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French authorities have made yet another monumental error in judgment after arresting Marine Le Pen’s chief of staff and bodyguard for questioning over alleged misuse of public funds to pay parliamentary assistants – the equivalent of a jaywalking ticket in terms of public opinion. By making le mountain out of le molehill, this latest debacle by French authorities is the most recent in a long list of backfired attempts to […]

Suppliers to Tesla and other electric carmakers are scrambling to secure shipments of the key battery material cobalt after a group of hedge funds amassed a large stockpile of the scarce metal. In a bold wager on higher prices, half a dozen funds, including Swiss-based Pala Investments and China’s Shanghai Chaos, have purchased and stored an estimated 6,000 tonnes of cobalt, worth as much as $280m, according […]

Waymo is suing Otto and Uber for allegedly stealing its trade secrets, Layer gets more funding and acquires Cola, a major Cloudflare bug leaked sensitive data from customers’ websites and Elon Musk addresses unionization concerns at Tesla. All this on Crunch Report. Read More Via ASDA Alltop

North Korea is evading international sanctions with a sophisticated network of overseas companies, enabled partly by its continued access to the international banking system, says a forthcoming United Nations report seen by Reuters. North Korea is under heavy U.N. sanctions and a strict arms embargo designed to impede the development of its banned nuclear and missile programmes. The U.N. panel of experts, which produced the 100-page draft […]

By Alexandria Sage | SAN FRANCISCO SAN FRANCISCO Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Waymo self-driving car unit sued Uber Technologies [UBER.UL] and its autonomous trucking subsidiary Otto on Thursday over allegations of theft of its confidential and proprietary sensor technology. Waymo accused Uber and Otto, acquired by the ride services company in August, with stealing confidential information on Waymo’s Lidar sensor technology to help speed its own efforts in […]

DUBAI // “It’s New Year’s Eve all over again … but the real way we should have celebrated,” declared Mariah Carey, launching into Emotions at Dubai Jazz Festival — and tackling the elephant in the room head-on. Thursday’s concert was Carey’s first public gig since that over-reported, televised “meltdown” on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, in which she embarrassingly struggled through the same song, and was […]

SoFi, the biggest and the brashest of a new breed of online lenders in the US, has sealed a $500m funding round, giving it firepower to push into new products and markets including Canada and Australia. The private San Francisco-based company last received a big shot of funds — its fifth — in September 2015, when SoftBank of Japan led a $1bn round, the biggest in the […]

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Sign up to receive Authers’ Note daily by email here Despite appearances to the contrary, the Trump trade may be moving into reverse as the president’s maiden State of the Union address approaches. The overall level of the stock market is, of course, at fresh records. But the pattern within it is shifting again. The end of the week saw sharp falls for almost all equity markets […]

LG Gram laptop LG has largely scaled back its global PC ambitions — its U.S. website shows a single Chromebase desktop for sale — except for its Gram family of ultra-light laptops. It rolled them out late in 2015 — 13-inch and 14-inch notebooks that each weighed a little over 2 pounds, then added a 15-inch version a couple of months later. The lineup has thrived enough […]

By Lewis Krauskopf | NEW YORK NEW YORK U.S. President Donald Trump’s planned economic agenda has fanned the flames for Wall Street’s record-setting run, but some investors worry that his first major address to Congress next week risks dousing it if his plans look slow to execute or are overly vague. The benchmark S&P 500 .SPX has surged 10 percent since Trump’s Nov. 8 election, with optimism […]

Eat the World DXB is in full swing this weekend, with 25 international street-food traders from the United Kingdom, the United States and Singapore serving up street food with vendors from the UAE (each street food trader is cleverly marked by its country’s flag). Held in Burj Park with a close-up view of the Burj Khalifa, the festival has plenty of food on offer, a host of […]

By Frank Jack Daniel | MEXICO CITY MEXICO CITY An emboldened Mexico hardened its opposition to President Donald Trump on Friday by saying it would retaliate if the United States imposed a border tax and that it can afford to lose financial aid that might be pulled to pay for a border wall. Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray said Mexico could respond to any tax the United States […]

