Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon chief, didn’t get where he is by being nice to China. When Beijing tried to force his company to abandon a gas exploration project in the waters off Vietnam in 2008, ExxonMobil showed it the finger. BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and several others caved to Chinese pressure. ExxonMobil is still there, drilling on a Vietnamese license in waters also claimed by China. Is […]
The digital humanities is the most exciting field you haven’t heard of—unless you happen to work on a college or university campus. For everyone else, I’ll risk censure and offer the pithiest definition I can muster: digital humanities is an interdisciplinary field in which scholars and educators bring computational tools and methods to humanistic inquiry. (For a more thorough definition, I recommend curious readers visit […]
Deir al-Zour, an oil-rich province that borders Iraq, is largely under Islamic State control and has been the focus of American-led airstrikes and other military action. Continue reading the main story Since early 2015, the jihadists have besieged the provincial capital, also called Deir al-Zour, where about 200,000 people live. The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, controls roughly half of the city, while the […]
DUBAI // Academics have welcomed a new agreement between the UAE Space Agency and eight universities as a way of developing much-needed manpower for the country’s space industry. As part of the agreement between University of Sharjah, Zayed University, the American University of Sharjah, Khalifa University, American University of Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates University, New York University Abu Dhabi, and the Masdar Institute of Science […]
Throughout the presidential campaign and since Donald Trump’s election, former diplomats, retired generals, and foreign-policy analysts have attempted to decipher, explain, and predict his foreign-policy strategy. Will he pursue the big-stick model of Teddy Roosevelt? Embrace a neo-Nixonian “madman” strategy? Is Trump actually a champion of foreign-policy realism, or perhaps no realist at all? But all those questions make the same mistake — they assume the incoming […]
By Ingrid Melander | PARIS PARIS Every week, a small group of Marine Le Pen’s aides brainstorm on how to achieve what many say is impossible: change how most French people view her to get her elected president in May. The “Idea-Image” committee of Le Pen’s far-right National Front (FN) consists of about 10 party officials and supporters. It held its first meeting in October as the […]
Josh Benson and Tom McGeveran, who founded the politics, culture and media site Capital New York in 2010 before selling it to Politico in 2013, are leaving the company. The departures were announced in a memo to staff from Politico Editor-in-Chief John Harris, who also said Politico’s statewide operations would be consolidated in Rosslyn. Launched in 2015, Politico States has established a presence in states across America, […]
Chatbots, collective intelligence and blockchain are some of the big technology trends that will change the way entrepreneurs run their businesses in 2017, says Klaus-Michael Vogelberg, chief technology officer at Sage. Vogelberg sees six major trends in 2017 that could make a big difference to the way business builders will work in 2017 and beyond. 1. Chatbots and autonomous interfaces Autonomous interfaces, such as chatbots or digital […]
While we learned earlier that John McCain was responsible for handing over the 35-page “dossier” of compromising, if arguably fake, revelations about Trump’s connections to Russia over to the FBI, the identity of the actual creator, who was said to be an ex-British intelligence service, remained a mystery. No longer. Courtesy of the WSJ, we now know his name: the former MI-6 officer, now working for a […]
While the 2011 revolution cannot be solely credited for creating an alternative music scene in Egypt, the ensuing political turmoil did trigger an outpouring of creativity. Music festivals from SOS to the Cairo Jazz Festival, and smaller independent music labels such as 100Copies, had been sowing the seeds of an alternative home-grown alt-music scene since the late 1990s, but the protests that began on the streets on […]
Photo Sue Fulton Credit Andrew T. Warman for The New York Times You were a member of the first co-ed class at West Point, then you served in the Army for five and a half years, but it’s safe to say that you’ve spent more time on a different battle: fighting for civil rights within the military. Do you think there are any similarities between what drew […]
A project of Bristol University is making news with a team of its Artificial Intelligence researchers sourcing colossal information from more than 100 British regional newspapers spanning 150 years in defining and pinpointing important turning points in the country’s history and culture. The results are amazing with many interesting revelations. What makes the project remarkable is the methodology. Already, it is known to all that history is well-etched […]
It would be premature to decide whether an agreement among OPEC and non-OPEC oil producers to cut output, reached late last year, needs to be extended beyond six months, the United Arab Emirates’ energy minister said on Wednesday. Speaking at an oil industry conference, Suhail bin Mohammed al-Mazroui said there needed to be competition in the oil market and trying to fix the market to achieve a […]
Economic growth will slow in Bahrain throughout 2017 and the government will continue to post large deficits as social instability limits opportunities for effective spending cuts, according to new research. In two separate reports this week, BMI Research warns that domestic instability in Bahrain will cause revenues to remain low by historical standards, even as oil prices start to recover. BMI forecasts Bahrain’s budget deficit to come […]
Since the start of the 21st century the South American nation of Suriname, population 540,000, has been riding a commodity boom that yielded major benefits for a country rich in bauxite, gold, oil and bananas. From 2000 to 2014, annual per capita income more than quintupled to almost $10,000. Child mortality fell by a third. A child born there today can expect to live to 70, up […]
By Hamid Shalizi | KABUL KABUL A Taliban suicide attack in the Afghan capital Kabul on Tuesday killed more than 30 people and wounded some 70 others, as twin blasts hit a crowded area of the city during the afternoon rush hour. Saleem Rasouli, a senior public health official, said 33 people had been killed and more than 70 wounded on the Darul Aman road, near an […]
They did, and in a finish that was frenzied and frenetic. Trailing by 24-14 at the start of the fourth quarter, the Tigers cut the deficit to 3 with a 4-yard touchdown pass from Deshaun Watson to Mike Williams. After both teams traded missed opportunities, Clemson finally took the lead for the first time in the game with just four minutes remaining when Williams made an acrobatic […]
A man wearing a VR headset experiments with a merged reality experience using Project Alloy at the Intel exhibit during the 2017 Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas Virtual reality sought its stride Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show, where despite being a hot topic there was little sign it is racing into mainstream culture. Show floor space devoted to virtual reality abounded with companies diving into […]
09 January 2017 Technology today has progressed to the point where innovation is no longer about creating a better life, instead it is the desire to create a better lifestyle for consumers that underpins the most exciting new products. While some of these innovations will quickly find their way into our lives and change how we do things, others are concepts that may or may not be […]
Credit: CC0 Public Domain What could be learnt about the world if you could read the news from over 100 local newspapers for a period of 150 years? This is what a team of Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers from the University of Bristol have done, together with a social scientist and a historian, who had access to 150 years of British regional newspapers. The patterns that emerged […]
Once again, the dawn of a new year is upon us. People will wonder what to do, what will happen and what can they expect. We, as humans, will rely on pundits to tell us what they think and yes most of what will be said will have a 50/50 chance of being as much right as wrong. This year is going to usher in many seismic […]
“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” So Henry Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston, described British foreign policy in 1848, at the height of its imperial pomp. “England is a power sufficiently strong, sufficiently powerful to steer her own course.” It is more than fanciful to imagine US […]
The world’s main repository for data on credit derivatives deals will move its database on to the blockchain, in the first big test case for whether the emerging technology can be employed across the finance industry. The DTCC, a US post-trade services group that processes more than $1,500tn of securities a year, will use technology from IBM and US blockchain start-ups R3 and Axoni as the basis […]
Two weeks ago we previewed that the U.S. Department of Energy could begin to sell off some of its strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) as soon as January, the beginning of a multi-year process to shrink the nation’s stockpile of oil. Congress has authorized DOE to sell off $375.4 million worth of oil in its recent budget resolution. The DOE said that such a sale could be held […]
