May, 2017

• 17 May

  73 tailgating accidents claim 8 lives in Abu Dhabi

  Abu Dhabi / WAM Eight people lost their lives and three sustained serious injuries in 73 traffic roads where motorists failed to keep a safe distance between vehicles, during the first four months of the year, revealed Police statistics. According to the statistics, traffic police booked 5,150 violations for not leaving enough distance between vehicles. ”Tailgating was one of the ...

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• 17 May

  Trump faces deepest crisis of presidency with Comey memo

  

  Bloomberg Donald Trump is facing the deepest crisis of his presidency after contents of a memo written by James Comey when he was FBI director surfaced on Tuesday, alleging that the president asked him to drop an investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. The White House was already on the defensive over the president’s firing of Comey a ...

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• 17 May

  Putin offers record to US of disputed Trump-Lavrov talks

  Bloomberg Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to give a transcript of White House talks between his foreign minister and Donald Trump to Congress to prove that the US president didn’t give away secrets. “We’re ready to provide a record of Lavrov’s discussions with Trump” to U.S. legislators to prove that no secrets were disclosed, “if the American administration would like ...

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• 17 May

  Brexit talks can’t be secret, EU says in transparency push

  Bloomberg The European Union is refusing to allow the upcoming Brexit talks to take place in secret, in a rebuff to U.K. appeals to keep positions confidential. With just over a month to go before negotiations are due to start, the bloc set out how it will make its negotiating documents public every step of the way. The EU has ...

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• 17 May

  The bull in the intelligence china shop

  

  Think of the intelligence community and its fragile array of secret relationships as a china shop. Think of President Trump as a bull, restless and undisciplined. For months, we’ve been watching the disastrous collision of the two. Trump’s latest self-inflicted spy scandal was the disclosure this week that he had boastfully revealed to Russian visitors his knowledge of highly classified ...

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• 17 May

  Cyberattacks are certain; cybersecurity business is not

  

  It’s now clear that cyberattacks are a fact of life for corporations and governments. What’s less clear are the winners and losers among companies focused on stopping the digital break-ins. News about the WannaCry digital extortion attack that crippled hundreds of thousands computers worldwide caused predictable stock market euphoria on Monday. As tends to happen when there is a highly ...

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• 17 May

  Budget advice for the EU’s big three

  In a fresh sign of confidence about the euro zone’s recovery, the European Commission has just upgraded its growth forecasts for the bloc. This raises a question: Should governments now start tightening fiscal policy to put their public finances on a sounder footing? It depends. Many euro-zone countries have worryingly high levels of public debt, and the best time to ...

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• 17 May

  For Macron, the fight has only just begun

  Many remarkable things happened in this year’s French presidential election. Emmanuel Macron became the youngest president of France. The extremist party garnered highest-ever scores. And for the first time, none of France’s traditional parties were represented in the final vote. Despite these extraordinary developments, the 39-year-old president’s future in office is full of challenges. He has daunting tasks ahead. Macron ...

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• 17 May

  For poor nations, productivity begins on the farmland

  

  When discussing countries that have undergone astonishing economic transformations — as, most notably, China has over the past few decades — observers usually credit success to industrialization. After all, that’s the visible consequence of rapid growth: Where sleepy fishing villages once lay, ports and factories and high-speed rail networks spring up. The people who lived in those villages are in ...

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• 17 May

  UBS loss is hard cheese for Singapore

  

  Sour grapes. That’s a two-word description for the Singapore sovereign fund’s decision to slash its shareholding in UBS Group AG at a loss after nursing the investment for nearly a decade. But is the sale also a flashing neon ‘buyer beware’ sign for HNA Group Co., the Chinese aviation-to-hotels conglomerate that recently boosted its stake in another European lender, Deutsche ...

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