WASHINGTON — American-led airstrikes have destroyed 14 Syrian Army tanks at a military base in central Syria that, just days earlier, had been captured by Islamic State fighters, the United States military said Friday. The strikes against the group of Russian-made T-72 battle tanks on Thursday near Palmyra came one day after senior American officers in the region warned their Syrian and Russian counterparts that United States […]
Where there was discord, Donald Trump has remarkably brought harmony. He has brought peace between the markets and Janet Yellen, as traders at last appear to believe her forecast for interest rates over the next year. The Federal Reserve says it intends to raise rates three times next year, and the market implicitly, through Fed Funds futures, puts the chance of this happening at almost exactly 50 […]
‘You can’t put a price tag on anybody’s life’ Two years after the overdose that killed her 21-year-old son, Terri Bartlett traveled to Illinois’ state capital to champion an unlikely cause: revamped painkillers. Bartlett’s son Michael became hooked on Vicodin and later graduated to heroin. In emotional testimony last year, she urged lawmakers to support a bill that would prioritize the new harder-to-crush pills, saying she believed […]
GAZIANTEP, Turkey A bus transporting off-duty soldiers and civilians was hit by an explosion near a university in the central Turkish city of Kayseri on Saturday, killing and wounding an unknown number of people, security sources and local media said. Ambulances were sent to the area after the explosion, the sources said. There were dead and wounded from the blast, local hospital sources confirmed, but they were […]
BEIJING China expects a smooth resolution to the seizure by its navy of “unidentified” equipment found in the South China Sea, a state-run newspaper said on Saturday, after U.S. officials said a Chinese warship had taken a U.S. underwater drone. The drone was taken on Thursday, the first seizure of its kind in recent memory, about 50 nautical miles northwest of Subic Bay off the Philippines just […]
BEIJING Beijing’s city government has ordered 1,200 factories near the Chinese capital, including an oil refinery run by state oil major Sinopec and a Cofco food plant, to either shut or cut output following its highest possible air pollution warning. Environmental authorities issued a red alert that started on Friday night and will run until Wednesday after warning of a smog build-up across China’s north. That will […]
An Amazon picture of a flying “octocopter” mini-drone that would be used to fly small packages to consumers Amazon said Wednesday it completed its first delivery by drone, in what the global online giant hopes will become a trend in automated shipments by air. The delivery to a customer near Cambridge, England, was announced in a tweet by Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos. “First-ever […]
Toronto worker Kristy Milland looks for data jobs that she can pick up to make ends meet. Image: Sam Santos/George Pimentel Photography This article originally appeared on TechRepublic. Each morning when she wakes up, Kristy Milland powers up her home computer in Toronto, logs into Amazon Mechanical Turk, and waits for her computer to ding. Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), which has been around for over a decade, […]
By Roberta Rampton and Julia Harte | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON President Barack Obama on Friday defended the U.S. approach toward the civil war in Syria, saying he understood the desire for action to end the conflict but it would have been impossible to do “on the cheap” without a full U.S. military intervention. “Unless we were all in and willing to take over Syria, we were going to […]
By Sam Forgione | NEW YORK NEW YORK The U.S. dollar edged lower against a basket of major currencies on Friday, but still held near 14-year highs touched after Wednesday’s Federal Reserve meeting, with profit-taking halting the greenback’s rally. The dollar index .DXY, which measures the greenback against a basket of six major rivals, was last at 102.900, not far from Thursday’s 14-year high of 103.560 but […]
There’s a great scene in The Big Short, the movie of Michael Lewis’ book about the mortgage crisis, where two shiny-suited brokers brag about how many loans they’ve been producing — for big commissions — to unsuitable borrowers. “We call those loans ‘Dorothys’ ‘cause they’re magic,” grins the one in black. “No credit, no income, no problem: just tap your shoes together three times and say ‘There’s […]
By Anggy Polanco and Maria Ramirez | EL PINAL/CIUDAD GUAYANA, Venezuela EL PINAL/CIUDAD GUAYANA, Venezuela Small protests and looting broke out in some Venezuelan provinces on Friday due to lack of cash after the socialist government suddenly decreed this week that its largest banknote would be pulled from circulation in the midst of a punishing economic crisis. President Nicolas Maduro on Sunday gave Venezuelans a few days […]
