Two pupils were stabbed in suspected gang-related attacks at Meriti Secondary School in Rustenburg on Tuesday morning.

Apple is said to be developing a new product that could function as a wall-mounted display, according to Bloomberg News. This display is expected to provide controls for smart home devices, as well as support for voice commands through Siri and will reportedly offer Apple Intelligence features. Here's everything you need to know about Apple's upcoming device.

Street vendors at a vegetable market in Delhi's Najafgarh will have to display their names on carts in a move the local councillor and the market association claimed was aimed at preventing "illegal" Bangladeshi and Rohingya migrants from selling pro

Street vendors at a vegetable market in Delhi's Najafgarh will have to display their names on carts in a move the local councillor and the market association claimed was aimed at preventing "illegal" Bangladeshi and Rohingya migrants from selling pro

A young man who stabbed a doctor multiple times at a Chennai hospital threw away the knife and calmly walked to the exit when people shouted "he cut him up" and security personnel grabbed him.

A Professor in the Department of Geography at the Kaduna State University, John Laah, has defended the proposed Federal University of Applied Sciences in Kachia, stressing that it would benefit all Nigerians, not just the people of Southern Kaduna. During an interactive session with journalists in Kaduna on Wednesday, Laah, speaking on behalf of the

The reports are heavily shrouded in secrecy, point fingers in different directions, and must be taken with a grain of salt.

A recent photo of Williams aboard the ISS sparked rumors about her health, restoring the media's habit of prying into the appearance of women astronauts.

Assassin's Creed turns 17 years old today, so we're taking a blood-spattered walk down memory as we check out some of its most infamous fictional kills of real people

Until now, β-hydroxybutyrate (BHB) has been known as a compound produced by the liver to be used as fuel.

The post Metabolic Compound Found to Regulate Appetite and Body Weight appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

1. Doctor stabbed by patient’s son: Demanding security, Tamil Nadu government doctors begin indefinite strike  The Hindu
2. Video | Chennai Doctors To Boycott Non-Patient Work For An Hour Amid Stabbing Incident  NDTV
3. Tamil Nadu doctors attacked: Protests erupt, no surgeries, OPDs at Coimbatore hospitals today  The Times of India
4. Video: Chennai man calmly walks away after stabbing doctor, wipes knife  India Today
5. Chennai doctor stabbing: Minister Subramanian retracts “north Indians” claim, apologises  The News Minute

AI is powerful technology, but that doesn’t mean we should adopt it unquestioningly.

Everything old is new again. Turntable Labs just launched Hangout, a social music platform that’s eerily similar to that champion of 2010s internet, Turntable.fm. The app is available as a web client or via an app for Android and iOS. It allows users to play virtual DJ, with over 100 million songs to choose from.

It not only functions like the old-school Turntable.fm. It even looks the same. There’s a stage, record players and cartoon avatars that sort of look like characters from South Park. I started my own room just to check things out and am pleasantly surprised at the sheer number of songs here that I actually like.

This is because those 100 million songs have been secured through partnerships with Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. The catalog also pulls from Merlin, which represents a vast array of indie labels and rights holders.

The company likens the experience to “gathering around a jukebox or listening to albums with friends.” It seems that way to me, as someone I don’t know just jumped in my room and started playing their own stuff. To that end, folks take turns playing DJ. There looks to be room for five people at the same time to play a game of round robin with their favorite songs.

The robust catalog is one major difference from Turntable.fm. The platform didn’t have agreements in place with labels, instead relying on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and a partnership with ASCAP. This forced a number of rules on users as to how many people could be in a room at once and how many songs could be played each hour. It looks like those rules are now dunzo.

Turntable.fm originally went dark all the way back in 2013, before showing signs of renewed life in 2021. This could be a fun retro throwback to an age when we actually got our music recommendations from people, and not algorithms.

Republicans do not have the luxury of wasting all their political capital on a damaging internal family feud that would drag on for weeks or months.

