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Swiss startup bringing AI to music label business

  Bloomberg A Swiss-Swedish startup wants to bring the power of big data and social-media analysis to the music business, offering artists instant insight into where and how their songs are playing so they can market more effectively to fans. Utopia Music Group is being billed as a new kind of record company by its founder, Mattias Hjelmstedt. Like an ...

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What makes this temple different!

  BANGKOK / AP It’s more than eight times bigger than Vatican City and twice the size of Cambodia’s ancient Angkor Wat, making it quite possibly the world’s biggest religious complex. Yet few non-Buddhists have heard of Wat Dhammakaya, a sprawling, extravagant temple compound north of Bangkok that has been at the center of a high-profile power struggle between monks ...

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Car rampage, knife attack leave two dead in London

  LONDON / AP A vehicle mowed down pedestrians on London’s Westminster Bridge, killing at least one woman and leaving others with injuries described as catastrophic. Around the same time on Wednesday, a knife-wielding attacker stabbed a police officer and was shot on the grounds outside Britain’s Parliament, sending the compound into lockdown. Authorities said they were treating the attacks ...

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Dozens dead or missing from airstrike in IS-held north Syria

  BEIRUT / AP Syrian activists said on Wednesday that dozens of people were killed or missing after an airstrike the day before leveled a school near the IS-held city of Raqqa where displaced families had sought refuge. The activist-run group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently said some 50 families had been sheltering at the school in the northern Syrian ...

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China says no monitoring station on disputed island

  BEIJING / AP China is not building an environmental monitoring station on a disputed South China Sea shoal, the foreign ministry said Wednesday, apparently denying remarks made by a local official last week that prompted a request for clarification from rival claimant the Philippines. Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said reports about the facility on Scarborough Shoal had been checked ...

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Afghanistan wants more US help in fight against Taliban, IS

  WASHINGTON / AP Afghanistan wants the United States to send more forces to help meet shortfalls in the battle against the Taliban and the IS group, the nation’s top diplomat said. Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani welcomed a recent call by US Gen. John Nicholson, the top American commander in Afghanistan, for a few thousand more troops from the US ...

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Obamacare — ‘mend it, but don’t end it’

  Mend it, don’t end it’ was Bill Clinton’s rhetorical straddle regarding affirmative action. Republican efforts to ‘repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (ACA) (Obamacare) look increasingly like ‘mend it, don’t end it.’ The problem is not that, as is frequently said, no entitlement can be ended. The most consequential legislation of the 1990s, the 1996 welfare reform, repealed ...

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Grab the defibrillator, China’s going to need it

  Among financial geeks, the repurchase market is seen as the lifeblood of a monetary system. Without it, banks can’t really operate. China’s seized up, prompting the People’s Bank to perform an emergency cardiac massage. Other regulators in Beijing may want to look on closely, because they may be called upon to undertake a similar maneuver shortly. To understand what ...

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The Fed’s dollar problem

  The Federal Reserve might be doing the right thing for the US economy by moving to bring interest rates back up to normal. But for foreign companies and governments that have borrowed trillions of US dollars, the adjustment could be painful. Thanks in large part to a prolonged period of extremely low US interest rates, borrowers around the world ...

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Sanctions better option to rein in North Korea

  North Korea launched yet another missile. The missile test, though it turned out to be damp-squib, is nevertheless evidence of Pyongyang’s continued determination to develop intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). It seems there is nothing which can hold it back from pursuing its nuclear ambitions. North Korea is pushing hard to upgrade its weapons systems to cope with the so ...

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