North Korea has reportedly replaced guards and fortified a section of its border with South Korea where a North Korean soldier staged a daring defection last week, while South Korean and U.S. soldiers have been decorated for their role in his rescue. The North Korean defector was shot and wounded by his fellow soldiers as […]
Read moreAdrian Bonilla lived in a shared house in this Silicon Valley town with his wife and two grandchildren until earlier this year, when the rent for their bedroom jumped to $1,200 from $900 a month. Mr. Bonilla attributed that rise to Facebook, which is based nearby and was growing. So Mr. Bonilla, a 43-year-old mechanic […]
Read moreRetailers are using facial recognition to collect data about customers as they shop in stores, according to an IT company with insight into the space. “One of the big things brick-and-mortar retailers are getting into now is knowing their customers … tracking who’s entering their mall and how they’re behaving,” said Mark Lunt, group managing […]
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China is growing its ties with Kazakhstan as the “Belt and Road” program gets underway. A prime example is the nearly seven-year-old railway container center in China’s ancient capital city of Xi’an that links the world’s second-largest economy to the Central Asia country. Kazakhstan is the so-called inland port’s biggest market, followed by Amsterdam, said […]
Read moreThe Irish government was on the verge of collapse on Thursday after the party whose votes Prime Minister Leo Varadkar depends on to pass legislation said it would move to remove the deputy prime minister in a breach of their cooperation agreement. The crisis comes weeks ahead of a European Union summit in which the […]
Read moreThe overnight trading session was relatively quiet, with U.S. markets closed for the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday. In Asia, futures pointed to a lower start for Japanese markets while investors are likely to keep an eye on Chinese markets after equities took a tumble in the last session. On the data front, the European composite […]
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Officially, North Korea’s top exports are coal and textiles, but its business dealings go beyond those products, extending to arms sales and exported labor. The United Nations estimates that more than 50,000 North Korean workers are employed in foreign countries, mostly in China and Russia, but also in countries like Malaysia, Qatar, Ethiopia and Poland. […]
Read moreWendy Poth, my aunt, lost her sight when she was 7. She’s now completely blind, so she doesn’t see shadows, faces or even the darkness when she closes her eyes. Wendy, who’s now in her 60s, has lived an independent life as a therapist and trained social worker. These days, she’s a die-hard technology enthusiast […]
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WHAT does France’s corporate establishment make of the change in fortunes of Patrick Drahi, a telecoms billionaire who achieved brief greatness before crashing to earth? In August he was reported to be planning a $185bn bid for Charter Communications, America’s second-largest cable operator, which is part-owned by John Malone, a famous cable investor. This month […]
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ITALY seems an unlikely place to be enjoying a boom in new listings on the stockmarket. It is full of family-run small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that mostly rely for their finance on banks; and Italy’s banks are notorious for the bad debts still lingering on their balance-sheets. But Borsa Italiana, Milan’s stock exchange, has […]
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