|Arabian Post Staff| Banks in Saudi Arabia are coming under fresh pressure over products that allow speculators to bet against the kingdom’s currency peg, Bloomberg reports quoting people with knowledge of the matter. Bloomberg said the Saudi Arabia Monetary Agency has asked lenders to explain why they are offering dollar-riyal forward structured products to customers less than four months after the regulator banned options contracts that let […]
By TIM ARANGO May 28, 2016 BAGHDAD — American commandos are on the front lines in Syria in a new push toward the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Raqqa, but in Iraq it is an entirely different story: Iran, not the United States, has become the face of an operation to retake the jihadist stronghold of Falluja from the militant group. On the outskirts of Falluja, tens of […]
By NICOLA CLARK May 27, 2016 PARIS — A French naval vessel fitted with sophisticated underwater sensors raced on Friday toward the eastern Mediterranean Sea, as the window for locating the so-called black boxes of a downed Egyptian airliner rapidly closed. The ship is expected to arrive in the search zone early next week to help locate and recover the EgyptAir jet’s cockpit voice and data recorders. The recorders, […]
Prescribing certain medications on the basis of a patient’s race has long come under fire from those uneasy with using race as a surrogate for biology when treating disease. But there are multiple challenges to overcome before we can move beyond race-based treatment decisions, writes Duke University geneticist and bioethicist Charmaine Royal in a perspective piece published May 25 in the New England Journal of Medicine. In […]
SHIRAZ, Iran — For centuries, Iran’s famed carpets have been produced by hand along the nomad trail in this region of high plains around the ancient city of Shiraz. Sheep grazed in high mountain pastures and shorn only once a year produce a thick, long wool ideal for the tough thread used in carpet making. But high-quality production of hand-woven carpets is no longer sustainable on the […]
An Apple store is seen in Los Angeles, California, United States, April 22, 2016. Reuters/Lucy Nicholson/Files SAN FRANCISCO Apple Inc is investigating how to charge electric cars, talking to charging station companies and hiring engineers with expertise in the area, according to people familiar with the matter and a review of LinkedIn profiles. For more than a year, Silicon Valley has been buzzing about Apple’s plan to […]
|By Matein Khalid| In retrospect, 2016 will go down in German political and economic history as a significant game changer, on the scale of 1989 (fall of the Berlin Wall), 1990 (reunification) and 1999 (the Euro), even 1945 (launch of Deutschemark), 1945 (Third Reich surrenders), 1943 (Stalingrad) and 1933 (Hitler elected). Chancellor Merkel, renamed Mutti Multi kulti, allowed a million migrants to settle in Germany. The far right […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| The overall tourism spend by visitors to the UAE declined by 6% in the first quarter of 2016, according to a report on consumer card spends by Network International, the leading payment solutions provider in the MENA region. Due to a continuous appreciation in the US Dollar along with a bullish global economic outlook and a fall in the prices of crude oil, […]
Dark matter is a mysterious substance composing most of the material universe, now widely thought to be some form of massive exotic particle. An intriguing alternative view is that dark matter is made of black holes formed during the first second of our universe’s existence, known as primordial black holes. Now a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, suggests that this interpretation aligns […]
A GoPro Hero 3+ camera is seen at the Nasdaq Market Site before before GoPro Inc’s IPO in New York City, June 26, 2014. Reuters/Mike Segar SAN FRANCISCO Shares of GoPro Inc (GPRO.O) got a lift on Tuesday after the struggling action camera maker said it was partnering with extreme sports sponsor Red Bull in a marketing and promotion deal. Briefly a Wall Street favorite following an […]
Books of The Times By MICHIKO KAKUTANI The title of Janine di Giovanni’s devastating new book, “The Morning They Came for Us,” refers to those terrible moments in ordinary Syrians’ lives when the war in their country becomes personal. Those moments when there is a knock on the door and the police or intelligence services take a family member away. Those moments when a government-delivered barrel bomb […]
ABU DHABI // Hospitals in Abu Dhabi that provide inadequate treatment or fail to meet quality targets will have their funding cut. The rules will affect all 41 public and private hospitals in the emirate. Funding cuts will be applied directly to public hospitals, and may be applied to private hospitals by reducing their grants or holding their payments from health insurers. “We want to create a […]
