Friday 02:10 GMT Overview The US dollar has climbed to a 14-year high in the wake of the Federal Reserve’s decision this week to lift interest rates, putting pressure on Asian currencies and prompting caution among traders of regional stocks. Hot topic The dollar has been one of the biggest stories of the December quarter thanks to a more robust outlook for US inflation and growth. That […]
Submitted by Eric Zuesse via Strategic-Culture.org, Was the Cold War against communism, or against Russia? Russia was our ally in World War II, and we’d have a Nazi world today if 26 million Russians hadn’t died from Hitler’s bombs and attacks while Russia fought on with courage amidst desperation, finally to crush his regime. But Russia was communist, so the Cold War developed after that alliance (the Allies in […]
By Joseph Menn The U.S. agency charged with ensuring that voting machines meet security standards was itself penetrated by a hacker after the November elections, according to a security firm working with law enforcement on the matter. The security firm, Recorded Future, was monitoring underground electronic markets where hackers buy and sell wares and discovered someone offering log-on credentials for access to computers at the U.S. Election […]
LONDON // Doctors have declared that infertility caused by treatment for inherited blood disorders affecting thousands of Gulf Arabs may at last be wiped out. In a medical breakthrough, Emirati Moaza Al Matrooshi, a 24-year-old from Dubai who was born with the fatal blood condition thalassaemia, this week became the first patient to give birth to a healthy baby after herself being cured of the disease. Thanks […]
To understand Arabs and their culture, one must first understand their language, but with many conflicting theories about its origins, this is no easy task. To celebrate a language used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, December 18 is the designated UN Arabic Language Day. The day was established by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) in 2010 to “celebrate multilingualism […]
A one-two punch of a surging US dollar and rising interest rates sent the price of gold tumbling to its lowest level since February on Thursday, hurting the shares of miners and spurring hefty liquidations of exchange traded funds that track the metal. The price of gold in New York fell as much as 1.8 per cent to $1,122 an ounce, as the dollar rose across the […]
BRUSSELS The heads of European Union institutions were given a mandate to plan a possible summit meeting with Turkish leaders in the coming months at an EU summit on Thursday, summit chair Donald Tusk told a news conference. “We have a mandate to organise this kind of summit in the next months,” Tusk said, adding that no date had been set. The EU would be represented by […]
What’s the story behind your business? Our story is a typical start-up story. We began 15 years ago with six people, and at the time we operated out of our chairman’s extra bedroom in Jumeirah. We started the agency with the philosophy of changing the rules of advertising across the region. At the time, people thought we were a bit crazy – they said everything had already […]
Caitlin Johnston and Anthony Cormier spent so much time with a 182-page plan from the Florida Department of Transportation that it became like a bible to them: important, instructive, kind of mysterious and confusing. But the truth that came out of its pages aren’t the result of thousands of words of copy. It’s revealed, instead, through Legos. Johnston, a transportation reporter, and Cormier, an investigative reporter at […]
By Greg Lacour | CHARLESTON, S.C. CHARLESTON, S.C. A jury on Thursday found avowed white supremacist Dylann Roof guilty of federal hate crimes resulting in the deaths of nine black parishioners at a historic church in Charleston, South Carolina, last year. Jurors also said Roof, 22, was guilty of firearms violations and obstructing the exercise of religion for those he shot and killed during a Bible study […]
If you like to surround yourself with all things luxury and are the type who simply ‘needs’ the latest threads, jewellery and cosmetics, the minute you set eyes on them online, you’ll be pleased to know that UAE brand lovers now has somewhere to get them in two hours flat. Luxury delivery service Ounass.com, which is now available across the region, is UAE retail giant Al Tayer […]
While a liberal group responsible for fomenting the Electoral College rebellion claims to have at least 20 of the 37 GOP defectors needed to pull an upset and send the election to the House, The Hill reports that, among Republicans on the ground, though, there is no chatter or speculation surrounding that possibility. The liberal opposition has generated a cottage industry of online speculation that an Electoral […]
