BEIJING China has ordered private think tanks to register with the authorities, who will also keep tabs on research activity, under new rules published by state media, the ruling Communist Party’s latest move to stamp its authority on intellectual bodies. President Xi Jinping has overseen a drive to place the party back at the centre of China’s media, academia and charities, while cracking down on civil society […]
Amaysim has said it is committed to introducing National Broadband Network (NBN) services with faster speeds than its current maximum 100/40Mbps tier once it is “economically viable”. “We will definitely be coming out with higher-speed plans as they become commercially viable in the market … 1Gbps is an option that’s on the table and being looked at but not guaranteed at this stage,” Rob Appel, Amaysim’s commercial […]
Spotify and a host of European internet businesses have called on Brussels to crack down on what they see as troubling practices by the likes of Apple and Google. Big internet platforms “can and do abuse their privileged position”, according to a letter signed by the chief executives of Spotify, music streaming rival Deezer and German start-up investor Rocket Internet among others. Although the letter to the […]
Photo Gholamali Khoshroo, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, speaking at a U.N. Security Council meeting in February. Credit Mark Lennihan/Associated Press Iran responded angrily on Thursday to criticisms by Saudi Arabia’s defense minister, accusing him of acts that violate the United Nations Charter and calling his kingdom an instigator of “dangerous ambitions in the region and beyond.” The Iranian response came in a formal protest letter […]
Throw them into the bay, or throw them into jail? Those were two possible replies to a poll set up by a user on Twitter. He wanted to know how to deal with “treacherous journalists” – the journalists in question were reporters working for the Panamanian daily newspaper La Prensa. The paper’s newsroom lies just 7.2 miles away from the offices of Mossack Fonseca, the law firm […]
Google has agreed to pay €306 million in back taxes to Italy and Ireland to end a criminal investigation into whether the company avoided paying the full amount on its revenues for more than a decade, Italian tax officials confirmed on Thursday. The agreement resolves multiple disputes including a criminal probe that saw Milan prosecutors accuse Google of generating revenues of €1 billion in Italy and Ireland […]
Commodities futures in China are diving further, led by another large drop in the price of iron ore to a six-month low. Iron ore futures were down by their daily limit of 8 per cent on the Dalian Commodity Exchange at Rmb458.5 ($66.48). Yesterday, futures were down by as much as the daily limit, before easing to close 5.3 per cent lower. Dalian coking coal futures were […]
Jeff Immelt, the GE chairman and chief executive, has called for Donald Trump to keep the US in the Paris climate accord, weighing into a debate inside the new administration over a campaign promise to withdraw from the landmark agreement. “We are for staying in the treaty. I think global engagement is a good thing,” Mr Immelt told a Washington audience on Thursday. The business community “has […]
White House officials said foreign leaders would be more willing to help the United States if disagreements over human rights and other issues were aired in private. They cited the recent release of an Egyptian-American aid worker detained in Egypt, which was negotiated in quiet talks with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Continue reading the main story “Obama’s approach was to build support with the Arab public through […]
Authored by John Solomon via Circa.com, During his final year in office, President Obama’s team significantly expanded efforts to search National Security Agency intercepts for information about Americans, distributing thousands of intelligence reports across government with the unredacted names of U.S. residents in the midst of a divisive 2016 presidential election. The data, made available this week by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, provides […]
(Image: CNET/CBS Interactive) More than two-dozen popular apps for iPhones and iPads are still leaking sensitive information, such as login details for their services, despite having months to roll out a fix. Earlier this year, Will Strafach set out to see which popular iPhone apps were vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, which allow attackers to intercept data as it’s being passed from a device to a server. Strafach, […]
The US energy industry has morphed from 2016’s big winner to the bottom of the heap this year in a slide that has accelerated as oil prices fell on Thursday to the lowest level since November. Energy stocks listed on the S&P 500 index dropped 1.9 per cent on Thursday. The fall brings the sector’s decline this year to 12.1 per cent, the biggest drop of the […]
