Tag: All Regions

Syria permitted the UN and its agencies concerned to use Bab Assalama and al-Rae’ crossing points to deliver humanitarian aid to people in need for three extra months to end on November 13th. “The decision comes in light of Syria’s keenness on boosting stability, improving the humanitarian and livelihood situation of the Syrians and facilitating the delivery of aid to people in need,” Syria’s permanent representative to the UN, Bassam Sabbagh said Tuesday. On July 13th, Syria allowed the UN agencies to use Bab al-Hawa crossing point to deliver humanitarian aid. – End of content –

Students rights are limited on school grounds. But they don’t cease to exist. And what they do off-campus is subject to even fewer limitations. These are long-held facts backed by years of court precedent, the most famous of which is the Supreme Court’s 1969 Tinker decision. This is the baseline for school-student interactions when it comes to constitutional rights, as written by Justice Abe Fortas: It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to…

United Nations agencies scramble to replace depleting aid stocks as regional sanctions start to kick in. Niger’s military coup is disrupting humanitarian efforts by the United Nations as border and airspace closures threaten to cut off supplies of medicine and food, says a UN official. UN aid agencies are scrambling to replenish depleting stocks just as regional sanctions potentially increase the number of people in need, its humanitarian chief in Niger, Louise Aubin, warned on Tuesday. “The risk is that…

The grey, two-storey home with white trim toppled and slid, crashing into the river below as rushing waters carried off a bobbing chunk of its roof. Next door, a condo building teetered on the edge of the bank, its foundation already having fallen away as erosion undercut it. The destruction came at the weekend as a glacial dam burst in Alaska’s capital, swelling the levels of the Mendenhall River to an unprecedented degree. The bursting of such snow-and-ice dams is…

Researchers have discovered a new and powerful transient execution attack called ‘Inception’ that can leak privileged secrets and data using unprivileged processes on all AMD Zen CPUs, including the latest models. Transient execution attacks exploit a feature present on all modern processors named speculative execution, which dramatically increases the performance of CPUs by guessing what will be executed next before a slower operation if completed. If the guess is correct, the CPU has increased performance by not waiting for an…

On July 28, 2023, Weekend Australian Magazine published a bombshell report based on an exclusive interview with Dr. Robert (Bob) Kadlec, the HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) who served under Donald Trump. To many readers this may seem like just more Washington, DC Kabuki theater with a side order of limited hangout (much like the prior Vanity Fair article in which Kadlec provided a generous scoop of spin with a topping of CYA). Personally, I find this whole “inside…

The Air Force has detected unsafe levels of a likely carcinogen at underground launch control centers at a Montana nuclear missile base where a striking number of men and women have reported cancer diagnoses. A new cleanup effort has been ordered. The discovery “is the first from an extensive sampling of active U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile bases to address specific cancer concerns raised by missile community members,” Air Force Global Strike Command said in a release Monday. In those samples, two…

The European Commission (EC) has confirmed that it’s opening an in-depth investigation into Adobe’s proposed $20 billion bid for digital design software rival Figma. The Commission said that the acquisition “may reduce competition in the global markets for the supply of interactive product design software and for digital asset creation tools.” First announced last September, Adobe’s megabucks bid for one of its biggest competitors was always likely to attract scrutiny from regulators around the globe. The U.S. Department of Justice…

As SoftBank prepares to dive deeper into AI investments, the group posted an unexpected consecutive quarterly overall loss, as well as a continued loss in its existing investment business. SoftBank’s Vision Fund 1 and 2 and its Latin American fund together posted a quarterly investment loss of 13 billion yen ($91 million). That is significantly less than the 2,919 billion yen loss a year ago ($20 billion) but cumulatively, the company said that investments across the three funds, as of…

Occupied Jerusalem, SANA- Dozens of Palestinians were injured Tuesday at dawn, as the Israeli occupation forces stormed Askar camp, east of Nablus city in the West Bank. ‘The occupation forces raided the camp, opened fire on the Palestinians and threw toxic gas bombs at them, causing the injury of six, in addition to 185 suffocation cases, Wafa News Agency said. The occupation also stormed the eastern region in Nablus and demolished the house of the family of martyr Abdel-Fattah Kharousha….

HONG KONG – A number of global investors including Warburg Pincus and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board are opting out of Ant Group’s proposed share buyback after the Chinese fintech’s valuation was slashed by more than 70 per cent, according to people familiar with the matter. Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and Carlyle Group are also among top foreign shareholders that are not participating in the buyback, the people said. A few money managers, including Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe…

SINGAPORE – Cryptocurrency firm Blockchain.com has been granted a licence in its South-east Asian headquarters of Singapore that will allow it to expand its services to global institutional and accredited investors. The company was granted a major payment institution licence from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on Aug 1. This comes less than a year after Blockchain.com, a pioneer of key infrastructure for the Bitcoin community, received in-principle approval from MAS, which is relatively quicker than the usual time…

China Tuesday renewed calls for the Philippines to remove an aging ship from a reef which Manila uses to press its stake in the Spratly Islands in defiance of Beijing’s claim to nearly the entire South China Sea. The move comes after the Philippines at the weekend accused the China Coast Guard of firing water cannon against boats on a resupply mission to its garrison stationed on the grounded vessel. The BRP Sierra Madre – deliberately grounded in the late…

The pervasive use of facial recognition technology across all facets of life in China has elicited both praise for its convenience and backlash around privacy concerns. The widespread adoption has also fueled the exponential growth of valuations in companies specializing in the field, such as AI giants SenseTime and Megvii. Now the industry is facing some potentially significant changes as Beijing steps up efforts to establish more defined boundaries for the technology’s usage. The move is building upon the implementation…

ASIC has banned a Sydney mortgage and finance broker for six years from engaging in credit activities after allegedly making false disclosures and mishandling home loan applications among other offences. The broker, Qingshan Yu, was also banned from controlling a credit business and performing any function in relation to carrying on a credit business while the regulator cancelled the Australian credit licence of Yu’s company, Actif Pty Ltd (Actif). Actif held a credit licence from November 9, 2010, and provided…

SAN FRANCISCO – Moody’s Investors Service lowered the credit rating of 10 small and mid-sized US banks and said it may downgrade major lenders including US Bancorp, Bank of New York Mellon, State Street, and Truist Financial as part of a sweeping look at mounting pressures on the industry. Higher funding costs, potential regulatory capital weaknesses and rising risks tied to commercial real estate (CRE) loans amid weakening demand for office space are among strains prompting the review, Moody’s said…