By Lisa Baertlein and Svea Herbst-Bayliss Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc (CMG.N), under pressure from activist investor Bill Ackman, named four new board members on Friday, paving the way for a reunion of sorts between its chief executive and a former top executive at McDonald’s, which once owned the burrito chain. Matthew Paull, a former McDonald’s Corp (MCD.N) chief financial officer, will join the Chipotle board. Media executives […]
The war in Syria has subjected Turkey’s border regions to terrorist attacks and demographic upheaval on an historic scale, but on the face of it there’s a welcoming feeling to Samanda, a bustling town of 45,000 on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. On a wall by the town’s beachside boardwalk, graffiti proclaims how “Syrians are our brothers”, a sentiment in sharp contrast to the burning of refugees’ […]
The global benchmark interest rate for trillions of dollars of corporate loans, credit cards and derivative contracts is approaching 1 per cent for the first time since the US emerged from recession, as global markets reach the end of a turbulent week. With the US Federal Reserve anticipating greater US economic strength in 2017, this has pushed the dollar to a 14-year high and spurred further selling […]
By Peter Nicholls | BIRMINGHAM, England BIRMINGHAM, England Hundreds of rioting prisoners took control of at least two wings of an English jail on Friday, authorities said, in the latest and most serious disturbance at a British prison this year. The trouble erupted at HMP Birmingham in central England, which can hold 1,450 male prisoners, shortly after 0900 GMT, forcing staff to withdraw, according to G4S (GFS.L), […]
Vanity Fair is the latest news organization to profit from President-elect Donald Trump’s Twitter ire. The Condé Nast magazine has seen its subscriptions rise 100 fold Thursday after Donald Trump tweeted that the publication was “way down, big trouble, dead.” This is the highest number of subscriptions sold in a single day ever at Condé Nast, according to a spokesperson. Has anyone looked at the really poor […]
From left, Richard Baraniuk, Tan Nguyen and Ankit Patel. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University Neuroscience and artificial intelligence experts from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have taken inspiration from the human brain in creating a new “deep learning” method that enables computers to learn about the visual world largely on their own, much as human babies do. In tests, the group’s “deep rendering mixture model” largely […]
In 2009, my TV cable bill went over $100 a month, and I decided enough was enough. I cut my cable. It wasn’t easy then. The internet streaming devices were primitive, and my choices were few. Today, Netflix is more popular than conventional TV, more teenagers watch YouTube than the networks, and rival streaming services Amazon Video, Hulu, and Sling TV are growing by leaps and bounds. […]
By Laila Bassam, Lisa Barrington and John Davison | ALEPPO, Syria/BEIRUT ALEPPO, Syria/BEIRUT The evacuation of the last opposition-held areas of the Syrian city of Aleppo was suspended on Friday after pro-government militias demanded that wounded people should also be brought out of two Shi’ite villages being besieged by rebel fighters. The second day of the operation to take fighters and civilians out of Aleppo’s rebel enclave […]
Despite economic uncertainty, almost two thirds of family businesses in the Middle East have grown over the past year, according to a new survey conducted by PwC. The poll showed that while the region’s family businesses continue to be active and successful, the changing political and economic environment is affecting both their current performance and their growth expectations. Respondents to the PwC survey said that the three […]
Wells Fargo & Co reported another decline in monthly consumer account openings, indicating that the bank is having trouble rebuilding its reputation after a sales scandal. The bank agreed in September to pay regulators $185 million to settle charges that its staff opened as many as 2 million accounts without customers’ knowledge. Wells Fargo said on Friday consumer checking account openings fell 9 percent in November from […]
General Motors seems determined not to get sidelined by the recent flurry of announcements in the self-driving car category such as those issued by Waymo and Uber. GM’s Chairman and CEO Mary Barra presided a rare press conference last Dec. 15 to declare that GM’s autonomous vehicle called Chevrolet Bolt is now prowling the streets of southeast Michigan. Fleet of self-driving Bolts have already been unleashed in San Francisco […]
ABU DHABI // The UAE has appointed its first Ambassador to a Baltic nation. Hanan Al Alili will become Ambassador to Latvia when the UAE Embassy opens in the capital, Riga, next month. Inara Murniece, Latvia’s speaker of parliament, was in Abu Dhabi for the Global Summit of Women Speakers of Parliament when the announcement was made. “It is important to have women in key positions in […]