We’ve known for years that a key protocol that allows global cellular networks to communicate with each other had vulnerabilities — and nobody really took it that seriously. Hackers and politicians alike have been warning for years that these flaws in the calling and text message routing system, known as Signaling System 7 (SS7), can be used to intercept and redirect calls and text messages, allowing hackers […]
May 4, 2017 by: Katrina Manson in New York Donald Trump will visit Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Vatican on his first foreign trip as US president in an effort to unite a coalition against Islamist terrorism and Iran and extract more from traditional allies. The travel plans mark a departure from US foreign policy norms, which usually see new presidents visit neighbouring Canada or Mexico within a month of taking office. […]
Under the memorandum they signed as guarantors of a cease-fire, fighting between government forces and insurgents is to stop in four zones that include rebel-held territory in the north, central and southern parts of the country. Continue reading the main story It remains unclear precisely how the guarantors will monitor compliance with what they are calling “de-escalation zones.” Aleksandr Lavrentyev, the Russian negotiator at the Astana talks, […]
(Image: file photo) Last month, several competing students from universities across the US descended upon San Antonio for the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC). CCDC, which originated in 2005, is a defensive security competition that puts students in a real-world commercial IT environment and tests their ability to defend, detect, and respond to outside threats, including maintain availability of existing services like mail servers and web […]
Royal Dutch Shell on Thursday rounded off the strongest set of quarterly results from “big oil” for over two years, even as a fresh slide in crude prices raised doubts over the sustainability of recovery from one of the deepest downturns in industry history. Earnings from the Anglo-Dutch group in the first three months of this year more than doubled from the same period of 2016. This […]
Authored by 720Global’s Michael Lebowitz via RealInvestmentAdvice.com, “History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums” – Alan Greenspan The ability to see beyond the observable and the probable is the most important and under-appreciated characteristic of successful investors. For example, visualize a single domino standing upright. With this limited perspective, one can establish what the domino is doing in the […]
By Julia Simon | NEW YORK NEW YORK Oil prices collapsed on Thursday to their lowest since late November as investor worries about the world’s stubbornly persistent glut of crude erased most of the gains that followed last year’s OPEC’s output cut. The slide worsened after OPEC delegates downplayed the chance that their group and other producing countries would deepen their output cuts when they meet on […]
Fun times, tan lines, and the threat of tick-borne diseases. Apparently, this is what summer has got in store for us this year. As if blacklegged ticks in the country aren’t already teeming with enough pathogens to make us go crazy, there’s a new tick infection to add to the list — Powassan virus. Rumor has it, it’s even worse than Lyme disease. What Is Powassan Virus? […]
Figure 1: An X-ray diffraction image of a chip package containing four multi-stacked silicon die. The thickest silicon die (300 µm thick) is the large flat stripe, which experiences the least warpage as it is glued to the package lead frame (lead frame not imaged). The three “wiggly” strips are individual transmission section images for each of the three remaining die (each 50 µm thick) stacked upon […]
One of the EU’s most senior officials has called for a ceasefire in the verbal hostilities over Brexit with Theresa May, warning that looming talks could become “impossible” if calm is not restored. The intervention by Donald Tusk, European Council president, marks a concerted effort to defuse escalating tension between Brussels and London after the UK prime minister accused EU officials of trying to sabotage her election […]
Microsoft looks ready to widen its Cortana Skills Kit availability as of next week, simultaneous with its Build 2017 developer conference in Seattle. Microsoft has published its schedule and session descriptions for many of its Build 2017 talks via its official Build schedule builder mobile application. (I downloaded a version from the Google Play Store today for my Android phone.) The session list includes several Cortana Skills […]
US Treasuries came under pressure across the curve on Thursday, following a round of solid economic data and indications that the Federal Reserve is willing to look past the slowdown in economic growth at the start of this year. The 10-year yield was up 0.043 percentage point (4.3 basis points) at 2.363 per cent. Meanwhile, the policy-sensitive two-year yield ticked up 2.81 bps to 1.322 per cent. […]
