During a seminal scene in Season 4 of Schitt's Creek, Noah Reid rediscovered his passion for music. Friday, he released his hopeful ballad "Hold On."

Haim tells The Times that its album "Women in Music Pt. III" will be released on June 26: "We really want it to be out for the summer."

Los Angeles history — in particular its Mexican and Chicano culture and folklore — is at the heart of Showtime's "Penny Dreadful: City of Angels."

Moeen Ali has opened up on the return of cricket but has sent a stark warning to his fellow players and the decision-makers on the sport.

GLENN MILLER mysteriously disappeared several months before VE Day - but one expert claims his death was due to determination to win World War 2.

GOOGLE MAPS is a useful tool that is great for navigating around the world. But sometimes, the huge Street View lens spots some very bizarre scenes which is definitely the case for one street in New Orleans.

GOOGLE CHROME is the undisputed champion of the internet browser marketplace, but one of its big rivals has received a major update that may tempt you over.

WHITE-TAILED eagles have been spotted in England for the first time in 240 years.

Rangers beat Aberdeen 5-0 in the Scottish Premiership to go within a point of Celtic at the top of the table, and former Rangers star Alan Hutton has hailed striker Jermain Defoe as “unbelievable” after Steven Gerrard’s sixth win of the season.

IRANIAN agents are delivering suitcases stuffed with £800,000 in cash to Hezbollah terrorists despite the Islamic state begging for financial help to deal with coronavirus, it is claimed.

On the Northwest side of Indianapolis, Eagle Creek serves as a break from the bustle of the city.

Yes you read the headline correctly.

And, of course, if you think I look like a plonker, that's fair enough.

Here is what happened.

Glencore's announcement that it plans to list on the London and Hong Kong stock exchanges said this:

"Glencore has made its decision regarding the new chairman and is in the final stages of making the appointment, which will be communicated shortly".

I was told by impeccable sources that the chosen candidate was Lord Browne. And that is definitely the case.

However those "final stages of making the appointment" were not the formality that I and my sources believed.

When it came to the final talks between Lord Browne and Glencore, there was a disagreement about governance issues.

Anyway, Glencore came to the view that Browne wasn't quite right for it. My sense is that Lord Browne was more of a stickler for detail than this entrepreneurial company felt comfortable with.

So what on earth happens now?

Well Glencore can't float without a chairman.

Before Lord Browne became the preferred candidate, Simon Murray - the Hong Kong business leader - was the favourite to take the job.

Does he still want the job? Does Glencore want him?

I don't know, but I will endeavour to find out.

It's all a cracking corporate soap opera. But probably not the ideal curtain-raiser for the biggest flotation the London market has ever seen.

Update 15:15: Glencore has now appointed Simon Murray, former managing director of the Asian giant Hutchison Whampoa, as its chairman.

I can't recall a flotation like it, in terms of the sheer number of executives emerging as wealthy beyond most people's wildest dreams or expectations - not even the conversion of Goldman Sachs into a public company or the listing of Google.

When Glencore publishes its full flotation prospectus later this morning, it will show that there are four billionaires working for the world's leading commodities, minerals and energy trader.

These are led by the chief executive Ivan Glasenberg, who will be shown to be worth around $10bn.

But it is the quartet of billionaires, plus many others worth more than $100m each, and hundreds who are millionaires, that makes Glencore quite extraordinary.

Now all the top executives are saying they won't sell any of their shares for five years at least - that they won't use the flotation to cash in. As for Glasenberg, he's pledging not to sell even a single share till he steps down as chief executive.

Even so, the stock market listing converts their stakes into currency. These are not paupers.

Is there a price for them of this remarkable valuation of their respective Glencore holdings?

Well their company is already receiving vastly more public scrutiny - for it's environmental record and tax practices, for example - than it did as a pretty secretive private company over the last 20 years or so.

It won't like all this attention - such as claims in this morning's Daily Mail of how Glencore's copper mining operations in Zambia are doing too little for that country.

And it certainly didn't enjoy the furore sparked by remarks of the new chairman, Simon Murray, about how women's desire to have babies prevents them rising to then top in business.

But some of you might feel that whatever embarrassment is caused to Glencore's bosses will be softened by all that personal wealth.

Update 16:44: Oh dear. There’s another billionaire at Glencore I somehow missed.