“I hope that the court will hold accountable those who have committed these crimes, and have reduced homes to rubble.”

The oncologist who was attacked has been identified as Balaji Jagannath. He has been admitted in the ICU, and his condition is said to be critical

So far, at least 10 people from Malda and Uttar Dinajpur districts have been arrested on charges of wrongfully siphoning funds allocated for tablets for the State’s higher secondary students

IIT-M Pravartak Technologies invites applications from engineers, developers for the hackathon

One of the aims of the exercise was also to identify vulnerabilities in conduct of operations in the event of denial or disruptions of space-based services

Millions of people have used 23andMe’s simple genetic testing service, which involves ordering a saliva test, spitting into a tube, and sending it back to the company for a detailed DNA analysis

Bédard, J H; Saumur, B -M; Williamson, M -C; Tegner, C; Troll, V R; Deegan, F M; Evenchick, C A; Grasby, S E; Dewing, K. Geological Survey of Canada, Open File 8759, 2020, 7 pages, https://doi.org/10.4095/327829
<a href="https://geoscan.nrcan.gc.ca/images/geoscan/gid_327829.jpg"><img src="https://geoscan.nrcan.gc.ca/images/geoscan/gid_327829.jpg" title="Geological Survey of Canada, Open File 8759, 2020, 7 pages, https://doi.org/10.4095/327829" height="150" border="1" /></a>

Behnia, P; McMartin, I; Campbell, J E; Godbout, P -M; Tremblay, T. Geological Survey of Canada, Open File 8717, 2020, 6 pages, https://doi.org/10.4095/327796
<a href="https://geoscan.nrcan.gc.ca/images/geoscan/gid_327796.jpg"><img src="https://geoscan.nrcan.gc.ca/images/geoscan/gid_327796.jpg" title="Geological Survey of Canada, Open File 8717, 2020, 6 pages, https://doi.org/10.4095/327796" height="150" border="1" /></a>

Trivedi, C B; Stamps, B W; Lau, G E; Grasby, S E; Templeton, A S; Spear, J R. mSystems vol. 5, issue 4, e00504-20, 2020 p. 1-16, https://doi.org/10.1128/mSystems.00504-20
<a href="https://geoscan.nrcan.gc.ca/images/geoscan/20200388.jpg"><img src="https://geoscan.nrcan.gc.ca/images/geoscan/20200388.jpg" title="mSystems vol. 5, issue 4, e00504-20, 2020 p. 1-16, https://doi.org/10.1128/mSystems.00504-20" height="150" border="1" /></a>

A silent crisis of ‘serial returns’ is eroding retail profit margins as uncovered in the Annual Returns Benchmark Report 2024 conducted by returns specialists ZigZag, in partnership with Retail Economics.

Aramex announced its financial results for the third quarter  and first nine months of the year ending 30 September 2024, revealing double-digit revenue growth across all product lines.

Mixed majors bowling league action at the Warwick Lanes saw the MiniMax defeat the Warriors 13 – 7, the Activators went down 12 ½ – 7 ½ to the Unpredictable, Spare Change defeated the Mix Ups 15 – 5, and the Movers & Shakers went down 16 – 4 to Fight Back. Women Scratch Game […]

Mixed majors bowling league action at the Warwick Lanes saw fifth placed Fight Back defeat seventh placed Activators 17 – 3, sixth placed Warriors defeat the league leaders Spare Change 12 – 8, while the eighth placed Movers “N” Shakers lost 14 – 6 to third place Unpredictable, and second placed MiniMax Forwarders went down […]

Donald Trump’s policies risk making the US dollar a source of global instability Expert comment LToremark 13 November 2024

Although Trump favours a weaker exchange rate, his policies are likely to have the opposite effect. The risk is that the US dollar could become too strong, which is bad news for the global economy.

