By Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay | GENEVA GENEVA U.N. mediator Staffan de Mistura said on Wednesday he did not expect an immediate breakthrough when Syria peace talks restart on Thursday but wanted productive talks that relaunch the process towards a political solution to end the six-year war. They will be the first U.N.-mediated negotiations on Syria in almost a year, during which time the military and […]
March is a major month for Amazon Prime members. That’s because brand new content is coming to Prime Video, with the emphasize on new original series and movies. These include the anticipated season 2 premiere of Hand of God starring Ron Perlman as Judge Maximum. And while viewers will get to see how the Judge truest gain back his sanity in this final season, Amazon is getting […]
The shelves of Guillermo Lasso’s office are lined with books that inform his politics: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations; The Denationalization of Money by Friedrich Hayek; a compendium of cases about free speech from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. “A government cannot regulate freedom of expression,” the Ecuadorean conservative opposition leader told the Financial Times before Sunday’s presidential election, in which he won more than […]
The military’s stance softened somewhat in 2015, when an army court ruled that veiled relatives of soldiers could enter military grounds. The army’s cultural shift was also reflected in last July’s failed coup attempt. The government claims that the putsch was organized by an Islamist faction within the military, an institution previously assumed to be staffed mainly by Kemalists — followers of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder […]
BERLIN A wrought iron gate with the chilling inscription “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work sets you free”) was returned to Germany’s Dachau concentration camp on Wednesday, more than two years after it was stolen. The theft in 2014 of the symbol of suffering inflicted by Hitler’s Nazis on Jews and others caused outrage around the world. Police in Norway found it in December after an anonymous tipoff. More […]
By SUZAN FRASERAssociated Press ANKARA, Turkey (AP) – Turkey’s military has changed its regulations to allow female officers to wear headscarves while on duty, defense officials said Wednesday, removing a ban on Islamic-style head coverings at an establishment that once was considered a bastion of secularism. The move also ends the last remaining headscarf ban at a public institution in the predominantly Muslim, but officially secular country. […]
We live in a society where it seems like the only way to meet someone new to start a serious relationship with is through dating apps. But using these platforms leave users at risk of finding out the one they have been talking to was too good to be true after finally meeting in person. Not to mention there is always the worst case scenario: getting catfished. […]
Paul Polman thought it was just going to be an informal catch-up. But it quickly became clear that Alexandre Behring, chairman of Kraft Heinz, had something very specific on his mind when he visited Unilever’s art deco headquarters in London last month. Had Mr Polman, chief executive of Unilever since 2009, ever considered a collaboration with Kraft Heinz, Mr Behring wanted to know. Mr Polman took this […]
When Lieutenant General HR McMaster walks into his office in the West Wing of the White House as the new US national security adviser, the widely respected soldier and military historian will face one of the biggest challenges of his decorated career. President Donald Trump named Lt Gen McMaster — a three-star army general who commanded troops in Iraq and served in Afghanistan — to succeed Michael […]
But they are not buying much. Unemployment is high, especially among the many young people graduating from college. In all, 50,000 people remain displaced. Electricity and water supplies are still near crisis levels. Hamas, which governs Gaza, elected a new hard-line leader. Tunnel building goes on (and, presumably, so does the construction and smuggling of weapons). On the Israeli side, the political right talks of a new […]
This is a difficult time for democracy, and autocratic leaders are on the rise. I refer, of course, to shareholder democracy and to the increasingly bold attempts of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, when they go public, to prevent investors from having a say in the running of their company. The founders of Snap, the owner of the messaging service Snapchat are brazenly selling second-class shares that give investors […]
Injecting large amounts of offshore wind power into the US electrical grid is manageable, will cut electricity costs, and will reduce pollution compared to current fossil fuel sources, according to researchers who have completed a first-of-its-kind simulation with the electric power industry. (via WSJ)
