Relaxnews Instagram has seen 100 million new users sign up over the past six months, pushing its total base to more than 600 million. The image sharing social media platform announced the news on its blog on Thursday, thanking users and adding: “we’re working to make Instagram safer than ever for connection and self-expression.” Recent updates to the platform ...

  Bloomberg Private sector investors are showing new interest in Saudi Arabia’s solar energy market, after the nation’s leadership included plans to add 9.5 GW of renewables to the energy supply as part of Saudi Vision 2030, along with opening the way to greater private sector and international investment. Announced in April, the Vision 2030 strategy sets 9.5 GW as ...

  Bloomberg OPEC’s deal to cut production and boost prices gives oil companies the opportunity to shake off two years of layoffs and slumping profits to start investing again — if they still have the risk appetite. Just ask Patrick Pouyanne, chief executive officer of Total SA. Throughout the downturn he’s consistently warned that tens of billions of dollars of ...

  Bloomberg Oil rose for the first time in three days after the dollar’s advance stalled and attention shifted back to projected production cuts. Futures rose 2 percent in New York. Prices dropped the past two days as the dollar climbed against major peers after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, which curbed the appeal of commodities to investors. Goldman ...

  AFP Ethiopia on Saturday inaugurated a hydroelectric dam that aims to double the country’s electricity output, but which critics say is a threat to locals and a UNESCO-listed lake in Kenya. The Gibe III dam, which reaches 243 metres (800 feet) in height, is the third-largest dam in Africa and the biggest in a series built along the Omo ...

  Bloomberg Verizon Communications Inc.’s deal with Yahoo! Inc. has hit a rocky patch, but the phone giant is forging ahead with a strategy focusing on mobile advertising and still has appetite for more deals. Whether or not the $4.83 billion Yahoo deal goes through, the company is likely to look at purchasing digital media companies that could drive more ...

  Bloomberg DeepMind, the London-based division of Alphabet Inc. that’s responsible for numerous recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, is hiring its first researcher in the US to boost collaboration across the Atlantic. The “applied research scientist position” described in a job posting on DeepMind’s website will be located at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. It would be the first ...

  Bloomberg General Motors Co. will begin producing self-driving cars at a Michigan factory — and testing them on the state’s roads — in a step toward building the vehicles on a large scale, Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra said. “We believe GM will be one of the first automakers to build high-volume autonomous vehicles in an assembly plant,” Barra ...

  Bloomberg After the worst French wheat crop in decades this season, the European Union’s largest producer looks set to return to global export markets. Output of soft wheat is expected to jump by about a third to 37.7 million metric tons in the season starting July, according to estimates from Tallage, publisher of the Strategie Grains report. That will ...

Washington / AFP President Barack Obama declared that Bashar Al-Assad’s Syrian regime, Iran and Russia are responsible for the carnage in Aleppo and argued there was nothing Washington could have done to stop the war, short of a military takeover of Syria. And he warned Assad, who has been engaged in a brutal civil war against opposition forces since 2011, that ...