By Arshad Mohammed | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON The longest-serving U.S. diplomat warned against isolationism, protectionism and Russian aggression on Friday in a retirement speech implicitly criticizing some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies even as he urged officials to serve the White House loyally. Ambassador Dan Fried argued that since becoming a world power over a century ago, the United States had largely pursued an open, rules-based world, […]

Dubai’s Department of Economic Development (DED) received 27,027 consumer complaints in 2016, an increase of 23 percent compared to the previous year. On average, the DED received 2,252 complaints monthly as continued awareness campaigns led to better understanding of consumer rights and responsibilities across the emirate, state news agency WAM reported. The complaints received in 2016 involved non-compliance with warranty terms (39 percent of complaints), refunds (17 […]

About a month ago, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz decided to ‘take a stand’ in defiance of Trump’s immigration executive order and penned a message to the world vowing, among other things, to hire 10,000 refugees over the next 5 years and “build bridges, not walls, with Mexico”.  Here are some excerpts from the politically charged message drafted by Schultz with “deep concern and a heavy heart”: I […]

The Dow was on track to break its 10-day record-setting streak on Friday, as investors turned cautious after recent comments from Trump administration suggested that pro-growth policies may take longer to be implemented. Wall Street is trading at record levels since the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, spurred by his promises of tax reforms, reduced regulations and increased infrastructure spending. However, with Trump giving scant […]

Primary dealers have warned of obstacles to the US Treasury introducing very long-dated bonds, despite some early support for the plans. This week Steven Mnuchin, Treasury secretary, said his staff had begun to look into issuing US government debt with maturities of as long as 50 or 100 years. Such a move would be a historic shift in policy for the $14tn Treasury market, which has resisted […]

By Emily Stephenson and Steve Holland | NATIONAL HARBOR, Md./WASHINGTON NATIONAL HARBOR, Md./WASHINGTON President Donald Trump said he would make a massive budget request for one of the “greatest military buildups in American history” on Friday in a feisty, campaign-style speech extolling robust nationalism to eager conservative activists. Trump used remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an organization that gave him one of his first […]

Stock photo SoftBank, Sprint, and TBCASoft have revealed plans to create new solutions which introduce blockchain technology into the telecommunications industry. On Friday, the companies announced their intentions to “aim” for a technology partnership which will jointly develop blockchain technology for telecommunication carriers. In a press release, the firms explained that the heart of the research and development of a new blockchain solution relies on TBCASoft, which […]

Alphabet contends that a manager at its autonomous car subsidiary Waymo took technical data with him when he left to launch a competing venture that went on to become Otto, Uber’s self-driving vehicle unit The race to develop self-driving vehicles took a new turn on Thursday when Google’s parent company Alphabet filed a lawsuit against Uber, accusing it of stealing technology. Alphabet contends that a manager at […]

TOKYO Asian shares took a breather on Friday, slipping from 1-1/2-year highs as material shares were hit by sudden falls in copper and other commodity prices while investors assessed Washington’s stance on tax and currency policies. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS was down 0.5 percent, giving back part of this week’s gains, though it is likely to log its fifth straight weekly advance. […]

Since its launch in 2010, Pinterest has established itself as one of the most popular image and idea curation sites, with an incredible 100 million monthly active users. There are plenty of other social-media sites, but for design lovers, Pinterest is still the ultimate source of inspiration, with everything from room makeovers to colour palettes, creative projects and insider tips. Here’s a rundown of some of our […]

Should we try to time the market? And has the boom in passive investments brought any problems in its wake? The problems are linked and urgent. The move from traditional actively managed funds to passive indexed funds, which aim merely to track and index and reduce costs, continues to intensify. Meanwhile, if ever there was a point when it might seem right to time the market, and […]

So much for sticking “nuclear weapons” in carriers’ dumb pipes. Shine, last year’s enfant terrible of mobile ad blocking is pivoting (again!) — in both tone of voice and business model. It’s also rebranding to, er, Rainbow. So, to keep tabs, since 2011 this Disrupt startup battlefield alum has moved from trying to sell mobile antivirus (Shine Security), to threatening network-level mobile ad blocking (Shine Technologies), to — its latest pivot — […]

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