MEXICO CITY Homicides in Mexico jumped by more than a third in January, new figures showed, fueled by violence in states hit by an internal split in the Sinaloa drug cartel. Murders were up by more than half in the northern states of Chihuahua and Sinaloa, according to official figures dated Monday. In Baja California there were almost 50 percent more. Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the powerful […]
If eight years under Obama rule, 6 of which included Republican majorities in Congress, taught us anything, it’s that Presidents have fairly broad authority to govern through executive orders and rules changes implemented at the 100’s of government agencies responsible for overseeing our every move. Fortunately for the Trump administration, this broad Presidential authority extends to immigration laws and, despite his recent defeat in the 9th Circuit, […]
Last fall, we saw the biggest distibuted denial of service (DDoS) attack ever. This year we’ll see even bigger ones. According to Akamai‘s latest State of the Internet Security report, here’s what’s behind them. Behind today’s DDoS attacks you’ll find botnets and they’re using the same old techniques hackers have always used to bring down your servers. Akamai First, you should know that while the total DDoS […]
Evan Spiegel and other top executives at Snap, the owner of messaging app Snapchat, on Tuesday pitched the company to hundreds of investors in New York and faced questions about user growth, costs and the development of the platform. The ballroom at the Mandarin Oriental in midtown Manhattan was the second stop on a roadshow for the company’s listing, after it kicked off its marketing blitz in […]
The Isomax cell configuration. Credit: UCSB Engineering In 2015 UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineer and materials scientist Jonathan Berger developed an idea that could change the way people think about high-performance structural materials. Two years later, his concept is paying research dividends. In a letter published in the journal Nature, Berger, with UCSB materials and mechanical engineering professor Robert McMeeking and materials scientist Haydn N. G. Wadley from […]
Saudi Arabia has invited investors to submit requests to qualify for the first round of its $30-$50 billion National Renewable Energy Programme by March 20, it said on Monday. Saudi Arabia is targetting 9.5 GW of renewable energy by 2023 in line with Vision 2030, an economic reform plan launched last year to diversify the economy beyond oil. The renewable programme involves investment of between $30 billion […]
At the start of January, when the Mexican Central Bank spent $2 billion to defend its currency in a rare intervention in the spot market, and which lasted just a few hours before the selling resumed, Goldman analyst Albert Ramos had some advice for Banxico: don’t use reserves to defend the Peso as Mexico would have greater need for them elsewhere. : Instead, Goldman’s advice was to […]
My taxi driver in San Diego had a plan. He was moving to Laredo to get back into long-distance trucking. He’d work hard for 10 years, save a couple of hundred grand, and retire to Mexico. I did the math: that put him around 2028. He might just make it before all the trucking jobs go away. At Qualcomm last week, Cristiano Amon, president of […]
BEIRUT: France’s far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen sparked controversy Tuesday during her brief visit to Lebanon when she refused to wear a headscarf to meet the country’s top Sunni Muslim cleric. On her last day in the small Mediterranean country, Le Pen arrived at Sheikh Abdellatif Deryan’s office in Beirut and was offered a white shawl to cover her blonde hair. The National Front candidate promptly […]
By Edward Taylor and Laurence Frost | FRANKFURT/PARIS FRANKFURT/PARIS PSA Group (PEUP.PA) has pledged to respect existing Opel and Vauxhall job guarantees if it buys the European arm of General Motors (GM.N), though some analysts say thousands of jobs are eventually likely to go for the deal to work. As part of a broader charm offensive, PSA Chief Executive Carlos Tavares met with representatives of powerful German […]
Ecuador will have to wait until later this week for the result of Sunday’s presidential election after the country’s electoral council deemed the vote too close to call following a knife-edge poll. It was the first time in recent memory that the winner has not been declared on election night. Lenín Boltaire Moreno, the leftwing protégé of President Rafael Correa, is in touching distance of the 40 […]
iPad sales are in serious decline, but Apple CEO Tim Cook remain “very bullish” about the tablet. Can a March refresh turn things around? Must read: OLED iPhone 8 may finally have the feature that owners have been craving The Internet of Things 10 types of enterprise deployments As businesses continue to experiment with the Internet of Things, interesting use cases are emerging. Here are some of […]