The prospectus – which is longer than Proust, and racier than Proust in parts – shows that the chief executive, Ivan Glasenberg is worth just under $10bn.

Also, two of his lieutenants are each worth around $3.7bn, one other has a $3.2bn holding and the fifth in this billionaire quintet has a $2.8bn stake.

The poor finance director, Steven Kalmin, is worth a mere $610m.

As the FT points out, each one of these has a holding worth more than what the famous (some would use a less flattering epithet) founder of Glencore, Marc Rich, pocketed when he sold the business to management less than 20 years ago.

Google's move to put Javier Soltero, VP and GM of G Suite, in charge of Messages, Duo, and the phone app on Android, puts all of Google's major communication products under one umbrella: Soltero's team. Dieter Bohn reports via The Verge: Soltero tells me that there are no immediate plans to change or integrate any of Google's apps, so don't get your hopes up for that (yet). "We believe people make choices around the products that they use for specific purposes," Soltero says. Still, Google's communications apps are in dire need of a more coherent and opinionated production development, and Soltero could very well be the right person to provide that direction. Prior to joining Google, he had a long career that included creating the much-loved Acompli email app, which Microsoft acquired and essentially turned into the main Outlook app less than two months after signing the deal. Soltero has also moved rapidly (at least by the standards of Google's communication apps) to clean up the Hangouts branding mess, converting Hangouts Video to Google Meet and Hangouts Chat to Google Chat -- at least on the enterprise side. Google Meet also became free for everybody far ahead of the original schedule because of the pandemic. Cleaning up the consumer side of all that is more complicated, but Soltero says, "The plan continues to be to modernize [Hangouts] towards Google Meet and Google Chat." "Soltero will remain on the cloud team but will join Hiroshi Lockheimer's leadership team," Dieter adds. While Lockheimer believes there are opportunities to better integrate Google's apps into its platforms, he says it doesn't make sense to force integration or interoperability too quickly. "It's not necessarily a bad thing that there are multiple communications applications if they're for a different purpose," Lockheimer says. "Part of what might be confusing, what we've done to confuse everyone, is our history around some of our communications products that have gone from one place or another place. But we're looking forward now, in a way that has a much more coherent vision."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I am roaming the halls of Google I/O 2013 and wondering whether Google’s platform passes the ecosystem test. … no platform has become hugely successful without a corresponding ecosystem of vendors building significant businesses on top of the platform. Typically, … Continue reading →

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Visitors to the Eiteljorg Museum through January 21 get a chance to see model trains laid out in an intricate winter set in an annual show.

It was the match made famous by Ben Stokes' heroics. But just how much can you recall from the epic third Ashes Test last summer?

Migrants in Calais and the UK say the Covid-19 pandemic is deepening the struggles they face.

Some garden centres in the area opened Friday morning with physical distancing measures in place after the provincial government lifted the closures earlier this week.

Loon — an Internet-providing balloon service owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company — will give “mountain villagers” in Kenya the opportunity to purchase 4G service.

If all goes according to plan, future generations will be able to interact with departed relatives using mobile devices or virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, asking the deceased questions, eliciting stories and drawing upon a lifetime’s worth of advice long after their physical body is gone.

It hasn't been a great year for road favorites. Those who enjoyed a three-point advantage or more on the road have gone 21-30-2 against the spread.

• Oracle's bid to become a bigger player in the cloud has become more aggressive in the COVID-19 crisis, highlighted by a new partnership with Zoom.
• The tech giant is up against stronger rivals led by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, but the need for more cloud capacity sparked by the sudden pivot to remote work has created opportunities for the Silicon Valley behemoth.
• Here are the 10 Oracle executives who are playing key roles in CEO Safra Catz and founder Larry Ellison bold cloud offensive.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Oracle has been through some jarring changes in the last seven months. 

The tech giant lost a well-regarded and experienced co-CEO when Mark Hurd died in October after taking leave for health reasons, leaving Safra Catz as the solo CEO. Now, like other major tech companies, Oracle is grappling with the impact of the coronavirus crisis.

But Oracle has been through tough times in its 43-year history. In fact, the Silicon Valley giant has been known to seize opportunities during rough spots. It's already seen some success during this crisis, too: Oracle just scored a big win when videoconferencing company Zoom — suddenly facing a surge in demand — chose to expand on Oracle Cloud, instead of other platforms like top cloud provider Amazon. Oracle is generally considered a smaller player in the cloud wars, behind giants Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba.