President-elect Donald Trump has a dollar problem. In recent months he has shown a clear preference for a weaker exchange rate to support the competitiveness of US exports and help reduce the US trade deficit. And yet, as the market has sensed since the US election, the much more likely outcome is that his policies end up strengthening the greenback. The risk is that the US dollar – which is expensive already – becomes more obviously overvalued, and this could increase the risk of global financial instability. 

The dollar has been on a rollercoaster ride in the past few decades. From 2002 until 2011, for example, the dollar weakened by around 30 per cent in inflation-adjusted, trade-weighted terms, according to BIS data. Yet in the years since 2011, the dollar has strengthened and is now at a more appreciated level than at any time since 1985.

What shapes this rollercoaster, broadly speaking, is the global balance of economic vitality: when the US economy gains momentum relative to the rest of the world, the dollar tends to strengthen; and vice versa. 

After China joined the WTO in 2001, the balance of economic vitality shifted decisively away from the US, in favour of China and other emerging economies. This was the decade of the commodity boom: the longest, biggest peacetime increase in commodity prices in nearly 200 years during which a sustained surge in China’s economy supported GDP growth across the developing world. The dollar weakened as a result.

But after 2011, a combination of factors – including the eurozone crisis and its aftermath, together with the sagging of the Chinese economy – tipped the balance of economic vitality back in favour of the US. The dollar strengthened once again.

And since both the European and Chinese economies remain very fragile, the balance of economic vitality seems likely to keep favouring the US dollar.

Two more considerations also point to a stronger US dollar under a second Trump administration.

The first is the exchange rate implications of Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on imports. When the US imposes tariffs on a trading partner, the foreign exchange market tends to sell that trading partner’s currency, forcing it to weaken to offset the dollar-price increase induced by the tariff. This helps explain why the Chinese renminbi depreciated by some 10 per cent in 2018 after Trump began imposing trade restrictions on China in January of that year. 

More widespread tariffs on a whole range of US trading partners should therefore strengthen the dollar more broadly.

A stronger dollar should also result from the macroeconomic framework Trump seems likely to deliver. He will certainly want to extend his 2017 tax cuts beyond 2025 when they are currently due to expire, so a more sustained loosening of US fiscal policy seems likely. Since boosting the US economy will create inflationary pressure, the market will expect interest rates to end up higher than they might otherwise be. The resulting combination of looser fiscal and tighter monetary policy tends to be a stronger currency.

The dollar probably has a fair amount of room to keep going up, since it is not obviously overvalued just yet. The US current account deficit – the broadest measure of a country’s trade deficit, and a rough but useful measure of financial vulnerability – was a little over 3 per cent of GDP last year. 

This is around half the level it reached in 2006, just before the 2008 global financial crisis, meaning the risks arising from an overvalued dollar may be for the latter part of Trump’s second presidency.

A strengthening dollar is also not great news for the rest of the world economy. A strong dollar tends to depress global trade growth, restrict developing countries’ access to international capital markets, and make it more difficult for countries whose currencies will be weakening to keep inflation under control.

If and when the dollar becomes unsustainably expensive, a further problem will present itself: how to deal with an overvalued currency without risking a lot of financial dislocation.

This problem last occurred in early 1985, when the dollar was universally reckoned to be dangerously dear. At that time the US was able to call on trading partners who depended on the US security umbrella – the UK, Germany, France and Japan – to negotiate the ‘Plaza Accord’, which coordinated a series of interventions in the foreign exchange market that allowed the dollar to decline in a measured way.  

It is virtually unimaginable that something similar could be negotiated today, not least because Chinese policymakers believe that the post-Plaza strengthening of the yen in the late 1980s led to an economic disaster for Japan. Beijing will not play ball.

Without much scope for a negotiated decline in the dollar, more chaotic alternatives seem likely. 

One is that the market decides suddenly that it no longer has an appetite for expensive dollar-denominated assets, and this might lead to a messy adjustment in the foreign exchange market.