The smart home is gaining ground, but it’s still a muddle of confusing standards, competing platforms, and gadgets that don’t do what you might expect. But the promise of products that can make your life a little easier is hard to resist, so I’m here to answer the inevitable questions that arise. Whether it’s figuring out the best connected door lock to assembling the right […]
MOSCOW Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held phone calls with the foreign ministers of Turkey and Iran on Saturday to discuss the Syria crisis, the Russian foreign ministry said. The ministers stressed the importance of joint efforts by the international community to provide humanitarian aid in Syria and facilitate a political resolution of the conflict, the ministry said in a statement, adding that the calls were made […]
DUBAI // Young footballers dreaming of playing in one of the best leagues in the world are edging closer to achieving their ambitions as trials backed by telecom firm du and Spain’s La Liga move to the next level of selection. The partnership between the home of footballing legends Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, and the duFC International scouting programme offers an opportunity for talented youngsters to […]
Designer-to-the-stars Furne One, from the label Amato, rarely talks about his many achievements. Despite having found worldwide success dressing celebrities including Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé and Katy Perry, the Dubai-based Filipino couturier’s reputation for being self-effacing precedes him. Seeking to shine a light on his talent is Los Angeles film producer, and founder of the Fashion News Live (FNL) network, Rocco Leo Gaglioti. His film, Inside Amato, had […]
Wherever she travels, Christine Lagarde receives head of state treatment. But back home in Paris this week, in the chamber where Marie-Antoinette was sentenced to death by guillotine during the French Revolution, the chief of the International Monetary Fund faced unimpressed judges and uncompromising former colleagues. For five days in the small, wood-panelled room, she gave evidence and listened to damning testimonies that pointed to her alleged […]
To do otherwise, he said, would have required the United States to be “all in and willing to take over Syria.” Continue reading the main story The recent developments in the Syrian conflict send a message to autocratic leaders in the region and elsewhere that force works — and brings few consequences, said Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. The lesson […]
CAIRO Osama bin Laden’s son Omar was refused entry to Egypt on Saturday, airport sources said, giving no reason why his name was on a list of people banned from the country. Omar, 34, Osama bin Laden’s fourth-eldest son, was travelling with his British wife Zaina al Sabah from Doha, and they asked to be sent to Turkey, the sources said. The couple, who lived in Egypt […]
The genome was just the beginning. Rapid advances in technology and computational tools are allowing researchers to categorize many aspects of the biological world. (via WSJ)
By Laila Bassam and Lisa Barrington | ALEPPO, Syria/BEIRUT ALEPPO, Syria/BEIRUT A new deal has been reached to complete the evacuation of rebel-held areas of Syria’s east Aleppo which ground to a halt on Friday over demands from pro-government forces that people also be moved out of two villages besieged by rebels. Syrian rebel official al-Farouk Abu Bakr, speaking from Aleppo to news channel al-Arabiya al-Hadath on […]
The arctic air that has chilled large swaths of the northern United States for days will culminate this weekend with dangerous cold in Montana and North Dakota as heavy snow falls in other parts of the country, officials said. People in North Dakota face “life threatening cold” and the risk of frostbite with exposure of 10 minutes or less, the National Weather Service (NWS) said in an […]
BEIRUT A new deal has been reached to complete the evacuation of rebel-held areas of eastern Aleppo which stalled over demands from pro-government forces that two villages besieged by rebels must also be evacuated, a Syrian rebel told news channel al-Arabiya al-Hadath on Saturday. Rebel official Al-Farouk Abu Bakr, speaking from Aleppo, said the deal comprised an evacuation from the two Shi’ite villages besieged by insurgents, the […]
Ghost sharks, officially called chimaeras, have been living in the deep sea swimming at great depths of about a mile and half below the ocean long before the time of the dinosaurs. These prehistoric marine creatures, however, are rarely seen and scientists know little about them. Now, the world has a chance to see this rare deep-sea shark as a video of this creature has finally been […]
When it emerged from stealth in 2011, MapR was an outlier in the Hadoop community. At the time, Hadoop was defined largely by two projects adapted from Google research: MapReduce, which introduced highly linear, massively parallel processing to big data, and the HDFS file system, which could accommodate data by the petabyte. And at the time, Hadoop was defined as an Apache open source platform. MapR’s message, […]
Capitalism as we know it is irrevocably in its death throes, argues German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, which on its own is not a novel thesis. In our age of regular financial crashes and bursting bubbles, illiberal movements and borderless wars, even Nobel Prize winners and mainstream thinkers – I think of Joseph Stiglitz, among others – say that the post-war free market regime is broken, and that […]
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 […]
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 […]
Submitted by Duane via Free Market Shooter blog, On Thursday, December 1st, Yasmin Seweid was allegedly assaulted by Trump supporters in NYC. According to BuzzFeed and the NY Daily News, the attack took place at the uptown 6 train stop at 23rd Street in midtown Manhattan. The assaliants allegedly called Seweid a terrorist, broke her bag strap, followed her when she tried to get away from them, […]
Artificial intelligence and neuroscience experts 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. (via WSJ)
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 […]
Dubai, 15 December 2016 At the end of October the new cryptocurrency Zcash was launched. It is positioned by its creators as a more secure alternative to Bitcoin. Soon after the launch, the price of Zcash coins skyrocketed, followed by a spike in the installation of the application used to generate Zcash on personal computers. In many of these cases, the app was disguised as something else […]
The biggest surprise in meeting the entrepreneur behind Gulf meat eateries such as B+F Burger Boutique and Slider Station is learning that he is a recent adopter of veganism. Basil Al Salem — king of the juicy steak shawarmas on offer at Nomad Kitchen and the Coca-Cola-braised short ribs served up at Slider Station — went vegan earlier this year. But this does not mean that he […]
By Roberta Rampton and Jeff Mason | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON President Barack Obama said on Friday it was fine for President-elect Donald Trump to review Washington’s “one-China” policy toward Taiwan, but he cautioned that a shift could lead to significant consequences in the U.S. relationship with Beijing. “For China, the issue of Taiwan is as important as anything on their docket,” Obama told a news conference. “The idea […]
