WorldcrunchIt has finally begun. More than two years since ISIS conquered Iraq’s third-biggest city, a coalition of local ground forces, supported by U.S. air power, has launched a coordinated attack to recapture Mosul. “The time of victory has come and operations to liberate Mosul have started,” Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in a televised […]
Shimon Peres, whose six decades of public service included stints as both Israel’s prime minister and president, has died at the age of 93, two weeks after suffering a stroke. The joint 1994 Nobel Peace Prize laureate played a defining role for Israel since its founding in 1948, serving as an aide to the first […]
-Essay- PARIS — Will reality become a rare commodity? The digital revolution has given humans the greatest power — that of creating and manipulating reality. We make machines and algorithms that can imitate our world so well that they manage to deceive our brains. For example, Applied VR, a U.S. startup, offers a therapy based […]
It was the week two U.S. tech giants saw their seemingly unstoppable sprint toward global domination hit a wall. First, on Tuesday, Apple was ordered to pay up 13 billion euros in back taxes after the European Union ruled that a series of sweetheart tax deals made with the Irish government were illegal. That’s a […]
SPOTLIGHT: WHY ARMENIAN GENOCIDE MATTERS NOW As the country responsible for the Holocaust, Germany understands better than others the importance of acknowledging and atoning for the wrongs in your past. But today, German lawmakers will confront another country’s historical crime, as a debate opens on a resolution that would officially qualify the 1915 mass deportations […]
ASSAD CALLS FOR UNITY GOVERNMENT Syrian President Bashar al-Assad reiterated calls yesterday for opposition members to join him in forming a national unity government, a prospect opposition leaders have rejected. In an interview with Russian news agency Ria Novosti that comes days after the government’s recapture of Palmyra, Assad said that the main goal of […]
PARIS — We’ve hardly made peace with the idea of driverless cars, and now we’re being told that artificial intelligence could also control rifles, missiles and bombs of the future. The warning was issued last summer by leading figures such as Tesla chief Elon Musk, physicist Stephen Hawking and MIT Professor Noam Chomsky. During July’s […]
Perhaps just as fascinating as the electric cars is the company’s founder and the genuinely earnest ideal among employees to make the world a better place.
NETANYAHU WINSExit polls had them neck-and-neck yesterday evening but in the end, Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party secured a solid victory ahead of the centrist Zionist Union led by Isaac Herzog. Likud came in with an expected 30 Knesset seats ahead of 24 for the Zionist Union. With pre-voting polls suggesting a defeat of the […]
The announcement of major layoffs for Tesla China, the entrepreneur’s electric car company, prompts a deeper analysis of Musk as manager.
With its programs aging, Russia has announced that it’s pulling out of the International Space Station in 2020. Where does that leave space exploration for the rest of the world?
LOS ANGELES TIMES, REUTERS Worldcrunch SAN FRANCISCO – California billionaire Elon Musk has unveiled the design of his Hyperloop, a $6 billion would-be high-speed transport system powered by solar energy. The network of crash-proof capsules could become “a fifth mode of transport after planes, trains, cars and boats,” Musk declared in a blog post. Hyperloop […]