By Andreas Cremer | BERLIN BERLIN Volkswagen’s (VOWG_p.DE) supervisory board is meeting on Wednesday to approve a draft $4.3 billion settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, marking a milestone in its attempts to recover from its emissions test cheating scandal. Shares in Europe’s biggest carmaker rose as much as 4 percent as investors welcomed the latest move to draw a line under the biggest business scandal in […]
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 […]
In order to survive, the Syrian regime has had to rely to an extraordinary degree on Russian and Iranian forces, and their proxies, like Hezbollah. It really wasn’t the Syrian Arab Army that retook Aleppo. Indeed, the Syrian military is stretched so thin by geography and attrition that last month it lost most of the city of Palmyra (again) to the Islamic State while pro-government forces were […]
By Andrew Osborn | MOSCOW MOSCOW The Kremlin says U.S. intelligence agency allegations it ran an influence campaign to help President-elect Donald Trump win the White House are false. But if U.S. spies are right, Moscow may wish it hadn’t bothered to meddle in the first place. The belief, widely held in the West, that the Kremlin helped discredit Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by orchestrating embarrassing media […]
Bjarni Benediktsson, leader of the conservative Independence Party, is Iceland’s new prime minister. (Halldor Kolbeins/Agence France-Presse) The Panama Papers — a huge leak of documents detailing the alleged secret offshore holdings of a global elite — were released in April 2016. The leak made headlines all over the world, but its impact was probably most keenly felt in Iceland. Just two days after the leak appeared, Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson […]
Gamers who are looking forward to the Nintendo Switch will finally know all the details on the upcoming hybrid console on Jan. 12, through a presentation by Nintendo that will be livestreamed for the whole world to watch. In advance of the official presentation, the rumor mill has been busy churning out reports and leaks for the Nintendo Switch, including the lineup of games available upon the hybrid […]
“I think that, somehow, we overprotect children,” says A Monster Calls director J A Bayona. “This is a story that was written for kids and helps them deal with complicated emotions.” Adapted from a book by Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls tells the story of a boy (Lewis MacDougall) trying to cope with the news his mother (Felicity Jones) has cancer. To make matters worse, he has to […]
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog, The true patriotism, the only rational patriotism is loyalty to the nation all the time, loyalty to the government when it deserves it. – Mark Twain, The Czar’s Soliloquy” At this point, pretty much everyone in America has seen the results of Hillary Clinton media pet, John Harwood’s recent Twitter poll. Who do you believe America? — John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) January 6, […]
The list grows longer. The names sometimes come via police posts like Police Station 3, and Sagpang described how he compiled them. “A confidential informant came, to say drugs are very prevalent in such-and-such area,” he told me. “We have to dig deeper. We deploy detectives and intelligence operatives” to verify that “Mr. So-and-So is fiddling drugs in the community.” In other words, the police counted on […]
The FTSE 100 notched up its longest run of record highs on Tuesday as another low for sterling helped the UK’s blue-chip index outperform European peers. The main London benchmark added 0.5 per cent, up 37.7 points to 7,275.47. It was the FTSE’s ninth consecutive record-high close as well as its 11th consecutive gain, a winning streak it has only equalled three times — in 1997, 2004 […]
By Amanda Ferguson | BELFAST BELFAST After a decade of bitter compromises over paramilitaries and policing, Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government finally fell apart this week over the abuse by farmers of a green-energy grant to burn fuels such as wood pellets instead of coal. The confrontation has exposed a growing rupture in trust between Catholic Irish nationalists and pro-British Protestant unionists whose cooperation underpins the 1998 Good […]
Over the past few years, a new tradition has emerged, the Holiday DDoS Attack. While distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks happen throughout the year, some of the highest profile attacks occur during the holidays, when the most users will be impacted. Attackers may target online shopping sites to disrupt pre-holiday gift buying. Or they may attack voice over IP services, like Skype, which are used to […]
Short-lived compounds like greenhouse gas methane stay in the atmosphere just between a year and a few decades. However, researchers have found that they can cause lingering warmth that can lead to sea levels rising for centuries long after the compounds have been cleared from the atmosphere. In a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the Simon Fraser University and […]
For more evidence that central bank intervention in the foreign exchange market is increasingly becoming an exercise in futility – look no further than Mexico. The peso briefly sank to a fresh all time low against the dollar on Tuesday, dropping by as much as 1.1 per cent to MXN 21.6227, as concerns continue to mount over incoming US president Donald Trump’s trade rhetoric towards Mexico, report […]
Close on the heels of plans for the first-ever Apple Store in Seoul, South Korea, Apple is all set to embark on building an underground retail store in the historic Liberty Square in Milan. For the unfamiliar, Piazza del Liberty – popularly called the Liberty Square – is one of the most populous metropolitan areas in Italy. The city’s planning department has approved of the construction last month based on […]
“Have you ever eaten Danish food?” Chef Henrik Yde Andersen asks me during a morning Skype call. He is absent-mindedly waving about a cup of coffee as he talks. “It is rather bland – all potatoes and cabbages – and so, when I first encountered Thai cuisine, during a holiday on the island of Krabi many, many years ago, I cried my eyes out – from the […]
Good morning. Elites caught in a bubble? John Oliver and Meryl Streep bashed Donald Trump and praised journalism. Donations soared for two nonprofits praised by them: ProPublica and the Committee to Protect Journalists. Hip, hip, hoorah. Truth and justice win out over the forces of darkness. Or did they? You couldn’t try harder, or be more articulate, than Streep. “It was simply stunning: eloquent and urgent, the […]
Over 13 years, consumption of gasoline rose in countries that lowered taxes or raised subsidies The average tax on petrol in 157 nations fell 13 percent from 2003 to 2015, even as the world acknowledged the need to slash greenhouse gases from fossil fuels, researchers reported Monday. Over 13 years, consumption of gasoline rose in countries that lowered taxes or raised subsidies, they said in a study […]
Submitted by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute, Sharia courts administering Islamic justice in Britain are run by clerics who believe some offenders should have their hands chopped off, according to Muslim scholar Elham Manea. She described the prevailing attitude as “totalitarian” and as more backward than some parts of Pakistan. Teaching children fundamental British values is an act of “cultural supremacism,” according to the National Union […]
Since the dawn of the century, Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) has been at the core of many, if not most, enterprise web-centric, service-oriented, cloud-capable computing assemblies. Lately, though, even its proponents have been asking if the venerable framework has outlived its usefulness, and is being supplanted by lighter, nimbler and simpler setups, such as containers, cloud services, or APIs. Photo: Joe McKendrick All this is happening […]
BEIJING A Chinese professor has been sacked after he criticised Chairman Mao Zedong on his 123rd birthday in an commentary he posted online that enraged leftists. Mao, who died on Dec. 9, 1976, is still officially venerated by the ruling Communist Party as the founder of modern China and his face appears on every yuan banknote. But he is particularly respected by leftists who believe the country […]
Reykjavik (AFP) – The Panama Papers came back to haunt Iceland’s right-wing parties Monday as they prepare to form a new government, after the candidate for prime minister admitted hiding a report on offshore accounts. Iceland was rocked in April when the Panama Papers revealed a global tax evasion scandal that ensnared several senior politicians and triggered the resignation of former prime minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, with […]
Last year was a relatively tough year for real estate players across the UAE, as the market adjusted to lower levels of economic growth. This ‘new normal’ is a reflection of oil prices well below their peaks of 2014 and 2015. While the average oil price declined dramatically during 2015, the decline was much more modest in 2016 and it is important to recognise that oil prices […]
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 […]