Yes, Oracle still has a long way to go to match its rivals' reach, but its strategy of expanding its capacity by building more data centers seems to be paying off, IDC President Crawford Del Prete told Business Insider.

That increased capacity and Oracle's "world class" applications are key in the cloud words, Del Prete said: "Oracle is one of the few companies able to deliver both at scale in order to compete."

While Catz and founder, executive chairman, and chief technology officer Larry Ellison the lead company, they're also relying on key top executives, including cloud veterans from rival Amazon, to advance Oracle's cloud strategy. 

Nearly all are white men, something Oracle has criticized for in the past: Over 30 members of Congress slammed the company late last year about the lack of diversity in its leadership team and on its board.

Meet the 10 top executives playing important roles in Oracle's cloud offensive:

SEE ALSO: Oracle is known for making bold M&A moves in a recession and it's sitting on a fresh $20 billion. Here are the 7 companies experts think it could acquire as the coronavirus crisis drives down valuations

SEE ALSO: Experts lay out five moves that Oracle founder Larry Ellison, one of tech's best tacticians, might take in a coronavirus-driven downturn

Don Johnson left Amazon to focus on Oracle's cloud infrastructure.

Title: Executive vice president, cloud infrastructure

Reports to: Larry Ellison

Johnson  played a key role in Amazon's dramatic expansion in the cloud before joining Oracle in 2014.

He was instrumental in setting up Oracle's cloud engineering development center in Seattle and in the tech giant's expanding data center footprint.  Johnson has also led another major Oracle initiative: forming a cloud partnership with Microsoft.

Oracle's chief corporate architect Edward Screven has been with the company since 1986.

Title: Chief corporate architect

Reports to: Larry Ellison

Screven is an Oracle veteran who helped lead the company through all of the major industry changes of the past 30 years.

He admits that cloud market-leader Amazon had a head start, but says that there are benefits to following it. 

"We definitely started after Amazon: The bad news is they have market share, the good news is we get to learn a lot," he told Business Insider in an interview in May 2019. "Mindshare, that may be their biggest asset. But there is no technology they have that is concerning to me at all."

As one of Oracle's top technologists, he's focused on making Oracle's cloud infrastructure more secure, with more sophisticated and efficient ways to manage data. 

"We have hundreds of thousands of customers that store their most important data in Oracle databases," Screven said. "We could do a far better job for them than any other cloud provider. We are doing a far better job for them."

Clay Magouyrk leads cloud infrastructure engineering and played a key role in forging Oracle's new alliance with Zoom.

Title: Executive vice president, cloud infrastructure engineering

Reports to: Don Johnson

Magouyrk is another veteran of Amazon Web Services who joined the Oracle team in Seattle in 2014. 

He was Oracle's point-man in forging its new partnership with Zoom, which was seen as a major victory for Oracle.

"They needed capacity," Magouyrk told Business Insider last month "They reached out to us and we were like, 'Awesome, we can work with you.' Within a day, we had their application up and running."

Magouyrk was a founding team member of Oracle's cloud engineering development center in Seattle, which is spearheading the company's cloud infrastructure efforts.

Ariel Kelman left Amazon Web Services to become Oracle's chief marketing officer.

Title: Chief Marketing Officer

Reports to: Safra Catz

One of the biggest hurdles for Oracle is the public perception that it's a minor player in the cloud. In other words, it's a marketing problem.

This is where Kelman comes in. Before Oracle brought him on board in January 2020, Kelman led rival Amazon's cloud marketing efforts, and served as a marketing executive at Salesforce for six years before that.

"Ariel is a super smart hire for Oracle," analyst Ray Wang of Constellation Research told Business Insider. "He brings the cred in the market and understands how to counter all of Amazon's tactics and long-term strategy. He has the ear of Larry and Safra and is making progress with some great hires on his team."

Juergen Lindner left SAP to lead Oracle's software-as-a-service marketing strategy.

Title: Senior vice president, software-as-a-service marketing

Reports to: Ariel Kelman, chief marketing officer

Lindner spent most of his career helping SAP outsell Oracle in the traditional business software market: both dominated teh market for software installed in private data centers. 

