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  Moscow/ AFP Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday called for the country to reinforce its military nuclear potential and praised the army’s performance in its Syria campaign. In a speech that recapped military activities in 2016, Putin said the army’s preparedness has “considerably increased” and called for continued improvement that would ensure it can “neutralise any military threat”. “We ...

  Moscow / AFP Russia’s defence minister on Thursday accused the British army of using Russian insignia to designate the enemy during training, a method he said was employed by Nazi Germany during World War II. Minister Sergei Shoigu said that British troops at the Salisbury Plain training facility “have started to use Russian-made tanks and uniforms of the Russian ...

  Lubumbashi / AFP Soldiers sealed part of DR Congo’s second city and carried out mass arrests of young men on Thursday, residents said, as talks to defuse the country’s explosive political crisis were set to continue. Protests and deadly clashes have erupted in the vast country over President Joseph Kabila’s refusal to step down at the end of his ...

  Istanbul/ AFP Turkey on Thursday vowed to press on with the fight against “terror”, a day after 14 Turkish soldiers were killed by extremists in an intensifying battle for a flashpoint Syrian town, Ankara’s biggest loss of its Syria campaign so far. The soldiers were killed in a succession of attacks by IS extremists around the town of Al-Bab ...

  WhiteOps, a US cybersecurity company, says it has uncovered the biggest online advertising scam ever, operated from Russia and making between $2.6 million and $5.2 million a day —as much as four times what the New York Times makes from advertising. The announcement should be a warning to anyone entrusted with a corporate budget to spend on online marketing: ...

  India’s ‘House of Debt’ is still swaying, though a little less dangerously than before. For the country’s highly leveraged companies, the year is closing on a somewhat more cheerful note than seemed possible six months ago. First, it was the billionaire Ruia brothers delivering the good news to Standard Chartered Plc and other creditors. As much as $5 billion ...

  What is Amazon.com Inc., exactly? If you answered “an online book retailer,” then you haven’t been paying attention for like, oh, the past decade or so. What seems like a straight-forward question is actually a much more complex and surprising inquiry than you might have guessed. I began thinking about this earlier this year, when we looked at whether ...

  Bloomberg China has targets for just about everything, from ethanol production to reaching Mars. Now the top economic planning body wants to get more tourists to hit the road, and has even announced targets for skydiving, water skiing and mountain climbing, as authorities push for more consumer spending to aid the economic transition away from old industrial drivers. The ...

  Bloomberg An Indian green court ordered the country’s aviation safety regulator to ensure planes don’t dump human waste during flights, ruling on a plea by a New Delhi resident who claimed his neighborhood had to endure excreta that fell from the skies. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation, the safety regulator, should conduct surprise checks on aircraft when they ...

  Abu Dhabi / Emirates Business Middle East has seen a tremendous rise in smartphone penetration rates and social media usage as the total number of Internet users has recently crossed a 100 million mark. Retailers are exploring ways to get more personal with their customers, through online offerings and social media interactions, to gain loyalty. A recent research by ...