By Leonardo Goy | SALGUEIRO, Brazil SALGUEIRO, Brazil The rusting tracks of Brazil’s Transnordestina railway peter out and give way to a dirt trail in a remote corner of the country’s arid northeast, far from the ports or farms it was meant to serve. No trains run on these tracks and the cleared path for one of Brazil’s most ambitious infrastructure projects is used only by local […]
15 December 2016 – Beijing, People’s Republic of China China Oceanwide (together with its subsidiary, “Oceanwide Resort Paradise HI LLC”) entered into a management agreement today with subsidiaries of Kerzner International Holdings Limited (“Kerzner”), a leading international developer and operator of destination resorts and ultra-luxury hotels, for a new, Atlantis resort in Ko Olina, a 642 acre development on the white sand beaches of the island of […]
WASHINGTON/BEIJING China’s plan to punish a U.S. automaker accused of price-fixing is a sign of how Beijing could retaliate if President-elect Donald Trump upends decades of relations between the two nations. Trump’s assertion that the United States need not be bound by the policy that Taiwan is part of “one China” would erode a bedrock of U.S.-China ties that has underpinned the vast increase in trade and […]
Photo With a season-high 10 points on Wednesday night, guard DeAndre Liggins, left, is now averaging 3.1 points a game this season for the Cavaliers. Credit Brandon Dill/Associated Press The tickets that fans bought for Wednesday night’s game in Memphis promised a matchup between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Grizzlies. And the paying customers did indeed get to see a game between the Cavaliers and the Grizzlies. […]
“If they’ve managed to sleep through the night, bonds traders in the US will have quite a shock when they check their screens in the morning,” Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz, tweeted early on Thursday. Wall Street bond traders and investors will have turned in on Wednesday night already jolted by the Federal Reserve, which under Janet Yellen’s leadership has become synonymous with caution on […]
Everyone is gaga over the idea of frictionless grocery shopping: tap your phone on a turnstile device upon entry, retrieve food from the shelves, and walk out; your bill is charged to the credit card connected to your device. No waiting in line; no chit chat as your groceries are rung up. In other words, say hello to Amazon Go, which will be tested in […]
By Patrick Markey | AL-DHIBANIYAH, Iraq AL-DHIBANIYAH, Iraq His right arm strapped with a tourniquet and numbed by anaesthetic, Azad Hassan sat before the crowd waiting for Islamic State militants to chop off his hand as a punishment. First, he had watch them do the same to his brother. Freed from Islamic State rule in Mosul by Iraqi forces who are fighting to recapture the city, the […]
A new technique devised by MIT researchers can take data sets with huge numbers of variables and find approximations of them with far fewer variables. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology One way to handle big data is to shrink it. If you can identify a small subset of your data set that preserves its salient mathematical relationships, you may be able to perform useful analyses on it […]
MOSCOW Ahead of his visit to Japan later this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin brought his dog Yume into an interview with Japanese journalists, and the large Akita breed made sure she as well as her master were well heard. Putin gave an interview to Nippon Television and Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper in Moscow on Tuesday, accompanied at first by Yume, who was given to him by Japan’s […]
By Natalie Schachar | MEXICO CITY MEXICO CITY Some Mexican banks are lowering credit card spending limits and raising consumer lending standards in the face of an economic slowdown, rising interest rates and the U.S. election victory of Donald Trump. After a period of robust overall credit growth, Mexican banks are cutting credit card exposure to counter a potential rise in consumer defaults and the risks of […]
NASA’s Curiosity rover, currently studying Martian mountains for ancient environmental changes, has zeroed in on wet environments and their evolution over billions of years. The new data indicate that past environment in Mars was supportive of microbial life though the exact time frame is up for debate. This was mooted by NASA and Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. “There […]
Last week, the Library of Congress (LOC), the nation’s largest library, announced a partnership with the Digital Public Library of America, the nation’s largest digital library. The first fruits of that collaboration—5,000 maps from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and panoramic map collections—are available immediately, with many more to come. However, you don’t have to be an historian or cartographer to appreciate why this partnership is a […]