He switched sides and roles four years ago to support Oracle's bid to become a stronger player in cloud software, also referred to as software-as-a-service, where businesses access applications through cloud platforms and pay via a subscription, usually based on the number of users granted access. 

Lindner has said it became clear to him that Oracle had a better strategy for the cloud-software era.

"Oracle has architected a very sustainable cloud infrastructure and applications strategy," he told Business Insider last year.

Steve Daheb left Citrix to lead Oracle's cloud marketing strategy.

Title: Senior vice president, cloud go-to-market

Reports to: Ashley Hart, senior vice president, global marketing cloud platform and database

Daheb joined Oracle in 2015 after serving as the chief marketing officer of Citrix, a cloud pioneer that first let businesses set up computing networks on web-based platforms instead of on-premise data centers, leading to dramatic IT cost savings.

Daheb witnessed the unexpected rise of Amazon in cloud computing, which began in the early : 2000s when the online retail giant realized it could make some extra money by giving businesses access to its massive but underutilized computing infrastructure, hosted from its data centers.

"Amazon had spare computing resources to rent out," he told Business Insider last year. "It's like, 'Hey, man, I got an extra room in the house during the summer when it's not spike retail time. There's nobody in there, so why don't I put this thing on Airbnb and see if anybody wants it?'"

Amazon Web Services has led the industry ever since. 

Like others on the Oracle team, Daheb thinks the software giant's technology and track record of working with major players across industries will eventually propel it to the front of the cloud pack.

"There's a level of understanding we have and a level of empathy we have for enterprise users: We serve the major banks, we serve transportation, we serve healthcare," he said. "We brought this enterprise mentality to it."

Juan Loaiza, who has been with Oracle since 1988, is in charge of mission-critical database technologies.

Title: Executive vice president, mission-critical database technologies

Reports to: Larry Ellison

Loaiza is another Oracle veteran who has been with the company for more than 30 years and is currently focused on its bid to expand the reach of its flagship database product.

The tech giant's cloud-based automated data-management platform Autonomous Database uses machine learning to quickly repair and update itself.Loaiza has compared the status of this fairly new initiative to the development of the self-driving car:

"It took a long time to get to a point where we are now and say, 'The next step is a self-driving car,'" he told Business Insider last year. "It's got to be safe. It has to have seatbelts and airbags and a navigation system. All that stuff was necessary before you take it to the next stage." 

The database is ready for that next stage. 

Jason Williamson left Amazon to lead Oracle's outreach to startups.

Title: Vice president, Oracle for Startups

Reports to: Mamei Sun, Ellison's chief of staff

Startups have played an important role in the growth of cloud computing and Oracle has launched a big push to establish closer ties with these smaller companies, given that they could eventually become the biggest power players. 

Williamson has been the company's point-man in this effort, as he develops ways to make Oracle's products and services more accessible to startups.

Williamson is another veteran of Amazon Web Services where he led the cloud giant's private-equity team before joining Oracle in 2017.

Evan Goldberg cofounded NetSuite, which is now part of Oracle.

Title: Executive vice president, NetSuite

Reports to: Safra Catz

Goldberg is part of the elite club of Oracle alums who went on to launch successful enterprise-software companies. (Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is perhaps the best-known.)

Goldberg left a long career at Oracle in the late 1990s to launch NetSuite, a cloud-based provider of financial- and accounting-management services. He was the chief technology officer alongside CEO Zach Nelson, another Oracle alum, and Ellison was actually one of their early backers.

Oracle acquired the company in 2016 and it now has more than 18,000 customers. 

Steve Miranda has been with Oracle since 1992 and leads cloud-applications development.

Title: Executive vice president, applications product development

Reports to: Ellison

Miranda is an Oracle veteran in charge of different aspects of the company's cloud-software business, including product development and strategy.

This covers applications used for major business operations, like supply-chain management, human resources, and enterprise performance management.