INTERNATIONAL. Global inclusion in the internet could bring seven percent of the world’s population – 500 million people – above absolute poverty levels, and add US$6.7 trillion (£4.6 trillion) to global economic output, according to a new study by Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting business. The study, for Facebook, encompassed 120 countries over a 10-year period and examines how barriers to accessing the internet could be removed, and […]
ABU DHABI // Car dealers are looking to the traditionally busy holy month to recoup on poor sales this year – so don’t be afraid to squeeze them, an industry insider advises. With low oil prices hitting the economy and job losses in major sectors, some dealers are reporting sales 25 per cent lower than normal for the first five months of the year. “Car sales across […]
At its WWDC developer conference in San Francisco next month, Apple is reportedly planning to unveil an OS X update that would let iPhone owners unlock their Macs using the Touch ID feature on their phones. While not identifying its sources, an article published yesterday by MacRumors said Apple engineers were working on a Bluetooth-enabled auto unlock feature that might be included in OS X 10.12, the […]
Call them the RoboBats. In a recent article in Science, Harvard roboticists demonstrate that their flying microrobots, nicknamed the RoboBees, can now perch during flight to save energy — like bats, birds or butterflies. “Many applications for small drones require them to stay in the air for extended periods,” said Moritz Graule, first author of the paper who conducted this research as a student at the Harvard […]
|By Matein Khalid| If ever there was a year to win or lose money big time in emerging markets, 2016 was it. As an investor in the world’s dark alleys (the Third World rebranded as EM!), I am forced to dissect geopolitical, government/monetary policy, foreign exchange, flows, positioning and current account, volatility and credit cycle trends across emerging markets to develop money making strategies. It helps that I […]
Reuters/Dado Ruvic Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) users will soon have more flexibility in writing tweets because the company plans to stop including photos and links as part of its 140-character limit, according to a Bloomberg report. The social media platform has faced stagnant user growth. Months earlier, Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey said the company would simplify its product in an effort to attract new users. […]
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc (BRKa.N) revealed a more than $1 billion stake in Apple Inc (AAPL.O) in a rare foray into the technology sector, which Buffett has largely shunned apart from a poorly performing investment in IBM (IBM.N). Shares of Apple rose 3.7 percent on the news, closing up $3.36 at $93.88. Berkshire made its investment in the first quarter, before the iPhone maker in April […]
|By Arabian Post Staff| Saudi Arabia ranks among the top dozen foreign holders of U.S. debt, the Treasury Department disclosed, breaking its silence on the issue for the past four decades. “The stockpile of the world’s biggest oil exporter stood at $116.8 billion as of March, down almost 6 percent from a record in January, according to data the Treasury disclosed Monday in response to a Freedom-of-Information […]
Ministry has been also taking steps to intervene in the market on time so that consumers are not affected by price rise New Delhi: Keen to prevent a repetition of last year’s skyrocketing prices of onions and pulses, the union Food and Consumer Affairs Ministry is taking steps to prepare timely import plans and also set up buffer stocks of these items, official sources said here on […]
Concerns about identity theft, financial fraud and business or government tracking are creating a “chilling effect” on online commerce and free expression, according to analysis of data from a 2015 survey of Internet use conducted for the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Of the 41,000 households asked about privacy and security in the July 2015 U.S. Census Bureau survey for the NTIA, 19 […]
The sun rises behind the entrance sign to Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park before the company’s IPO launch, May 18, 2012. Reuters/Beck Diefenbach/File Photo Facebook (FB.O) on Thursday emphasized that it does not permit its employees to block news stories from its “Trending Topics” list based on political bias, amid a controversy over how the social media superpower selects what news it displays. Technology news website Gizmodo […]
UAE. According to a new survey released by PwC Middle East, capital projects and infrastructure has been greatly impacted by slowdowns and deferrals of government spending as a result of ‘lower for longer’ oil prices. PwC Middle East’s survey titled “Delivering during change” includes responses from over 130 owners and developers across the region from a range of sectors including transport, cities and urban development, social infrastructure, […]
