on 3.3 million users was exposed. The leaked data from the fan site of the Japanese toy company includes information like users’ full names, email addresses and encrypted passwords, according to the report by security website CSOonline.com, which cited researcher Chris Vickery. […]
The Cisco Systems logo is seen as part of a display at the Microsoft Ignite technology conference in Chicago, Illinois, May 4, 2015. Reuters/Jim Young BOSTON Networking equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc said on Monday it has launched a product review to look for tampering after rival Juniper Networks Inc’s disclosure found code in firewall software that made it vulnerable to cyber attacks. Juniper warned customers on […]
Foreign Hackers Accessed U.S. Power Grid ‘Dozens of Times’ Recently, a private security researcher hot on the trail of hackers who stole information from a California university’s housing files discovered something far more nefarious: the attackers had found a way into networks running America’s power grid. That security researcher was Brian Wallace. Those attackers appear to be based in Iran. According to his research, these bad actors […]
Our father died six years ago, and this year our mother died. As the eldest child, I became responsible overnight for my brother and sister. I’ve never not looked forward to this time of year. The fact that I get to eat my bodyweight in food without feeling an ounce of guilt plays a big part in my high spirits during the lead-up to Christmas. The lights, […]
There is an old cliché that goes, “they don’t make them like they used to.” With the pronounced computerization of contemporary cars in mind, that adage certainly stands tall. More than 50 percent of vehicles sold this year connect to the Internet in one or more ways, and it is predicted by 2025, every car will be connected in multiple ways. That brings up the issue of car hacking. […]
MAMATA WOOING CONGRESS AGAIN
By Ashis Biswas
For the Bharatiya Janata Party in Bengal, the theme song could well be akla chalo re: Ironically, as the weakest opposition party in West Bengal, the BJP alone is not contemplating any alliance, with only a few months left before the 2016 Assembly polls.
Among other parties, the usually derided, much weakened Congress has emerged as the prime choice as an alliance partner both for the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the CPI(M). Interestingly, the Left camp remains divided over the question of political alignments. For instance, the CPI a firm ally of the Congress during the seventies, has put its foot down to any linkage with it, as have smaller parties like the SUCI or the CPI(M-L). The CPI’s logic: it points to its own remarkable decline over the years, which it sees as a consequence of its earlier reliance on