The CBS Studios show will be based on the former FBI director's best-selling memoir.

oscon: RT @oreillyanimals Vote Instant Wild's Digital Eyes & Ears for Wildlife Protection to win Google Global Impact Award http://t.co/BM3qufX1PF

Local news publishers have struggled to monetize spike in consumer interest.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

The Rich Results Test tool now also supports SpecialAnnouncement markup.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

‘The idea that what’s happening with searcher behavior is not causing these shifts means that Google is in there writing that code for every intent, every day, and I can’t believe that’s what’s happening,’ said Dr. Pete Meyers on Live with Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

If you are having indexing issues with your HTML or JavaScript-based website then you won’t want to miss this chat.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Even the biggest sites on the internet can have problems with their SEO and Google.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

The suggestions surface for multiple intents for logged-in users.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

This is the first time Google says it has provided this kind of data to the public.

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This update was an “absolute monster” said Mordy Oberstein from RankRanger.

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A Shopping ad is accompanied by a clickable text unit.

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velocityconf: Free webcast from our friends at @citrix 5/29 http://t.co/IOeY4U0wUP Learn to consolidate 40 load balancers and ADCs into single platform

velocityconf: RT @oreillyanimals Vote Instant Wild's Digital Eyes & Ears for Wildlife Protection to win Google Global Impact Award http://t.co/Z0EetiQshZ

velocityconf: Call for speakers and registration is open for @webperfdays in Silicon Valley http://t.co/cJKBmynkjI June 22, Google HQ (cc @sfwebperf)

After three decades of mystery, the cold case murder of a 17-year-old Ohio teen named Barbara Blatnik has been solved thanks in part to DNA genealogical research. The last time anyone saw Blatnik alive was around midnight on Dec. 19, 1987, when a friend dropped her off in Garfield Heights, Ohio. The following day, Blatnik,…

The post 32 Years After Teen’s Body Found Strangled on Side of Road, Suspect Finally Arrested appeared first on The Western Journal.

A new year brings another run at my annual predictions: For 17 years now, I’ve taken a few hours to imagine what might happen over the course of the coming twelve months. And my goodness did I swing for the fences last year — and I pretty much whiffed. Batting .300 is great in the majors, but it … Continue reading "Predictions 2020: Facebook Caves, Google Zags, Netflix Sells Out, and Data Policy Gets Sexy"

Google's video chat app got new features this week. No, the other one. No, the other other one.

In a Friday blog post, Google announced some snazzy new features for Duo, one of its three video chat services. Let's get this out of the way early: Duo is the one that's mobile-friendly and resembles FaceTime more than Hangouts and Meet.

The new features make more sense with that in mind. Google added something called "Family Mode" to Duo, in which you can draw silly little doodles on the video feed, presumably to amuse the little ones on the call. There are also AR effects you can use on one-on-one calls on Android and iOS, similar to those available on Facebook's video calls. Read more...

Older Boomers: Single Females Buying Homes

A woman in her 90s living at the Bradford Valley Care Community is the latest coronavirus victim in the region.

As British Columbians digest the implications in the steps the premier announced in reopening the province's economy, some residents have come to the conclusion they’re too much too soon.

Research Event

Event participants

Renad Mansour, Research Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House
Alia Moubayed, Managing Director, Jefferies
Chair: Lina Khatib, Head, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House

Research Event

Allostery exploits the conformational dynamics of enzymes by triggering a shift in population ensembles toward functionally distinct conformational or dynamic states. Allostery extensively regulates the activities of key enzymes within biosynthetic pathways to meet metabolic demand for their end products. Here, we have examined a critical enzyme, 3-deoxy-d-arabino-heptulosonate 7-phosphate synthase (DAH7PS), at the gateway to aromatic amino acid biosynthesis in Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which shows extremely complex dynamic allostery: three distinct aromatic amino acids jointly communicate occupancy to the active site via subtle changes in dynamics, enabling exquisite fine-tuning of delivery of these essential metabolites. Furthermore, this allosteric mechanism is co-opted by pathway branchpoint enzyme chorismate mutase upon complex formation. In this study, using statistical coupling analysis, site-directed mutagenesis, isothermal calorimetry, small-angle X-ray scattering, and X-ray crystallography analyses, we have pinpointed a critical node within the complex dynamic communication network responsible for this sophisticated allosteric machinery. Through a facile Gly to Pro substitution, we have altered backbone dynamics, completely severing the allosteric signal yet remarkably, generating a nonallosteric enzyme that retains full catalytic activity. We also identified a second residue of prime importance to the inter-enzyme communication with chorismate mutase. Our results reveal that highly complex dynamic allostery is surprisingly vulnerable and provide further insights into the intimate link between catalysis and allostery.