When a 10-year-old asked Alexa for a “challenge to do”, Alexa challenged her to touch a penny coin to the prongs of a half-inserted live plug. Amazon has since updated its Alexa voice assistant the error as soon as the company became aware of it. The girl’s mother, Kristin Livadhi, described the incident…
How a broken corporate culture paved the way for catastrophe, with race to beat competition and reward top executives, Boeing skimped on testing, pressured employees to meet unrealistic deadlines, and convinced and forced regulators to put planes into service without properly equipping them or their pilots for flight, Peter Robinson, award-winning reporter for Bloomberg, looks…
On Wednesday afternoon a fire started to rip through the 38-story building which houses offices and mall, including World Trade Centre, in the bustling commercial and shopping district of Causeway Bay, trapping 350 people waiting to be rescued. The blaze was upgraded to a level three incident on a scale of one to five. Seven…
NatWest contributed to anti-money-laundering failures that involved black bin liners stuffed full of cash being deposited, and sums so large that one branch’s two floor-to-ceiling safes proved “inadequate” for storing it all. The Bradford Jeweller Fowler Oldfield’s predicted annual turnover was £15m when first taken on as a client, but it ended up depositing…
Vicenta Fernandez, the King of Mexico’s traditional ranchera music, known for classics like “El Rey” and Volver, Volver, has died aged 81. He died on the same day as Mexicans celebrate the Virgin of Guadalupe. Fernandez who was critically acclaimed and had sold tens of millions of records worldwide and began his career singing…
“The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan” assess the West’s similarly failed approach to Afghanistan in military, diplomatic, political and developmental terms and reveals the west’s failure to understand Afghanistan and the ties that bind Afghanistan, and its people underpins the west’s 20-year struggle there. Building on record of the past starts from the first…
The government plans to introduce a law that, starting in 2027, will lift the smoking age by a year every year. New Zealand plans to raise the legal smoking age by one year every year effectively banning the sale of tobacco to people born after 2008. “We want to make sure young people never start…
533: A Book of Days, tells the story through a tireless explorer of distant cultures, for more than forty year Cees Nooteboom has been returning to the Island of Menoca, “the Island of Wind”, and it is in his house there, with a study full of books, and a garden taken over with native plants…
A provocative history of Henry Kissinger’s art of diplomatic negotiations in the Middle East that is full of unique challenges and barriers Kissinger and his successors have faced in their attempts to broker peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours. Master of the Game, reveals the drama, dazzling manoeuvres and grand strategic vision. In…
Array Collective, a Belfast-based activist group have won the prestigious Turner Prize 2021, after they beat four other collectives to take the £25, 000 prize money. Their works, a mock Irish pub adorned in banners supporting reproductive rights and protesting against conversion therapy. The Judges praised the group for highlighting social and political issues in…