The Interpreter By MAX FISHER When three suicide bombers attacked Istanbul’s main airport on Tuesday, killing at least 41 people, Turkey began a ritual that it has refined with so many recent bombings: looking for hints as to which of the country’s two major terror threats was responsible. Over the past year, Turkey has endured at least 14 major terrorist attacks, killing more than 200 people. The […]
TEHRAN — Iran’s supreme leader, in an unexpected move, replaced the general in charge of the Iranian armed forces on Tuesday with the general’s deputy, a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The replaced general, Hassan Firouzabadi, had held the position of chief of staff since 1989 and is known to have been a confidant of both the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and President Hassan […]
A journalist’s account of the conflict in Afghanistan details the cascading failures of the West Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World By Christina Lamb, William Collins, 640 pages, $25 There is a certain subspecies of journalist who comes to feel more at home in a foreign war zone than in her native land, who gets so plugged in with power brokers and average people […]
Government has been informed and security of the strategically important facility beefed up, committee says Jammu: Terrorists are hiding in villages close to the “vulnerable” Pathankot airbase, which can come under fresh attack from them, the Parliamentary Standing Committee (PSC) on Home Affairs said on Tuesday. It said the government has been informed about it and security of the strategically important facility beefed up. The committee was […]
Security experts regularly urge people to make their online accounts safer with two-factor authentication. Now Google has introduced new settings designed to make that easier for Google Apps administrators and users. By changing their Google sign-in and security settings, users can now opt for an alternative to the six-digit codes Google usually sends out to enable identity verification via mobile devices. Instead, Google Apps users can choose […]
BAGHDAD — Long before Falluja was known the world over for deadly jihadists, it was known all over Iraq for its kebab — fatty lamb, ground and mixed with onion, grilled on a skewer over an open fire and served with a pinch of sumac — at a joint called Haji Hussein. Everyone, it seemed, ate at Haji Hussein: locals, soldiers, tourists and businessmen traveling the Baghdad-to-Amman […]
By RANA F. SWEIS June 21, 2016 AMMAN, Jordan — Four Jordanian soldiers, a police officer and a civil defense officer were killed on Tuesday after a car bomb exploded on the Jordanian border with Syria, according to a statement by the Jordanian Armed Forces. The attack took place around 5:30 a.m. on the sand berm across from a camp for Syrian refugees in Rukban with more than 55,000 people […]
During its annual SugarCon conference last week, customer relationship management (CRM) firm SugarCRM unveiled a new machine learning-based offering that’s currently in development: Sugar Intelligence Service. The service, which will be delivered through a Siri- or Cortana-like artificial intelligence (AI) agent called “Candace,” will combine companies’ in-house data with other outside sources to provide predictive analytics and a more 360-degree view of customers. No release date or […]
Beijing’s patent regulator has ordered Apple to stop selling its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in the city because their design too closely resembles that of a Chinese phone. Apple is appealing the ruling, which marks the latest challenge to the tech company in its second-largest market. The two iPhone models violated design patents held by Chinese device maker Shenzhen Baili because of similarities in external […]
The macaw has a brain the size of an unshelled walnut, while the macaque monkey has a brain about the size of a lemon. Nevertheless, the macaw has more neurons in its forebrain — the portion of the brain associated with intelligent behavior — than the macaque. That is one of the surprising results of the first study to systematically measure the number of neurons in the […]
New research explains why so many biological networks, including the human brain (a network of neurons), exhibit a hierarchical structure, and will improve attempts to create artificial intelligence. The study demonstrates this by showing that the evolution of hierarchy — a simple system of ranking — in biological networks may arise because of the costs associated with network connections. (via WSJ Blogs)
By RANA F. SWEIS June 6, 2016 AMMAN, Jordan — Three officers of the Jordanian intelligence service and two other employees of the service were killed on Monday in a Palestinian refugee camp near the capital, Amman, in what the government said was a terrorist attack. The government has opened an investigation into the assault, which took place around 7 a.m. at an intelligence office in the Baqaa refugee camp, […]
AMMAN, Jordan — Three Jordanian intelligence officers and two other employees of the service were killed on Monday in a Palestinian refugee camp near the capital, Amman, in what the government said was a terrorist attack. The government has opened an investigation into the assault, which took place around 7 a.m. at an intelligence office in the Baqaa refugee camp, which was set up after the Arab-Israeli […]
WASHINGTON — An exhausted and ill-equipped Iraqi Army faces daunting obstacles on the battlefield that will most likely delay for months a long-planned major offensive on the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul, American and allied officials say. The delay is expected despite American efforts to keep Iraq’s creaky war machine on track. Although President Obama vowed to end the United States’ role in the war in Iraq, […]
Living cells are capable of performing complex computations on the environmental signals they encounter. These computations can be continuous, or analogue, in nature — the way eyes adjust to gradual changes in the light levels. They can also be digital, involving simple on or off processes, such as a cell’s initiation of its own death. Synthetic biological systems, in contrast, have tended to focus on either analogue […]
The latest acquisition by Intel could give it a big leg up in the race to develop Internet of Things (IoT) and autonomous driving technology. The chipmaker signed an agreement yesterday to acquire computer vision software company Itseez Inc. The 11-year-old San Francisco-based firm will become part of Intel’s IoT Group (IOTG). “Intel is focused on delivering end-to-end IoT solutions addressing devices, wired and wireless networks and […]
The interior of the office of ride-hailing service Uber is seen in this picture in Gurugram, previously known as Gurgaon, on the outskirts of New Delhi, India, April 19, 2016. Reuters/Anindito Mukherjee SAN FRANCISCO Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) said on Tuesday it would invest in on-demand ride-hailing company Uber, the latest in a wave of high-profile moves by automakers to embrace their potential upstart rivals as partners, […]
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 […]
Big Blue has announced that it is now offering the Nvidia Tesla M60 GPU accelerator to enterprise clients in the cloud. IBM said it is the first company to do so, giving companies of all sizes easier and more affordable access to virtual desktop applications without having to skimp on performance. The Tesla M60 (pictured above) is the latest in a line of Nvidia GPUs available through […]
By DECLAN WALSH May 22, 2016 CAIRO — Egypt has deployed a submersible to help find the wreckage of EgyptAir Flight 804 in the deep Mediterranean waters where it crashed, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said Sunday, as he warned that it might take a “long time” before the cause of the crash was determined. An international flotilla of search ships, aided by surveillance planes, was scouring a section of […]
A new developer portal and Android SDK (software developer kit) for SoftBank’s robot platform are aimed at convincing developers to build apps for the Pepper humanoid robot. Although the platform was first announced two years ago, the decision to open it up to Android apps should help greatly expand the base of app developers working on Pepper programs. “By making Pepper compatible with Android, Android application developers […]
A security guard keeps watch as he walks past a logo of Google at an exhibition stage during the 4th China (Shanghai) International Technology Fair 2016 in Shanghai, China, April 21, 2016. Reuters/Aly Song WASHINGTON Google has no plans to expand its partnership with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV to create a self-driving car, the program chief at the Alphabet Inc unit said on Thursday, affirming that the […]
At its I/O Developers Conference this week, Google announced a new product that had been an open secret for several months. The Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is named after the TensorFlow software it uses for its machine learning programs. In announcing the chip, Google referred to the TPU as an accelerator chip, able to speed up a given task, like data analysis or voice translation. When he […]
|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 […]
