SHAFAQNA

SHAFAQNA-- A 53-year-old businessman in Taiwan has the first case of the H7N9 bird flu virus outside mainland China, health officials there have confirmed. The man is in a serious condition in hospital days after returning from the Chinese city of Suzhou, officials say. China has confirmed 108 cases of H7N9 since it was initially reported in March, with at least 22 people dead. The World Health Organization (WHO) says this strain appears to spread more easily from birds to…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Google will be making quite a few announcements at the I/O conference. The company will unveil Android’s next major platform update, version 5.0 or Key Lime Pie. It is also expected make hardware announcements, though recent rumors suggest that it won’t be unveiling Nexus 5 or Motorola X. Rather it will be announcing a Nexus 4 with 32GB storage and 4G LTE. Now it is being speculated that the company will unveil a revamped…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – As the death toll from China's bird flu outbreak rose to 22 with news of another victim in eastern Zhejiang Province, the World Health Organization warned the H7N9 virus was one of the most lethal that doctors and medical investigators had faced in recent years. "This is an unusually dangerous virus for humans," Keiji Fukuda, WHO's assistant director-general for health, security and the environment told a news conference in Beijing Wednesday. "We think this…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Researchers genetically modified E. coli bacteria to convert sugar into an oil that is almost identical to conventional diesel. If the process could be scaled up, this synthetic fuel could be a viable alternative to the fossil fuel, the team said. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Professor John Love, a synthetic biologist from the University of Exeter, said: "Rather than making a replacement fuel like some…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Google has been fined 145,000 euros (£125,000) by German data regulators for illegally recording information from unsecured wi-fi networks. The country's data chief called it "one of the biggest known data protection violations in history". But the regulator admitted the amount was "totally inadequate" as a deterrent to the company. The search giant said it unintentionally collected data including emails, passwords and photos. Google has said it never intended to store the personal data,…

SHAFAQNA-- Half a century ago this month Martin Luther King wrote his famous prison protest against racial injustice, entitled ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’. An excerpt reads: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality... Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Fifty years on to this very month, King’s defiant cri de coeur could hardly be more apt to express the barbarous injustice being committed by the US government against one…

SHAFAQNA-- ASIA is “the most exciting region on earth in higher-education terms”, said the Times Higher Education (THE) when introducing its inaugural Asian University Rankings this month. The region (defined by THE as including the Middle East but excluding Australasia) accounted for 57 of the top 400 institutions worldwide, with many Asian ones gaining ground on their Western counterparts. Japan has both the highest number of universities in the top 100 in Asia and the top-ranked Asian university overall, the University of Tokyo.…

SHAFAQNA-- A new strain of bird flu that has killed 22 people in China is "one of the most lethal" of its kind and is more easily transmissible to humans than an earlier strain that has killed hundreds around the world since 2003, a top World Health Organisation (WHO) official has said. The H7N9 virus has infected 108 people in China since it was first detected in March, according to the Geneva-based WHO. Although it is not clear exactly how people have been…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Apple has been exceeding analysts’ expectations since 2003, but now the same analysts think the company’s profit will fall for the first time in a decade. Even worse, one Citibank analyst believes the iPhone 5S will be delayed, resulting in even more worry for Apple stockholders. Analysts expect Apple’s quarterly report to show an 18% decline in net income with revenue growing by 8%. That would be the slowest growth rate Apple has seen…

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a self-regulator for brokerages, says investors must be protected; if stockbrokers are chattering about stocks on Facebook and Twitter, FINRA must ensure that they must comply with Wall Street firms' policies. Those policies involve everything from requiring brokers to disclose conflicts of interest, to ensuring they aren't recommending a stock in official company forums and trashing the company elsewhere. In order to keep stockbrokers and firms in line…